Flying Dutch

TWO

The National Lombard Bank is situated in the very heart of downtown Bridport. It is the sort of location any red-blooded bank manager would give his heart and soul for, right in the epicentre of a triangle formed by the town’s most beguiling attractions—the fish and chip shop, the Post Office and the traffic lights. In summer, whole families still make the difficult journey into Bridport from the surrounding countryside to stand and watch the traffic lights performing their dazzling son et lumiere; and although they now have a set of lights in Charmouth—a deliberate and cynical attempt to poach the holiday trade that has introduced much bitterness into the previously friendly relationship between the two communities—purists insist that the Bridport set has a purer green, a rosier red, a more scintillating amber than any others this side of Dorchester.

To a Sybaritic Londoner like Jane Doland, however, the Bridport Lights meant nothing more than another hold-up on her way to a not particularly pleasant assignment, and with the poverty of spirit that is the hallmark of the city-dweller she assumed that the small throng of children gathered round them were merely waiting to cross the road. She had no street-plan of Bridport to help her find the bank, but she located it nevertheless simply by looking straight in front of her as she drove in from the roundabout. A bank, she said to herself, what fun. This is well worth missing the London premiere of Crocodile Dundee 9 for.

The causes of momentous events are often so bewilderingly complex that even highly-trained historians are at a loss to unravel them. Men wise in their generation have gone grey, bald and ultimately senile in the great universities grappling with the origins of the English Civil War, the Peasants’ Revolt and the rise of Hitler, and it is doubtful now that the truth will ever be known. In contrast, the reason why Jane Doland was in Bridport, two years (give or take a week or so) since she had gone to see The Flying Dutchman at the Royal Opera House, was quite remarkably simple. A decree had gone out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, and since this particular decree had had some viciously unexpected things in it about Advance Corporation Tax, all leave was cancelled in the offices of the leading accountancy firm where Jane Doland occupied a trivial and poorly-paid position, and accountants were dispersed like dazed bacilli into the bloodstream of British commerce to sort out the affairs of the National Lombard Bank, the firm’s largest and most complicated client. Since the National Lombard has more branches than all the trees in the New Forest, and the Bridport branch occupies roughly the same place in the bank’s list of priorities as that assigned to Leatherhead Rovers in the Football League, its affairs were unhesitatingly entrusted to Jane Doland’s skill, expertise and highly-motivated commitment.

Jane was considering this when she parked her car under a lime tree in that famous Bridport thoroughfare which some unusually imaginative soul had christened South Street. In fact the term nonentity had been raffling about in her brain like a small, loose bearing all the way down the A303, and by the time she reached her destination she was in no mood to be pleasant to anybody or to appreciate anything. This would go some way towards explaining her lack of enthusiasm for the traffic lights, which happened to be at their luminescent best this not particularly fine morning.

Nevertheless, Jane said to herself as she walked through the door of the bank. When trying to cheer herself up, she never got further than nevertheless, but it was always worth giving it just one more go. As she had expected, they had looked out lots of nice accounts for her to amuse herself with, and although they were all in such a hopeless mess that Sherlock Holmes, with Theseus to help him, Einstein to handle the figures and Escoffier laying on plenty of strong black coffee, would have had a devil of a job sorting them out. Jane told herself that it is always the thought that counts. She could imagine the faces of the bank staff when the news hit them that an accountant from Moss Berwick was coming to visit them. “Moss Berwick, eh?” she could hear them saying to each other. “Somebody hide the July returns while I shuffle the invoices.”

After several false starts, the hour-hand of the clock on the wall in the pleasantly intimate cupboard they had set aside for her personal use crept round to one o’clock and she made her Unilateral Declaration of Lunchtime. The precious forty-five minutes that her contract of employment allowed her for rest, nourishment and the contemplation of the infinite was mostly dissipated in locating and booking into the Union Hotel, which Jane was able to tell from the public lavatories next door by the fact that the roller towel in the public lavatories worked. By not bothering to unpack, Jane was able to dash down to the bar, fail to get a drink and a sandwich before it shut, and sprint back to the bank just in time to be three minutes late for the afternoon session. The manager wasn’t impressed, and one of the cashiers gave her a look that nearly stripped all the varnish off her nails. At about three-fifteen her pencil broke.

