I wondered how much Fifeshire knew that he hadn’t told me. Had he placed Martha in that job? She wasn’t telling that. But she had told me pretty well all of what she had found out: about Harry Slan and American Fossilized, proving that Quoit was right in his theory – or at least, looked as though he was about to be proved right. The most important thing I had to find out in the next three days was whether Sleder was blackmailing Harry Slan and Horace Whalley, and perhaps others, merely because AtomSled needed orders, or whether Sir Isaac Quoit’s hunch was correct.

What I wanted was very well hidden, and it took me until Sunday afternoon to find it; it was hidden in an ingeniously concealed spring-loaded drawer at the back of a filing cabinet in Sleder’s own office. I had first to pull the front drawer right out, and then a second drawer popped up behind it. The front drawer had been the first place I had looked, and it was only when I returned to it and in a fit of frustration yanked too hard that I realized it would come out and that there was another drawer behind it.

The file in the drawer was marked, innocently but appropriately enough, New Business. It contained a buff folder, a sheath of papers, and a copy of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Inside the folder were several packs of Kodachrome X colour-negatives, and printed contact sheets. In some of the snaps I recognized my chum Horace Whalley; in the others were a total of eleven different men, none of whom could reasonably be described as good-looking, engaged in virtuoso performances with a bevvy of truly stunning young ladies. All had been captured, either for immortality or for some other purpose, in excellent colour, by a photographer who knew exactly what he was doing. I pressed a button on my ubiquitous Trout and Trumbull adapted Seiko digital quartz watch, and the face disappeared, exposing a tiny camera lens. The quality of my snaps would not be as these, but the fidelity of reproduction would be passable; Henri Cartier-Bresson might have turned in his grave, but it wasn’t a one-man show at the National Gallery that I was after. I recorded the faces of each individual, then replaced the snaps in the buff folder. Next, I took the sheath of papers and went and sat down at Sleder’s desk.

The papers were divided into five sections; one was headed United States, the second Canada, the third Great Britain, the fourth France and the fifth Spain.