I searched every inch of the darkroom and went back out and searched every inch of the flat but nothing further of any interest yielded itself to me. I wished I could have found just one shred of evidence to put one more tiny piece of the puzzle into place. Whilst having a secret darkroom is distinctly odd there is nothing necessarily underhand about it; I knew damn well that it wasn’t for processing snaps of Welsh valleys but I couldn’t be sure exactly what it was for. If it was Wetherby’s quirk to pass his leisure hours munching peanuts in a hidden darkroom, then he was fully entitled to, all the days of his life. He certainly swept up the shells all right.
20
Trout and Trumbull would have looked more at home in a dusty gentleman’s outfitters — probably the school clothing department of an old-fashioned provincial department store. They were pasty-faced men, both well into their fifties, Trout short and stocky, Trumbull short and thin, and both wore dark flannel suits, white shirts and grey-and-black patterned ties knotted very precisely.
They had clean hands, white, with a few veins showing, their shoes were brilliantly polished, and what hair remained to them was neatly lacquered to their heads. They smelt, ever so slightly, of a mixture of talcum powder and hair cream.
Trout and Trumbull ran the Playroom. This is the name given to the area of the underground offices at Hyde Park that houses the agents’ weapons, or toys as they are better known. These two gentlemen were the agents’ armourers; they doled out the weapons, cleaned the weapons, serviced the weapons, and spent much of their time trying to devise new weapons, some brilliant, some not so brilliant, but always weapons that could be trusted to work. Their reputation for reliability was legendary. Once, some years ago, a bullet had failed to go off; Trout and Trumbull were in tears for a week. The agent wasn’t; he was dead. Now they packed every single bullet themselves.
Messrs Trout and Trumbull were not the world’s liveliest people, nor did they have much of a sense of humour, or if they did they never made it apparent to me or to anybody else; but I had to take my hat off to them. ‘I would take my hat off to any pair of grey-haired gentlemen who could hand me in all solemnity a packet of exploding parrot seeds without the faintest hint of a smile. They were showing me the latest they had to offer.
‘Exploding parrot seeds?’
‘Correct, Mr 4404,’ said Trumbull. Due to regulations, they had to address everyone by their number only; but it was beyond their dignity not to place the correct title before the number. Accordingly my number was always prefixed by Mister.
‘What do I do? Fill some poor parrot’s food tray with these things and wait for him to explode?’ I had visions of perplexed customs officials all over the world wondering why a small percentage of English businessmen and businesswomen had taken to carrying packets of parrot seed in their baggage.
‘Mr Trout.’ Trumbull indicated with a short movement of his hand.
Trout solemnly took a packet and held it up. It read: ‘Oldham’s sunflower seeds for parrots and other tropical cage birds.’
‘Vacuum-packed,’ said Trout, tapping the packet. ‘No air inside. Open the top’ — he proceeded to rip off the top — ‘and the air reacts with the seeds, fuses them.’ He took out a seed and held it up. ‘Come, Mr 4404.’ He walked over to the firing range and I followed. He pushed a button and a dummy man was automatically lowered down on a web of wires. The dummy was a complete life-size replica of a 200-pound human, authentic in every possible detail, including internally. Trout and Trumbull had invented this type of dummy, which were now produced in vast quantities for a great variety of testing purposes.
Trout tossed a parrot seed at the dummy and it landed at his feet; there followed an explosion which shattered the dummy completely, blowing him in forty different directions. I was impressed. Trout turned to me quite unemotionally. ‘Don’t leave an opened packet lying around. Best used for dealing with a crowd; throw the whole lot at once — don’t want to go tripping over with an open packet.’
Trout could have spared his breath.
Trumbull handed me a cigarette lighter. ‘Click one way and it lights cigarettes. Click another way and it takes pictures. Click another way and it records sound. Click another way and it’s a radio receiver. Click another way’ — he pointed it away from me, and a flame about 10 foot long seared out. ‘Click another way,’ this time he just pointed, ‘and in ten seconds it blows to smithereens.’ Trout and Trumbull were big licks on bangs this year.
‘If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I think I’ll take a rain check on those two and stick to what I’m used to right now.’ I handed them my Beretta and they gave me a shiny, stripped, repaired, oiled and tested replacement. Along with it they handed me a new pair of hand-made leather boots. I tugged my old ones off and pulled the new ones on. They were a good snug fit. One heel was packed with spare ammunition, the other contained a silencer.
Away down a corridor I heard the dull ‘plunk’ of a silenced gun, followed by the whang of the bullet hitting some metal target. The ‘plunk’ got louder at each shot until it became a loud ‘crack’. It has always been a problem for the ballistics boys to produce an effective silencer. They were trying out a new lightweight silencer. From the sound of it, Trout and Trumbull had a long way to go.
In another direction a steady ‘crack-whang-crack-whang-crack-whang’ of target practice started up. Open-plan offices were all right in some places. Here it was downright mournful. Maybe if it wasn’t for Trout and Trumbull it would be all the fun of the fair. Somehow I doubted it.
There was one specific item I wanted from Trout and Trumbull; I filled in a requisition form and Trumbull marched off into the racks of stores, moments later he returned, holding it with all the emotion of a man holding a replacement set of wiper blades; but it wasn’t wiper blades in his hand. It was something that looked a good deal more innocent even than that: it was a slim object that to all outward appearances was one of a standard brand of slimline pocket calculators, complete with chimes. I slipped it inside my jacket pocket, left Trout and Trumbull to their devices, and look the elevator two floors up to Wotan’s domain.
Arthur was white and shaking and looking very agitated when I went in. ‘You’re for the high jump!’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘which particular high jump are you referring to?’
‘Your boss, Commander Scatliffe.’
‘My boss is Fifeshire.’
‘I know that and you know that,’ he gave me a long warm smile, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘It would appear that Commander Scatliffe isn’t aware of that. Not that it’s any of my business — and you can be sure I haven’t told him a thing — but he’s out for your blood.’
I refrained from telling him that that was more than a small hunch of my own. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘He’s left a message in no uncertain terms that the moment you turn up here I’m to tell you to go straight to Whitehall. He’s really hopping mad, old boy.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing very much at all; he just shouted down the phone at me, the same instructions about three times, then hung up. I damn near shouted back at him. Been rubbing him up the wrong way?’ He smiled wryly.
‘I don’t have to try very hard with him.’
‘Take a tip from me — it’s not my business to be telling you this, but I think you should listen to me for a moment. I get to hear a lot; not everything, but a lot of what goes on in this outfit sooner or later ends up down here. I don’t listen through keyholes but it’s unavoidable, doing this job, that I should hear things. Scatliffe’s going to the top. Whatever your view on him might be it’s going to be better for you in the long term to stay on the right side of him. He’s very good at rubbing people up the wrong way himself but he is going to the top, and he’s a relatively young man so when he does get to the top he’s going to remain there a long time. If you’re going to stay in this game, really make this your career, your chances of promotion and getting into the plum jobs aren’t going to be too clever if you remain on the wrong side of him.’