Flying Dutch

FOUR

The plump young man is now two years older and an inch and an eighth plumper, and he has become a partner in the firm of Moss Berwick. Oddly enough, there were no comets seen that evening nine weeks ago when Mr Clough and Mr Demaris told him the wonderful, wonderful news; the only possible explanation is that it was a cloudy night, and the celestial announcement was obscured by a mass of unscheduled cumulo-nimbus. These things happen, and all we can do is put up with them.

Although they had made the plump young man (whose name, for what it is worth, was Craig Ferrara) a partner, they had not seen fit to tell him about The Thing. Or at least, they had not told him what it was; they had hinted at its existence, but that was all. For his part, Craig Ferrara had been aware that it existed for some time, ever since he had been allowed access to the computer files generally known in the firm as the Naughty Bits.

Moss Berwick’s computer was a wonderful thing. It lived, nominally, in Slough; but, rather like God, it was omnipresent and of course omniscient. Unlike God, you could telephone it from any one of the firm’s many offices and even, if you were a show-off like Craig Ferrara, from your car. You could ask it questions. Sometimes it would answer and sometimes not, depending on whether it wanted to. Not could, mark you; wanted to. It would take a disproportionate amount of ingenuity to think up a sensible question that the computer couldn’t answer if it wanted to, up to and including John Donne’s famous conversation-killers about where the lost years are and who cleft the Devil’s foot—and this despite the fact that the Devil is not (as yet) a client of Moss Berwick.

But in order to ask the computer high-rolling questions like these, you have to be the right sort of person. Only someone with a Number can get at that part of the computer; all that earthworms like Jane Doland can get out of it is a lot of waffle about the Retail Price Index for March 1985. Not that Jane Doland hadn’t been trying, ever since she came back from Bridport. That, although he didn’t know it, was the main reason why Craig Ferrara had become a partner.

Craig Ferrara was only human, and so he would dearly have loved to find out what The Thing was. However, it had been made unequivocally clear to him by Mr Clough and Mr Demaris that he didn’t really want to know; and although in law he was now a sharer of their joys, sorrows and financial commitments, he was not so stupid as to believe that a mere legal fiction made him worthy to loosen the straps of their sandals, should they ever behave so uncharacteristically as to wear such things. His relationship to The Thing was that of ignorant guardian. If any member of his department started showing an unhealthy interest in anything to do with Bridport, he was to report directly to Mr Clough and Mr Demaris, who would take the necessary, action. What that action might be Mr Ferrara knew not, but he had a shrewd notion that it would be the terror of the earth.

A brief glance at the computer’s call-out sheet told Mr Ferrara that Jane Doland, the girl with the tin ear, had made a large number of Bridport-related enquiries of the computer in the last few months, most of them at times of day when she could normally be relied on to be hanging from one of those Dalek’s antennae things in a compartment in a Tube train. This was exactly the sort of thing Mr Ferrara had been told to keep an eye out for, and he felt a degree of pride at having immediately succeeded with the project his betters had entrusted to him. Find us a mole, Clough and Demaris had said, and here one was. For such a fiercely, passionately corporate man as Mr Ferrara, it was roughly the same as discovering insulin.

But accountants are not hasty people. They do not out with their rapiers the moment they hear rats behind the arras. Smile and smile and smile and be an accountant is the watchword. Before calling in Clough and Demaris, Mr Ferrara resolved to try one more, utterly diabolical test. He would give Doland the RPQ Motor Factors file.

The RPQ Motor Factors file, it should be explained, was where failed accountants went to die. How the affairs of a relatively straightforward small business had come to get into such a state of Byzantine complexity nobody really knew; it had just happened, like the British economy, and the more people tried to straighten it out, the more it wrapped itself round its own intestines. Just reading through the horrible thing was enough to make most young accountants run away and become wood-turners, but trying to sort it out was an infallible cure for sanity. Jane Doland was henceforth to be its custodian; furthermore, she was to be given a month to produce a balance sheet and profit-and-loss account.

