Enigma

inside and standing at the back of the nave until the service ended, but experience had taught him there was no such thing as a quiet entry into a church. The door would bang, heads would turn, some officious sidesman would come hurrying down the aisle with a prayer sheet and a hymn book. Such attention was the last thing he wanted.
    He left the path and pretended to study the tombstones. Frosted cobwebs of improbable size and delicacy shone like ectoplasm between the memorials: marble monuments for the well-to-do, slate for the farmworkers, weathered wooden crosses for the poor and infants. Ebenezer Slade, aged four years and six months, asleep in the arms of Jesus. Mary Watson, wife of Albert, taken after a long illness, rest in peace ... On a few of the graves, bunches of dead flowers, petrified by ice, testified to some continuing flicker of interest among the living. On others, yellow lichen had obscured the inscriptions. He bent and scratched away at it, hearkening to the voices of the righteous beyond the stained glass window.
    'O ye Dews and Frosts, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever.
    O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever..."
    Odd images chased through his mind.
    He thought of his father's funeral, on just such a day as this: a freezing, ugly Victorian church in the industrial Midlands, medals on the coffin, his mother weeping, his aunts in black, everyone studying him with sad curiosity, and he all the time a million miles away, factoring the hymn numbers in his head ('Forward out of error,/Leave behind the night'—number 392 in Ancient and Modern -came out very prettily, he remembered, as 2 x 7 x 2 x 7 x 2...)
    And for some reason he thought of Alan Turing, restless with excitement in the hut one winter night, describing how the death of his closest friend had made him seek a link between mathematics and the spirit, insisting that at Bletchley they were creating a new world: that the bombes might soon be modified, the clumsy electro-mechancial switches replaced by relays of pentode valves and GT1C-thyatrons to create computers, machines that might one day mimic the actions of the human brain and unlock the secrets of the soul. . .
    Jericho wandered among the dead. Here was a small stone cross garlanded with stone flowers, there a stern-looking angel with a face like Miss Monk. All the time he kept listening to the service. He wondered whether anyone from Hut 8 was among the congregation and, if so, who. With all else failing, might Skynner be offering up a prayer to God? He tried to imagine what fresh reserves of sycophancy Skynner would draw on to communicate with a being even higher than the First Lord of the Admiralty, and found he couldn't do it.
    'The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with you always. Amen.'
    The service was over. Jericho wove quickly through the headstones, away from the church, and stationed himself behind a pair of large bushes. From here he had a clear view of the porch.
    Before the war the faithful would have emerged to an uplifting peal of grandsire triples. But church bells now were to be rung only in the event of invasion, so that when the door opened and the elderly priest stationed himself to say farewell to his parishioners, the silence gave the ceremony a subdued, even melancholy air. One by one the worshippers stepped into the daylight. Jericho didn't recognise any of them. He began to think he might have come to the wrong conclusion. But then, sure enough, a small, lean young woman in a black coat appeared, still holding the prayer book from the night before.
    She shook hands briefly, even curtly, with the vicar, said nothing, looped her carpetbag over the handles of her bicycle and wheeled it towards the gate. She walked quickly, with short, rapid steps, her sharp chin held high. Jericho waited until she had gone some way past him, then stepped out from his hiding place and shouted after her: 'Miss Wallace!'
    She stopped and glanced back in his direction. Her weak eyesight made her frown. Her head moved vaguely from side to side. It wasn't until he was within two yards of her that her face cleared.
    'Why, Mr . . .'
    'Jericho.'
    'Of course. Mr Jericho. The stranger in the night.' The cold had reddened the sharp point of her nose and painted two neat discs of colour, the size of half-crowns, on her white cheeks. She had long, thick, black hair which she