Stay with it, girl, she said to herself as the office junior came to tell her to go away because they were locking up now, you’ve got four more days of this. Think (she said to herself) of the Honour of the Firm. Think of old man Moss hauling himself up by his bootstraps out of the slums of nineteenth-century Liverpool, studying all the hours God sent at the Mechanics Institute to pass his examinations, qualify, meet up with old man Berwick and found the greatest accounting firm the world has ever known. She had read this stirring story in the recruitment pamphlets they had sent her when she joined, and the recollection of it never failed to arouse in her strong feelings of pure apathy. Oddly enough, the pamphlet had been curiously reticent on the subject of old man Berwick, preferring to concentrate on his more dashing colleague, and Jane often wondered where he had pulled himself up out of by his bootstraps. Harrow, probably.

A year or so back, the compilers of the same recruitment guide had been going round interviewing members of staff for the new edition, and they had asked Jane what the most satisfying, fulfilling, life-enhancing thing about working for the firm was, in her lowly opinion. She had replied, without hesitation, going home, and they hadn’t included her in the guide or even the video, although she prided herself that she had the best legs in the department. Since the rest of the legs in the department belonged to Mr Shaw, Mr Peterson, Mr Ferrara and Mr Timson respectively, this was no symptom of vanity on Jane’s part, merely the scrupulous accuracy and devotion to truth which marks an accountant out from his fellow creatures.

Since then, Jane had kept her opinion of her chosen career very much to herself; but, as if to compensate, she let it out of its cage pretty freely once she was alone with it. As she was now, for instance, on a cold Monday night in Bridport.

There are few excitements to compare with one’s first night in a strange new town, and despite her weariness and a deplorable urge to take her tights off and watch “Cagney and Lacey” on the black and white portable in her room at the Union Hotel, Jane set out to immerse herself completely in the town. After all, she reckoned, she might never come here again; live this precious moment to the full, crush each ripe fruit of sensation against the palate until the appetite is cloyed in intoxicating richness.

The cinema was closed when she eventually found it, what with it being half past September, and since she had no wish to be raped, robbed or murdered she didn’t go into the White Hart, the Blue Ball, the Bunch of Grapes, the Prince of Wales, the Peacock, the Catherine Wheel, the Green Dragon, the Four Horseshoes, the Hour Glass, the Half Way House, the Bird in Hand, the Bottle and Glass, the Jolly Sportsman, the Dorsetshire Yeoman, the Boot and Slipper, the Rising Sun, the Crown and Cushion, the Poulteney Arms, the Red Cross Knight, the Two Brewers, the Black Dog, the Temporary Sign, the Duke of Rochester, the Gardeners Arms or the Mississippi Riverboat Night Club. Apart from these, the only place of entertainment open to the public was the bus shelter, and that was a touch too crowded for Jane’s taste. She went back to the Union Hotel, had a glass or orange juice and some fresh local boiled carpet with gravy in the dining room, and went upstairs to catch the last ten minutes of “Cagney and Lacey”, which had been cancelled and replaced with athletics from Zurich.

Isn’t it fortunate, Jane reflected, that I brought a good book with me. The only thing which can stop me enjoying my book is if the proprietors of this charnel-house forget to put a shilling in the meter. She picked the book out of her suitcase, opened it where her expired Capitalcard marked the place, and began to read.

This is not the right book, she said to herself as her eye fell upon the corduroy furrows of the page. This is the book I finished reading yesterday.

You can tell of your Torments of the Damned. You can, if you wish, allude to Sisyphus and the Stone. You can wax eloquent, especially if you are a television evangelist, about what is going to happen to the fornicators and the bearers of false witness when they finally come eyeball to eyeball with the Big G. But you cannot begin to describe, not if you speak with the tongues of men and of angels, the exquisite agony of being stuck in a fleabag hotel in a shut town with a choice between watching a load of tubby East Germans putting the shot in their underwear or reading a detective story every detail of whose plot is etched on your mind.

A berserk fury came over quiet, tranquil-minded Jane Doland. She pulled on her tights, picked up her room-key and went out into the gloomy corridor. Downstairs, in what was described with cruel irony as the residents’ lounge, there might be a week-old newspaper or the July 1956 issue of Woman and Home. Or perhaps she might find a reasonably well-written telephone directory, or even a discarded matchbox with a puzzle on the back. There is always hope, so long as life subsists. The beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a useful prevarication, keeping all options open.

She did find a matchbox, as it happens, but all it said was “Made in Finland, Average Contents Forty Matches”, and after the third reading Jane felt that she had sucked all the value out of that one. Disconsolate, she wandered out to the reception desk. The sound of a television commentator joyfully exclaiming that Kevin Bradford from Cark-in-Cartmel had managed to avoid coming last in the six hundred metres drifted through the illuminated crack above the office door. Jane looked down and saw the hotel register. Salvation! She could read that.