Although a degree of sadism went into the decision—Ferrara could never forget that Jane Doland was the girl who didn’t appreciate Wagner—it was mainly a shrewd piece of tactical planning. Anyone with a month to sort out the RPQ Motor Factors file wouldn’t have time to brush their teeth, let alone ask the computer awkward questions about Bridport or The Thing. By the time Jane Doland had either succeeded or failed with RPQ she would be so sick of sorting things out and investigating anomalies that she could safely be entrusted with the expenditure accounts of the CIA.

Mr Ferrara dictated the memo, smiled and started to hum the casting scene from Die Freischutz.

It is galling, to say the least, to have been to every place in the world and then not know where somewhere is. It’s rather like having a doctorate in semiconductor physics and not being able to wire a plug. You begin to wonder whether it’s all been worthwhile.

Vanderdecker, typically, blamed himself. Instead of frittering away his time and money on beer and scientific journals, he should have remembered that he was, first and foremost, a ship’s captain and got some decent charts. Quite a few of the ones he still used had bits of Latin and sea-serpents in the margins, and he defended his retention of them by saying that:

he was used to them,

they looked nice and

in the circumstances, what the hell did it matter anyway?

Since his crew generally lacked the intellectual capacity to argue with a man who spoke in bracketed roman numerals, he had managed to have his own way on this point, but the short-sightedness of this attitude was coming home to him at last.

He had heard of Dounreay; he had an idea it was somewhere in Scotland, on the coast. That, however, was as far as his memory took him. After four hundred years of existence, one’s powers of recollection become erratic. Just as when a stamp collector has been going for a year or so, he will discard all the used British definitives his elderly female relatives have been clipping off envelopes for him and start buying choicer specimens, so Vanderdecker was becoming selective in what he chose to keep in his head.

He rummaged around in his map-chest and dug out a chart he hadn’t tried yet. Unfortunately it showed Jerusalem as being at the centre of the world, and he put it back with a sigh. The next one he found was extremely non-committal on the topic of Australia, and that too was discarded. As it happened, Vanderdecker had been the first European to set foot on Australian soil. He had taken one look at it, said “No, thank you very much” and gone to New Guinea instead. Subsequent visits had not made him review his opinion.

There was, he said to himself, only one thing for it. He would have to ask the First Mate. Not that Antonius would know the answer; but it would at least put his own ignorance in some sort of respectable context.

Antonius was playing chess with the cook on the quarterdeck. Vanderdecker saw that of Antonius’ once proud black army, only the King remained. This was by no means unusual. Antonius had been playing chess for three or four hours a day for four centuries and he still hadn’t won a game.

“Antonius,” he said, “do you happen to know where Dounreay is?”

Antonius looked up irritably. His expression suggested that he had been on the point of perfecting a sequence of manoeuvres which would have resulted in victory in four moves, and that his captain’s interruption had dispersed this coup to the four winds.

“No,” he said. “Is it in Italy?”

“Thanks anyway,” said Vanderdecker.

“I know where Dounreay is,” said the cook.

Vanderdecker stared. It was remarkable that anything should surprise him any more, but this was very much out of the ordinary. The last time the cook had been deliberately helpful was when Sebastian van Dooming had gone through a brief wrist slashing phase and the cook had lent him one of his knives.

“Do you?” Vanderdecker asked.

“Yes,” replied the cook, affronted. “It’s on the north coast of Scotland.”

Vanderdecker frowned. “How do you know that?” he asked.

“I was born there,” said the only non-Dutch member of the crew. “They’ve built a power station over it now. Typical.”

Well yes, Vanderdecker said to himself, it is rather. Miserable things tended to happen to the cook, probably because they were sure of an appreciative welcome.

“So you could tell me how to get there?” he asked. The cook shook his head.

“No way,” he said. “I’m a cook, not a pilot. I couldn’t navigate this thing if you paid me.” The cook frowned. “That reminds me…” he said.

