The old man fumbled with the kettle.
“I find it hard to talk about Filbert,” he announced at length, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “It was so long ago!”
“He’s dead?” I asked.
“Oh no,” murmured the old man. “He’s not dead; I think you were told he was unavoidably detained, yes?”
“Yes. I thought he had found someone else or something.”
“We thought you would understand; your father was or is, I suppose, in the ChronoGuard and we use certain—let me see—euphemisms.”
He looked at me intently with clear blue eyes staring through heavy lids. My heart thumped heavily.
“What are you saying?” I asked him.
The old man thought about saying something else but then lapsed into silence, paused for a moment and then shuffled back to the main room to mark up videotape labels. There was obviously more to it than just a girl in Tewkesbury, but time was on my side. I let the matter drop.
It gave me a chance to look around the room. A trestle table against one damp wall was stacked with surveillance equipment. A Revox spool-to-spool tape recorder slowly revolved next to a mixing box that placed all seven bugs in the room opposite and the phone line onto eight different tracks of the tape. Set back from the windows were two binoculars, a camera with a powerful telephoto lens, and next to this a video camera recording at slow speed onto a ten-hour tape.
Tamworth looked up from the binoculars.
“Welcome, Thursday. Come and have a look!”
I looked through the binoculars. In the flat opposite, not thirty yards distant, I could see a well-dressed man aged perhaps fifty with a pinched face and a concerned expression. He seemed to be on the phone.
“That’s not him.”
Tamworth smiled.
“I know. This is his brother, Styx. We found out about him this morning. SO-14 were going to pick him up but our man is a much bigger fish; I called SO-1, who intervened on our behalf; Styx is our responsibility at the moment. Have a listen.”
He handed me some earphones and I looked through the binoculars again. Hades’ brother was sitting at a large walnut desk flicking through a copy of the London and District Car Trader. As I watched, he stopped, picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Hello?” said Styx into the phone.
“Hello?” replied a middle-aged woman, the recipient of the call.
“Do you have a 1976 Chevrolet for sale?”
“Buying a car?” I asked Tamworth.
“Keep listening. Same time every week, apparently. Regular as clockwork.”
“It’s only got eighty-two thousand miles on the clock,” continued the lady, “and runs really well. MOT and tax paid ’til year’s end too.”
“It sounds perfect,” replied Styx. “I’ll be willing to pay cash. Will you hold it for me? I’ll be about an hour. You’re in Clapham, yes?”
The woman agreed, and she read over an address that Styx didn’t bother writing down. He reaffirmed his interest and then hung up, only to call a different number about another car in Hounslow. I took off the headphones and pulled out the headset jack so we could hear Styx’s nasal rasp over the loudspeakers.
“How long does he do this for?”
“From SO-14 records, until he gets bored. Six hours, sometimes eight. He’s not the only one either. Anyone who has ever sold a car gets someone like Styx on the phone at least once. Here, these are for you.”
He handed me a box of ammunition with expanding slugs developed for maximum internal damage.
“What is he? A buffalo?”
But Tamworth wasn’t amused.