The Eyre Affair

me.’

I looked at him. He meant it.

‘Is this a transfer?’

‘No,’ replied Tamworth, ‘it isn’t. I just need you because you have information that is of use to us. You’ll be an observer; nothing more. Once you understand what we’re up against you’ll be very glad to be just that.’

‘So when this is over I just get thrown back here?’

He paused and looked at me for a moment, trying to give the best assurance that he could without lying. I liked him for it.

‘I make no guarantees, Miss Next, but anyone who has been on an SO-5 assignment can be pretty confident that they won’t be SO-27 forever.’

‘What is it you want me to do?’

Tamworth pulled a form from his case and pushed it across the table to me. It was a standard security clearance and, once signed, gave SpecOps the right to almost everything I possessed and a lot more besides if I so much as breathed a word to someone with a lesser clearance. I signed it dutifully and handed it back. In exchange he gave me a shiny SO-5 badge with my name already in place. Tamworth knew me better than I thought. This done, he lowered his voice and began:

‘SO-5 is basically a Search & Containment facility. We are posted with a man to track until found and contained, then we get another. SO-4 is pretty much the same; they are just after a different thing. Person. You know. Anyway, I was down at Gad’s Hill this morning, Thursday—can I call you Thursday?—and I had a good look at the crime scene at first hand. Whoever took the manuscript of Chuzzlewit left no fingerprints, no sign of entry and nothing on any of the cameras.’

‘Not a lot to go on, was there?’

‘On the contrary. It was just the break I’ve been waiting for.’

‘Did you share this with Boswell?’ I asked.

‘Of course not. We’re not interested in the manuscript; we’re interested in the man who stole it.’

‘And who’s that?’

‘I can’t tell you his name but I can write it.’

He took out a felt tip and wrote ‘Acheron Hades’ on a notepad and held it up for me to read.

‘Look familiar?’

‘Very familiar. There can’t be many people who haven’t heard about him.’

‘I know. But you’ve met him, haven’t you?’

‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘He was one of the lecturers when I studied English at Swindon in ‘68. None of us were surprised when he switched to a career of crime. He was something of a leech. He made one of the students pregnant.’

‘Braeburn; yes, we know about her. What about you?’

‘He never made me pregnant, but he had a good try.’

‘Did you sleep with him?’

‘No; I didn’t figure sleeping with lecturers was really where I wanted to be. The attention was flattering, I suppose, dinner and stuff. He was brilliant—but a moral vacuum. I remember once he was arrested for armed robbery while giving a spirited lecture on John Webster’s The White Devil. He was released without charge on that occasion, but the Braeburn thing was enough to have him dismissed.’

‘He asked you to go with him yet you turned him down.’

‘Your information is good, Mr Tamworth.’

Tamworth scribbled a note on his pad. He looked up at me again.

‘But the important thing is: you know what he looks like?’

‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘but you’re wasting your time. He died in Venezuela in ‘82.’

‘No; he just made us think he had. We exhumed the grave the following year. It wasn’t him at all. He feigned death so well that he fooled the doctors; they buried a weighted coffin. He has powers that are slightly baffling. That’s why we can’t say his name. I call it Rule Number One.’

‘His name? Why not?’

‘Because he can hear his own name—even whispered—over a thousand-yard radius, perhaps more. He uses it to sense our presence.’

‘And why do you suppose he stole Chuzzlewit? ’

Tamworth reached into his case and pulled out a file. It was marked ‘Most Secret—SpecOps 5 clearance only’. The slot in the front, usually reserved for a mugshot, was empty.

‘We don’t have a picture of him,’ said Tamworth as I opened the file. ‘He doesn’t resolve on film or video and has never been in custody long enough to be sketched. Remember the cameras at Gad’s Hill?’

‘Yes?’

‘They didn’t pick anyone up. I went through the tapes very carefully. The camera angle changed every five seconds yet there would be no way anyone could dodge all of them during the time they were in the building. Do you see what I mean?’

I nodded slowly and flicked through the pages of Acheron’s file.

Tamworth continued: ‘I’ve been after him for five years. He has seven outstanding warrants for murder in England, eighteen in America. Extortion, theft and kidnapping. He’s cold, calculating and quite ruthless. Thirty-six of his forty-two known victims were either SpecOps or police officers.’

‘Hartlepool in ‘75?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Tamworth slowly. ‘You heard about it?’

I had. Most people had. Hades had been cornered in the basement of a multi-storey carpark after a botched robbery. One of his associates lay dead in a bank nearby; Acheron had killed the wounded man to stop him talking. In the basement, he persuaded an officer into giving him his gun, killing six others as he walked out. The only officer who survived was the one whose gun he had used. That was Acheron’s idea of a joke. The officer in question never gave a satisfactory explanation as to why he had given up his firearm. He had taken early retirement and gassed himself in his car six years later after a short history of alcoholism and petty theft. He came to be known as the seventh victim.

‘I interviewed the Hartlepool survivor before he took his own life,’ Tamworth went on, ‘after I was instructed to find… him at any cost. My findings led us to formulate Rule Number Two: If you ever have the misfortune to face him in person, believe nothing that he says or does. He can lie in thought, deed, action and appearance. He has amazing persuasive powers over those of weak mind. Did I tell you that we have been authorised to use maximum force?’

‘No, but I guessed.’

‘SO-5 has a shoot-to-kill policy concerning our friend—‘

‘Whoa, whoa, wait a sec. You have the power to eliminate without trial?’

‘Welcome to SpecOps 5, Thursday—what did you think containment meant?’ He laughed a laugh that was slightly disturbing. ‘As the saying goes: If you want to get into SpecOps, act kinda weird. We don’t tend to pussyfoot around.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘Not in the least. It’s Blind Eye Grand Central below SpecOps 8. We have a saying: Below the eight, above the law. Ever hear it?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll hear it a lot. In any event we make it our Rule Number Three: Apprehension is of minimal importance. What gun do you carry?’

I told him and he scribbled a note.

‘I’ll get some fluted expansion slugs for you.’

‘There’ll be hell to pay if we get caught with those.’

‘Self-defence only,’ explained Tamworth quickly. ‘You won’t be dealing with this man; I just want you to ID him if he shows. But listen: if the shit hits the fan I don’t want any of my people left with bows and arrows against the lightning. And anything less than an expanding slug is about as much good as using wet cardboard as a flak jacket. We know almost nothing about him. No birth certificate, not even a reliable age or even who his parents were. He just appeared on the scene in ‘54 as a petty criminal with a literary edge and has