The Shepherd File by Conrad Voss Bark Read Free Book Online

Indeed we have two African students here at this moment studying diet.’
    ‘Have you now?’
    ‘The students,’ she said, tactfully, ‘do not mix with the patients. They have their own quarters, of course.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘If you come to us, Mr Holmes, one thing you will need is absolute peace and quiet; absolute rest.’
    Holmes smiled wanly. When he left Mrs Wrythe after a fascinating quarter of an hour he was puzzled and slightly excited. He felt that he was on to something; if only he knew what it was. He began to make his own highly individual enquiries about Uplands. They were not exactly the same methods Morrison used but they provided the information. Uplands was genuine and many highly distinguished people swore by Mrs Wrythe and her methods. A stockbroker friend of Holmes who had been there for a week had lost nearly a stone and had come away feeling like a two-year-old. He had swum naked in the lake in the grounds, been massaged, taken hot and cold showers, sunbathed, climbed trees in the woods, and eaten nothing but oranges and vegetables and drunk nothing but rather flat and tasteless water, which he thought must have been distilled water, but all the same it cured his indigestion and gave him something of a waistline again. ‘Marvellous place,' he said, nostalgically. ‘Marvellous.’ Mrs Wrythe was a martinet, a tyrant, but she got results.
    ‘Is she a qualified chemist?' asked Holmes. The stockbroker, somewhat naturally, had not the faintest idea. It took two days before Inspector Post could come up with the answer. She was not. Holmes took the growing accumulation of papers about Mrs Wrythe and Uplands to bed with him and spent a sleepless night brooding over them.
    The case took another turn with the deportation of Nina Lydoevna.
    Like other Foreign Office decisions, no one knew anything about it in advance. It was a diplomatic matter, and diplomatic affairs were the province of the Foreign Office alone. It was true that the second secretary at the Soviet Embassy had been under suspicion for some time and that the Shepherd affair was not the only thing the Foreign Office had against Nina Lydoevna but at least — declared the indignant Morrison — Scott Elliot could have asked Scotland Yard about it first. The answer to that was that Scott Elliot probably would have told Morrison if he had not known that Lamb would have got to hear of it as well. So Scott Elliot observed protocol and told nobody. The first that Lamb or Morrison knew about it was the arrival of the copy of the Foreign Office note to his Excellency the Ambassador of the United Soviet Socialist Republics that his second secretary, Nina Lydoevna, was no longer persona grata to Her Majesty's Government.
    ‘And that is that,' said Morrison. ‘They've done it on purpose.'
    They had probably done it to avoid trouble, thought Holmes. There were many reasons why it would be advantageous to the Foreign Office to have sent Nina Lydoevna out of the country if she had been concerned in a security case. The impression would be created that MI5 had done nothing and the Foreign Office had. They had got rid of her.
    ‘I know she had diplomatic immunity,' said Morrison, ‘but given a chance we might have got something on her. Do you know one reason why the Foreign Office wanted to get rid of her? — she was carrying on Russian propaganda among foreign students in London.’
    ‘Was she?’ murmured Holmes. ‘Carrying on propaganda, eh? How very serious.’
    ‘There were complaints about her,’ said Morrison.
    ‘Were there?’
    ‘From the students themselves.’
    ‘Were there now?’ said Holmes. His eyes were suddenly bright. ‘These students who complained,’ said Holmes, — were they, by any chance, African?’
    There was a slow silence. Morrison took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘As a matter of fact, they were,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing surprising about that. Nina Lydoevna is supposed to be one of the Soviet Union’s