Preston sat in the office of a very worried Bertie Capstick and examined the ten photocopied sheets spread out on the desk, reading each carefully. “How many people have handled the envelope?” he inquired.
“The postman, obviously. God knows how many people in the sorting office. Inside the building, the front-office people, the messenger who brings the morning mail up to the offices, and myself. I can’t see you’ll get much joy out of the envelope.”
“And the papers inside?”
“Just myself, Johnny. Of course I didn’t know what they were until I had pulled them out.”
Preston thought for a while. “Apart from the person who mailed them they might, I suppose, contain the prints of someone else who removed them. I’ll have to ask Scotland Yard to check them out. Don’t have much hope, personally. Now for the contents. It looks like very high-level stuff”
“The tops,” said Capstick gloomily. “Nothing short of top secret, the lot. Some of it very sensitive, concerning our NATO allies; contingency plans for NATO to counter a variety of Soviet threats—that sort of stuff.”
“All right,” said Preston, “let’s just run through the possibilities. Bear with me. Supposing this was sent back by a public-spirited citizen who for one reason or another did not want to be identified. It happens; people don’t want to get involved. Where could such a person have got these papers? A briefcase left in a cloakroom, a taxi, a club?”
Capstick shook his head. “Not legally, Johnny. This stuff should never under any circumstances have left the building, except possibly in the sealed bag to go across to the Foreign Office or the Cabinet Office. There have been no reports of a Registry bag being tampered with. Besides, they are not marked for a destination outside this building, as they would be if they had been taken legitimately. The people who would even begin to have access to this sort of stuff know the rules. No one—but no one—may carry this sort of stuff home to study. Answer your question?”
“More than somewhat,” said Preston. “It came back from outside the ministry. So it had to be taken outside. Illegally. Gross negligence? Or a deliberate attempt to leak?”
“Look at the dates of origin,” said Capstick. “These ten sheets cover a full month. There’s no chance they all arrived on a single desk in one day. They had to be collected over a period of time.”
Preston, using his handkerchief, eased the ten documents back into their envelope of arrival. “I’ll have to take them to Charles Street, Bertie. May I use your phone?”
He called Charles Street and asked to be put straight through to the office of Sir Bernard Hemmings. The Director-General was in, and after a delay and some insistence from Preston, took the call himself. Preston simply asked for an appointment within minutes and got it. He put down the phone and turned to Brigadier Capstick.
“Bertie, for the moment don’t do or say anything. To anyone. Just carry on as if this were just another routine day,” said Preston. “I’ll be in touch.”
It was out of the question to leave the ministry with these documents but without an escort. Brigadier Capstick loaned him one of the front-hall commissionaires, a burly former guardsman,
Preston left the ministry with the documents in his own briefcase and took a taxi to the Clarges Apartments; he watched the vehicle disappear down Clarges Street before walking the last two hundred yards to Charles and his head office, where he could dismiss his escort. Sir Bernard saw him ten minutes later.
The old spycatcher looked gray, as if he were in pain, which he frequently was. The disease that was growing deep inside him showed little to the observer, but the medical tests left no doubt. A year, they had said, and not operable. He was due to retire on September 1, which with terminal leave meant he could depart in mid-July, six weeks before his sixtieth birthday.
He would probably have gone already but for the personal responsibilities that bore upon him. He had a second wife who had brought to the marriage a stepdaughter on whom the childless man doted. The girl was still at school. Early retirement would severely curtail his pension, leaving his widow and the girl in straitened circumstances. Wisely or not, he sought to carry on until the statutory retirement date in order to leave them his full pension. A
fter a lifetime in the job, he had virtually no other asset.
Preston explained briefly and concisely what had happened at the Ministry of Defense that morning, and the view of Capstick regarding the feasibility of the documents’ departure from the ministry’s being anything other than a deliberate act.
“Oh, my God, not another,” murmured Sir Bernard. The memory of Vassall and Prime still rankled, as did the acid reaction of the Americans when they had been apprised.
“Well, John, where do you want to start?”
“I’ve told Bertie Capstick to stay silent for the moment,” said Preston. “If we have a genuine traitor inside the ministry, there’s a second mystery: Who sent the stuff back to us? Passerby? Sneak thief? Wife with feelings of remorse? We don’t know. But if we could find that person, we might find where he got the stuff. That would short-circuit a lot of inquiry. I don’t hold out much hope for the envelope—standard brown paper sold in thousands of outlets, normal stamps, address in block capitals written with felt-tip pen, and already handled by a score of anonymous people. But the papers inside might have retained prints. I’d like Scotland Yard to test them all—under supervision, of course. After that, we may know where we go next.”
“Good thinking. You handle that side of it,” said Sir Bernard. “I’ll have to tell Tony Plumb and probably Perry Jones. I’ll try to set up a meeting over lunch with them both. It depends on what Perry Jones thinks, of course, but we have to set up the JIC on this one. You get on with your side, John, and stay in touch with me. If the Yard comes up with anything, I shall want to know.”
Down at Scotland Yard, they were very helpful, putting one of their best lab men at Preston’s disposal. Preston stood by the civilian technician as he carefully dusted every sheet. The man could not help reading the TOP SECRET heading on each page.
“Someone been naughty down in Whitehall?” the technician asked archly.
Preston shook his head. “Stupid and lazy,” he lied. “That stuff should have been in the shredder, not a wastepaper basket. It’ll be a hell of a rap on the knuckles for the clerk responsible if we can identify the knuckles.”
The technician lost interest. When he had finished he shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Clean as a whistle. But I’ll tell you one thing. They’ve been wiped. There’s one clear set of prints, of course, probably your own.”
Preston nodded. There was no need to reveal that the single set of prints belonged to Brigadier Capstick.
“That’s the point,” said the technician. “This paper will take prints beautifully, and keep them for weeks, maybe months. There ought to be at least one other set, probably more. The clerk who touched them before you, for example. But nothing. Before they went in the wastepaper basket, they were wiped with a cloth. I can see the fibers. But no prints. Sorry.”
Preston had not even offered him the envelope. Whoever had erased the prints from the documents was not going to leave them on the envelope. Moreover, the envelope would give the lie to his cover story about the negligent clerk. He took the ten secret papers and left. Capstick’s right, he thought. It’s a leak, and a bad one. It was three in the afternoon; he went back to Charles Street and waited for Sir Bernard.