Gibraltar Road Read Free

World War had not altered that—though they had altered his personal appearance quite a lot.
    Quite a lot. And his name was altogether different.
    Shaw was, in fact, one of only three people in the Service who knew that Mr Latymer was a dead man. Or, more precisely, that he wasn’t ‘Mr Latymer’ at all, that his estate, when he had ‘died’ so tragically a few years after the second war, had in fact been credited with the balance of pay due to Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Charteris, K.C.B., D.S.O. and two bars, D.S.C., and a host of foreign decorations; and that it had been Sub-Lieutenant Charteris, and not Mr Latymer, who had pinched that Turkish admiral’s desk so long ago. During the Second World War Charteris had been Chief of the Special Services of the Naval Intelligence Division—the department within a department. He still was; only now he called himself Mr Latymer, and, comparatively, only a handful of people even knew that the Special Services lived on. Officially Mr Latymer’s job, though he was quite openly attached to Naval Intelligence—which, especially in peacetime, covered a multitude of jobs, not all of them connected with the man-in-the-street’s idea of Intelligence even remotely— was simply that of a civilian Permanent Assistant Undersecretary in charge of a department which, on the surface, dealt with all those non-intelligent unromantic things, such as arranging for frigate escorts to be provided for visiting Heads of State arriving by sea, certain aspects of dockyard security, loss of brief-cases by senior officers, and—occasionally and more excitingly—investigation into sand maliciously injected into the oil-fuel systems of H.M. Ships for the private purposes of disgruntled ratings, or into fires started aboard for the same reasons. And so on.
    But in reality, of course, and very much under cover, Mr Latymer’s job went far deeper than that.
    During the War Sir Henry Charteris had become a marked man, but he was far too useful to be discarded on that account, for no one else had his knowledge, his experience, his authority—or his manner. So when Charteris had been badly knocked about, particularly as to the face and hands, by a bomb which had been placed in the bedroom of his Eaton Square flat one fine spring evening an alert Admiralty, knowing he had no near relatives to question its decision, had at once declared him dead and had smuggled the living body away to the home of a certain senior naval officer where a plastic surgeon had been summoned as soon as Sir Henry was out of danger and had had the Official Secrets Act quoted at him . . . and a year or so later ‘Mr Latymer’ had joined the N.I.D. A year after that, when people had got accustomed to seeing Latymer around the place, the existing (and purely temporary) Chief of Special Services had been pensioned off, and officially the job had ceased to exist. Nevertheless, Mr Latymer was given a change of appointment and promotion, in actual fact taking over as Chief of Special Services though calling himself a plain Under-Secretary; it was the first time a ‘civilian’ had ever held the particular post which Mr Latymer was supposed to hold, and very often Sir Henry Charteris found it hard on the blood-pressure to have to pretend to a complete lack of knowledge of purely nautical subjects when, in his capacity as Under-Secretary Latymer, he had to deal with an argumentative naval officer years junior to him in the Flag List.
    However, there it was, and he was damned lucky to be alive at all, let alone back in his old job . . . though it had all happened quite a few years back, he kept on reminding himself, whenever he looked appreciatively round that beautifully appointed office of his, to be thankful.
    Now Mr Latymer smiled gently, and when he spoke he spoke as a seaman. That was just one of the reasons why he always looked forward to seeing Shaw—he could forget pretence for once in a while. He’d have liked a long chat, but