Enigma

the door.
    Jericho glanced ahead, then checked in his mirror. The village appeared to consist of nothing more than this one street. No parked vehicles that he could see. No one about. He guessed that a private car, especially one driven by a stranger, would be a rarity, a talking-point. In the little red-brick cottages and the half-timbered houses he could already imagine the curtains being twitched back. He turned off the windscreen wipers and sank lower in his seat. For the twentieth time his hand went to the bulge of cryptograms in his inside pocket.
    Two Englands, he thought. One England—this one—familiar, safe, obvious. But now another, secret England, secluded in the grounds of stately houses -Beaumanor, Gayhurst, Woburn, Adstock, Bletchley—an England of aerial farms and direction finders, clattering bombes and, soon, the glowing green and orange valves of Turing machines ('it should make the calculations a hundred times, maybe a thousand times as fast'}. A new age beginning to be born in the parklands of the old. What was it that Hardy had written in his Apology? 'Real mathematics has no effect on war. No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers.' The old boy couldn't guess the half of it.
    The bell tinkled again and Hester emerged from the post office holding a newspaper over her head like an umbrella. She opened the car door, shook the paper and threw it, not very gently, into his lap.
    'What's this for?' It was the Leicester Mercury, the local rag: that afternoon's edition.
    'They print appeals for help, don't they? From the police? When someone is missing?'
    It was a good idea. He had to concede it. But although they checked the paper carefully—twice, in fact—they could find no photograph of Claire and no mention of the hunt for her.
    Dropping southwards, heading for home. A different route for the return journey, more easterly—this was Hester's plan. To keep their spirits up, she occasionally recited the names of the villages and checked them in the gazetteer as they rattled down their empty high streets. Oadby, she said, ('note the early English to Perpendicular church'), Kibworth Harcourt, Little Bowden, and on across the border out of Leicestershire and into Northamptonshire. The sky over the distant pale hills brightened from black to grey and finally to a kind of glossy, neutral white. The rain slowed, then stopped. Oxendon, Kelmarsh, Maidwell . . . Square Norman towers with arrow-slits, thatched pubs, tiny Victorian railway stations nesting in a bosky countryside of high hedges and dense copses. It was enough to make you want to burst into a chorus of 'There'll Always Be an England' except that neither of them felt like singing.
    Why had she run? That was what Hester said she couldn't understand. Everything else seemed logical enough: how she would have got hold of the cryptograms in the first place, why she might have wanted to read them, why she would have needed an accomplice. But why then commit the one act guaranteed to draw attention to yourself? Why fail to turn up for your morning shift?
    'You,' she said to Jericho, after she had thought it over for a few more miles. There was a hint of accusation in her voice. 'I think it must be you.'
    Like a prosecuting counsel she took him back over the events of Saturday night. He had gone to the cottage, yes? He had discovered the intercepts, yes? A man had arrived downstairs, yes?
    'Yes.'
    'Did he see you?'
    'No.'
    'Did you say anything?'
    'I may have shouted “Who's there?” or something of the sort.'
    'So he could have recognised your voice?'
    'It's possible.'
    But that would mean I knew him, he thought. Or at least that he knew me.
    'What time did you leave?'
    'I don't know exactly. About half past one.'
    'There you are,' she said. 'It is you. Claire returns to the cottage after you've gone. She discovers the intercepts are missing. She realises that you must have them because this mysterious man has told her you were there. She believes you'll take them straight to the authorities. She panics. She runs
    'But that's madness.' He took his eyes off the road to stare at her. 'I'd never have betrayed her.'
    'So you say. But did she know that?'
    Did she know that? No, he realised, returning his attention to the wheel, no, she did not know that. Indeed, on the basis of his behaviour on the night she found the cheque, she had good reason to assume he was a fanatic about security—a pretty ironic