As I approached she stood and formally extended her hand. I smiled and extended mine in return: not my usual style of greeting, but with Lydia it comes with the territory. Then, with no words spoken, we turned and began to walk down the path. We’d been here, and done this, before.
About forty metres from the bench we hit a side trail that was rarely used by Council employees. We turned onto it and walked quietly, enjoying the silence. The woods smelled of autumn, the soft earthy odour of leaf mould mixed with slow, organic decomposition. Every few metres a golden leaf, poplar or birch, floated to the ground and settled with a whisper. In summer the under-story was in shade, but now sunlight dappled the ground, dancing on the tapestry of leaves that had already fallen.
We came up over a rise and hit a curtain of cool, damp air. The path then dipped and made an abrupt left, meeting a brook that it escorted downstream for two hundred metres before looping back to the main path. There was a bench overlooking the brook and we sat down. It gave us an excellent view of uninvited guests, and the burble of the water masked our conversation to anyone not within visual range. We were silent for a moment more, absorbed in the peace of the forest — an island of sanity in an otherwise idiotic world — then I took a breath and broke the spell.
“Tell me about the file.”
She turned slowly, as if pulling herself away from the stream. Her voice was cool. “What exactly concerns you?”
I was taken aback. Usually Lydia was more forthcoming. “Gee, Lyd. For starters, according to the chronology of the documents, the file seems to have vanished between September and June. Any idea where it might have been?”
She hesitated, then turned back to the stream. Her back was ramrod straight: the bearing of a queen. She took her time, enunciated each word clearly, but in a flat, expressionless voice. Quite a performance. “I lost it.”
I had to stop myself from laughing. I would have at least chuckled, except for the sensation of a very serious subtext underlying the little game.
“No, you didn’t.” I let a few seconds pass, then I said gently, “I do need to know where it was. If someone was sitting on it, I have to know who and why before I dive in head first. Otherwise I’ll be eaten alive. You didn’t lose it, so either someone told you to make it disappear or you’re being used as a scapegoat. Which is it?”
She turned back to me. Did I see a hint of amusement in her eyes? “Of course, your expertise in interrogation puts me under significant duress to be as truthful as possible.”
“That, and the moral and legal imperative to tell the truth in the course of a federal investigation; don’t forget that,” I said. I like to be helpful.
“Quite right.” She nodded and sighed dramatically. “Well, I really have no choice, do I?”
“In that case…” then she went back to deadly serious, “… let me say first that I am reassured by the fact that you think I did not lose the file. That is precisely why I have been waiting to see who the investigating officer would be. If you should decide to call Patricia for an explanation, she will tell you that I did lose it.”
“But you didn’t.” She shook her head. “Someone on your staff then?”
“One of my girls? Absolutely not.”
I waited, and she paused as if gathering her thoughts. Her hands were settled in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankle and tucked under the bench. I had one leg crossed over the other, at the knee not the ankle, and an arm flung over the back of the bench. I felt like a bohunk sitting with a duchess. She continued. “I’ll tell you what happened from my perspective. It will not answer your primary question, mainly, the location of the file from September through to June, but it may give you some avenues of inquiry.”
She spoke, then, as if reading from a script; as though she’d run over the story so many times in her mind that it was now memorized and distanced from emotion. “When the first letter arrived I logged it. That means I opened a file for the project, gave it a code number, and entered it in my master database. Once in the master database, every time a file moves across my desk its destination is tracked. That way I know where all the files are at any given moment in time. I followed this procedure for the salmon file. However, I did not send the file directly to Bob, as I would have for a more minor investigation. Given the nature of the complaint and the political implications I stapled an urgent tag to the folder and placed it directly on Patricia’s desk. I didn’t see it again, which was unusual, but I assumed that it had gone to the president and was being handled at a higher level. Then the second letter came. That was ten months later. I was alarmed and took it personally into Patricia. When I asked her where the file was in the process, so that I could add the letter, she said, ‘How should I know? I gave it back to you three days after I received it.’ I was shocked, but I said nothing, and I went to check my log. If I had received the file and forgotten, it would appear there.”
At this point Lydia turned to look me in the eye, as if defying me to believe her. “When I called up that entry, it was no longer there. The complete log of that file had disappeared. Patricia was furious.”
“Was it just that entry and nothing else?”
She nodded. “Needless to say, I was very concerned, so I decided to investigate further. In addition to the system backups, I personally back up all our files on disk every three months: at the beginning of January, April, July, and October.” She reached into the pocket of her suit jacket and pulled out a computer disk. “This backup was done in April, eight months after we received the initial letter from Dr. Edwards. The file exists on this backup, and there is no record of it ever coming back to me.”
“Does Patsy know about this?” I nodded to the disk. “Actually, no. When I tried to discuss it with her she made it very clear that, as far as she was concerned, she had her answer and the subject was closed.”
I reached out and took the disk. “Mind if I keep this for you?”
“Thank you. I would be most grateful if you would.” I slipped it into my jacket pocket. “But somewhere along the line the file was obviously recovered.”
“Yes. Another curious event. I was not happy at being accused of losing the file. I have never, in my life, misplaced so much as a sheet of paper. However, I am eight months away from early retirement. I cannot afford to make any significant waves.”
That was the understatement of the year. Patsy is a card-carrying member of the “off with her head” school of personnel management. Insubordination is not tolerated, and that includes defending yourself against false accusations, particularly if she’s the one accusing. In Lydia’s position she was better to eat the crap and retire happy eight months from now with a plump little buy-out package. If she so much as squeaked about this file she risked being fired and out on the streets with no bucks and no job. The Red Queen had done it before.
She continued. “The best I could do was suggest that we mount an all-out search of the files the following day. The girls and I would put everything else aside and comb the filing cabinets, since some sort of misfiling was the most likely explanation. It took us two days to locate the folder. It had been placed under optoelectronics.”
I must admit, I felt a stab of regret. P for Pacific and O for optoelectronics. That sounded to me like an honest mistake. “So it was misfiled.”
“That would be the obvious conclusion, yes. However, engineering and life sciences are filed in different cabinets. In fact, they are filed in different rooms. No one on my staff would make such an error.”
At this point my intellect piped up and chirped principle of parsimony, principle of parsimony like some hormone-crazed male warbler. It was true: good scientific practice demanded that I accept the simplest and most