The Shepherd File Read Free Page B

rolling the first sip round his tongue and although he could have sworn that it was the amontillado he was not now happy. ‘It tastes,’ he said, struggling to find the right word, ‘excellent.’
    Holmes made an effort. He could have spent a long time encouraging Scott Elliot’s affectations but teasing the Foreign Office got them nowhere. ‘I think we might begin,’ he said. ‘Lamb and Pendlebury will be here in a moment but Superintendent Morrison would like to hear how the Foreign Office comes into all this.’
    ‘I wish we hadn’t,’ said Scott Elliot, taking the chair which Holmes offered him. The three men sat round the desk.
    Morrison had his notebook open in front of him and took occasional notes. ‘I do wish we hadn’t,’ continued Scott Elliot. ‘One tries to be helpful. But I do wish we hadn’t. We should have relied on our own men. After all, Foreign Intelligence has been adequate in the past.’ He glared round but no one contradicted him. It would not, at that stage, have been of any use.
    ‘How did you come into it?’ asked Morrison.
    ‘We had heard, last year,’ said Scott Elliot, ‘of some rather unusual activity in the Libyan desert.’ He pronounced the words ‘Libyan desert’ as though they were distasteful. ‘Quite unusual activity,’ he repeated. ‘Quite unusual. Someone had started a very large chemical factory there. Very large. The Libyan desert was not normally a place where one would start a chemical factory.’ Scott Elliot used the word ‘chemical’ with an effort, as though the thought of it was repulsive. ‘So,’ he said, ‘it seemed necessary to investigate why someone had gone to great trouble and secrecy to establish a chemical factory in a desert. After all, why not on the coast, where there is cheap labour and communications are good? If’ — he went on — ‘it had not been chemicals, we would not have been so interested. But chemicals can be important. Frightfully important.’
    Morrison asked a few questions on detail and location. The factory was isolated and labour was recruited on the coast and housed on the site. The first news of it had come through an agent in Casablanca, a man called Ian Dixon. Shepherd had been sent out to investigate.
    ‘Why Shepherd?’
    ‘Ah,’ said Scott Elliot, ‘if one could go into that — ’
    They waited, but he did not.
    ‘Colonel Lamb,’ said Holmes, ‘picked Shepherd as the best man for the job.’
    ‘And was he?’ asked Morrison.
    A dry smile crackled over Scott Elliot’s face. He rolled his eyes and spread out his hands. ‘He has had access to all my files!’ he said. The smile had turned out to be not so much a smile as an expression of agony. ‘All my files,’ he repeated.
    ‘God only knows what he has told that Russian woman. Imagine it! One of Lamb’s best men!’
    ‘Have you any idea what he told her?’
    ‘I told you,’ said Scott Elliot, ‘he could have told her anything.’
    Morrison came back with relief to matters of detail. Shepherd had been sent out to North Africa in April to investigate and by June had sent a long report. The report had been sensational enough to be considered by the Cabinet committee on defence. The factory was a large one, financed by foreign capital, and it was producing a rare drug which could be of military use.
    ‘Then he was successful!’ said Morrison.
    ‘He was successful in finding out what was going on,’ said Scott Elliot grudgingly.
    ‘To that extent Lamb was right — he was one of his best men.’
    ‘My dear Superintendent,’ said Scott Elliot, freezingly.
    Scott Elliot shrank from contradicting anyone; instead he called Morrison his dear Superintendent in such a way that it was insulting.
    ‘He was successful,’ persisted Morrison, ‘in finding out what he was sent there to find out. That’s what I mean. Now — when did you first believe that his conduct might be unsatisfactory?’
    ‘It was never satisfactory,’ said Scott