The small boy came in for something, stared at the stranger and went out. He asked about the boy. He was just starting school. She had no plans for the future. She did not know whether they were going to stay in England. In one way she would like the boy brought up in England but in another way she would not.
He changed the subject.
‘When did you first meet your husband?’
‘In Brussels.’
‘You were a dancer?’
‘I worked at a nightclub called Au Poids de l’Or … ’
‘You met him there.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know who he was?’
‘Not then, no. I thought he was in the diplomatic service. We used to get a number of foreign visitors. It was one of the show spots. I liked him. He asked me to go out. That’s how it began.’
‘Did you ever know what his job was?’
‘I wasn’t interested in his job.’
‘What were you interested in?’
‘In him.’
‘Did you know where he worked?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did he tell you?’
‘Just before we were married.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he was a civil servant, that he worked in the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Did you know what he was doing in Brussels?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Did you ever know he worked for the department?’
‘I knew it was secret work. I didn’t know what it was.’
‘You weren’t interested?’
‘I was curious, sometimes.’
‘When?’
‘Mostly about his trips abroad. He used to say he was buying army supplies. Sometimes he would be away for three or four months and I would hardly ever hear from him.’
‘You used to get worried?’
‘I didn’t like being left alone.’
‘You imagined him at other nightclubs?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you wondered about his work?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did you ever ask him, directly, what he was doing?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Did he tell you?’
‘He used to tell me something. It didn’t mean very much.’
‘Did you say you didn’t like him being away for so long at a time?’
‘He knew that.’
‘You told him?’
‘There was no need. He knew.’
‘But he didn’t mind?’
‘He enjoyed his work.’
‘Did he say so?’
‘I could see he did.’
‘Did you ever ask him to change his job so that he could be at home more?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He refused.’
She had no idea why she was talking so freely. She was surprised. It had seemed casual conversation but she had already gone so far that she felt much of the reserve had been broken. It made her suddenly cautious. She asked several questions in her turn, probing to see if he had known her husband well. By his answers he appeared to have done so. He spoke quite easily and freely about him. Suddenly she said:
‘He thought of nothing but his work.’
‘He thought of you.’
‘Did he?’ She spoke eagerly. ‘You think so?’
Looking at her he thought, suddenly, abruptly, that Shepherd had been fortunate in marrying her. She had the long classical head which he had always associated with the women of the Renaissance, the high forehead, the full red lips, the perfectly proportioned nose; the head of the women of the castles of Poitou and Angouleme.
‘I was entirely separate from Peter's work,’ she said. ‘Entirely separate. It was like, in a way, only living with half a man. Eventually it was his work which killed him.’
‘What makes you say that?'
‘It may not be obvious to the department, but it is obvious to me.’
‘It was an accident?’
‘Colonel Lamb thinks it was suicide.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘It’s what he thinks.’
‘But he didn’t say so?’
‘He as good as said it.’
‘Why?”
‘Because of this Russian woman he got mixed up with.’ Holmes cursed silently. He began to say: ‘I don’t think — ‘ but got no further.
‘Of course!’ she interrupted, bitterly. ‘It’s obvious! You’re trying to be nice. But it’s no good. I know what you’re all thinking. Colonel Lamb as good as said it. Well, why shouldn’t he? It is obvious, isn’t it, when you look at it? He comes back without leave and meets a woman who has now been deported. I saw she had been deported in the papers. Why? Because she’s been spying. And he helped her. That’s what you think. Then he committed suicide because he couldn’t face it. That’s what you think, isn’t it? I know you’re trying to be nice to me but that’s what you think.’
Her hands were trembling. She took a cigarette and inhaled the smoke savagely. She came back to the table and poured another drink.
‘Well, of course,’ she said, in a quieter voice. ‘It is obvious.’
Holmes spoke equally quietly: ‘It’s not obvious and knowing Shepherd it’s not what I believe.’
‘Everyone else does.’
‘Not everyone.’
‘When the department gets an idea in its head you won’t be able to get it out again.’ She was vindictive, savage, contemptuous. He could see the hatred in her eyes.
‘I can’t blame you for feeling like that,’ he said.
‘You’re all wrong about Peter,’ she said. ‘All of you.’ She spoke with that abnormal vehemence which he had already noticed. She stood up and crossed the room. She turned round. He could not help admiring her gesture. It was that of an actress. It was vibrant with indignation. Her shoulders were thrown back, breasts straining against the blouse, hips and legs wide, hair flying.
‘Peter would never have drowned,’ she said. ‘Not even when he was drunk. Not Peter. I told Colonel Lamb. He would never have drowned. Once when we were at a party he was blind drunk. They threw him into the swimming pool: at the Poids de l’Or: you can ask the manager. He swam easily, in his clothes, yet he could hardly stand upright. A man like that,’ she said, ‘would never have drowned.’
He wondered whether he ought to suggest to her that Shepherd might have drowned if he had been drugged; but he did not.
