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.'
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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?'
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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 dummy2
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 information 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 dummy2
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.'
