Enigma

line, as it were. Just the two stations: a mother and a lone star. But we'd need to see the log sheets to be certain.'
    'And where are they?'
    'They should have been in the Registry. But when we checked we found they'd all been removed as well.'
    'My, my,' murmured Jericho, 'they really have been thorough.'
    'Short of tearing the sheets out of the Control Room Index, they couldn't have done much more. And you think she's behaving suspiciously? I'll have that back now, if I may.'
    She took the record of the interceptions and bent forwards to hide it in her bag.
    Jericho rested his head on the back of the pew and stared up at the vaulted ceiling. Special? he though. I'll say it was special, more than special for the Director-General himself to palm the entire bloody file, plus all the log sheets. There was no sense to it. He wished he weren't so damned tired. He needed to shut his study door for a day or two, sport his oak, find a good, fresh pile of clean notepaper and a set of sharpened pencils . . .
    He slowly let his gaze descend to take in the rest of the church—the saints in their windows, the marble angels, the stone memorials to the respectable dead of Bletchley parish, the ropes from the belfry looped together like a hanging spider beneath the gloomy organ loft. He closed his eyes.
    Claire, Claire, what have you done? Did you see something you weren't supposed to in that 'deadly dull' job of yours? Did you rescue a few scraps from the confidential waste when nobody was looking and spirit them home? And if you did that, why? And do they know you did it? Is that why Wigram's after you? Have you learned too much?
    He saw her on her knees in the darkness at the foot of his bed, heard his own voice slurred with sleep -' What on earth are you doing?'—and her ingenuous reply: 'I'm just going through your things. . .'
    You were always looking for something, weren't you? And when I couldn't provide it, you just went on to someone else. (' There's always someone else,' you said: almost the last words you ever spoke to me, remember?) What is it, then, this thing you want so badly?
    So many questions. He realised he was beginning to freeze. He huddled down into his coat, burying his chin in his scarf, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets. He tried to recall the images of the four cryptograms—LCNNR KDEMS LWAZA—but the letters were blurred. He had found this before. It was impossible mentally to photograph pages of gibberish: there had to be some meaning to them, some structure, to fix them in his mind.
    'A mother and a lone star ...'
    The thick walls held a silence that seemed as old as the church itself—an oppressive silence, interrupted only occasionally by the rustling of a bird nesting in the rafters. For several minutes neither of them spoke.
    Sitting on the hard bench, Jericho felt as though his bones had turned to ice, and this numbness, combined with the silence and the reliquaries everywhere and the sickly smell of incense, made him morbid. His father's funeral came to him for the second time in two days—the gaunt face in the coffin, his mother forcing him to kiss it goodbye, the cold skin beneath his lips giving off a sour reek of chemicals, like the school lab, and then the even worse stench at the crematorium. 'I need some air,' he said.
    She gathered her bag and followed him down the aisle. Outside they pretended to study the tombs. To the north of the churchyard, screened by trees, was Bletchley Park. A motorcycle passed noisily down the lane towards the town. Jericho waited until the crack of its engine had dwindled to a drone in the distance and then said, almost to himself: 'The question I keep asking myself is why did she steal cryptograms? I mean, given what else she could have taken. If one was a spy -' Hester opened her mouth to protest and he held up his hand. 'All right, I'm not saying that she is, but if one was, surely one would want to steal proof that Enigma was being broken? What earthly use is an intercept?' He lowered himself to his haunches and ran his fingers over an inscription that had almost crumbled away. 'If only we knew more about them ... To whom they were sent, for instance.'
    'We've been over this. They've removed every trace.' 'But someone must know something,' he mused. For a start, someone must have broken the traffic. And someone else must have translated it.'
    'Why don't you ask one of your cryptanalyst friends? You're all terrifically good chaps together,