This time he couldn’t resist catching Sir Frederick’s eye, but before he could speak Macready gave a derisive snort.
“And now you’re going to suggest that he had some sort of inside information!”
Sir Frederick looked at him innocently. “What makes you think that, Neville?”
“Because that’s what David believed. He practically suggested that the Russians had given Narva the green light.”
“Which is nonsense?”
Macready squared up decisively in front of the desk.
“Fred—I simply don’t believe it was possible for anyone—not the Russians, not us, not anyone—to forecast the presence of oil in commercial quantities. Small amounts, yes—everyone knew there might be some there. After all, it’s got the same rock sequences as the major producing basins in the Middle East and the States. But when Narva moved nobody—and I mean nobody—could have known what was there.”
Sir Frederick did not attempt to reply; he merely watched Macready with a curiously deferential intentness, almost as though he was the junior partner in the exchange, waiting for enlightenment. Indeed, from the moment Macready had blundered into the room like a fugitive from Alice in Wonderland he had said remarkably little except to spark the economist on from one burst of exasperation to the next. It was, thought Richardson with a small twinge of bitterness, a very different technique from that which had been applied in his own case: it was like David himself had once observed after a tough session—there were some you led, and some you drove, and some you ran behind, hoping to keep up with.
“But suppose—“ Macready turned away from the desk and started to walk the carpet, following its pattern like a child on the cracks of a pavement. “That’s what you want me to do, just like David did— suppose … suppose, suppose, suppose…”
He stared into space, his brow furrowed.
“Well, they wouldn’t help Narva, the Russians wouldn’t for a start. He’s right wing Christian Democrat—not neo-fascist, but the MSI have certainly made a play for him. And I can’t think of any reason why they might want to tempt him out of Italy either, and certainly not into North Sea investment—it wasn’t in their interests to encourage that at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Could his movement of capital have had that sort of effect?” asked Sir Frederick encouragingly.
Macready thought for a moment, still moving like a robot over the carpet. “It’s hard to gauge exactly. He’s nowhere near in the big league even now, and the companies were pretty well committed by then… But he damn well boosted their morale—and he certainly gave Xenophon a shot in the arm just when they needed it. … Except that all militates against the Russians giving him anything, even if they had it—“
He swung round and set off again “—because that’s the real objection—the technology… Offshore operations are the coming thing all right; they’re maybe budgeting for four, five hundred millions on underwater exploration next year, world-wide, the companies are… But Houston is where the action is, not Baku—and if anyone comes up with a way of finding oil without drilling for it then it’ll be someone from the Capitalist Republic of Texas, not the Azerbaidjan Soviet Socialist Republic, take my word for it. And so far no one has—you can take my word for that, too!”
“Hmm!” Sir Frederick looked down at his virgin blotter, straightened it, and then examined his fingernails. “I rather think Lockheed’s are involved in underwater oil technology these days, aren’t they?”
Macready jerked to a halt.
“And of course they would have obtained their underwater experience from working with the American navy on submarine rescue systems, since one thing has a way of leading to another in such fields —eh?” Sir Frederick smiled at Macready, who was now at last giving him the appearance of undivided attention.
“Now, it does occur to me—“ continued Sir Frederick smoothly, “—that ever since they have been operating a nuclear submarine force the Russians have also been working very hard on the problems of ultra deep-sea systems. In fact they performed quite creditably in recovering the wreckage of one of their Far East boats off Sakhalin Island last year. So I’m wondering—and I’d be obliged if you would wonder also, Neville—if one thing might have led to another with them too.”
Macready continued to stare at Sir Frederick, though now with an air of calculation.
“I was pretty sure David had something more than hypothesis to work on,” he murmured, nodding to himself as if satisfied that both Audley and Sir Frederick could not be really as foolish as their questions. “Just what is it you’ve got, Fred?”
“What about the Russians?” Sir Frederick’s tone hardened for the first time.
Macready shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought anyone is able to operate on the seabed yet without surface supporting vessels, certainly not far from their home base. And as far as I’m aware they haven’t had any vessels keeping station in the North Sea.” He paused, evidently grappling at close quarters with the possibility of something he had been categorically denying a few moments earlier. “But if they can—Fred, just what is it you’ve got?”
“Nothing concrete, I’m afraid, Neville. But it does look as though Narva managed to tap a leak in Moscow.”
“A leak—not a tip-off?”
“I don’t know which. But I agree with you that this isn’t the sort of thing they’d give away, and certainly not to Narva. Only in any case it seems that it was one of our own men who passed on the information.” He reached forward to the intercom. “I don’t suppose you remember Little Bird?—Mrs. Harlin, where the devil is that file on Hotzendorff?”
The intercom was silent.
“Mrs. Harlin—are you there?” snapped Sir Frederick.
The intercom cleared its throat.
“I beg your pardon, Sir Frederick.” Mrs. Harlin did not sound flustered, but she did not sound quite like herself. “The Hotzendorff Dossier has just arrived. The Archivist has brought it himself.”
