Enigma

the curtains to unveil another cold, clear morning. It was only his third day in the Commercial Guesthouse but already the view had acquired a weary familiarity. First came the long and narrow garden (concrete yard with washing line, vegetable patch, bomb shelter) which petered out after seventy yards into a wilderness of weeds and a tumbledown, rotted fence. Then there was a drop he couldn't see, like a ha-ha, and then a broad expanse of railway lines, a dozen or more, which led the eye, at last, to the centrepiece: a huge Victorian engine shed with LONDON MIDLAND & SCOTTISH RAILWAY in white letters just visible beneath the grime.
    What a day in prospect: the sort of day one waded through with no aim higher than to reach the other end intact. He looked at his Waralarm. It was a quarter past seven. It would be dark in the North Atlantic for at least another four hours. By his reckoning there would be nothing for him to do until—at the earliest -midnight, British time, when the first elements of the convoy would begin to enter the U-boat danger zone. Nothing to do except sit around the hut and wait and brood.
    There had been three occasions during the night when Jericho had made up his mind to seek out Wigram and make a full confession, on the last of which he had actually got as far as putting on his coat. But in the end the judgement was too fine a one to call. On the one hand, yes, it was his duty to tell Wigram all he knew. On the other, no, what he knew would make little practical difference to the task of finding her, so why betray her? The equations cancelled one another out. By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.
    And it could all still be some ghastly mistake -couldn't it, just? Some prank gone badly wrong? Eleven hours had passed since his conversation with Wigram. They might have found her by now. More likely, she would have turned up, either at the cottage or the hut—wide-eyed and wondering, darlings, what on earth the fuss was all about.
    He was on the point of turning away from the window when his eye was caught by a movement at the far end of the engine shed. Was it a large animal of some sort, or a big man crawling on all fours? He squinted through the sooty glass but the thing was too far away for him to make it out exactly, so he fetched his telescope from the bottom of the wardrobe. The window sash was stuck but a few heavy blows from the heel of his hand were enough to raise it six inches. He knelt and rested the telescope on the sill. At first he couldn't find anything to focus on amid the dizzying crisscross of tracks but then, suddenly, it was filling his eye—an Alsatian dog as big as a calf, sniffing under the wheels of a goods wagon. He shifted the telescope a fraction to his left and there was a policeman dressed in a greatcoat that came down below his knees. Two policemen, in fact, and a second dog, on a leash.
    He watched the little group for several minutes as they searched the empty train. Then the two teams split up, one passing further up the tracks and the other moving out of sight towards the little railway cottages opposite. He snapped the telescope shut.
    Four men and two dogs for the railway yard. Say, a couple more teams to cover the station platforms. How many in the town? Twenty? And in the surrounding countryside?
    'Got a photo of her? Something recent?'
    He tapped the telescope against his cheek.
    They must be watching every port and railway station in the country.
    What would they do if they caught her?
    Hang her?
    Come on, Jericho. He could practically hear his housemaster's voice at his elbow. Brace up, boy.
    Get through it somehow.
    Wash. Shave. Dress. Make a little bundle of dirty laundry and leave it on the bed for Mrs Armstrong, more in hope than expectation. Go downstairs. Endure attempts to make polite conversation. Listen to one of Bonnyman's interminable, off-colour stories. Be introduced to two of the other guests: Miss Quince, rather pretty, a teleprincess in the naval hut, and Noakes, once an expert on Middle High German court epics, now a cryptanalyst in the weather section, vaguely known since 1940: a surly creature, then and now. Avoid all further conversation. Chew toast as stale as cardboard. Drink tea as grey and watery as a February sky. Half-listen to the wireless news: 'Moscow Radio reports the Russian Third Army under General Vatutin is making a strong defence of