Enigma

aren't you?'
    'Not especially. In any case I'm afraid we're encouraged to lead quite separate lives. There is a man in Hut 3 who might have seen them . . .' But then he remembered Weitzman's frightened face ('please don't ask me, I don't want to know. . .') and he shook his head. 'No. He wouldn't help.'
    'Then what a pity it is,' she said, with some asperity, 'that you burned our only clues.'
    'Keeping them was too much of a risk.' He was still rubbing slowly at the stone. 'For all I knew, you might have told Wigram I'd asked you about the call sign.' He looked up at her uneasily. 'You didn't, I take it?'
    'Credit me with some sense, Mr Jericho. Would I be here talking to you now?' She stamped off down the row of graves and began furiously studying an epitaph.
    She regretted her sharpness almost at once. ('He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.' Proverbs 16.xxxii.) But then, as Jericho pointed out later, when relations between them had improved sufficiently for him to risk the observation, if she hadn't lost her temper, she might never have thought of the solution.
    'Sometimes,' he said, 'we need a little tension to sharpen our wits.'
    She was jealous, that was the truth of it. She had thought she knew Claire as well as anyone but it was fast becoming apparent that she knew her hardly at all, scarcely better even than he did.
    She shivered. There was no warmth in this March sun. It fell on the stone tower of St Mary's as cold as light from a looking glass.
    Jericho was back on his feet now, moving between the graves. She wondered whether she might have been like him if she'd been allowed to go to university. But her father wouldn't stand for it and her brother George had gone instead, as if it were God's law: men go to university, men break codes; women stay at home, women do the filing.
    'Hester, Hester, just in time. Will you talk to Chicksands, there's a good girl, and see what they can do? And while you're on, the Machine Room reckon they've got a corrupt text on the last batch of Kestrel—the operator needs to check her notes and re-send. Then the eleven o 'clocks from Beaumanor. . .'
    She had been standing slack with defeat, gazing at a tombstone, but now she felt her body slowly coming to attention.
    'The operator needs to check her notes ...'
    'Mr Jericho!'
    He turned at the sound of his name to see her stumbling through the graves towards him.
    It was almost ten o'clock and Miles Mermagen was combing his hair in his office, preparatory to returning to his digs, when Hester Wallace appeared at his office door.
    'No,' he said, with his back to her.
    'Miles, listen, I've been thinking, you were right, I've been an utter fool.'
    He squinted suspiciously at her in the mirror.
    'My application for a transfer—I want you to withdraw it.'
    'Fine. I never submitted it.'
    He returned his attention to himself. The comb slid through the thick black hair like a rake through oil.
    She forced a smile. 'I was thinking about what you said, about needing to know where one fits into the chain . . .' He finished his grooming and turned his profile to the mirror, trying to look at his reflection sideways on. 'If you remember, we talked about my possibly going to an intercept station.'
    'No problem.'
    'I thought, well, I'm not due on shift till tomorrow afternoon—I thought I might go today.'
    'Today?' He looked at his watch. 'Actually, I'm tied up, rather.'
    'I could go on my own, Miles. And report my finding -' behind her back she dug her nails into her palm '—one evening.'
    He gave her another narrowed look and she thought, No, no, really this is too obvious, even for him, but then he shrugged. 'Why not? Better call them first.' He waved his hand grandly.
    'Invoke my name.' 'Thank you, Miles.'
    'Lot's wife, what?' He winked. 'Pillar of salt by day, ball of fire by night. , .?'
    On the way out he patted her bottom.
    Thirty yards away, in Hut 8, Jericho was knocking on the door marked us NAVY LIAISON. A loud voice told him to 'come on in'.
    Kramer didn't have a desk—the room wasn't big enough—just a card table with a telephone on it and wire baskets filled with papers stacked on the floor. There wasn't even a window. On one of the wooden partitions separating him from the rest of the hut he'd taped a recent photograph, torn out of Life magazine, showing Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca conference, sitting side by side in a sunny garden. He