Enigma Read Online Free Page B

curtains came a faint flurry
of splashes and the mournful quacking of a duck. Logie sat on the
floor, his long legs outstretched, fiddling with his pipe. Jericho
slouched in one of the two easy chairs, prodding the carpet
absent-mindedly with the toasting fork. Leveret had been told to
stand guard outside: “Would you mind closing both doors, old thing?
The inner door and the outer door, if you’d be so kind?”
    The warm aroma of toast hung over the room. Their plates had
been pushed to one side.
    “This really is most companionable,” murmured Logie. He struck a
match and the objects on the mantelpiece threw brief shadows on the
damp wall. “Although one appreciates that one is, in a sense,
fortunate to be in a place like Bletchley, given where else one
might be, one does start to get rather down with the sheer drabness
of it all. Don’t you find?”
    “I suppose so.” Oh, do get on with it, thought Jericho, stabbing
at a couple of crumbs. Just sack me and leave. Logie made a
contented sucking noise through his pipe, then said quietly: “You
know, we’ve all been terribly worried about you, Tom. I do hope you
haven’t felt abandoned.”
    At this unexpected display of concern, Jericho was surprised and
humiliated to find tears pricking at his eyes. He kept looking down
at the carpet. “I’m afraid I made the most frightful ass of myself,
Guy. The worst of it is, I can’t remember much of what happened.
There’s almost a week that’s pretty well a blank.”
    Logie gave a dismissive wave of his pipe. “You’re not the first
to bust his health in that place, old thing. Did you see in The
Times poor Dilly Knox died last week? They gave him a gong at the
end. Nothing too fancy—CMG, I think. Insisted on receiving it at
home, personally, propped up in his chair. Dead two days later.
Cancer. Ghastly. And then there was Jeffreys. Remember him?”
    “He was sent back to Cambridge to recover as well.”
    “That’s the man. Whatever happened to Jeffreys?”
    “He died.”
    “Ah. Shame.” Logie performed a bit more pipe smoker’s business,
tamping down the tobacco and striking another match.
    Just don’t let them put me in admin, prayed Jericho. Or Welfare.
There was a man in Welfare, Claire had told him, in charge of
billeting, who made the girls sit on his knee if they wanted digs
with a bathroom.
    “It was Shark, wasn’t it,” said Logie, giving him a shrewd look
through a cloud of smoke, “that did for you?”
    “Yes. Perhaps. You could say that.” Shark nearly did for all of
us, thought Jericho. “But you broke it,” pursued Logie. “You broke
Shark.”
    “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We broke it.”
    “No. You broke it.” Logie twirled the spent match in his long
finger. “You broke it. And then it broke you.”
    Jericho had a sudden memory-flash of himself on a bicycle, under
a starlit sky. A cold night and the cracking of ice.
    “Look,” he said, suddenly irritated “d’you think we could get to
the point here, Guy? I mean, tea in front of the college fire
talking about old times? It’s all very pleasant, but come on—”
    “This is the point, old thing.” Logie drew his knees up under
his chin and wrapped his hands around his shins. “Shark, Limpet,
Dolphin, Oyster, Porpoise, Winkle. The six little fishes in our
aquarium, the six German naval Enigmas. And the greatest of these
is Shark.” He stared into the fire and for the first time Jericho
was able to have a good look at his face, ghostly in the blue
light, like a skull. The eye sockets were hollows of darkness. He
looked like a man who hadn’t slept for a week. He yawned again.
“You know, I was trying to remember, in the car coming over, who
decided to call it Shark in the first place.”
    “I can’t recall,” said Jericho. “I’ve an idea it was Alan. Or
maybe it was me. Anyway, what the devil does it matter? It just
emerged. Nobody argued. Shark was the perfect name for it. We could
tell at once it was going