Enigma

pile of Shark intercepts waiting for him on his desk but he doesn't care. He catches at her arm.
    'I need to talk to you.'
    Their bodies block the pavement. The flow of people has to pass around them, like a river round a rock.
    'Mindout, 'says someone.
    'Tom,' she hisses, 'for God's sake, you're making a scene.'
    'Good. Let's get out of here.'
    He is pulling at her arm. His pressure is insistent and reluctantly she surrenders to it. The momentum of the crowd sweeps them through the gate and along the road. His only thought is to put some distance between them and the Park. He doesn 't know how long they walk for—fifteen minutes, perhaps, or twenty—until, at last, the pavements are deserted and they are passing through the hinterland of the town. It is a raw, clear afternoon. On either side of them, semidetached suburban villas hide behind dirty privet hedges, their wartime gardens filled with chicken runs and the half-buried, corrugated-iron hoops of bomb shelters. She shakes her arm free. 'There's no point in this.'
    'You 're seeing someone else?' He hardly dares to ask the question.
    'I'm always seeing someone else.' He stops but she walks on. He lets her go for fifty yards then hurries to catch her up. By now the houses have petered out and they're in a kind of no-man's land between town and country, on Bletchley's western edge, where people dump their rubbish. A flock of seagulls cries and rises, like a swirl of waste paper caught by the wind. The road has dwindled to a track which leads under the railway to a row of abandoned Victorian brick kilns. Three red-brick chimneys, as in a crematorium, rise fifty feet against the sky. A sign says: DANGER, FLOODED CIAY PIT—VERY DEEP WATER.
    Claire draws her coat around her shoulders and shivers—'What a filthy place!'—but she still walks on ahead.
    For ten minutes, the derelict brick works provide a welcome distraction. Indeed, they wander through the ruined kilns and workshops in a silence that is almost companionable. Amorous couples have scratched their formulae on the crumbling walls: AE + GS, Tony = Kath, Sal 4 Me. Lumps of masonry and brick litter the ground. Some of the buildings are open to the sky, the walls are scorched—there's clearly been afire—and Jericho wonders if the Germans could have mistaken it for a factory, and bombed it. He turns to say as much to Claire, but she has disappeared.
    He finds her outside, her back to him, staring across the flooded clay pit. It is huge, a quarter of a mile across. The surface of the water is coal-black and perfectly still, the stillness hinting at unimaginable depths.
    She says: 'I ought to get back.'
    'What do you want to know?' he says. 'I'll tell you everything you want to know.'
    And he will, if she wants it. He doesn't care about security or the war. He'll tell her about Shark and Dolphin and Porpoise. He'll tell her about the Bay of Biscay weather crib. He'll tell her all their little tricks and secrets, and draw her a diagram of how the bombe works, if that's what she wants. But all she says is: 'I do hope you're not going to be a bore about this, Tom.'
    A bore. Is that what he is? He is being a bore?
    'Wait,' he calls after her, 'you might as well have this.'
    He gives her the little box with the ring in it. She opens it and tilts the stone to catch the light, then snaps the lid shut and hands it back.
    'Not my style.'
    'Poor you, 'he remembers her saying a minute or two later,
    'I've really got under your skin, haven't I? Poor you ...'
    And by the end of the week he's in the deputy director's Rover, being borne back through the snow to King's.

2

    The smells and sounds of an English Sunday breakfast curled up the staircase of the Commercial Guesthouse and floated across the landing like a call to arms: the hiss of hot fat frying in the kitchen, the dirge-like strains of a church service being relayed by the BBC, the muffled crack of Mrs Armstrong's worn slippers flapping like castanets on the linoleum floor.
    They were a ritual in Albion Street, these Sunday breakfasts, served up with appropriate solemnity on plain white utility crockery: one piece of bread, as thick as a hymn book, dunked in fat and fried, with two spoonfuls of powdered egg, scrambled and slopped on top, the whole mass sliding freely on a rainbow film of grease.
    It was not, Jericho had to acknowledge, a great meal, nor even a particularly edible one. The bread was rust-coloured, flecked with black, and obscurely flavoured by