The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [13]
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.
“We’re up against something quite different here, Thursday. Pray to the GSD you never have to use them, but if you do, don’t hesitate. Our man doesn’t give second chances.”
I took the clip out of my automatic and reloaded it and the spare I carried with me, leaving a standard slug on top in case of an SO-1 spot check. Over in the flat, Styx had dialed another number in Ruislip.
“Hello?” replied the unfortunate car owner on the other end of the line.
“Yes, I saw your advert for a Ford Granada in today’s Trader,” continued Styx. “Is it still for sale?”
Styx got the address out of the car owner, promised to be around in ten minutes, put the phone down and then rubbed his hands with glee, laughing childishly. He put a line through the advert and then went onto the next.
“Doesn’t even have a license,” said Tamworth from the other side of the room. “He spends the rest of his time stealing ballpoints, causing electrical goods to fail after the guarantee has expired and scratching records in record shops.”
“A bit childish, isn’t it?”
“I’d say,” replied Tamworth. “He’s possessed of a certain amount of wickedness, but nothing like his brother.”
“So what’s the connection between Styx and the Chuzzlewit manuscript?”
“We suspect that he may have it. According to SO-14’s surveillance records he