"There's a better one —»

"Look, Frank, I've really got to do some research," I tell him, grabbing a notebook and heading for the library. Hell, I have to work with the guy; better to stage a tactical retreat in the face of the utterly unamusing spell-check running-jape than lose the rag and tell Frank where to stick his software.

The Caley still has a library, where the cuttings are kept. When you start getting into a story the first step is usually getting the cuts up, and this is where they come from. I suppose in a few years absolutely everything will be stored in databases and you'll be able to do this sort of thing from anywhere in the world by modem, but for now there's a real place you have to come to if you want to look up the more obscure reference books, the paper's pre-computer files and back issues of the Caledonian itself (though even these are held on microfiche rather than actual newsprint). The Caley's library is housed in a single cavernous room deep inside the building, two floors below the reception area; it has no windows, you can't hear any traffic or trains and it's actually pretty restful unless the presses are running. I exchange a few words with Joanie, our head librarian, then settle in and start exploring.

Apart from confirming that Ares is the god of massacre, which may or may not have any relevance to anything, I can't find much. There's no reference to anybody or anything called Jemmel. I find myself leafing through the stuff I've already discovered about Wood, Bennet, Harrison, Aramphahal and Isaacs.

Wood and Isaacs worked for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, Bennet for the Nuclear Inspectorate, Aramphahal was a cryptography expert at GCHQ and Harrison was a DTI guy with rumoured links to MI6. Aramphahal went down to the railway track that ran at the bottom of his garden near Gloucester, tied a rope round his neck, secured the other end to a tree on one side of the track and himself to a trunk on the opposite side, and waited for an express. Wood lived in Egremont, a small village in Cumbria; he took a bath with an electric drill. Not the battery-powered type. Bennet was found drowned in a farm cesspit near Oxford. Isaacs tied an ancient and very heavy typewriter to his feet and threw himself into Derwent Water, and Harrison sat in a hotel room in Windermere and swallowed the two liquids which react together to make cavity-wall insulation foam: choked to death. They all seemed to know each other and they all had very hazy work records with long gaps in them when nobody seemed to know where they'd been, and none of them had any close colleagues — or at least none who'd admit to being close to them.

It all looked suspicious as hell and I know people on a couple of the London broadsheets who were trying to find out if this was more than a series of coincidences, but nobody ever got anywhere. There was a question asked in Parliament and a police investigation was launched but it promptly submerged and didn't discover anything either, or if it did it was kept very quiet.

According to Mr Archer the five dead men all had one thing in common: an injection mark on the arm and/or a contusion on the back of their skull where they'd been hit. The implication was that none of them had been conscious when they'd supposedly killed themselves. Mr Archer claimed to have seen copies of the original forensic records that proved this, but I — like other hacks — had checked with the relevant local cops and coroners and discovered nothing untoward, though admittedly the old guy in Cumbria who'd done the PMs on Isaacs, Wood and Harrison had died of a coronary shortly after the police investigation began, which was either a coincidence or not but unprovable either way, especially as he'd been cremated, like the other five had.

I'm shaking my head at all this conspiracy-theory stuff and just starting to wonder whether the sensation at the back of my eyes is the start of a headache or not when the library extension rings. Joanie calls me over; it's for me.

"Cameron?" It's Frank.

"Yes," I say through my teeth. This had better not be another spell-checkism.

"Your Mr Archer's on the phone. Shall I put him through?"

Ah-ha. "Oh, why not?"

There are a few clicks (while I think, Shit, I can't record this call either) and then the Stephen Hawking voice: "Mr Colley?"

"Speaking. Mr Archer?"

"I have more."

"What?"

"Jemmel's real name still eludes me. But I know the name of the agent, the sales representative for the end-user."

"Uh-huh?"

"His name is Smout." He spells it for me.

"Okay," I say, thinking the name sounds familiar. "And —?"

"He's the one they don't talk about, in Baghdad. But —»

But, the line goes dead. There are a couple of clicks, a sequence of faraway noises like touch-tones and a faint, barely audible echo: "… they don't talk about, in Baghdad. But —»

I put the phone down, feeling just a little dizzy; still somewhat tipsily drunk from lunch, cock-sore from two heavily frustrated wanks, and mind reeling with the implications of what Mr Archer's just told me, not to mention the heavy hint that — even if I wasn't able to — somebody somewhere was recording it all.

The thing is, I know who Smout is: I did an article on him. The forgotten hostage, the man who — like Mr Archer says — they don't talk about.

Daniel Smout is — or was — a medium-ranking arms dealer who's been in prison in Baghdad for the last five years, charged at first with spying and then convicted of drug smuggling; he was sentenced to death but that was commuted to life imprisonment. HMG has always shown a marked reluctance to have anything to do with him and the last time any diplomatic representative saw him was three years ago. But there's been a persistent rumour that he was an agent for the West, working on something so sensitive that nobody involved wanted the press or anybody else to know anything about it, and the reason he's been banged up is to stop him talking, after whatever deal he was working on finally fell through.

So we're talking about a project with the code-name of the god of massacre, involving Iraq, a very secret deal and five dead men including at least three who had access to nuclear intelligence and two to physical nuclear product — plutonium — in the place where they've managed to lose more weapon-grade material than your average nuke-ambitious third-world dictator has ever had wet dreams of acquiring. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, General Communications Headquarters, the Nuclear Inspectorate, the Department of Trade and Industry, and an agent — a sales rep for the end-user, Mr Archer called him — in Baghdad.

Dear holy shit.

I hit the news room to show my face and just as I get to my desk my phone goes and I jump and grab it and it's Mr Archer again. I get the Pearlcorder working this time.

"Mr Colley, I cannot talk now but if I can call you at home on Friday night I hope to give you something more then."

"What?" I say, putting a hand through my hair. At home? This is a departure. "All right; my number —»

"I have your home number. Goodbye."

"… Goodbye," I say to the silent receiver.

"Everything all right?" Frank asks, eyebrows arched in concern.

"Fine," I say, grinning wildly and probably unconvincingly. "Just fine."

Retreat to toilets again claiming dodgy ingredient in lunch-time chowder and snort some speed, then take a walk out to Salisbury Crags and sit on rock looking out over the city, smoking a spliff and thinking, Oh, Mr Archer, whatever are we involved in?