It was a fascinating document. For example, Jane learned that in November 1986 Mr and Mrs Belmont from Winnipeg had stayed three nights at the Union Hotel, and although they had had breakfast, they had not had any evening meals.

Why was that, she wondered? Had they spent every last cent on the flight, and been reduced to eating their way through all the individual portions of jam and marmalade on the breakfast table to keep body and soul together during their stay? Did they spend the evenings flitting from casino to night-club to casino, scorning the Union’s prosaic cuisine? Perhaps they just didn’t like the look of the menu terribly much. She could sympathise with that. And what had brought these globe-trotting Belmonts half-way across the world, uprooting them from their cosy timber-frame home among the wheatfields, beside the immeasurable vastness of the mighty lake? Had they come back in search of their heritage, or to pay their last respects to a dying relative, resolving a twenty-year-old feud in a final deathbed reconciliation? Did they feel that same restless urge that drove much-enduring Ulysses to see the cities of men and know their minds? Or had they simply got on the wrong coach?

Another thing that Jane discovered, and could well believe, was that not many people stayed at the Union Hotel, or at least not enough to fill up an optimistically large register in a hurry. This one went back nine years, to when a Mr J Vanderdecker of Antwerp had booked in for two nights. Oddly enough, she noticed, another J Vanderdecker (or the same man that bit older and wiser) had booked in seven years later. On neither occasion had he risked the evening meal, but he had insisted on a room with bath both times. A shy, private sort of man, Jane imagined, who would rather die than have strangers see him in his dressing gown and slippers wandering the corridors at half-past seven in the morning.

The office door started to open, and Jane dodged guiltily away from the desk. As she did so she barked her shin on a low table, on which reposed a dog-eared copy of Shooting Times and Country Magazine. She seized it, fled, read it from cover to cover, finally fell asleep and had a nightmare about a man-eating ferret.

“I spy,” said the first mate, “with my little eye, something beginning with W.”

Nobody took any notice. Even Jan Christian Duysberg had guessed that one back in the 1740s, and he had been thirty-four years old before he realised he was left-handed.

A seagull drifted across the sky, staggered in mid-air, banked violently and flew off to the south-east. Cornelius Schumaker clipped his toenails quietly in the shade of the mast. Wilhelm Triegaart completed his seventy-ninth crossword of the trip.

For some of the crew of the sailing-ship Verdomde (which is Dutch for “Damned”) the second year of each seven-year term was the worst. Just as Jane Doland often felt at her most miserable on Tuesdays, because the memory of the brief freedom of the weekend had already faded without bringing Friday appreciably nearer, so it was with the more impatient of Vanderdecker’s command. Others were content to take each year as it came, whiling away the time with impossible projects—Pieter Pretorius, for example, was building a scale model of the baffle of Lepanto inside an empty Coca-Cola bottle, while his brother Dirk pushed back the limits of pure mathematics by calculating the overtime claim he was going to put in when the trip finally ended—while the remaining members of the crew saw no further than the next watch. By now, the only man on the ship who even bothered trying to do something about the mess they were all in was the captain himself.

Captain Vanderdecker was a great reader of the Scientific American. He sat in his cabin with his feet up on the map-table and a relatively recent copy of that publication on his knees, trying to do long division in his head while he shook his solar calculator violently in a vain effort to make it work. Something important to do with the half-life of radium was on the point of slipping away from him for want of the square root of 47, and if it got away this time it might take him weeks to get it back. The fact that time was not of the essence was something he tried not to think about, for fear of giving up altogether.

Vanderdecker generated artificial urgency with the same fatuous optimism that makes an eighty-year-old woman dye her hair.

Ever since 1945, Vanderdecker had been fascinated by radiation. His original wild hopes had been dashed when he and the crew had lived through an early nuclear test in the Pacific and suffered nothing worse than glowing faintly in the dark for the next week or so; but he had persisted with it with a blind, unquestioning faith ever since he had finally been forced to give up on volcanoes. Not that he approved of radiation; he had read too much about it for that. For the rest of the human race, he thought it was a bad move and likely to end in tears before bedtime. For himself and his crew, however, it offered a tiny glimmer of hope, and he could not afford to dismiss it until he had crushed every last possibility firmly into the ground.

