Enigma by Robert Harris Page B

of people moving
about.
    She must be on duty. She must be working the midnight shift. She
might be three feet from where he stood.
    He was on tiptoe.
    He had never been inside Hut 3. For reasons of security, workers
in one section of the Park were not encouraged to stray into
another, not unless they had good reason. From time to time his
work had taken him over the threshold of Hut 6, but Hut 3 was a
mystery to him. He had no idea of what she did. She’d tried to tell
him once, but he’d said gently that it was best he didn’t know.
From odd remarks he gathered it was something to do with filing and
was “deadly dull, darling”.
    He stretched out as far as he could, until his fingertips were
brushing the asbestos cladding of the hut.
    What are you doing, darling Claire? Are you busy with your
boring filing, or are you flirting with one of the night-duty
officers, or gossiping with the other girls, or puzzling over that
crossword you can never do?
    Suddenly, about fifteen yards to his left, a door opened. From
the oblong of dim light a uniformed man emerged, yawning. Jericho
slid silently to the ground until he was kneeling in the wet earth
and pressed his chest against the wall. The door closed and the man
began to walk towards him. He stopped about ten feet away,
breathing hard. He seemed to be listening. Jericho closed his eyes
and shortly afterwards he heard a pattering and then a drilling
noise and when he opened them he saw the faint silhouette of the
man pissing against the wall, very hard. It went on for a
wondrously long time and Jericho was close enough to get a whiff of
pungent, beery urine. A fine spray was being borne downwind on the
breeze. He had to put his hand to his nose and mouth to stop
himself gagging. Eventually, the man gave a deep sigh—a groan,
almost—of satisfaction, and fumbled with the buttons of his fly. He
moved away. The door opened and closed again and Jericho was
alone.
    There was a certain humour in the situation, and later even he
was to see it. But at the time he was on the edge of panic. What,
in the name of reason, did he think he was doing? If he were to be
caught, kneeling in the darkness, with his ear pressed to a hut in
which he had no business, he would have—to put it mildly—a hard
time explaining himself. For a moment he considered simply marching
inside and demanding to see her. But his imagination recoiled at
the prospect. He might be thrown out. Or she might appear in fury
and create a scene. Or she might appear and be the soul of
sweetness, in which case what did he say? “Oh, hello, darling. I
just happened to be passing. You look in good form. By the way,
I’ve been meaning to ask you, why did you wreck my life?”
    He used the wall to help him scramble to his feet. The quickest
way back to the road was straight head, but that would take him
past the door of the hut. He decided that the safest course would
be to go back the way he had come.
    He was more cautious after his scare. Each time he took a step
he planted his foot carefully and on every fifth pace he paused to
make sure that no one else was moving around in the blackout. Two
minutes later he was back outside the entrance to Hut 8.
    He felt as if he had been on a cross-country run. He was out of
breath. There was a small hole in his left shoe and his sock was
wet. Bits of damp grass were sticking to the bottoms of his trouser
legs. His knees were sodden. And where he had rubbed against the
concrete wall the front of his overcoat was streaked luminously
white. He took out his handkerchief and tried to clean himself
up.
    He had just about finished when he heard the others coming back
from the canteen. Atwood’s voice carried in the night: “A dark
horse, that one. Very dark. I recruited him, you know,” to which
someone else chimed in: “Yes, but he was once very good, wasn’t
he?”
    Jericho didn’t stop to hear the rest. He pushed open the door
and almost ran down the passage, so that by the time