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them, and seen them, twice. Ormerod had also displayed them to numerous other security guards and officials, so faceless
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    they could have been phantoms. 'It's getting worn out,' he observed to the corporal, handing the authority across. 'The paper's not all that thick.'
    The military policeman had no concealed channel of humour. 'It should last,' he grunted. 'These sort of things are done on thin paper, you understand, in case they have to be destroyed. There might come a day when every bit in this building might have to be. Follow me.'
    Ormerod went after him, conjuring a mental picture of the entire staff of the War Office frantically chewing thin secret paper in the face of an advancing German army. They went through many corridors hung with signs and arrows and across two large chambers where senior military men were talking in whispers, their voices hissing up to the tall ceilings.
    They arrived at a lift which was not working because of the war and they had to walk up twelve flights of stone steps to reach the fourth floor. 'I'll come and fetch you to take you out again,' said the corporal stiffly as they walked by doors marked with titles like algebra problems. 'We don't like visitors memor izing their way around.'
    'No, well you wouldn't, would you,' agreed Ormerod, puffing after the exertion of the stairs.
    His escort gave a stiff sniff which hissed along the vacant corridor like the lash of a whip. They reached the second of two doors marked 'Four BX. Strictly No Entry' and the corporal knocked with what Ormerod thought might be a secret signal. The 'No Entry' sign was obviously another clever ruse to fool the enemy because the door opened quite easily and they went in.
    Ormerod was relieved to see that, after the frigid aspect of the outer corridors and their denizens, this office was com fortingly untidy with two desks not quite in line or order, piles of paper and haphazard trays, one of which was loaded crazily with dirty tea cups. A cheerful girl clerk, with a pneumatic bosom almost rending the buttons of her uniform tunic, got up from the floor where she had been collecting the spilled contents of a box of paper clips. Ormerod took her in appreci atively as she got to her feet, red-faced and slightly out of breath. The escorting corporal said: 'This is Detective
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    Sergeant Ormerod.' He hovered, apparently undecided whether he ought, after all, to leave Ormerod there. The girl decided him. 'Thank you, corporal,' she said sweetly. 'You can leave him with me. He'll be quite safe.'
    'Oh yes,' blinked the corporal. He cast a last suspicious glance at Ormerod and then withdrew with military movements. Ormerod grinned sheepishly. I thought he might ask you to sign for me,' he said.
    'Don't put ideas into their heads,' the girl pleaded. She looked around the polished floor. 'Now are there any more of these blessed clips down there? I'm always doing it. Knocking them down.'
    'Put in for a magnet,' suggested Ormerod, bending and picking up two clips from behind the leg of the desk. 'Pick them all up more or less at once then. And you won't lose so many.'
    The girl looked at him with some admiration. 'You know, I never thought of that,' she beamed. 'I will. I'll indent for a magnet. I expect they'll ask why, but it's going to save hundreds of man-hours, well woman-hours, during the whole war, isn't it? You're not a sort of boffin are you? One of those people they have in the special department? Not everyone would think of getting a magnet. I wouldn't for one. And this is supposed to be Intelligence, Four BX.'
    'So I hear,' nodded Ormerod. 'But I'm not a boffin, whatever that might be. I'm a policeman.
    'That's right. Of course you are. Well, in your job, you obviously have to think logically as well, don't you?' She wrote down the word 'Magnet' on a pad. 'Brigadier Clark will see you in a minute. He's got a Frenchman in there at the moment. You should see all his medals. Acres of them. You wouldn't think they'd