Enigma by Robert Harris

could hear people
moving in the shadows. The beams of torches glistened on the wet
tarmac. Atwood conducted them past the mansion and the arboretum
and through the main gate. Discussing work outside the hut was
forbidden and Atwood, purely to annoy Pinker, was declaiming on the
suicide of Virginia Woolf, which he held to be the greatest day for
English letters since the invention of the printing press.
    “I c-c-can’t believe you mmm-mmm-mmm…” When Pinker snagged
himself on a word, his whole body seemed to shake with the effort
of trying to get himself free. Above his bow-tie, his face bloomed
scarlet in the torchlight. They stopped and waited patiently for
him. “Mmm-mmm…”
    “Mean that?” suggested Atwood.
    “Mean that, Frank,” gasped Pinker with relief. “Thank you.”
    Someone came to Atwood’s support, and then Pinker’s shrill voice
started to argue again. They moved off. Jericho lagged behind.
    The canteen, which lay just behind the perimeter fence, was as
big as an aircraft hangar, brightly lit and thunderously noisy,
with perhaps five or six hundred people sitting down to eat or
queuing for food.
    One of the new cryptanalysts shouted to Jericho: “I bet you’ve
missed this!” Jericho smiled and was about to say something in
return but the young man went off to collect a tray. The din was
dreadful, and so was the smell—a blended steam of institutional
food, of cabbage and boiled fish and custard, laced with cigarette
smoke and damp clothes. Jericho felt simultaneously intimidated by
it and detached from it, like a prisoner returning from solitary
confinement, or a patient from an isolation ward released on to the
street after a long illness.
    He queued and didn’t pay much attention to the food being
slopped on his plate. It was only after he had handed over his two
shillings and sat down that he took a good look at it—boiled
potatoes in a curdled yellow grease and a slab of something ribbed
and grey. He stabbed at the lump with his fork, then lifted a
fragment cautiously to his mouth. It tasted like fishy liver, like
congealed cod liver oil. He winced.
    “This is perfectly vile.”
    Atwood said, through a full mouth: “It’s whale meat.”
    “Good heavens.” Jericho put his fork down hurriedly.
    “Don’t waste it, dear boy. Don’t you know there’s a war on? Pass
it over.”
    Jericho pushed the plate across the table and tried to swill the
taste away with the milk-water coffee.
    The pudding was some kind of fruit tart, and that was better,
or, rather, it tasted of nothing more noxious than cardboard, but
halfway through it, Jericho’s wavering appetite finally died.
Atwood was now giving them his opinion of Gielgud’s interpretation
of Hamlet, spraying the table in the process with particles of
whale, and at that point Jericho decided he’d had enough. He took
the leftovers that Atwood didn’t want and scraped them into a milk
churn labelled “PIG SWILL”.
    When he was halfway to the door he was suddenly overcome with
remorse at his rudeness. Was this the behaviour of a good
colleague, what Skynner would call “a team player?” But then, when
he turned and looked back, he saw that nobody had missed him.
Atwood was still talking, waving his fork in mid-air, Pinker was
shaking his head, the others were listening.
    Jericho turned once more for the door and the salvation of the
fresh air.
    ♦
    Thirty seconds later he was out on the pavement, picking his way
carefully in the darkness towards the guard post, thinking about
Shark.
    He could hear the click click of a woman’s heels hurrying about
twenty paces in front of him. There was no one else around. It was
between sittings: everyone was either working or eating. The rapid
footsteps stopped at the barrier and a moment later the sentry
shone his torch directly in the woman’s face. She glanced away with
a murmur of annoyance, and Jericho saw her then, for an instant,
spot-lit in the blackout, looking straight in his