Plot hole: When the police search the white car and the barn they fail to find the compartment in the car behind the boot in which the decoding equipment was hidden. This is completely improbable. It was a standard car, the compartment was not a secret add on, and the police were supposed to undertake a thorough search of everything.
Enigma (2001)
1 plot hole - chronological order
Directed by: Michael Apted
Starring: Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Dougray Scott, Saffron Burrows
Continuity mistake: After the "car chase" the white car gets put in the barn. When the black car arrives it is covered in mud (so much they have to wipe it off the windscreen) from the dirt track. The white car only has a few specks of dirt.
Tom Jericho: It's true though, isn't it? The Katyn Massacre?
Wigram: Oh, do shut up. There's a war to win, and Stalin's helping us win it.
Trivia: The twice-used shot of the train rounding a curve is actually near Rabbit Bridge on the Great Central steam railway near Loughborough. The train is in fact heading South; according to the film, it is first heading West (Cambridge to Bletchley), then North (Bletchley to Manchester). The same locomotive is hauling both trains - unlikely - and is suspiciously clean for wartime. However, it was a masterful touch to dub in a passing steam train as background noise when the security man interviewed Jericho in his digs. Such background noise is often conspicuously absent in films.
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Chosen answer: This is not a mystery. Claire "stole them to read them" as Tom Jericho told Hester. As he later explained to Wigram, she had taken the messages to give to Puck who had the means to decipher them, and who was looking for his missing brother. The Kestrel traffic from ADU contained the names of victims of the Katyn Massacre. However, Puck and Claire were surprised by the imminent reappearance of Tom, and suddenly fled, explaining why some messages were left behind.