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showing, we know how to open the package and render it harmless. We do it like this. Excuse me, Captain.’
    He took a law book out of the case behind the Captain’s chair and put it on the edge of the desk.
    ‘That’s the package, say. Now, I put the flat of my left hand right on top of the place where I know the break-back spring is and I press down firmly. Then, with my right hand, I take a knife with a sharpened hook at the end, like you can buy for cutting linoleum or shoe-leather, and I slit open the package around the edges of the long narrow side. Then, I can gradually slide out what’s inside while continuing to maintain pressure on the break-back to stop it flipping over. When it’s far enough out for me to see, I can get hold of the break-back itself. Then, all I have to do is remove the detonator. When we had that miners’ union trouble and people were sending package bombs to each other by every mail, we dealt that way with a dozen or more in a week.’
    ‘So that’s how you dealt with this one, eh?’ Captain Boyle had been fidgeting and now seemed ready to skip any further instruction in the rudiments of bomb disposal.
    Lampeter shook his head emphatically. ‘No, Captain, that’s how I was
allowed
to deal with this one by the son-of-a-bitch who sent it or arranged for it to be sent. I told you it was put together by someone who knows the score, someone who knew that it would be X-rayed and opened up like I’ve shown you with a hooked knife. So, what he does is put in a little extra gizmo to fool me. In the army, where I was trained, that was standard operating procedure with stuff like mines and delayed-action bombs. As soon as the guy who’d designed one of those items had figured, or beentold by Intelligence, that the enemy knew how to defuse it, he put in a modification. As a result, the next time some smart-ass enemy tried defusing it by the book he blew his stupid head off.’
    ‘You look all right to me, Lampeter,’ said Captain Boyle. ‘I take it you spotted the modification.’
    ‘No, Captain, I missed it completely. What he’s done is put in an electric detonator as well as the regular one. It doesn’t show in the X-ray because it’s in there behind the main spring of the break-back. The wiring from the little pen-light battery runs around the outside edge of the whole package. When I put the knife in and started cutting the side open, that should have set it off by shorting the twin flex he used, either straight away or when I began to pull the hook along.’
    ‘Why didn’t it? Luck? Some defect?’
    Lampeter breathed in deeply before answering. ‘No, Captain. No luck and no defect. The bomb-maker had the detonator connections neatly taped back out of the way so that I should know that this time he was just kidding. He could have blown my head off, but he didn’t. He’s a sweetheart. The FBI lab people are going to love him too.’
    The white bomb-squad man spoke for the first time. ‘If I ever get my hands on the mother,’ he said quietly, ‘I swear to God I’ll kill him.’
    ‘Aren’t you gentlemen taking this a little personally?’ I asked. ‘After all, I’m the nearly injured party. The bomb
was
sent to me. I’m delighted he was kidding.’
    Lampeter’s melancholy eyes took me to pieces for a moment before he answered. ‘You’re a civilian, Mr Halliday, and he hasn’t made a monkey out of
you
. They tell me you’re a writer. Movie stars’ biographies they say. Right?’
    ‘Among other things.’
    ‘Yeah. I think I’ve seen your name on drugstore bookstands. All that “truth-about” stuff. In that line of work you must have gotten to know where quite a lot of bodies are buried. And I’ll bet you’ve made quite a lot of enemies too.’
    ‘The sender of this bomb says it’s a friendly gesture. He wants to convince me of his personal integrity.’
    ‘Ah, shit.’
    ‘It’s true, Lampeter,’ said Boyle.
    ‘You said he’d had a threatening letter,