Sir Frederick frowned at the machine.
“Yes?”
“He wishes to see you.” The sudden tightness of Mrs. Harlin’s voice completed the story: Sir Frederick had not wished to be disturbed and in her opinion the Archivist had constituted a disturbance she reckoned she could handle; but he had evidently turned out tougher than she had expected.
“For God’s sake, woman—“ another voice, distant but sharp with anger, crackled from the intercom.
“Superintendent Cox is with him, Sir Frederick,” Mrs. Harlin said quickly. “He will not state his business.”
Oh God, thought Richardson, when the Special Branch wouldn’t state its business except to the top man, then something unpleasant was invariably about to happen. And he had a premonition that it would happen to him.
X
“MR. BENBOW—SUPERINTENDENT—?” Sir Frederick acknowledged the unlikely deputation neutrally.
“Sir!” Cox halted two yards from the desk, noted the presence of Macready and Richardson with two photographic blinks of the eye, and stood at ease with the calm resignation of a veteran bearer of evil tidings.
Benbow murmured something unintelligible and came to a stop alongside him. Then, almost as an afterthought, he took two more nervous steps forward, deposited a grey file on the edge of the desk and retreated again.
“Thank you, Mr. Benbow,” Sir Frederick nodded graciously. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“I asked Mr. Benbow to come here with me, sir,” said Cox calmly. “I think we may have an emergency on our hands.”
“You think?”
“I think.” Cox looked at Sir Frederick steadily. “The Librarian didn’t report for work this morning.”
“The—Librarian.”
“Mr. Hemingway, Sir Frederick,” said the Archivist. “He is in charge of the non-classified printed material—newspapers, periodicals and journals.”
Richardson tried to place Hemingway. A surprising amount of interesting and useful info
rmation emerged from routine publications, but it usually reached him in digested form after having been carried from its original source by some Argus-eyes expert like Macready or Fatso Larimer—or David. He had hardly ever penetrated to the bowels of the building himself, where the Reading Room—
The Reading Room!
“The Duty Officer carried out the routine check at ten-hundred.” The neutrality of Cox’s voice matched Sir Frederick’s. “His wife was in a state—he went out last night and didn’t come home. Didn’t use his own car. Said he might be back latish. None of the hospitals within a radius of a hundred miles has admitted him. None of the Police Forces in the area have anyone answering to his description in custody.” Cox paused. “But … the Chief Constable for Mid-Wessex advised me to have a word with Brigadier Stacker.” He paused again. “Just that—a word. Only the Brigadier isn’t available at the moment, and I thought it best to have the word with you first, sir.”
Sir Frederick turned to Richardson.
“Well?” he said heavily.
“What’s the description?”
“Grey-brown hair, moustache, blue eyes, prominent—“
“Not the face.”
Cox didn’t bat an eyelid. “Aged fifty, height five feet ten inches, weight 168 pounds. A photograph won’t help then?”
“It won’t.” Richardson tried not to imagine the face of Charlie Clark’s victim. They had been ready to let him see it, but he had managed not to have time to take up their offer. He had already seen one face like that in his career, and he didn’t want to seem greedy.
“Dark grey suit, white shirt, maroon tie, brown suede shoes.” Cox was watching him intently. “Well, we’ve got Hemingway’s prints on file. That is, if—“ he slowed down judiciously, “if you can provide anything for comparison.”
He was almost there, thought Richardson, looking questioningly at his master.
Sir Frederick nodded. “Go on, Peter.”
Richardson met the Special Branch man’s gaze. “It could be. The general description’s about right—height, age and so on. And the clothes are about right. It could very well be.”
Cox relaxed. “I take it you have a body?”
“That’s right.”
One lost and one found. At least the books balanced.
“Suicide or foul play?”
“The verdict will be misadventure, Superintendent,” said Sir Frederick. “As it happens that is not far short of the truth. But officially we shall fail to establish an identity. It will be an unknown intruder for the public record.”
“Might I ask where he was intruding, sir?”
“Dr. Audley’s place down in Hampshire.”
Cox’s face went blank—the books had unbalanced themselves again—and then clouded with surprise.
The change in expression was not lost on Sir Frederick. “Audley had nothing to do with it, Superintendent—at least not directly. He’s … on holiday with his family.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“Relieved?”
“Yes, sir.” Cox was feeling his way circumspectly now; he hadn’t yet been warned off, but he recognised the signs. “I understood he was not a violent man. Off the rugger field, at least. He’s never had a weapon booked out to him.” He paused. “But we do have a security problem now, sir.”
“If the body is Hemingway’s, we do—I agree,” Sir Frederick’s eyes shifted to the Archivist. “What was his security category?”
“Hemingway, sir?” The Archivist looked startled.
“Yes, Mr. Benbow.”
“Grade Four, sir.”
It was Sir Frederick’s turn to look surprised: Grade Four was hardly a security category at all. If the man who delivered the morning milk to the building had needed a category, that would have been it.
“I didn’t know we had any Grade Fours here.”
