The James Bond Anthology

Bond said: ‘These people can’t be hung, sir. But they ought to be killed.’

M.’s eyes ceased to focus on Bond. For a moment they were blank, looking inward. Then he slowly reached for the top drawer of his desk on the left-hand side, pulled it open and extracted a thin file without the usual title across it and without the topsecret red star. He placed the file squarely in front of him and his hand rummaged again in the open drawer. The hand brought out a rubber stamp and a red-ink pad. M. opened the pad, tamped the rubber stamp on it and then carefully, so that it was properly aligned with the top right-hand corner of the docket, pressed it down on the grey cover.

M. replaced the stamp and the ink pad in the drawer and closed the drawer. He turned the docket round and pushed it gently across the desk to Bond. The red sanserif letters, still damp, said: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.

Bond said nothing. He nodded and picked up the docket and walked out of the room.Two days later, Bond took the Friday Comet to Montreal. He did not care for it. It flew too high and too fast and there were too many passengers. He regretted the days of the old Stratocruiser – that fine lumbering old plane that took ten hours to cross the Atlantic. Then one had been able to have dinner in peace, sleep for seven hours in a comfortable bunk, and get up in time to wander down to the lower deck and have that ridiculous B.O.A.C. ‘country house’ breakfast while the dawn came up and flooded the cabin with the first bright gold of the Western hemisphere. Now it was all too quick. The stewards had to serve everything almost at the double, and then one had a bare two hours snooze before the hundred-mile-long descent from forty thousand feet. Only eight hours after leaving London, Bond was driving a Hertz U-drive Plymouth saloon along the broad Route 17 from Montreal to Ottawa and trying to remember to keep on the right of the road.

The Headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted police are in the Department of Justice alongside Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Like most Canadian public buildings, the Department of Justice is a massive block of grey masonry built to look stodgily important and to withstand the long and hard winters. Bond had been told to ask at the front desk for the Commissioner and to give his name as ‘Mr James’. He did so, and a young fresh-faced R.C.M.P. corporal, who looked as if he did not like being kept indoors on a warm sunny day, took him up in the lift to the third floor and handed him over to a sergeant in a large tidy office which contained two girl secretaries and a lot of heavy furniture. The sergeant spoke on an intercom and there was a ten minutes’ delay during which Bond smoked and read a recruiting pamphlet which made the Mounties sound like a mixture between a dude ranch, Dick Tracy and Rose Marie. When he was shown in through the connecting door a tall youngish man in a dark blue suit, white shirt and black tie turned away from the window and came towards him. ‘Mr James?’ the man smiled thinly. ‘I’m Colonel, let’s say – er – Johns.’

They shook hands. ‘Come along and sit down. The Commissioner’s very sorry not to be here to welcome you himself. He has a bad cold – you know, one of those diplomatic ones.’ Colonel ‘Johns’ looked amused. ‘Thought it might be best to take the day off. I’m just one of the help. I’ve been on one or two hunting trips myself and the Commissioner fixed on me to handle this little holiday of yours,’ the Colonel paused, ‘on me only. Right?’

Bond smiled. The Commissioner was glad to help but he was going to handle this with kid gloves. There would be no come-back on his office. Bond thought he must be a careful and very sensible man. He said: ‘I quite understand. My friends in London didn’t want the Commissioner to bother himself personally with any of this. And I haven’t seen the Commissioner or been anywhere near his headquarters. That being so, can we talk English for ten minutes or so – just between the two of us?’

Colonel Johns laughed. ‘Sure. I was told to make that little speech and then get down to business. You understand, Commander, that you and I are about to connive at various felonies, starting with obtaining a Canadian hunting-licence under false pretences and being an accessory to a breach of the frontier laws, and going on down from there to more serious things. It wouldn’t do anyone one bit of good to have any ricochets from this little lot. Get me?’

‘That’s how my friends feel too. When I go out of here, we’ll forget each other, and if I end up in Sing-Sing that’s my worry. Well, now?’