“All right, all right,” said Vanderdecker. “But you’d recognise it if you saw it again?”

“Maybe,” said the cook, “maybe not, how the hell should I know? Uke I said, they’ve built a bloody fast-breeder whatsisname on top of my poor granny’s wee croft, so there’s probably not a lot of the old place left to see.”

“Thanks anyway,” Vanderdecker repeated, and wandered off to have a stare at the sea. It was his equivalent to beating his head repeatedly against a war.

On the other hand, he said to himself, as he let his eye roam across the grey waves, the number of nuclear power stations on the north coast of Scotland is probably fairly small. All one would have to do in order to locate it is to cruise along keeping one’s eyes open for three-headed fish and luminous oysters. And God knows, we’re not in any hurry. We never are.

He walked back along the deck, feeling that he had earned this month’s can of Heineken. As he passed by the cook (who had finally and irretrievably checkmated the first mate, who seemed very surprised) he stopped and said thank you.

“Forget it,” growled the cook, in the tone of one who firmly believes that his request will be acted on.

“Just one more thing,” said Vanderdecker. “How did you know they’d built a nuclear power station on your granny’s wee croft?”

“I saw it last time we were there,” said the cook. “Last February, I think it was. I seem to remember it rained.”

Vanderdecker didn’t say, Then why the bloody hell didn’t you say so earlier. He said thank you. Then he went to have another good look at the sea.

Jane was feeling pleased with herself. Just when she had begun to think that her career was going nowhere and that she might soon be looking for another job, here she was with an important new file to look after.

Not that she was particularly fond of her career, but it did help pay the rent, and she was enough of a realist to know that it was probably the only one she was likely to have, what with the vacancy of Princess of Wales having been filled and so many 0-Levels being needed for pearl-diving these days.

She knew for a fact that the RPQ Motor Factors file was something of a mixed blessing. Look at Jennifer Cartwright. Look at Stephen Parkinson. In fact, you would need binoculars if you wanted to do this, since both of them had left the firm and gone to work in Cornwall after a week or so with RPQ. A hot potato with the pin out, as Mr Peters would say.

Of course, it would mean less time to try chasing up that strange thing she had come across in Bridport, but that was no bad thing. Ever since she had got back to the sanity of London, she had been seriously doubting whether she had actually seen all those curious and inexplicable things. There is nothing like a few trips up and down the Bakerloo line to convince you that nobody can live for ever, and the fierce determination to get to the bottom of it all had waned after the first few cracks at the computer.

It stood to reason that if there was anything to find out, it would come up on the wire from Slough. Slough—figuratively speaking—was brilliant. You could ask Slough anything and the answer would be waiting for you before you had time to blink twice. But she had found nothing, which must surely mean that there was nothing to find and that the Vanderdecker nonsense must all have been a figment of her imagination.

The coffee machine was going through one of its spasmodic fits of nihilism, during which it produced cups of white powder floating on cold grey fluid, and Jane decided to have tea instead. The tea came from a device which looked like a knight’s helmet, and generally tasted as if the knight hadn’t washed his hair for a long time, but Jane could live with that now that her future seemed slightly more secure. It is remarkable how quickly ennui evaporates when faced with a rent demand. Her Snoopy mug filled, she return to her desk and opened the RPQ file.

She read for about half an hour, and found that she was almost enjoying it. Jane had a perverse curiosity about the people who had left the firm shortly before she had joined it. Had they still been there and she had got to know them, she would doubtless have filed them away in her mental portrait gallery under Poison Toads and that would have been that. But knowing them only from their letters and file notes, she was able to recreate them as they should have been. She knew most of their names, but some were no more than initials or references, and of course these were the truly glamorous ones. She would, for example, have loved to know more about RS⁄AC⁄5612, who had passed briefly and intriguingly through the RPQ story like a Hollywood star playing a three-minute cameo, dictating four letters and disappearing into the darkness like the sparrow in the mead-hall. She pictured him—it had to be a him—as a tall, cynical man with hollow eyes and long, sensitive hands who had eventually turned his back on accountancy, started to write the Great Novel and died of consumption. At the other extreme there was APC⁄JL an old man, broken by frustration and disappointment, struggling to keep his job in the face of relentless youth and seizing on the RPQ file as his last chance to make his mark. There was a pathetic dignity in his last letter to Johnson Chance Davison, and the dying fall of his “we thank you sincerely in anticipation of your reply” moved her almost to tears.