And so he read on, disturbed only by the creaking of the rigging and the occasional thump as Sebastian van Dooming threw himself off the top of the mast onto the deck. In 1964 the poor fool had got it into his head that although one fall might not necessarily be fatal, repeated crash-landings might eventually wear a brittle patch in his invulnerable skull and offer him the ultimate discharge he so desperately wanted. At least it provided occasional work for the ship’s carpenter; every time he landed so hard he went right through the deck.

“The Philosopher’s Stone?” the captain read. “Breakthrough In Plutonium Isotopes Offers Insight Into Transmutation of Matter.” Vanderdecker swallowed hard and took his feet off the table. It was probably the same old nonsense he personally had seen through in the late seventies, but there was always the possibility that there was something in it.

“It is rumoured,” said the Scientific American, “that experiments at Britain’s Dounreay nuclear reactor will lead to a new reappraisal of some fundamental aspects of atomic theory. If recently published results by physicists Marshmain and Kellner are vindicated by the Dounreay tests, the alchemist may shortly step out of the pages of histories of the occult and into European R&D laboratories. The co-ordinator of the new programme, Professor Montalban of Oxford University…”

Montalban. Montalban, for God’s sake!

Over four hundred years of existence had left Vanderdecker curiously undecided about coincidences. Sometimes he believed in them, sometimes he didn’t. The name Montalban is not common, but it is not so incredibly unique that one shouldn’t expect to come across it more than once in four hundred years. Its appearance on the same page as the word “alchemist” was a little harder to explain away, and Vanderdecker had to remind himself of the monkeys with typewriters knocking out Hamlet before he could get himself into a properly sceptical frame of mind to read on. By then, of course, the lamp in his cabin had blown out, and rather than waste time trying to light it again with his original but clapped-out Zippo, he decided to go out on deck and let the sun do the work for once. With his finger in the fold of the magazine so as not to lose the place, he scrambled up the ladder and out of the hatch, just as Sebastian van Dooming made his ninth descent of the day.

Vanderdecker was knocked sideways and landed in a pile of coiled-up rope. As he pulled himself together, he saw his copy of the Scientific American being hoisted up into the air by a gust of wind and deposited neatly into the Atlantic Ocean.

“Sebastian.”

The sky-diver picked himself sheepishly off the deck. “Yes, captain?” he said.

“If you jump off the mast ever again,” said the Flying Dutchman, “I’ll break your blasted neck.”

They didn’t bother lowering the ship’s boat, they just jumped; the captain was in that sort of a mood. Eventually Pieter Pretorius fished the magazine out, and they tried drying it in the sun. But it was no good; the water had washed away all the print, so that the only words still legible on the whole page were “Montalban” and “alchemist”. Dirk Pretorius calculated the odds against this at nine million fourteen thousand two hundred and sixty-eight to one against, something which everyone except the captain found extremely interesting.

There, Jane said to herself, is a funny thing.

Do not get the impression, just because Jane is forever talking to herself, that she is not quite right in the head, or even unusually inclined towards contemplation. It was simply that in her profession there are not many people to talk to, and if one is naturally talkative one does the best one can. It is important that this point be made early, since Jane has a lot to do in this story, and you should not be put off her just because she soliloquizes. So did Hamlet. Give the poor girl a chance.

Extremely strange, she considered, and stared at the ledger in front of her through eyes made watery by deciphering handwriting worse even than her own. Undoubtedly there has been a visit from the Cock-Up Fairy at some stage; but when, and how?

It should not have been her job to look at the ledgers recording the current accounts; but an exasperating detail in quite ordinary calculation had gone astray, and she had, just for once, become so engrossed in the abstract interest of solving it that she had stayed with it for six hours, including her lunch break. Although she was not aware of it, she was pulling off a quite amazing tour de force of accountancy that her superiors would never have believed her capable of.

The reason why she had gone overboard on this one was a name. It wasn’t a particularly common name, you see, and she had come across it once already. The name was Vanderdecker, J.

Vanderdecker, J had a current account with the National Lombard Bank. It contained £6.42. It had contained £6.42 for well over a hundred years.

A pity, Jane said to herself, it hadn’t been a deposit account. The bank staff had stared at her as if she was completely crazy when she demanded the excavation of ledgers going back almost to the dawn of time. They had protested. They had assured her that the ledgers for the period before 1970 had been incinerated years ago. They had told her that even if they hadn’t been incinerated (which they had), they had been lost. Even if they hadn’t been lost, they were hopelessly difficult to get at. They were in storage at the bank’s central storage depot in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Even if they weren’t in Newcastle-under-Lyme, they were in the cellar. There were spiders in the cellar. Big spiders. A foolhardy clerk had gone into the cellar five years ago, and all they ever found of him was his shoes.

