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Enigma

Enigma

Titel: Enigma Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Robert Harris
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though. Nicely spoken. Very good manners. A quiet voice. She'd never had any children herself, never had a son, but if she had, he would have been about the same age. Well, let's just say he needed feeding up, anyone could see that.
    She was strict about the rent. She always demanded a month in advance—the request was made down in the hall, before she took them up to see the room—and there was usually an argument, at the end of which she grumpily agreed to settle for two weeks. But he paid up without a murmur. She asked for seven pounds six shillings and he gave her eight pounds, and when she pretended she hadn't any change, he said: 'Fine, give it me later.' When she mentioned his ration book he looked at her for a moment, very puzzled, and then he said (and she would remember it for the rest of her life): 'Do you mean this?'
    'Do you mean this? She repeated it in wonderment. As if he'd never seen one before! He gave her the little brown booklet—the precious weekly passport to four ounces of butter, eight ounces of bacon, twelve ounces of sugar—and told her she could do what she liked with it. 'I've never had any use for it.'
    By this time she was so flustered she hardly knew what she was doing. She tucked the money and the ration book into her apron before he could change his mind and led him upstairs.
    Now Ethel Armstrong was the first to admit that the fifth bedroom of the Commercial Guest House was not up to much. It was at the end of the passage, up a little twist of stairs, and the only furniture in it was a single bed and a wardrobe. It was so small the door wouldn't open properly because the bed got in the way. It had a tiny window flecked with soot which looked out over the wide expanse of railway tracks. In two and a half years it must have had thirty different occupants. None had stayed more than a couple of months and some had refused to sleep in it at all. But this one just sat on the edge of the bed, squeezed in between his boxes and his cases, and said wearily, 'Very pleasant, Mrs Armstrong.'
    She quickly explained the rules of the house, Breakfast was at seven in the morning, dinner at six thirty in the evening, 'cold collations' would be left in the kitchen for those working irregular shifts. There was one bathroom at the far end of the passage, shared between the five guests. They were permitted one bath a week each, the depth of water not to exceed five inches ( a line was marked on the enamel) and he would have to arrange his turn with the others. He would be given four lumps of coal per evening to heat his room. The fire in the parlour downstairs was extinguished at 9 p.m., sharp. Anyone caught cooking, drinking alcohol or entertaining visitors in their room, especially of the opposite sex—he'd smiled faintly at that—would be evicted, balance of rent to be paid as a forfeit.
    She'd asked if he had any questions, to which he made no reply, which was a mercy, because at that moment a nonstop express shrieked past at sixty miles an hour no more than a hundred feet from the bedroom window, shaking the little room so violently that Mrs Armstrong had a brief and horrifying vision of the floor giving way and them both plummeting downwards, down through her own bedroom, down through the scullery, crashing down to land amid the waxy legs of ham and tinned peaches so carefully stacked and hidden in her Aladdin's cave of a cellar.
    'Well, then,' she said, when the noise (if not yet the house) had finally subsided, Til leave you to get some peace and quiet.'
    Tom Jericho sat on the edge of the bed for a couple of minutes after listening to her footsteps descending the stairs. Then he took off his jacket and shirt and examined his throbbing forearm. He had a pair of bruises just below the elbow as neat and black as damsons, and he remembered now whom Skynner had always reminded him of: a prefect at school called Fane, the son of a bishop, who liked to cane the new boys in his study at teatime, and make them all say 'thank you, Fane' afterwards.
    It was cold in the room and he started to shiver, his skin puckering into rashes of gooseflesh. He felt desperately tired. He opened one of his suitcases and took out a pair of pyjamas and changed into them quickly. He hung up his jacket and thought about unpacking the rest of his clothes, but decided against it. He might be out of Bletchley by the next morning.
    That was a point—he passed his hand across his face -he'd just given away eight pounds,

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