Jane suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. She instinctively knew that the paper in front of her was different. For a start it was handwritten, and the handwriting was erratic. It read as follows:

THE VANDERDECKER POLICY

This has nothing to do with RPQ. This is a warning, in case they do it to you too.

I found out about the Vanderdecker Policy, which is the proper name for The Thing. It’s a safe bet, whoever you are, that you’ve found out about it too or you wouldn’t have been given this file.

The Vanderdecker Policy is important. It’s so important that anybody who finds out about it gets given the RPQ file. That’s how important it is. Sorry if you can’t read my writing, but I daren’t have anybody type this out, in case they find out. That’s why I’ve put this message here, in the RPQ file, because it’s the only place nobody would ever think of looking. Except you, and you’re only looking at it because they’ve found out that you’ve found out. Which is why they gave you the RPQ file.

I can’t risk doing anything about the Vanderdecker Policy. I can’t tell you where to look or what I’ve found out. I’m getting out and starting a new life a long, long way away, where they won’t find me.

Whatever you do, don’t let them know that you know that they know. For God’s sake stay with it, for as long as you can stick it out. Someone’s got to blow the whistle on it sooner or later, it just can’t go on like this much longer, it all has to stop.

So just carry on, pretend you don’t know they know, do something about it. If you’ve read this, please tear it out and burn it.

Jane looked round, then tore the sheet off the treasure tag, folded it up and stuffed it into her pocket. Her heart was beating like a pneumatic drill.

Somehow she survived the rest of the day and took the train home as normal. Every few minutes, in the intervals of looking over her shoulder for murderers, she tried telling herself that this was just some poor fool who’d finally flipped after doing too many bank reconciliation statements, but the name Vanderdecker was too big and too noisy to ignore.

She packed everything she thought she could possibly need, plus a pot of marmalade and her hot water bottle with the woolly tiger cover, into her car and drove. At the first National Lombard cash dispenser she saw, she stopped and withdrew all the money the machine would let her have. If only she’d been sensible, she told herself, and not been put off by all those idiotic white horses in their advertising campaigns, she could have had a bank that wouldn’t betray her whereabouts to Slough every time she made a withdrawal.

The question was where to go, but the answer wasn’t easy. She thought of her parents’ house, but the thought made her shudder; her father had succumbed to National Lombard Unit Trust propaganda nine months after retiring to the Sussex coast. Surely they wouldn’t do anything to hurt her parents? Better not to think about that.

Where else, then? Her sister had a National Lombard Home Loan, so that was out. Ever since she had left the world behind and taken to accountancy she had alienated all her friends by boring them to tears with accountancy stories. That only left…

No.

Yes, why not? It’s a long way from London. Even idiots have their uses. Even obnoxious, repulsive, pathetic little gnomes. She found a call-box and fished out her diary. Fortunately, the local vandals had spared the dialling codes section and she located the code for Wick. The phone started to ring. It was answered.

“Is that you, Shirley?” she asked. Shirley said yes, it was.

Jane took a deep breath. Even when her life was quite possibly at stake, this was extremely distasteful.

“Look, Shirley,” she said—the very words were like a live worm in her mouth—“I’m going to be up near you for a week or so, can I come and stay?”

Shirley said, “Well, it’s a bit short notice, isn’t it?” Jane’s fingernails were hurting the palm of her left hand. She fought herself and won.

“Look, Shirley, I’m in a call-box, I haven’t got much change. Will it be all right? I’ll be with you tomorrow afternoon some time. See you.”

