Three days later he found himself posted on a run to the north­western docks in company with Bunder and five others. He had been given his instructions in private, and so, apparently, had everyone else, for there was no public reference to the job in hand. Nor was there any elaborate parade of casualness. They under­stood one another.

When they had arrived at the docks, and duly driven the cars to the appointed berth, there remained the two usual formalities. One was to obtain for each car a certificate that it had been delivered in proper fashion—the ‘clearance chit’; the other was to unscrew the trade plates which the cars carried in place of the regulation number plates they would have when licensed. Each driver was always responsible for removing these plates, front and rear, from his vehicle and taking them back to Export Express.

Following Bunder’s instructions, Charles went, as soon as he was free, to the public lavatory which served that particular berth of the docks. Inside, he found the others already assembled. They had handed over their trade plates to Bunder, who received Charles’s from him and vanished, with the complete set, into one of the water-closet compartments. The others stood about, smoking, talking, and either using the urinals or pretending to do so, until, after a few minutes, Bunder reappeared, flushing the cistern noisily for the benefit of any outsiders who happened to be present. None were, and quickly, but without the need for concealment, Bunder handed everyone his trade plates back. Drifting out of the lavatory in ones and twos, they passed out of the dock gates and went off to the station.

Not until he was in the privacy of an empty compartment in the train did Charles look closely at the two trade plates he was carrying. Each of them had a plastic back, painted to look like metal. A stiff clip held the back in place, but by inserting a half-crown into a slot at one end, it could be levered off fairly easily. He levered one of them off. Snugly fitting into the space between the plate’s false back and its real one, a space perhaps three-sixteenths of an inch wide, were five tiny envelopes.

He snapped the back on again, and put the plates up on the luggage rack. He did not need to look inside those envelopes.