“He didn’t handle anything requiring a higher clearance, sir. And he wasn’t authorised to go above the ground floor.” Benbow was now pink with embarrassment. “His appointment was quite in order.”
“I’m sure it was. But who the devil agreed to it?”
The Archivist braced himself visibly. “You did, Sir Frederick,” he said.
“I did—did I?” Sir Frederick scowled reflectively.
Neville Macready, who had drifted away from the group to continue his examination of the carpet’s pattern, gave an irreverent snort.
“So I did, so I did!” Sir Frederick muttered at last. “I remember now: you wanted a Grade Two Deputy and I wouldn’t let you have him. You’re quite right, Mr. Benbow—I apologise.”
“It was a matter of finance, sir, as I recall.”
“Quite so. … Hmm! Then where did we get the man from, Superintendent?”
“From the Army, sir. He’d just taken early retirement from the RASC—warrant officer class two. He was in War Department records, so he had the right qualifications. It was a perfectly proper appointment.”
“Perfectly proper stupidity, you mean!” Sir Frederick shook his head regretfully. “And he had no access to classified material?”
“None at all,” said Benbow emphatically.
“What about the Dead Files? Weren’t they next door to the Reading Room?”
“They’re properly secured, sir. There’s an electronic lock and the key has to be signed for.”
“Of course,” Sir Frederick nodded. “And you were satisfied with Hemingway?”
“He was competent.”
“Competent?” The renewed question probed Benbow’s slight hesitation. “No more than that?”
“There was no scope in his grade for more than that, Sir Frederick.” The probe was rewarded with a suggestion of distaste.
“But you didn’t like him, Mr. Benbow?”
“I can’t say I cared for him. He was—he tried to be friendly, I suppose. He was always talking about what he saw on television—he had a colour set.”
The Archivist made television sound like a physical handicap not spoken of in polite society, the coloured version being a particularly unfortunate manifestation of it.
“I didn’t know him very well, Sir Frederick,” Benbow concluded rather defensively.
“Very good.” Sir Frederick stood up. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Benbow. If this body of ours does turn out to be Hemingway, you are certainly not responsible in any way for what has occurred. But even if it doesn’t we shall get rid of him. And you shall have a Grade Two deputy for the Reading Room, I promise you …”
“Well?”
Richardson waited for Cox to speak first.
“He could have been got at, sir,” said Cox. “It would be worth their while to have someone in this building, even in the Reading Room. He could report on comings and goings at the least. And on the things that interested us. A foot in the door’s better than nothing.”
“Richardson?”
“He overheard David talk to Macready here. That’s what set him off, I’ll bet.”
“Neville—was Hemingway there when you met David?”
Macready stopped pacing, shrugged. “He could have been. We were there—he’s just part of the furniture as far as I’m concerned.”
“Could he have seen the file?”
“What file?”
“The one David was looking at,” said Sir Frederick with well-controlled patience.
Macready frowned. “I didn’t see any file.”
“David was looking at that file,” Sir Frederick pointed to the desk.
“Not when he talked to me,” said Macready.
“It is important, Neville,” Sir Frederick said softly, but with an iceberg tip of firmness showing.
Macready stared at him. “Oh—come on, Fred! I went down there to look at the new AEQ. I was just going to sit down and David came up—we walked around a bit as we talked. I didn’t look under the bloody table for spies—“
As he trailed off in vague irritation Richardson found himself once more searching for emotion in the
faces of the other two men, and finding very little. He felt he was learning something useful about man—management, but he wasn’t at all sure yet what it was. But they’d got what they wanted, anyway, even if it was not exactly reassuring: while Macready and David had communed with each other on their own esoteric intellectual plane Hemingway could probably have learnt the file’s contents by heart without disturbing them.
“What’s in it that’s so special, for God’s sake?” said Macready suddenly, lurching towards the desk and scooping up the file. Without another word he split it open with a well-chewed thumbnail and plunged into it, oblivious of his surroundings.
“Superintendent—“ Sir Frederick’s equanimity was undented by this raid on his desk: he simply ignored it. “I think you’d better get after the Hemingway angle.”
“I’ll do that, sir,” said Cox. For the first time there was a hint of eagerness in his voice. Or was it gratitude?—it sounded quite remarkably like gratitude.
“Captain Richardson—“ as the Special Branch man nodded towards him Richardson detected a flicker of sympathy, “—good luck to you.”
It was gratitude.
The speed of Cox’s retreat took Richardson by surprise. And then, even before the door had clicked shut, its implications presented themselves to him like the figures on a bill run up by someone else which was about to be passed to him for payment.
Since Macready’s arrival, and even more since Cox’s, he had seemed to be no more than a spectator of a game in which he had already played his part. But Cox had been sent about his business at this point not simply because internal security was his job, but because Sir Frederick did not intend to involve him in its wider aspect. And he, Richardson, had remained—and was still uncomfortably remaining—because that too was part of the design.
Not for the first time he had the sense of being manipulated—of having only partial freewill: not a bus, not a train, but a tram…
October Men Page 13
