Free Game Without Rules by Michael Gilbert

“And it’s getting worse. I haven’t the staff to cope with it.”
    Mr. Behrens sympathised. He had found that a little sympathy went a long way with minor officials. “I’ll do the searching myself,” he said, “if you could just put me on the right track. For instance, I imagine that you index this stuff by departments. The papers I want would have come from the old MI5.”
    “The worst of the lot,” said the custodian.
    “I can tell you the approximate year of origin too. This would have originated at Blenheim in late 1940.”
    “When would it have been filed?”
    “Probably after the end of the war.”
    “We got a lot of stuff from Blenheim in 1946. That’s all at Staines, though.”
    Mr. Behrens went to Staines.
     
    Late that afternoon he unearthed a bundle of yellow dockets. They were labelled: “Routine interrogation reports: Nov-Dec. 1940. A-L.” They appeared to be curiously incomplete.
    He read them through, and then pressed the bell. When the official shuffled up, Mr. Behrens said to him, “Has anyone else been having a look at these particular records lately?”
    The official said that he really couldn’t say. All sorts of people came down every day to see papers. All he had to do was to be satisfied about their credentials. He couldn’t keep a record of what papers they looked at.
    Mr. Behrens reflected that if you paid people as little as they probably paid this particular civil servant it was idle to expect any enthusiastic or efficient service. He went back to London.
    He had booked himself a room at Dons-in-London (or the “Dilly” Club), which occupies two large houses north of Lord’s Cricket Ground and has the worst food and the best wine in London. It also has a unique library of classical pornography and several complete sets of the works of Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray. Mr. Behrens always used the D-I-L when he could, since he could rely on meeting a number of his cronies there.
    “I understand that Sand-Douglas is up in London,” he said to Mr. Calder. “I wanted to have a word with him, he was at Blenheim in 1940. You probably remember him. Why don’t you join us at dinner?”
    “After dinner,” said Mr. Calder firmly.
    At seven o’clock, Mr. Behrens alighted from the Bakerloo tube at Marlborough Road station and started up toward the street. The evening rush was over, and the long escalator was nearly empty. Mr. Behrens sailed sedately upward, rapt in meditation. At the top he gave up his ticket and dawdled out into the street.
    There were very few people about in the Finchley Road. Mr. Behrens noticed a policeman, strolling along the opposite pavement in a purposeful way which suggested that he was coming off duty and heading for home. Mr. Behrens crossed the road. When he reached the pavement, he stopped so abruptly that the man who had been crossing behind him bumped into him.
    Mr. Behrens whirled round, glared at him and said, “Why are you following me?”
    “What chew talking about?” said the man. He was stout, bald and unremarkable except for a twisted upper lip which seemed to give him some difficulty in enunciating.
    “You’ve been following me for more than an hour,” said Mr. Behrens, “and doing it very badly.”
    “You’re making an error there,” said the man. Mr. Behrens was blocking his way, and he dodged to one side to get past him.
    Mr. Behrens whipped up his umbrella and thrust the metal tip, hard, into the man’s crotch. The man let out a scream,
    “Now then,” said the policeman. “What’s all this?”
    The man was doubled up, speechless. Mr. Behrens said, “This gentleman has been making a nuisance of himself. He accosted me, and tried to sell me some most unpleasant pictures.”
    “Thass a lie,” said the man, but his eyes were flickering from side to side. “I never did anything to him. He poked me with his umbrella.”
    “Did you offer to sell anything to this gentleman?”
    “Course I didn’t.”
    “He’s got them in