The Division Bell Mystery by Ellen Wilkinson

Author:Ellen Wilkinson [Wilkinson, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781464210860
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2018-07-06T17:00:28+00:00

CHAPTER XII

The Home Secretary was not in his room when Robert went along there. The Cabinet meeting was evidently not yet over, for the Home Secretary prided himself on his strict punctuality in keeping appointments. He had all the drearier virtues of a public man. Robert remembered that he had promised the Minister to read for him a confidential report that had been prepared by the inspectorate on the conditions in female prisons. He looked among the papers on the Minister’s desk, but it was not there.

He proceeded to hunt through the drawers, all of which were kept in miraculous tidiness by the Minister himself. Robert was firmly of the opinion that tidiness in anyone above the rank of a typist was the sign of an inferior mind, but the Minister hated having his papers tidied by secretaries, though he had no objection to Robert’s ministrations. It said much for West’s dogged loyalty to his Chief that he spent hours tidying papers for the Home Secretary simply in order to put the Minister in the position of having to read papers because he had no excuse for doing anything else.

While he was going through his Chief’s private drawer in search of the missing report he came across an envelope file marked “Cabinet Papers. Secret.” As any scrap of paper that goes before a Cabinet meeting, even the most routine report, is always marked “Secret” Robert had no hesitation in opening the file. That the Minister gave him the right to do this was one of the reasons for Sir George Gleeson’s coldness to West. Sir George was a stickler for the convention of Cabinet secrecy even to the careful destruction of the blotting-paper after a meeting.

As he was carelessly turning over the papers, which did not seem to include the report for which he was looking, Robert’s heart gave a sudden leap. He picked up three sheets of House of Commons notepaper, held together by a paper-clip. He took them to the window to examine them more closely. There was no doubt about it. Accurately copied on to those sheets were the list of figures, code-words in block letters, and hieroglyphics over which he had puzzled for hours the previous night. They could only have been copied from the Oissel notebook, and they had been copied by the Home Secretary himself. Robert knew his hand so well. He looked at the notes at the side, also in the Minister’s handwriting. They were evidently a rough translation of the coded words, and they related to the loan negotiations. Here was the very information which would have been invaluable to the British Government had they been in possession of it during their negotiations with Oissel.

Robert replaced the papers in the file, put them tidily in the drawer, and went slowly back to the window. His brain would hardly form the words: “What does this mean?” But what did it mean? When had the Home Secretary made that copy? How had he got

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.