Enigma

messages. A thousand cipher groups. Five thousand individual characters. Even an expert operator would need the best part of half an hour to decode that much. It could have been done. But she would have needed a superman.'
    'Or woman.'
    'No.' He was remembering the events of Saturday night: the sound downstairs in the cottage, the big male footprints in the frost, the cycle tracks and the red rear light of the bicycle shooting away from him into the darkness. 'No. It's a man.'
    If only I'd been thirty seconds quicker, he thought. I'd have seen his face.
    And then he thought: Yes, and maybe got a bullet in my own for my trouble: a bullet from a stolen Smith and Wesson .38, manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts.
    He felt a sudden prickle of ice-cold moisture on the back of his wrist and glanced up. He followed its trajectory to a spot in the roof, just before the windscreen. As he watched, another dark bubble of rainwater slowly swelled, ripened to a rich rust colour, and dropped.
    Shark.
    He realised guiltily he had nearly forgotten it.
    'What's the time?'
    'Almost five.'
    'We should be getting back.'
    He rubbed at his hand and reached for the ignition.
    The car wouldn't start. Jericho twisted the key back and forth and pumped away frantically at the accelerator but all he managed to coax from the engine was a dull turning noise.
    'Oh, hell!'
    He turned up his collar, got out and went round to the boot. As he opened the lid a brace of pigeons took off behind him, wings snapping like firecrackers. There was a starting handle under the spare can of petrol and he inserted that into the hole in the front bumper.' You do this the wrong way, lad,' his stepfather had told him, 'and you can break your wrist." But which was the right way? Clockwise or anticlockwise? He gave the handle a hopeful tug. It was horribly stiff.
    'Pull out the choke,' he shouted to Hester, 'and press your foot down on the third pedal if she starts to fire.'
    The little car rocked as she slid across into the driver's seat.
    He bent to his task again. The forest floor was only a couple of feet from his face, a pungent brown carpet of decaying leaves and fir cones. He heaved a couple more times until his shoulder ached. He was beginning to sweat now, perspiration mingling with the rainwater, dripping off the end of his nose, trickling down his neck. The insanity of their whole undertaking seemed encapsulated in this moment. The greatest convoy battle of the war was about to start, and where was he? In some primeval bloody forest in the middle of bloody nowhere poring over stolen Gestapo cryptograms with a woman he barely knew. What in the name of reason did they think they were doing? They must be—he tightened his grip—crazy... He jerked viciously on the starting handle and suddenly the engine caught, spluttered, nearly died, then Hester revved it loudly. The sweetest sound he'd ever heard, it split the forest. He slung the handle into the boot and slammed the lid.
    The gearbox whined as he reversed along the track towards the road.
    The overhanging branches made a tunnel of the soaking lane. Their headlights glinted on a film of running water. Jericho drove slowly around and around the same course, trying to find some landmark in the gloom, trying not to panic. He must have taken a wrong turning coming out of the clearing. The steering wheel beneath his hands felt as wet and slippery as the road. Eventually they came to a crossroads beside a vast and decaying oak. Hester bent her head again to the map. A lock of long black hair fell across her eyes. She used both hands to pile it up. She clenched a pin between her teeth and muttered through it: 'Left or right?'
    'You're the navigator.'
    'And you're the one who decided to drive us off the main road.' She skewered her hair savagely back in place. 'Go left.'
    He would have chosen the other way but thank God he didn't because she was right. Soon the road ahead began to brighten. They could see patches of weeping sky. He pressed his foot down and the speedometer touched forty as they passed out of the forest and into the open. When, after a mile or so, they came to a village, she told him to pull up outside the tiny post office.
    'Why?'
    'I need to find out where we are.'
    'You'd better be quick.'
    'I've really no intention of sight-seeing.'
    She slammed the door behind her and ran through the rain, sidestepping the puddles with a gym mistress's agility. A bell tinkled inside the shop as she opened