Six COLIN LAMB’S NARRATIVE¹ I

When we had put ourselves outside two good underdone steaks, washed down with draught² beer,Dick Hardcastle gave a sigh of comfortable repletion³, announced that he felt better and said:
“To hell with dead insurance agents, fancy clocks and screaming girls! Let’s hear about you,Colin. I thought you’d finished with this part of the world. And here you are wandering about theback streets of Crowdean. No scope for a marine⁴ biologist at Crowdean, I can assure you.”
“Don’t you sneer⁵ at marine biology, Dick. It’s a very useful subject. The mere⁶ mention of it sobores people and they’re so afraid you’re going to talk about it, that you never have to explainyourself further.”
“No chance of giving yourself away, eh?”
“You forget,” I said coldly, “that I am a marine biologist. I took a degree in it at Cambridge.
Not a very good degree, but a degree. It’s a very interesting subject, and one day I’m going backto it.”
“I know what you’ve been working on, of course,” said Hardcastle. “And congratulations toyou. Larkin’s trial comes on next month, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Amazing the way he managed to carry on passing stuff out for so long. You’d think somebodywould have suspected.”
“They didn’t, you know. When you’ve got it into your head that a fellow is a thoroughly⁷ goodchap, it doesn’t occur to you that he mightn’t be.”
“He must have been clever,” Dick commented.
I shook my head.
“No, I don’t think he was, really. I think he just did as he was told. He had access to veryimportant documents. He walked out with them, they were photographed and returned to him, andthey were back again where they belonged the same day. Good organization there. He made ahabit of lunching at different places every day. We think that he hung up his overcoat where therewas always an overcoat exactly like it—though the man who wore the other overcoat wasn’talways the same man. The overcoats were switched, but the man who switched them never spoketo Larkin, and Larkin never

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