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act as a model for the size of unit we wanted.We’ve managed to reduce the size since, but in essentials it’s unchanged. It’s like a transistor set – with special valves of course. It has two loop aerials that act as direction finders, give a cross bearing, and can pinpoint a sound. It’s powered by ordinary transistor batteries. It has ear-phones with baffles that shut out exterior sound. They weren’t perfected, but at night, or anywhere with no more than an ordinary volume of sound … you only have to focus it on a wall or something, and choose the right distance and angle. If you get too close you might get overriding sounds on the same bearing – I mean from further off the angle’s more acute and the bearing more precise. At about thirty feet you’d get a conversation like ours.’
    â€˜So you were badly scared.’
    â€˜We thought it might get used for espionage or something. Anybody could learn to use it with a little practice. Of course it’s classified; we have a model for commercial use that works at much closer quarters only, can be built into inspection units. The Ministry would kick up a great stink … When Betty died, and then they found those letters we … some policeman got the idea but we were able to deny it.’
    â€˜We’ll get it back; it’s not being used for espionage. But just as long as we understand each other. I can twist your arm. You say nothing, you hear? About this, or about me. And not even to Will. You breathe and I’ll break your neck with this.’
    I stopped on the way out, and gave him my lecherous grin.
4
    The sun had vanished as I came out, and there was a raw north-westerly wind. I had still another call to make: themanager of the milk co-operative. His office here was not private, but the house adjoining was his home and I decided to work on him there. He was quite a classic type for stiffness and conformity. I certainly did not suspect him of anything, but there were one or two things in the reports I had thought a little odd, and I had wondered whether I could use these to lever any interesting information out of him.
    I had to wait five minutes; he had, it appeared, ‘some instructions he had to give’. The kitchen-maid put me in the good front room, and there I amused myself while waiting.
    I was hunting for an elusive phrase in my mind, and caught the reference suddenly. Ernest Hemingway. Overrated writer, but he wrote one good book at least, and created some unforgettable characters. This man was like one of them … Hemingway, of course, had been talking about a Spaniard. What were the exact words? ‘Heavier than mercury; fuller of boredom than a steer drawing a cart on a country road.’ Fernando, in
Bell
– peculiarly apt for this personage.
    You saw it looking round the room. It was classic too; the provincial ‘good front room’ of the Holland of forty years ago. Where no one ever came, bar the dominie twice a year, and the relations for the wedding anniversary, and the daughters for their protocolaire piano-practising. Sad rooms, hatefully clean, revoltingly arranged and undisturbed, full of unseen shutters, reeking of must and fust. Not one single tiny object that was either beautiful or useful; not a scrap of fringe or varnish that was necessary. No spontaneous, unpretentious breath had ever been drawn here.
    Why had the woman who had lived in this house put her head in the gas-oven? Looking at this room, I could hardly believe that she had made even the trivial slip that put her in the hands of a blackmailer. Something, I thought, had threatened her ‘standing’. Her position of ease and assurance among the other wives on the good-works committee; mostprecious thing in her life. Something had so undermined that solid prop that she had lost her footing and gone under. Provincial Holland.
    The steer came into the room, fidgeted, and sat at last uneasily on