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clerk’s hole, not the office proper. Nothing else there was important—but the quarterly ordnance requisitions for every British regiment between Calais and Prague! . . .”
    Grey pursed his lips, nodding in acknowledgment. It was a serious matter. Information on troop movements and disposition was highly sensitive, but such plans could be changed, if it became known that the intelligence had fallen into the wrong hands. The munitions requirements for a regiment could not be altered—and the sum total of that information would tell an enemy almost to the gun what strength and what weaponry each regiment possessed.
    “Even so,” he objected. “It must have been a massive amount of paper. Not the sort of thing a man could easily conceal about his person.”
    “No, it would have taken a large rucksack, or a sail bag—something of that sort—to cart it all away. But cart it away someone did.”
    The alarm had been raised promptly, of course, and a search instigated, but Calais was a medieval warren of a place, and nothing had been found.
    “Meanwhile, O’Connell disappeared—quite properly; he was given three days’ leave when he took the requisitions in. We hunted for him; found him on the second day, smelling of drink and looking as though he hadn’t slept for the whole of the time.”
    “Which would be quite as usual.”
    “Yes, it would. But that’s also what you’d expect a man to look like who’d sat up for two days and nights in a hired room, making a précis of that mass of paper and turning it into something a good bit smaller and more portable—feeding the requisitions into the fire as he went.”
    “So they weren’t ever found? The originals?”
    “No. We watched O’Connell carefully; he had no chance to pass on the information to anyone after that—and we think it unlikely that he handed it on before we found him.”
    “Because now he’s dead—and because Jack Byrd has disappeared.”
    “Rem acu tetigisti,” Quarry replied, then snorted, half-pleased with himself.
    Grey smiled in spite of himself. “You have touched the matter with a needle”; it meant, “you’ve put your finger on it.” Probably the only bit of Latin Quarry recalled from his schooldays, other than cave canem .
    “And was O’Connell the only suspect?”
    “No, damn it. Hence the difficulty. We couldn’t simply arrest him and sweat the truth out of him with no more evidence than the fact of his being there. At least six other men—all from different regiments, damn it!—were there during the relevant time, as well.”
    “I see. So the other regiments are now quietly investigating their potential black sheep?”
    “They are. On the other hand,” Quarry added judiciously, “the other five are still alive. Which might be an indication, eh?”
    The coach stopped, and the sounds and smells of Kettrick’s Eel-Pye House floated through the window: laughter and talk, the sizzle of food and clank of wooden plates and pie tins. The brine-smell of jellied eels and ale and the solace of floury pies lapped round them, warm and comforting, spiced with the sauce of alcoholic conviviality.
    “Do we know for certain how O’Connell was killed? Did anyone from the regiment see the body?” Grey asked suddenly, as Quarry descended heavily to the pavement.
    “No,” Quarry said, not looking round, but heading for the door with single-minded determination. “You’re going to go and do that tomorrow, before they bury the bugger.”
             
    Grey waited until the pies had been set down in front of them before he undertook to argue with Quarry’s statement that he, Grey, was forthwith relieved of other duties in order to pursue an investigation into the activities and death of Sergeant Timothy O’Connell.
    “Why me?” Grey was astonished. “Surely it’s sufficiently serious a matter to justify the senior ranking officer’s attention—that would be you, Harry,” he pointed out, “or possibly