The Shepherd File by Conrad Voss Bark

silently. He began to say: ‘I don’t think — ‘ but got no further.
    ‘Of course!’ she interrupted, bitterly. ‘It’s obvious! You’re trying to be nice. But it’s no good. I know what you’re all thinking. Colonel Lamb as good as said it. Well, why shouldn’t he? It is obvious, isn’t it, when you look at it? He comes back without leave and meets a woman who has now been deported. I saw she had been deported in the papers. Why? Because she’s been spying. And he helped her. That’s what you think. Then he committed suicide because he couldn’t face it. That’s what you think, isn’t it? I know you’re trying to be nice to me but that’s what you think.’
    Her hands were trembling. She took a cigarette and inhaled the smoke savagely. She came back to the table and poured another drink.
    ‘Well, of course,’ she said, in a quieter voice. ‘It is obvious.’
    Holmes spoke equally quietly: ‘It’s not obvious and knowing Shepherd it’s not what I believe.’
    ‘Everyone else does.’
    ‘Not everyone.’
    ‘When the department gets an idea in its head you won’t be able to get it out again.’ She was vindictive, savage, contemptuous. He could see the hatred in her eyes.
    ‘I can’t blame you for feeling like that,’ he said.
    ‘You’re all wrong about Peter,’ she said. ‘All of you.’ She spoke with that abnormal vehemence which he had already noticed. She stood up and crossed the room. She turned round. He could not help admiring her gesture. It was that of an actress. It was vibrant with indignation. Her shoulders were thrown back, breasts straining against the blouse, hips and legs wide, hair flying.
    ‘Peter would never have drowned,’ she said. ‘Not even when he was drunk. Not Peter. I told Colonel Lamb. He would never have drowned. Once when we were at a party he was blind drunk. They threw him into the swimming pool: at the Poids de l’Or: you can ask the manager. He swam easily, in his clothes, yet he could hardly stand upright. A man like that,’ she said, ‘would never have drowned.’
    He wondered whether he ought to suggest to her that Shepherd might have drowned if he had been drugged; but he did not.
    ‘You think,’ he said, ‘that he might have been killed?’
    ‘Murdered?’ she corrected. ‘I don’t know. It is more understandable than an accident. Suicide I do not believe. Don’t expect me to think that he betrayed secrets!’
    She had an obsession about Nina Lydoevna. He could tell that from her next question. ‘What was she like, this Russian; was she attractive?’
    ‘I don’t think so. She is over forty.’
    ‘Some women over forty are very attractive.’
    She was intensely jealous. He imagined that at times she could be violently passionate. He wondered what her relationship with Shepherd had been.
    ‘What a waste of a life,’ she said.
    He did not know what to reply.
    ‘A complete waste,’ she said. ‘He had brains, intelligence, a wonderful spirit. He had a tremendous belief in love, in idealism, in living, in creating things. So he creates nothing and does nothing and throws his life away. On what? For what? Why should he? It would not matter in a cause, a battle, something in which he could believe.’
    He looked at her for a long time. In her anger she was somehow very beautiful but it was a contemptuous and violent beauty. It was no good trying to assuage her contempt, to argue otherwise.
    ‘He could have created a poem,’ she said. ‘Or music. He could have done something useful.’
    ‘Maybe he did.’
    ‘You seem to be the only one who thinks so.’
    ‘So you hated his work?’
    ‘I did,’ she said. The emphasis on the words implied that Shepherd had not. It was a confirmation he needed. He had got a better picture of Shepherd by talking to her than he had ever had before from all the reports which had been compiled for him.
    ‘Look here,’ he said, seriously. ‘Don’t think it was a waste. We don’t know. No one knows.