Until computerisation, all the ledgers were handwritten, and some of the handwriting was difficult to read. Jane’s eyesight had never been brilliant, and too much staring at scrawly copperplate gave her a headache. She had a headache now; not one of your everyday temple-throbbers but something drastic in the middle of her forehead. Despite this, she was managing to think.

The logical explanation of the mystery—there is always a logical explanation—was that Vanderdecker, J had opened an account in 1879, lived his normal span of years and died, leaving the sum of £6⁄8⁄4d. In the anguish of his parting (Jane had read some deathbed scenes in Victorian novels and knew that people made a meal of such things in those days) the account had been overlooked. Inertia, the banker’s familiar demon, had allowed the account to drift along from year to year like an Iron Age body in a peat bog, dead but perfectly preserved, and here it was to this day. Very salutary.

The only problem was the name J Vanderdecker in the register of the Union Hotel. Dammit, it wasn’t a common name; and if J Vanderdecker was swanning around Bridport two years ago, and seven years before that, he couldn’t have died in the early nineteen-hundreds, which was what the sensible theory demanded.

Anyone but an accountant would have told the sensible theory to stuff it and gone on with something else. But accountants are different. Legend has it that all accountants are descended from one Barnabas of Sidon, a peripheral associate of the disciples of Our Lord who had done the accounts for Joseph’s carpentry business in Galilee. After receiving a severe shock at the Feeding of the Five Thousand, he had been present at the Last Supper but had missed all the fun because he was too busy adding up the bill and trying to remember who had had what. Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing.

Well now, said Jane to herself, what are we going to do about this? In theory, all she had to do was report her findings to the manager, who would say, Yes how interesting, have you got much more to do or will you be going soon? and then write the account off against arrears of bank charges as soon as she left the premises. Jane felt very strongly, for some reason, that this was not something that ought to happen. She had no idea why it was important, but it was.

The only other information she had about the account, apart from the name Vanderdecker, J and the sum of £6.42, was an address: Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage, Melplash, near Bridport, Dorset. It followed that if there was anything else capable of being found out about this mystery, it would have to be sought there. She would go there this evening, she resolved, and everything would be explained; there would be a simple explanation, and she would find it at Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage. In the meanwhile, she could get on with her proper work and put it out of her mind.

Came half-past six, and Jane was off in her W registration Ford Fiesta looking for Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage, a task marginally more difficult than finding the Holy Grail. Melplash is not on the street map of Bridport which the seeker after truth can buy at the newsagent; neither, if the truth be told, is most of Bridport itself. When it comes to Melplash, however, the stranger is definitely on his own. It is assumed that the only people who need have anything to do with Melplash are people who live there already, and of course they all know where Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage is. They have gone past it on their way to the pillar-box or the Green Man every day since they were six, and they don’t know it as Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage; they know it as “Davis’s” or “the old linney”, or even, rather metaphysically, “in over”. The postal address concerns nobody except the postman; and since he was up at half-past four this morning, he is presumably now in bed.

Jane was not one of those people who are too embarrassed to stop people and ask directions to places, but this facility wasn’t a great deal of use to her. Of the six people she stopped and asked, two were retired Midlanders who had only been living in Melplash for a year or so, two were informative but completely incomprehensible, and one gave her a set of clear and concise directions which, had she followed them, would have taken Jane to Liverpool. The sixth informant was the landlord of the Green Man. He asked if she was from Pardoes and were they going to do the old place up at last? Jane remembered the name Pardoes from For Sale boards, and said yes for the sake of a quiet life.

By the time Jane got to Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage—which is, of course, about as far from Lower Brickwood Farm as you can go without leaving the parish—it was nearly dark. The directions she had been given led her down an unmetalled road to a yard containing five fallen-down corrugated-iron sheds, which looked for all the world as if they were used for storing the proceeds of plundering expeditions against the neighbouring villages. There were in addition a spectacular collection of damaged tractor tyres, a burnt-out Ford Anglia with a small tree growing through the windscreen, several discarded items of farm machinery and a derelict stone structure of great age.

Jane would probably have given up at this point, for she was unused to such scenes; but she saw a crudely-painted sign on the derelict stone structure which said “Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage” and decided that this must be it. She walked up to the door and, being a well-brought-up young lady, knocked. A voice in the back of her mind called her an idiot, and she tried the door instead.

