Enigma

tops of grey woollen socks, and her stout boots were so clogged with mud they seemed the size of a carthorse's hooves. She hefted her bulging carpetbag into the back of the Austin and sank down low in the passenger seat. She gave a long sigh of relief.
    'Thank God. I thought I'd missed you.'
    He leaned over and closed the door very quietly.
    'How many are there?'
    'Six. Two in the fields opposite. Two going from house to house in the village. Two in the cottage—one upstairs, dusting Claire's bedroom for fingerprints, and a policewoman downstairs. I told her I was going out. She tried to stop me but I said it was my one day off this week and I'd do as I pleased. I left by the back door and worked my way round to the road.'
    'Did anybody see you?'
    'I don't think so.' She blew warmth on her hands and rubbed them. 'I suggest we drive, Mr Jericho. And don't go back into Bletchley, whatever you do. I overheard them talking. They're stopping all cars on the main road out of town.'
    She slid further down the seat so that she was invisible from outside the car unless someone came right up to the window. Jericho turned on the engine and the Austin rolled forwards. If they couldn't go back to Bletchley, he thought, then really he had no choice except to drive straight ahead.
    They came round the curve and the road was clear. The turning to the cottage was on the left, deserted, but as they came level with it a policeman suddenly stepped out from the hedge opposite and held up his hand. Jericho hesitated and then pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The policeman stepped smartly out of the way and Jericho had a momentary impression of an outraged brick-red face. Then they were dropping down into the hollow and rising again and passing through the village. Another policeman was talking to a woman on the doorstep of her thatched cottage and he turned to stare at them. Jericho trod on the accelerator again and soon the village was behind them and the road was corkscrewing down into another leafy hollow. They rose into Shenley Church End, passed the White Hart Inn, where Jericho used to live, and then a church, and almost at once they had to stop at the junction of the A5.
    Jericho glanced in his mirror to check there was no one behind them. It seemed safe enough. He said to Hester: 'You can get up now.' He was in a daze. He couldn't believe what he was doing. He waited to let a couple of lorries go by, indicated, and then swung left on to the old Roman road. It ran straight and true ahead of them, northwest, for as far as they could see. Jericho changed up a gear, the Austin gathered speed, and they were clear.
    Wartime England opened up before them—still the same but somehow subtly different: a little bit smudged, a little bit knocked about, like a prosperous estate going fast to ruin, or a genteel elderly lady fallen on hard times.
    They didn't encounter any bomb damage until they reached the outskirts of Rugby, where what looked from a distance to be a ruined abbey turned out to be the roofless shell of a factory, but the depredations of war were everywhere. Fences beside the road, after three years without repairs, were sagging or collapsed. The gates and railings had gone from the fine country parks to be melted down for munitions. The houses were shabby. Nothing had been painted since 1940. Broken windows were boarded over, ironwork was rusted or coated in tar. Even the inn signs were blistered and faded. The country was degraded.
    And we, too, thought Jericho, as they overtook yet another stooped figure trudging beside the road, don't we look slightly worse each year? In 1940 there had at least been the galvanising energy unleashed by the threat of invasion. And in 1941 there had been some hope when Russia and then America had entered the war. But 1942 had dragged into 1943, the U-boats had wrought murder on the convoys, the shortages had worsened and, despite the victories in Africa and on the eastern front, the war had begun to look endless—an unbroken, unheroic vista of rationing and exhaustion. The villages seemed almost lifeless—the men away, the women drafted into factories—while in Stony Stratford and in Towcester the few people who were about had mostly formed into queues outside shops with empty windows.
    Beside him, Hester Wallace was silent, monitoring their progress with obsessive interest on Atwood's atlas. Good, he thought. With all the signposts and place names taken down, they would have no