‘You think,’ he said, ‘that he might have been killed?’
‘Murdered?’ she corrected. ‘I don’t know. It is more understandable than an accident. Suicide I do not believe. Don’t expect me to think that he betrayed secrets!’
She had an obsession about Nina Lydoevna. He could tell that from her next question. ‘What was she like, this Russian; was she attractive?’
‘I don’t think so. She is over forty.’
‘Some women over forty are very attractive.’
She was intensely jealous. He imagined that at times she could be violently passionate. He wondered what her relationship with Shepherd had been.
‘What a waste of a life,’ she said.
He did not know what to reply.
‘A complete waste,’ she said. ‘He had brains, intelligence, a wonderful spirit. He had a tremendous belief in love, in idealism, in living, in creating things. So he creates nothing and does nothing and throws his life away. On what? For what? Why should he? It would not matter in a cause, a battle, something in which he could believe.’
He looked at her for a long time. In her anger she was somehow very beautiful but it was a contemptuous and violent beauty. It was no good trying to assuage her contempt, to argue otherwise.
‘He could have created a poem,’ she said. ‘Or music. He could have done something useful.’
‘Maybe he did.’
‘You seem to be the only one who thinks so.’
‘So you h
ated his work?’
‘I did,’ she said. The emphasis on the words implied that Shepherd had not. It was a confirmation he needed. He had got a better picture of Shepherd by talking to her than he had ever had before from all the reports which had been compiled for him.
‘Look here,’ he said, seriously. ‘Don’t think it was a waste. We don’t know. No one knows. But I, personally, don’t believe it was. And another thing. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t be impulsive.’
She shrugged her shoulders. There was a slight smile. It came and went.
‘Peter used to tell me.’
‘What?’
‘Not to be impulsive.’
‘He was right.’
Holmes got up. He did not know quite why he should have given her advice. In any case she was not the sort of woman who would take any notice. Lamb, he was convinced, had handled her in the wrong way. If it had been a man it would have been all right; Lamb could handle men. He was hopeless with women. She was antagonized. Not that he could blame her because it was true in one way that the department had killed her husband. His work had killed him. She hated his work. As though she was following his thoughts, she said just that.
‘His work destroyed him. In the end he became obsessed by it.’
‘Was he more obsessed by it when he came back from Africa the last time?’
‘Yes. He was restless and excited.’
‘Why did he leave hospital?’
‘He complained about the treatment and the noise in the ward. He said he was going to a private clinic.’
‘Did he say where it was?’
‘He gave me the address.’
‘Did you ask him anything about it?’
‘I asked how we were going to pay for it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said it didn’t matter. He could put it on expenses.’
‘Did you think he could?’
‘I accepted what he said.’
‘Did you know it was a nature-cure place?’
‘No.’
‘Was he interested in nature cure?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Were you?’
‘I would have been interested in anything that would have helped him to get better.’
Holmes did not stay long after that. He had an uneasy feeling about her, which he could not place, as though all that she had told him was only on the surface. But one thing was quite clear. Shepherd had been working to a prearranged plan. They had discussed the possibility of treatment in a private clinic and he had assured her that it could be put down on his expenses. He must have been confident that the private clinic would qualify as a legitimate expense that could be passed as such either by Lamb or Scott Elliot and, therefore, connected with his work. Moreover he had gone to the clinic direct from the Harley Street consulting-rooms so that the discussion about expenses must have taken place before he had gone to Harley Street. In other words it looked more and more as though Shepherd had selected the clinic in advance and after that had sought out the specialists who would be able to get him there.
Holmes felt cheerful. One did not need to go to the elaborate lengths of faking an ulcer and selecting a nature-cure place in Surrey merely to rendezvous with a Soviet spy at Runnymede. It was an over-elaborate screen for that. The suggested conclusion was that there was something at Uplands which Shepherd wanted to know about. The people at Uplands were concerned with, almost obsessed by, the thought of the pollution of food and water. Shepherd had been investigating a chemical which polluted water.
When Holmes got back to his office he rang Morrison and checked that Uplands was being watched. It was. Morrison had put two men on to it. They discussed the possibilities without getting very far.
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Morrison, ‘you saw Mrs Shepherd?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was her sister there?’
‘Her sister? No.’
‘She didn’t tell you she was coming?’
‘No.’
‘She is.’
‘How do you know?’
There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. ‘We keep our eyes open.’ There was another chuckle. ‘As a matter of fact it was a telegram from Brussels we monitored; from Rosa Verschoyle.’
'Her sister?’
‘Yes.’
'She didn’t come for the funeral.’
'Perhaps,’ suggested Morrison, 'she couldn’t get away? Rosa Verschoyle,’ he said, 'is the eldest sister. We’ve checked. She’s the wife of a linen draper in Liege.’
It seemed an innocuous situation to have in life; one could hardly imagine anything more bourgeois, safe and comfortable, than a Liege linen-draper’s wife; and it did not seem to match at all the image of the dancer from the Poids de l’Or. But sisters were often different.
