Enigma

wore piled up, shot through and secured by an armoury of pins. 'What did you make of the sermon?'
    'Uplifting?' he said, tentatively. It seemed easier than telling the truth.
    'Did you really? I thought it the most frightful rot I've heard all year. “Suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence . . .”' She shook her head furiously. 'Is it a heresy, do you suppose, to call St Paul an ass?
    She resumed her brisk progress towards the lane. Jericho fell in beside her. He had picked up a few details about Hester Wallace from Claire—that before the war she'd been a teacher at a girls' private school in Dorset, that she played the organ and was a clergyman's daughter, that she received the quarterly newsletter of the Jane Austen Society—just enough clues to suggest the sort of woman who might indeed go straight from an eight-hour night-shift to Sunday matins.
    'Do you attend most Sundays?'
    'Always,' she said. 'Although increasingly one wonders why. And you?'
    He hesitated. 'Occasionally.'
    It was a mistake and she was on to it at once.
    'Whereabouts d'you sit? I don't recall ever seeing you.'
    'I try to keep at the back.'
    'So do I. Exactly at the back.' She gave him a second look, her wire-framed round spectacles flashing in the winter sun. 'Really, Mr Jericho, a sermon you obviously didn't hear, a pew you never occupy: one might almost suspect you of laying claim to a piety you don't rightly possess.'
    'Ah..."
    'I'll bid you good day.'
    They had reached the gate. She swung herself on to the saddle of her bicycle with surprising grace. This was not how Jericho had planned it. He had to reach out and hold on to the handlebars to stop her pedalling away.
    'I wasn't in church. I'm sorry. I wanted to talk to you.'
    'Kindly remove your hand from my machine, Mr Jericho.' A couple of elderly parishioners turned to stare at them. 'At once, if you please.' She twisted the handlebars back and forth but Jericho held on.
    'I am so sorry. It really won't take a moment.'
    She glared at him. For an instant he thought she might be about to reach down for one of her stout and sensible shoes and hammer his fingers loose. But there was curiosity as well as anger in her eyes, and curiosity won. She sighed and dismounted.
    'Thank you. There's a bus shelter over there.' He nodded to the opposite side of Church Green Road. 'Just spare me five minutes. Please.'
    'Absurd. Quite absurd.'
    The wheels of her bicycle clicked like knitting needles as they crossed the road to the shelter. She refused to sit. She stood with her arms folded, looking down the hill towards the town.
    He tried to think of some way of broaching the subject. 'Claire tells me you work in Hut 6. That must be interesting.'
    'Claire has no business telling you where I work. Or anyone else for that matter. And, no, it is not interesting. Everything interesting seems to be done by men. Women do the rest.'
    She could be pretty, he thought, if she put her mind to it. Her skin was as smooth and white as Parian. Her nose and chin, though sharp, were delicate. But she wore no make-up, and her expression was permanently cross, her lips drawn into a thin, sarcastic line. Behind her spectacles, her small, bright eyes glinted with intelligence.
    'Claire and I, we were . . .' He fluttered his hands and searched for the word. He was so hopeless at all this. '“Seeing one another” I suppose is the phrase. Until about a month ago. Then she refused to have anything more to do with me.' His resolution was wilted by her hostility. He felt a fool, addressing her narrow back. But he pressed on. 'To be frank, Miss Wallace, I'm worried about her.'
    'How odd.'
    He shrugged. 'We were an unlikely couple, I agree.'
    'No.' She turned to him. 'I meant how odd that people always feel obliged to disguise their concern for themselves as concern for other people.'
    The corners of her mouth twitched down in her version of a smile and Jericho realised he was beginning to dislike Miss Hester Wallace, not least because she had a point.
    'I don't deny an element of self-interest,' he conceded, 'but the fact is, I am worried about her. I think she's disappeared.'
    She sniffed. 'Nonsense.'
    'She hasn't turned up for her shift this morning.'
    'An hour late for work hardly constitutes a disappearance. She probably overslept.'
    'I don't think she went home last night. She certainly wasn't back by two.'
    'Then perhaps she overslept somewhere else,' said Miss Wallace,