The More Deceived by David Roberts

She passed her key chain over to Edward.
    ‘And Mr Lyall and Mr Westmacott hold the other two?’
    ‘Yes. The files are secret and Mr Lyall is very conscious of the need for security.’
    ‘There’s a cabinet in Mr Lyall’s office where the Most Secret files are kept. You don’t have keys to that?’
    ‘Only Mr Lyall has a key to that cabinet.’
    ‘I do understand you must think I have a bee in my bonnet, Miss Hawkins, but will you look through your files once again? His wife remembers him reading a file marked Most Secret some days before he disappeared. I don’t know how he got it, or why, and no doubt it was returned from whence it came but I am almost certain that Mr Westmacott left this building with something he ought not to have had the day he disappeared.’
    Miss Hawkins looked at him with fear in her eyes. ‘I shall, of course, Lord Edward, if you so wish it but I hope you don’t think I was . . .’
    ‘No one is accusing you of anything but there is a puzzle to be solved and maybe you can help me solve it. Here is my card. Feel free to telephone me at any time of the day or night if you find anything that strikes you as not quite right. Now, may I speak to Mr McCloud?’
    Miss Hawkins took the proffered pasteboard and seemed about to say something but in the end merely nodded before leaving the room.
    ‘Statistics are my field, old boy, and analysing figures. You know the sort of thing? We get information and estimates in from all sorts of sources and I have to make sense of them. If one source indicates the Germans are building six fighter aircraft a month and another source seems to suggest the figure is nearer sixty, I have to put both through the wringer – that’s what I call it – and see which retains its “shape”. It’s interesting work but, if anyone had told me when I was at the Slade that I would end up here, I would have laughed in their face.’
    Angus McCloud was a bearded, ill-kempt young man – in his early thirties, Edward guessed – with a strong body odour. He smoked a pipe and there was a gap in his teeth where the pipe-stem lodged on an almost permanent basis. He obviously wanted to be taken for an artist rather than a civil servant and he did everything he could to impress upon Edward that he was different from other Foreign Office staff. He had to be a bachelor, Edward thought. No woman would have let him go to the office dressed in a check flannel shirt, dirty tie, corduroy trousers and brogues.
    ‘Do you still paint?’
    ‘At weekends – nothing serious.’
    ‘But you still move in that world?’
    ‘Not really. I bump into Rothy – Sir William Rothenstein – now and again and he asks me how the painting is going and I say not bad. Of course, I can’t say what I’m really doing, not even to Rothy. I occasionally go to one of Lady Ottoline’s “Thursday afternoons”, and I see Tonks sometimes and Mark Gertler, of course.’
    Edward thought he might ask his friend, the painter Adrian Hassel, what he knew about him. Adrian had been at the Slade and was about the same age as McCloud.
    ‘What do you think has happened to Westmacott? Is he a friend of yours?’
    ‘I get on with him well enough but he’s a cold sort of blighter – keeps himself to himself. Harry and I . . .’
    ‘Mr Younger?’
    ‘Yes. We go out for a pint after work once in a while. He’s a good kid, smart as paint, wasted here. He speaks quite good German, after a pint or two anyway.’
    ‘But Westmacott did not join you?’
    ‘No. Westmacott has to rush home to wifey.’
    There was a rather unpleasant sneer in McCloud’s voice and Edward wondered if the two men had quarrelled.
    ‘He’s got a girlfriend – Younger, I mean?’
    ‘You’ll have to ask him that. I think Jane – Miss Williams – is sweet on him but I’ve never heard he returned the favour.’
    ‘And you?’
    ‘Me? No such luck. I’ve had my chances but they take up too much time – women – not to mention money.