Enigma

Enigma secret.
    But then Wigram had remembered Edward Romilly.
    Poor old Edward Romilly. The widower. Barely known outside the Office, abroad these past ten years, with all the right connections, initiated into Enigma—and, more importantly, with the birth certificate of a girl of exactly the right age. All that was required of him, apart from the use of his daughter's name, was a letter of introduction to Bletchley Park. In fact, not even that, since Wigram would write her letter: a signature would suffice. And then Romilly could continue with his solitary existence, content to know he had done his patriotic duty. And given his daughter a kind of life.
    Jericho said: 'You never met her, I suppose? The girl who took your daughter's name?'
    'Good God, no. In fact, Wigram assured me I'd never hear another word about it. I made that a condition. And I didn't hear anything, for six months. Until you called one Sunday morning and told me my daughter had disappeared.'
    'And you got straight on the telephone to Wigram to report what I'd said?'
    'Of course. I was horrified.'
    'And naturally you demanded to know what was happening. And he told you.'
    Romilly drained his scotch and frowned at the empty tumbler. 'The memorial service was today, I think?'
    Jericho nodded.
    'May I ask how it went?'
    '“For the trumpet shall sound,”' said Jericho, '“and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed . . .'” He looked away from the photograph of the little girl above the fireplace. 'Except that Claire—my Claire—isn't dead, is she?'
    The room darkened, the light was the colour of the; whisky, and now Jericho was doing most of the talking.
    Afterwards, he realised he never actually told; Romilly how he had worked it all out: that host of tiny inconsistencies that had made a nonsense of the official version, even though he recognised that much of what Wigram had told him must have been the truth.
    The oddity of her behaviour, for a start; and their failure of her supposed father to react to her disappearance, or to show up at her memorial service; the puzzle of why her clothes had been so conveniently; discovered when her body had not; the suspicious speed with which Wigram had been able to halt the train . . . All these had clicked and turned and rearranged themselves into a pattern of perfect logic.
    Once one accepted she was an informer, everything else followed. The material which Claire—he still called her Claire—had passed to Pukowski had been leaked with Wigram's approval, hadn't it?
    'Because really—in the beginning, anyway—it was nothing, just chickenfeed, compared with what Puck already knew about naval Enigma. Where was the harm? And Wigram let her go on handing it over; because he wanted to see what Puck would do with it. See if anyone else was involved. It was bait, if you like. Am I right?'
    Romilly said nothing.
    It was only later that Wigram had realised he'd made the most almighty miscalculation—that Katyn, and more especially the decision to stop monitoring it, had tipped Puck over the edge into treason, and that somehow he'd managed to tell the Germans about Enigma.
    'I assume it wasn't Wigram's decision to stop the monitoring?'
    Romilly gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. 'Higher.'
    How high?
    He wouldn't say.
    Jericho shrugged. 'It doesn't matter. From that point on, Puck must have been under twenty-four-hour watch, to find out who his contact was and to catch them both red-handed.
    'Now, a man under round-the-clock surveillance is not in a position to murder anyone, least of all an agent of the people doing the watching. Not unless they are spectacularly incompetent. No. When Puck discovered I had the cryptograms he knew Claire would have to disappear, otherwise she'd be questioned. She had to vanish for at least a week, so he could get away. And preferably for longer. So between them they staged her murder—stolen boat, bloodstained clothes beside the lake. He guessed that would be enough to make the police call off their hunt. And he was right: they have stopped looking for her. He never suspected she was betraying him all the time.'
    Jericho took a sip of whisky. 'Do you know, I really think he may have loved her—that's the joke of it. So much so that his last words, literally, were a lie—“I killed her, Thomas, I'm so very sorry”—a deliberate lie, a gesture from the edge of the grave, to give her a chance to getaway.
    'And that, of course, was the cue