She slammed down the receiver quickly and jumped back into the car.

Maybe being murdered would be better after all.

Fair stood the wind for Scotland, which made a pleasant change. Indeed, it was nice to be going somewhere, as opposed to just going, and Vanderdecker found the crew rather less tiresome than usual.

The first mate climbed up onto the quarter-deck. He was going to ask the captain a question. Vanderdecker could hear his brain turning over like a coffee-mill before he so much as reached the foot of the stairway.

“Captain,” said the first mate, “we aren’t going to land, are we? When we reach wherever this place is we’re going to.”

“Yes,” said Vanderdecker, cruelly. As he had expected, this was beyond the first mate’s understanding. Antonius stood very still for a while as the coffee-mill approached maximum revolutions.

“Yes we are,” he finally asked, “or yes we aren’t?”

“Yes we are,” Vanderdecker said. “We’re going to land.” Antonius considered this reply and then looked at his watch, just to make sure. “But captain,” he remonstrated, “we can’t do that, it isn’t time yet.”

“So what?” Vanderdecker said, “we aren’t going to have a good time and get drunk. We’re going to see if we can find that blasted alchemist.”

“But won’t they just run away?”

“Possibly,” Vanderdecker admitted. “But it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? If we wait another five years we may be too late. They may all have gone away anyway by then.”

“Oh,” said Antonius, relieved to have been given an explanation even if he couldn’t understand it. All he needed to know in order to feel reassured was that there was a reason and that somebody was in control of it. Vanderdecker envied him.

“After all,” Vanderdecker went on, “we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose, have we?”

“I don’t know, do I?” said the first mate truthfully. “That’s why I asked.”

“Take it from me,” said Vanderdecker firmly, “we’ve got nothing to lose. If we’re lucky it could be the answer to the whole mess. If not, well, it makes a change, doesn’t it?”

The first mate nodded and went away. The coffee-mill was still turning fitfully, but it would soon be still again. Vanderdecker, for his part, was beginning to have his doubts. What if the smell did drive everyone away as soon as they came within smelling distance of the plant? And presumably it wasn’t going to be all that easy getting to see Montalban even if he was till there. He knew that all self-respecting governments are less than happy about the thought of members of the public tripping lightly round nuclear power stations, or even coming near them in a disconcerting manner. Now there was something about the sailing ship Verdomde that many people found highly disconcerting, and although its crew were invulnerable, the ship wasn’t. Not that he felt any great sentimental attachment to his command—far from it; he hated every timber in its nasty, clinker-built frame—but if the Verdomde got blown out of the water by some over-excitable patrol boat, they might have problems in finding another one; or at least one sufficiently primitive that it ran on wind and not oil. Oil is hard to come by when you spend all your time in the middle of the ocean and smell perfectly horrible.

Vanderdecker was still busy worrying himself to death (so to speak) with these and other misgivings when the look-out sighted Duncansby Head. This was Vanderdecker’s cue to get out his charts and his sextant, since there were other perils to navigation in these waters besides patrol-boats; for one thing there were rocks, and also sandbanks, eccentric and malicious tides and sundry other hazards to navigation. It was refreshing to be doing some real sailing again, and the Flying Dutchman’s mind soon became far too full with getting there to contain any worries about what he was going to do as and when he succeeded in this aim.

“If I remember right,” said the captain to the first mate, “there’s a little cove around here somewhere that we can hide up in.”

It was getting dark, and Vanderdecker was worried about shoals. They hadn’t progressed very far with their inch-by-inch search for Dounreay, but progress was necessarily slow because of the need to keep out of sight. Now a good skipper can plot a course that keeps him from being seen from the shore; or he can hug the coastline in such a way as to render himself almost invisible from the open sea. But not both at the same time. As it turned out, the Verdomde was seen by several ships and a fair number of landsmen, but none of them took any notice. They naturally assumed that the fishlinger people were filming yet another commercial, and carried on with their everyday tasks.

