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tray beside each sorter’s left elbow that really counted. The other trays were just so many bottomless tanks being filled up with the steady daily surge. The regular morning flow down the public pipe-line. The fuel that kept the firm going. The red trays were special. Anything that had explosive in it, the least little hint of fire, went straight into one of the red trays. As the red trays were filled, the supervisor emptied them. And, every five minutes or so, the whole collection of them, practically solid dynamite by now, were passed on to Miss Underbill for Mr. Rammell.
    They were a particular pet of Mr. Rammell’s, these complaints trays. He didn’t, of course, attend to any of the complaints himself. At least, not at this stage. He wasn’t an extra-department fiddler, a do-everything-myself kind of man. But he always liked to know what the dissatisfied customers were saying. It was the quickest way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the business. Or rather on the pulse of a hundred different businesses.
    And there was another advantage to be gained from glancing through the complaints trays. There was his personal stamp “Seen by the Managing Director” that his secretary, Miss Underhill, affixed afterwards. That stamp had a tonic effect on the entire store. It kept other people perpetually on their toes and up to scratch.
    Mr. Rammell was more than half-way through the first tray-ful already. The letter that he had just read was from someone complaining that one of the springs of a new sun-lounge had snapped clean in two the first time anyone had sat on it. The circumstances had evidently been violent and dramatic. And socially shaming into the bargain. According to the evidence, it had been a vicar and a doctor’s wife that the treacherous contrivance had been temporarily supporting. A wicker table with teapot and hot-water jug had been standing immediately in front.Only by the mercy of providence had the vicar escaped a terrible scalding; and, as it was ... there was a great deal more in the same vein. But Mr. Rammell merely jotted down the words “sun lounge,” and reached for the next letter.
    He never attempted to keep an exact record of what he read in the complaints tray. There were plenty of other people, hordes of them, analysing, cross-referencing, double-checking everything. And it was enough that he had seen it. It lit a tiny red lamp somewhere in his brain and reminded him that there had been two other complaints about sun lounges last month. Either the buyer didn’t know where to go for sun lounges, or Birmingham had been letting down the buyer. Later on in the morning he would ask Mr. Preece which way round it was.
    The next half-dozen letters were nothing. Simply nothing. A china tea-service had arrived in Northwood with the milk jug shattered. The electric motor of a newly delivered washing machine had fused all the lights in a house at Camberley as soon as the contraption had been turned on. Six pairs of stockings had been posted off by Rammell’s all half a size too large despite the fact that the correspondent had most particularly said “fives,” and didn’t Rammell’s assistants ever listen to anything that was said to them? A lady from Cheltenham had been violently ill in the 3.7 from Paddington after eating minced chicken in the Rammell’s restaurant. The assistant with red hair and an offhand manner in model millinery had been “grossly offensive”—Mr. Rammell had long ago noticed that nobody ever used the word “offensive”—to someone who was transferring her account immediately to Harrod’s because she disliked being spoken to by any shopgirl as though she were a common shoplifter. A bottle of perfume purchased last Tuesday had given the customer and her husband a peculiarly violent kind of hay-fever ...
    Mr. Rammell passed them all across to Miss Underhill for stamping. Then he paused. Here was