It wasn’t locked; indeed, it gave a couple of inches before coming to rest against something low and heavy and thereafter becoming immovable. It has previously been recorded that the book Jane Doland had been reading before she came to Bridport was a detective story, and it should be noted that Jane was a devotee of this genre of fiction. In many detective stories, the detective tries the door of the lonely house to find it open but obstructed in precisely this way. The obstruction, you can bet your sweet life, will invariably turn out to be a dead body.

The last thing Jane wanted to find was a dead body. However, the same inner voice that had called her an idiot only moments before urged her to push against the door, and when she did it opened. There was no dead body. Instead, there was a heavy snowdrift of envelopes, most of them extremely mouldy. Some of them had stamps with the head of Queen Victoria on them. All of them had come from the National Lombard Bank. Jane knelt down on a century’s worth of bank statements, invitations to take out credit cards, insurance company mail-shots and encomia of National Lombard Unit Trusts, and searched her handbag for her torch.

A brief torchlight survey produced evidence that Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage had not been inhabited for many, many years by anything except small animals and birds. It was extremely unpleasant, and Jane found herself thanking Providence that she had been born with virtually no sense of smell. She picked her way tentatively across the floor to the middle of the one room that occupied the ground floor and peered round. She saw that the staircase had long since collapsed, along with large portions of the ceiling. She decided that it probably wasn’t terribly safe in there.

Just as she was about to leave, she saw a small tea-chest. It too contained envelopes. Having come this far and found so little, Jane made up her mind to investigate these. With extreme distaste, she fished out a handful of them and looked at them in the torchlight. They were all addressed to J Vanderdecker, and they contained invoices.

Whoever J Vanderdecker was, he had been a good customer of Jeanes’ boatyard for a very long time. Each invoice was marked “Paid with thanks” and related to some sort of repair done to a ship. A wooden ship, evidently; many references to tar, nails, boards, ropes, lines, sailcloth, as well as a mass of nautical technical terms which Jane did not pretend to understand. The earliest invoice, which was so sodden with damp and rot that it fell to pieces in her hand, was dated 1704. The most recent one was exactly two years old. By the time her torch battery died on her, Jane had traced the invoices back in an unbroken line, from the present day to the reign of Queen Anne, at twenty-one year intervals.

Jane fumbled about in the dark looking for the door, and eventually she found it. No the front door, with all the dead bank statements; the back door, which was also unlocked. Jane suddenly felt very nervous; something was going on, and from the facts she had at her command it looked as if it was something highly peculiar. Peculiar things, her common sense told her, are usually illegal. Perhaps she didn’t want to know any more after all. Perhaps she should forget all about it and go back to London.

One thing was definite, and that was that she needed a drink, quickly. From what she had seen of it, the Green Man was fractionally less unpleasant than the snake-pit in a Harrison Ford adventure movie, but it was close and the landlord might tell her something else about Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage. She went there.

“So they’re selling the cottage, are they?” said the landlord. “They’ll be lucky.”

The pub was virtually empty, and Jane wondered how the landlord made a living out of it. She looked at him and decided that he probably did a little body-snatching on the side.

“Oh yes?” she said. “Why not?”

The landlord looked at her. “Haven’t you been up there, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jane said, “just now. But even if the building’s all fallen down, the site must be worth something, surely.”

The landlord looked at her again, and Jane started to feel uncomfortable. “You sure you went there?” he said.

Jane described what she had seen, leaving nothing out except the bank statements and the invoices. “Is that the place you mean?”

“You didn’t notice the smell?”

Jane explained that she had a truly abysmal sense of smell. The landlord burst out laughing. When, after a long time, he regained a semblance of coherence, he explained. He said that the place had been deserted for as long as everyone could remember because of the worst smell in the entire world. The story went that a foreigner with a funny name had rented it for a week or so, years and years back, before anyone now in the village had been born, and that ever since he left nobody had been able to stay more than ten minutes in the place, because of the smell. Everything had been tried to get rid of it, but it persisted. An attempt to use it as a pigsty had failed when all the pigs died. After being on the books of Messrs Pardoes for fifty-two years it had been taken off the market and forgotten about.

“Didn’t they tell you that, then?” he concluded.

“No,” Jane said, “they didn’t mention it.”

“And you, not being able to smell, you didn’t notice it.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” said the landlord, “if that doesn’t beat cock-fighting. That’ll be a pound five, for the gin and tonic.”

Jane drove back to Union Hotel and went to bed. She didn’t feel the lack of something to read. She was too preoccupied with thinking.