‘And Nina Lydoevna’s gone home,’ added Morrison gloomily. 'She left London Airport this morning for Moscow.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Ever Since Cecil Rhodes
Nothing seemed to go right. They were plagued by irrelevances. None of Morrison’s lines of enquiry produced anything. Somewhere or other there must be information they needed but they were unable to find out anything of any significance.
Morrison and Holmes had a long session with Lamb on the day following Nina Lydoevna’s deportation. Lamb had been at the airport to see her off. Holmes suspected he had gone down to the airport deliberately in order to offend Scott Elliot who would also be there.
‘I saw Tirov,’ said Lamb. ‘I bet he knows more than he says.’ That was a typical Lamb understatement. Tirov was head of the Soviet intelligence service in London, the senior air attaché at the Soviet Embassy, and reputedly the most efficient Soviet agent in western Europe. He had been at the airport to see Nina Lydoevna on to the plane.
‘Must have been a party,’ murmured Morrison but Lamb would not be drawn. The deportation of diplomatic staff always seemed to him a slightly foolish business, used mainly for reprisals, making difficulties, maintaining privileges; he had no time for diplomatic conventions. ‘Silly,’ said Lamb. ‘Just plain silly.’
They got down to the business of discussing their next move. They were all, if they had been frank, somewhat chastened. Morrison attempted to be optimistic but the reasons for optimism were slim. The trouble was that real progress so far on all the main issues — why Shepherd had come back, what he had told the Russians, what had he betrayed? — was nil. There was another trouble. There were far too many lines of possible enquiry open, far too many potential time-wasters which seemed to promise something, or demand investigation, which could not be ignored, and yet would probably lead nowhere in the end, only to some darkly interesting but unprofitable blind alley. It was easy to get side-tracked on a case, to waste precious resources and manpower for hours and even days and accumulate a vast amount of useless information which was impressive only on paper.
There were further complications: red herrings provided by chance or by well-meaning suggestions. Holmes had to spend nearly an entire morning discussing a theory put forward by Pendlebury that an ancillary use of LSD was for indoctrination. Pendlebury’s theory was that in Africa there were many governments uneasily poised on a pyramid of large and restive populations and that to keep their people quiet and happy one of the easiest methods would be to use a mild hallucinogen in the water supply. It would give a people living under intolerable social conditions a permanent mild sense of euphoria and well-being. ‘If they receive indoctrinated news,’ said Pendlebury, ‘there’s no reason why they should not receive indoctrinated water.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Holmes. He spent a long time proving the impracticability of the idea in the present stage of piped African water supplies. ‘Even so,’ he said to Morrison later, ‘the situation in Africa is odd,’ he told Morrison and Lamb the result of some of his researches. Many people in Africa seemed to be waiting for something to happen, something big, something that had never happened before, a new
movement. There were whispers of a black messiah, a new leader who would not be the leader of one people but of all Africans. ‘This is not a new feeling in Africa,’ said Holmes. ‘But this time everyone believes there’s something tangible behind it; and that’s the difference.’
‘I wish to God,’ said Lamb, ‘we knew what it was all about.’
They went through the reports of Foreign Office intelligence. The blue flimsies confirmed the feeling about which Holmes had reported. More and more agents were flooding into African territories, from Russia, from China, from South Africa, India, America. The struggle now, wrote one agent in Lusaka, is for the soul of the African people.
‘We’ve heard it all before,’ said the sceptical Morrison. They’ve been a-struggling for the dark soul of Africa ever since — what’s-his-name?’
Lamb looked surprised. ‘Stanley and Livingstone?’
‘No,’ said Morrison, ‘Cecil Rhodes.’
Holmes appreciated the point. Rhodes, as distinct from Stanley and Livingstone, had had money and a private army.
‘Which brings us back to Shepherd,’ said Lamb. ‘Why make this drug in Africa and which army is going to use it? So far there’s no evidence from Africa that anyone is. The more I think about it the more likely that it isn’t for military use at all. It’s black market. Kick pills. That sort of thing.’
‘So Shepherd comes back to London to see the Russians about organizing a black market in pep pills?’ asked Morrison, in scorn.
Lamb, a trifle dourly, said: ‘He may not have come back for that at all. It may be something quite different.’
That was the trouble.
The three of them eventually dispersed after a fruitless meeting to follow up their own ideas, and in the case of Lamb and Morrison to urge their departments to new and intensive effort. Holmes had his long-delayed lunch with the gentleman from the Sudan who had recently been as far south in Africa as the Transvaal and as far west as the Niger. His news was that one or two East African territories were near to revolution. Troops were being subjected to intense propaganda. Food was bad. Pay was meagre and irregular. In a crisis it was doubtful if the troops were entirely reliable. The gentleman from the Sudan wanted to know what Britain’s attitude would be if there were to be a large-scale mutiny or coup d’état in an East African country which was a member of the Commonwealth.
The Shepherd File Page 5