“Just before we came back from France, O’Connell took the ordnance requisitions into Calais. He was late—all the other regiments had turned in their papers days before. The damn fool clerk had left the lot just sitting on his desk, if you can believe it! Granted, the office was locked, but still . . .”

Returning from a leisurely luncheon, the clerk had discovered the door forced, the desk ransacked—and every scrap of paper in the office gone.

“I shouldn’t have thought one man could carry the amount of paper to be found in an office of that sort,” Grey said, half-joking.

Quarry flipped one hand, impatient.

“It was a 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.