The Shepherd File (6 page)

‘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.’

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.

‘I suppose,’ said Holmes, ‘if the government asked for British troops to be sent in to restore law and order we would send them,’ he dutifully reported his conversation to Downing Street where his memo was put in the Cabinet Office files. Copies of it were received by the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office, where it was generally felt that Holmes had gone too far.

The heatwave from which London was suffering during that fortnight increased in its intensity, which was one reason why Holmes, after his lunch mid-day with the Sudanese, in a very hot room at the embassy overlooking St James’s, decided to walk home that evening. He worked at Downing Street until nearly nine and then walked out through the back entrance, over Horse Guards’ Parade. It was a very pleasant beginning to a walk home. The buildings on three sides of the parade ground were in exquisite proportion and on the fourth gleamed the ornamental waters of St James’s Park. Apart from the bulk of the Citadel, on the far side, it was a scene which had been more or less unchanged since Nelson had sat in his room at the Admiralty, and Pitt in the house built by Sir George Downing.

More or less unchanged since the days of Cecil Rhodes.

The thought came back unpleasantly in the midst of a vague and idle reverie; unpleasantly, not because of Rhodes but because it was the private army he could command which had made the changes in what the man at Lusaka had called the soul of Africa. It was force which mattered; and the build-up of force in Africa was becoming more and more ominous.

Holmes came to the Horse Guards’ arch and as he turned the corner he looked back and stopped in the archway to admire the view from another aspect. He took in the buildings, the park, the lake glistening silver beyond the trees, the Guards’ memorial. A man crossing the vast expanse of the square changed direction. He noticed this in the same way that he took in the movement of other people, part of the pattern of the scene in front of him. He turned and went through the arch, across the cobbles, through the ornamental gates, into Whitehall. He crossed over a little farther up the road, near Trafalgar Square. As he turned to look out for traffic the man he had seen change direction had just come out of Horse Guards’ arch and was looking up Whitehall. Holmes crossed over and stayed by the window of a bookshop, apparently engrossed in the display of books and magazines. He watched the man come up Whitehall, hesitate, cross the road where Holmes had crossed and walk past him. The man did not look at him. He walked on, round the corner, out of sight. He was an African.

‘You’re imagining things,’ said Holmes severely to himself and hailed a passing taxi to take him to his flat.

Floral Street was nearly empty, a dark ravine of an eighteenth-century street alongside Covent Garden. Holmes let himself in through the street door, closed it behind him, switched on the light in the narrow hall, and ascended the stairs to his flat. His flat door had its peculiarities. It had two locks. They had been installed for him by a gentleman known as Fred Smith who worked for the MI5 technical branch and was as near a genius as they made them. Inside the door was a panel of six light signals let into the wall. This was Fred Smith’s panel and one of the lights was on.

Holmes frowned and went out through the door and examined it on the outside. There was nothing to be seen. He looked at the panelling where the scanner was which had operated the light signal but there was nothing to be seen there either; no marks, no scratches.

He went inside again and considered the message of the lights. Three different coloured lights meant that there was somebody inside the flat; a single red light an attempt to enter by the door and a single green an attempt by the windows. The light that was on was red.

The attempt to enter had been made but had not succeeded. Someone might have tried to use a skeleton key. Holmes smiled at the thought of how frustrating it must have been. Or they might have been trying to take a wax impression of the lock. That was a possibility.

He was glad he had been persuaded to allow Fred Smith to put up the electronic curtain, as Fred called it. Not only would ray barriers inside the flat ring an alarm in the main CID room at Bow Street police station but automatic cameras would be brought into action to take photographs of the intruders ready for the police when they arrived. The ray barriers, however, were still inactive. No one had entered. But nevertheless an automatic camera by the door had worked because when Holmes went into his sitting-room there was a small light on in the console by the bookcase.

Holmes went back to the front door and slipped a miniature polaroid camera from its housing in the wall. It had taken only one picture. Holmes took it out.

It was a photograph of the African who had followed him up Whitehall. Holmes turned the print over. On the back was the time check. It had been taken that afternoon, about six hours previously.

Holmes recharged and replaced the camera and put it back into its housing. There was a click as the panel closed. It appeared to be wood but was hard steel and could only be opened now by activating a switch on the console in the sitting-room. On the panel, painted the same colour, looking like a knot in the wood, was the micro-lens.

The sitting-room was warm and comfortable. Holmes put on one of his Piaf records, poured a sherry, and put his feet up. He studied the photograph while he drank his sherry and listened to Piaf. The husky, yearning voice of the singer seemed to add a particular poignancy to the face of the African that lay under his fingers.

This man knew where Holmes worked, he knew where his flat was, and it was not unlikely that he knew a great deal more. It was safe to assume he had known Nina Lydoevna and probably Shepherd. This was the link with Africa.

It was not difficult to guess how he had got on to Holmes: the hired Rolls, the visit to Uplands, the signature in the visitors’ book. At least there was now something tangible to be done. Holmes rang up Morrison when the Piaf record had finished and Morrison was round in ten minutes slightly alarmed, gulping a sherry in an absent-minded way as he stared at the photograph. Morrison had been contemptuous of MI5’s ‘gadgets,’ as he called them, when Fred Smith had spent two months wiring the flat. He was now full of admiration. He added: ‘It’s not a bad picture, either.’

It was in fact a very good picture of a fine African head; heavily built, high cheekbones, a high forehead. The face had distinction in spite of the man being caught in an awkward position, straining at something, his features contorted with physical effort. ‘But it’s a pity,’ said Morrison, ‘that your machine can't take fingerprints.’

They had a man round from Bow Street and he went over the door carefully but the only prints on it belonged to Holmes. The African had worn gloves.

‘We'll have a look in the files,' said Morrison. ‘It's not a bad likeness. We may have a record of him.' But he sounded a little doubtful and Holmes was not really surprised the next day when Morrison telephoned to say that the African was not known to the Yard. ‘We'll try the embassies, the high commissioners’ offices, the universities and colleges, the overseas clubs,' said Morrison. ‘There's not all that number of Africans in London. I expect he's known to somebody. But I'm afraid it'll take time.'

Holmes was afraid so too.

‘And of course,' said Morrison, ‘he could be snooping. What will we do? — attempted breaking and entering or being found on enclosed premises?'

‘We don't charge him with anything.'

‘No?'

‘We have a talk.'

‘What about?'

‘Uplands.'

‘You think he comes from there?'

‘I think he may know something of what is happening there.'

‘What is?'

‘You tell me.'

‘Would you like the place searched?’

‘We've got nothing against it,' murmured Holmes.

‘We could do it unofficially.’

‘We could,’ said Holmes. He looked in his diary. A smile spread over Morrison’s face as he watched. Holmes took some time to consider the entries in his diary, so much time in fact that it was doubtful if any week’s engagements would have required it.