'Brush.'
Deering walked not very slowly round his officer dabbing at his jacket with a clothes-brush, dislodging a few of the fallen hairs and specks of lint but merely changing the position of most.
'Sticky tape's the thing really.'
'You should have thought of that before.'
'Yes, sir.'
With a forgiving smile, Leonard crossed to the rosewood dressing-table that he had not had to bring with him. Such pieces as this and the imposing mahogany tallboy, tall enough almost to touch the beams overhead, harked back to the days when the Mess had functioned as a farmhouse. The place was large enough to accommodate all the unit's officers above the rank of captain, plus a few deemed to qualify for comfort on special grounds: the Adjutant, Hunter, as administration officer, Leonard himself, who had explained that he needed to be at the center of things. Had he not thought to do so he might have found himself bedding down in an outhouse with a couple of subalterns, or even trying to live in one of the box-shaped, pastel-colored huts that had recently been run up in a nearby meadow and rang with portable radios eighteen hours a day.
He now picked up a red leather spectacle-case, quickly removed the horn-rimmed glasses he was wearing, substituted a pair of pince-nez, and closed the case with a loud snap, his eyes steadily on Deering throughout. The effect of the change was to replace the semblance of an ambitious schoolmaster with that of a minor Slavic bureaucrat.
'Well, Deering, any news?'
This was the signal for the daily report on gossip and rumor within the camp. Only a short acquaintance with the Army had been needed to teach Leonard the usefulness of batmen as confidants, eavesdroppers and innocent over-hearers. He had seen exceptional intelligence-value of this sort in Deering as soon as the Mess Sergeant recommended him, and that value had proved itself ever since. There was something about the man that he sympathized with more personally, too. Untidy and casual and sometimes faintly impertinent he might be, but his contempt for the politicians supposedly in charge of national security, combined with his respect for those few who (like Leonard) were really doing something about it, was as proper as it was rare, and would have been totally admirable if expressed in a better accent.
Losing no time in displaying his less attractive side, Deering took half a cigarette from his trouser pocket and lit it. He sniffed twice and said,
'The padre's been on the prowl again.'
'Are you sure?'
'See how it strikes you. About two A.M. Coates is parked in the forecourt waiting to take the Colonel's guest home when he sees someone creeping across that bit of meadow towards the huts. Whoever it is goes into one of the ones near the far end-Coates can't be sure which one, but that's where Ayscue's hut is. It was him all right, no doubt about it.'
'What do you mean, no doubt about it?' Leonard spoke sharply. A conversation about the work of the unit he had had with Ayscue the previous week had convinced him that no suspicion of spying could be attached here, and the idea of having to reopen a closed file was disagreeable to him. 'A couple of the Indians have got huts down that end. It might have been one of them, or Churchill, or almost anybody.'
'Churchill and the Indians don't keep dogs. Ayscue does. If it had been anyone else but him, that bloody Alsatian bitch of his would have cracked on like it does whenever you go near it. But there wasn't a peep out of the pooch. I asked Coates particularly. That proves it, see. I remember reading a story about that somewhere, you know, the case of the dog that didn't bark.'
The power of reasoning shown here impressed Leonard, but it would not do to let Deering see this. 'All right, suppose it was Ayscue, where does that get us? He might have all sorts of reasons for slipping out of camp for a few hours.'
'Like what? Going on the piss? He shifts a few here in the Mess when he feels like it, and he keeps a bottle in his hut, too, Evans says. Nothing there. Out on the ram? Can you see our respected spiritual counselor engaging in amatory pursuits? He wouldn't touch a woman with yours. No, he's up to something. Why does he live in one of those bloody pencil-boxes when as a major he's entitled to a room here? So's he can keep a fatherly eye on his flock, I suppose?'
'Well, yes-from what I hear he does spend a lot of time talking to the lads.'
'Yes, in a very nasty nosey way, too. Always on at them to let him know if there's anything they're afraid of and whether they're happy. Happy! What business is it of his? And these gramophone recitals and chamber concerts and what-not. It's not natural. Never trust a parson and you won't go far wrong. Say one thing and do another. Politicians who haven't been able to make the grade.'
For once, Leonard felt he could do without Deering's support. 'Is that all you've got?'
'Not quite. That cupboard of his, the one he keeps locked. Evans says he's done everything he can think of to get a look inside and he's got nowhere at all. How do we know he hasn't got a short-wave radio tucked away in there?'
'Nonsense, there'd be no-'
'It could be something like tit pictures, of course, but he'd only need a drawer for those. It'd pay you to have a dekko at that cupboard, I bet you.'
Wearily, but silently, Leonard agreed that he could not afford not to. He had recently been shown a training film about techniques of concealment in which great play had been made with double bluffs, dummy strong-boxes being hidden in the rafters or magnetically attached to the underside of bed-springs while the real one sat in view on the table, and so on. Leonard himself had followed this principle by setting a permanent guard on his office and stowing his most secret documents in a suitcase which he kept under his bed. Its unusually complex lock, however, incorporated a fine wire which any attempts at forcing would rupture, thus triggering off an alarm circuit.
A trained spy might well have camouflaged the hiding-place of his tools after the same reasoning. Could Evans be bribed into doping Ayscue's whisky-bottle as preliminary to getting hold of his keys? Non-minimal risk-potential would be the verdict of the manual- which, however, would be sure to offer helpful alternatives. He must consult it, but not now.
