Free While Still We Live by Helen MacInnes

little speech.
    “Either you are very innocent, or very clever,” the black moustache said with a peculiar smile. “You know, or didn’t you, that the present secretary whom you saw today has only been recently employed by Hofmeyer? That the rest of the staff are now discharged, or have scattered? Some are innocent. Others are in hiding. When they are found they will be shot as spies.”
    Sheila made her last attempt. “If I were as clever and mysterious as you think, why should I have walked into such a trap this afternoon? Surely Hofmeyer would have warned me, if I were his accomplice?”
    “He would have warned you, I am sure, if there had been time. We heard the Lowicz German’s confession at four o’clock, implicating Hofmeyer. When our men arrived to arrest him, Hofmeyer was gone. If you, yourself, had arrived at the appointed time for your envelope, we would have been too late to find you. But you were the one who was too late. By these little mistakes, even the best spy walks into the net, Miss Koch.”
    “I am not Koch. I am Sheila Matthews.” Her Scots temper flared.
    “Now we are back where we started,” the man murmured. He looked over her shoulder, behind her. She suddenly remembered that someone had been standing there all this time.
    “Do you want to continue the interrogation, Mr. Commissioner?” the man at the desk was asking the unknown. Sheila turned her head, her eyes widened. But only the small, thin man, who was now advancing towards the desk, could see them. He looked at her without any sign of recognition, but there was almost a warning in the blankness of his eyes. He held her stare so coldly that her “Mr. Olszak!” froze on her tongue and remained unspoken.
    “No thank you, Colonel Bolt,” Mr. Olszak said crisply. “I think you have handled it as fully as possible at this stage, and you have treated it with your usual thoroughness and brilliance. The case of Margareta Koch is on the files of my little department and I think it would probably clarify matters if this young woman were to be put under our care, until a full check can be made of several interesting points which she has raised.”
    Colonel Bolt, obviously pleased with the beginning of that speech, seemed somewhat ruffled by the time it approached its end.
    “We are handling Hofmeyer, and it would seem that this case is linked with his.”
    “Hofmeyer was never under suspicion until four o’clock this afternoon. The files on him have only been opened. Koch, on the other hand, has been one of our subjects for the last six months, and the files on her past activities have grown in that time. In any case, Colonel, you have more important business at the moment than the tedious verification or disproval of this young woman’s statement. How’s that Gottlieb case coming along? My dear fellow, I thought your analysis of his reasons was really brilliant if I may say so.” Mr. Olszak had seated himself casually on the corner of the desk. He picked up Sheila’shandbag. “Examined these papers in here yet?” he asked as he opened the bag to show it stuffed with a woman’s usual concentration of odds and ends. “Of course not,” he added quickly, “it takes time to examine all these innocent-looking little scraps of paper and letters.”
    “There was no gun, no weapon,” Sheila’s first escort volunteered from the background.
    “Good,” Mr. Olszak said. “And now—”
    “We’ve wasted considerable time on this Koch-Matthews possibility,” Colonel Bolt said quickly. He was still inclined to be difficult.
    “Not wasted, I assure you,” Olszak said equally quickly. “And my department is in your debt, Colonel.”
    “For the matter of our records—” Colonel Bolt continued, but Mr. Olszak interrupted him with polite magnanimity.
    “The records, of course. By all means, Colonel, have it placed on your files that a young woman calling herself Sheila Matthews, but possibly Koch, was apprehended by your