made to the police but to your wife at the Waggoner's Rest, telling her that if the General — he gave his full name, rank and address — didn't pull in his horns then she, Mary, would receive a pair of ears in the mail to-morrow. The caller said that he was sure that though she had been married only a couple of months she would still be able to recognise her husband's ears when she saw them.'
I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck and that had nothing to do with any imagined sensation of ear- cropping. I said carefully, 'There are three things, Hardanger. The number of people in those parts who know we have been married only two months must be pretty few. The number of people who know that Mary is the General's daughter must be even fewer. But the number of people who know the General's true identity, apart from yourself and myself, can be counted on one hand. How in God's name could any criminal in the land know the General's true identity?'
'You tell me,' Hardanger said heavily. 'This is the nastiest development of the lot. This man not only knows who the General is but knows that Mary is his only child and the apple of his eye, the one person in the world who
' o high heaven,' I agreed slowly. 'Of treason — and treason in high places.'
'I don't think we'd better talk about it over the phone,' Hardanger said quickly.
'No, Tried tracing the call?'
'Not yet. But I might as well waste time that way as any other.'
He hung up and I stood there staring at the silent telephone. The General was a personal appointee of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. His identity was also known to the chiefs of espionage and counter- espionage — it had to be. An Assistant Commissioner, Hardanger himself, the Commandant and security chief at Mordon — and that ended the list of those to whom the General's identity was known. It was an ugly thought. I wondered vaguely how General Cliveden was going to enjoy the next couple of hours — I didn't require any powers of telepathy to know where Hardanger would be heading as soon as he had put down that phone. Of all our suspects, only Cliveden knew the General's identity. Maybe I should have been paying more attention to General Cliveden.
A shadow darkened the hall doorway. I glanced up to see three khaki-clad figures standing at the head of the outside steps. The man in the centre, a sergeant, had his hand raised to the bell-push but lowered it when he caught sight of me.
'I'm looking for an Inspector Gibson,' he said. 'Is he here?'
'Gibson?' I suddenly remembered that was me. 'I'm Inspector Gibson, Sergeant.'
'I've something here for you, sir.' He indicated the file under his arm. 'I've been ordered to ask for your credentials first of all.'
I showed them and he handed over the file. He said, apologetically, 'I'm under orders not to let that out of my sight, sir. Superintendent Hardanger said it came from Mr. Clandon's records offices and I understand it's highly confidential.'
'Of course.' Followed by the sergeant who was flanked by a couple of hefty privates, I walked into the living-room, ignoring the outraged glare of Mrs. Turpin who had belatedly appeared on the scene. I asked her to leave and she did, glowering savagely.
I broke the seal and opened the file. It contained a spare seal for re-sealing the cover and a copy of Dr. MacDonald's security report. I'd seen the report before, of course, when I'd taken over as head of security from the vanished Easton Derry, but had paid no particular attention to it. I'd had no special reason to. But I had now.
There were seven pages of foolscap. I went through it three times. I didn't miss a thing the first time and if possible even less the next two. I was looking for even the tiniest offbeat jarring note that might give me even the most insubstantial lead, Senator McCarthy sniffing out a Communist had nothing on me, but I found not the slightest trace of anything that might have been helpful. The only odd thing, as Hardanger had pointed out, was the extremely scanty information about MacDonald's Army career, and to information Easton Derry — who had indeed compiled the report — must have had access. But nothing, except for a remark at the foot of a page that MacDonald, entering the Army as a private in the Territorials in 1938, had finished his Army career in Italy as a lieutenant-colonel in a tank division in 1945. The top of the following page held a reference to his appointment as a government chemist in north-east England early in 1946. This could have been just the way Easton Derry had compiled the report: or not.
With the blade of my penknife, and ignoring the sergeant's scandalised look, I pried open the buckram corner holding the top left hand corners of the pages together. Under this was a thin wire staple, the kind of staple that comes with practically every kind of commercial stapler. I bent the ends back at right angles, slid the sheets off and examined them separately. No sheet had more than one pair — the original pair — of holes made by the stapler. If anyone had opened that staple to remove a sheet, he'd replaced it with exceptional care. On the face of it, it looked as if that file hadn't been tampered with.
I became aware that Carlisle, the plain-clothes detective-sergeant, was standing beside me, holding a bundle of papers and folders. He said, 'This might interest you, sir. I don't know.'
'Just a moment.' I clipped the sheets together again, pushed them into the file-holder, resealed it and handed it back to the army sergeant who took himself off along with his two companions. I said to Carlisle, 'What are those?'
'Photographs, sir.'
'Photographs? What makes you think I'll be interested in photographs, Sergeant?'
'The fact that they were inside a locked steel box, sir. And the box was in the bottom drawer — also locked — of a knee-hole desk. And here's a bundle found in the same place— personal correspondence, I would say.'
'Much trouble in opening the steel box?'
'Not with the size of hacksaw I use, sir. We've just about tied it all up now, Inspector. Everything listed. If I might venture an opinion, you'll find little of interest in the list.'
'Searched the whole house? Any basement?'
'Just about the filthiest coal-cellar you ever clapped eyes on.' Carlisle smiled. 'From what I've seen of Dr. MacDonald's personal tastes he doesn't strike me as the type of man who would keep even coal in a coal-cellar if he could find a cleaner and more luxurious place for it.'
He left me to his finds. There were four albums. Three of them were of the innocuous squinting-into-the-sun type of family albums you can find in a million British homes. Most of the photographs were faded and yellow, taken in the days of MacDonald's youth in the twenties and thirties. The fourth album, of much more recent origin, was a presentation given to MacDonald by colleagues in the World Health Organisation in recognition of his outstanding services to the W.H.O. over many years — an illuminated address pasted to the inside front board said so. It contained over fifty pictures of MacDonald and his colleagues taken in at least a dozen different European cities. Most of the photographs had been taken in France, Scandinavia and Italy, with a sprinkling from a few other countries. They had been mounted in chronological fashion, each picture with date and location caption, the last having been taken in Helsinki less than six months previously.
The photographs in the album didn't interest me: what did interest me was one photograph that was missing. From its place in the album it had almost certainly been taken about eighteen months previously. Its caption had been all but obliterated by horizontal strokes made in the same white ink used for all captions. I switched on the light and peered closely at the obliteration. No question but that the place name had once started with a T. After that it was hard to say. The next letter could have been either an O or a D. O, I felt sure — there was no city in Europe beginning with TD. The remainder of the word was completely obliterated. TO… About six letters in length, possibly seven. But none of the letters projected below the line, so that cut out all words with p's and g's and j's and so forth.
What cities or towns in Europe did I know beginning with the letters TO and six or seven letters in length? Not so very many, I realised, at least not of any size, and the W.H.O. didn't hold its meetings in villages. Torquay — no good, letters projecting below. Totnes — too small. In Europe? Tornio in Sweden, Tondor in Denmark — again both relatively insignificant. Toledo, now — no one could call that a village: but MacDonald had never been to Spain. The best bets were probably either Touraai in Belgium or Toulon in France. Tournai? Toulon? For a moment or two I mulled the names over in my mind. I picked up the bundle of letters.
There must have been thirty or forty letters in the Bundle, faintly scented and tied, of all things, with a blue
