'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?'
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'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 dummy2
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 —'
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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.'