Vanderdecker found the cove in the end, just before it became too dark to see anything at all, and the anchor slithered down and hit the water with its usual dull splosh. The crew settled down to sleep, but Vanderdecker was too restless to join them. Somewhere out there he might find the answer to his problem, and although common sense told him that the power station was not something he was likely to overlook, he felt an urge to get off the ship and go and have a look about. He licked his finger to reassure himself that the wind was still out to sea, lowered the boat, and rowed ashore.

A brisk climb brought him to the top of the low, shallow cliff, and he walked down the slope on the other side. To his dismay, he saw a building with lights in the windows, and the wind was changing. No good at all. He set off briskly in the other direction.

How it happened was always a mystery to him. One minute he was walking along the tarmac road, the next minute a car came round the sharp bend, failed to stop, and slammed into him. He went over the bonnet, bounced on the roof, and slid over the hatchback rear end to the ground. The car screeched to a halt (and why the devil couldn’t you have done that in the first place, said the Flying Dutchman under his breath), the door flew open, and the driver came running towards him. Vanderdecker groaned. Whoever this road-hog was, he was going to get the shock of his life just as soon as he next breathed in. Served him right, too.

It wasn’t a he, it was a she. Very much a she, bending over him and looking extremely worried.

“Oh God,” she said, “are you all right?”

Vanderdecker stared in disbelief. Even he could smell it, and he had long since stopped noticing the smell, except when it was at its most virulent. For some reason, contact with dry land tended to make it even more rank and offensive than usual. But this girl didn’t seem to have noticed, or else she was being quite incredibly polite.

“I’m fine,” Vanderdecker said, and stood up to prove it. “Look, no broken bones or anything. You may have shortened the life-expectancy of my trousers a bit but…”

A horrible thought struck him. He had forgotten to change. He was wearing his old, comfortable clothes, which were very old and very comfortable indeed. The girl seemed to be having enough difficulty in coming to terms with his invulnerability. As soon as she saw he was dressed in sixteenth century seafaring clothes, she would probably have hysterics.

Fortunately it was dark, too dark to see anything but silhouettes. Vanderdecker dusted himself off and started to back away. But he wanted to know, very much, why this girl couldn’t smell the smell.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Positive,” he said. “Sorry to have frightened you. My own silly fault.”

“Can I give you a lift anywhere?” the girl persisted. Vanderdecker remembered that they have funny little lights inside cars that switch themselves on when you open the door. He refused politely and said that he was nearly there. She didn’t ask where, thank God.

“I still can’t understand how you aren’t hurt,” said the girl.

“Luck,” replied the Flying Dutchman. “Fool’s luck. Look, can I ask you a question?”

“Yes,” said the girl doubtfully.

“Can you smell anything?”

“Smell anything?”

“That’s right,” Vanderdecker said. He hadn’t meant to ask, it had just slipped out. But now that it had, he might as well know the answer.

“No,” said the girl. “But I’ve got a really rotten sense of smell, so I’m not the best person to ask.”

“I see,” Vanderdecker said. “Sorry, I thought I could smell something. Can you tell me the way to Dounreay nuclear power station, by any chance?”

“I’m sorry,” said the girl, and Vanderdecker could tell she was staring at him despite the darkness. “I don’t come from around here, actually. I’ve got a map in the car…”

Vanderdecker remembered the little light. “That’s all right,” he said. “Well, I mustn’t keep you. Bye.” A moment later and the darkness had swallowed him.

Jane Doland stared a little more, realised that such an act was futile, and got back into the car. She still had twenty-odd miles to go, and it was late. She had missed her way at Lybster, or had it been Thurso, just before she had got behind the milk-tanker that was behind the tractor which had been trying to overtake the JCB ever since Melvich, and she knew that her obnoxious cousin Shirley went to bed at about half-past six. As she drove, she tried to work out what was really unsettling her; believe it or not, it wasn’t the fact that she had just run into a fellow human being at forty miles an hour, or even the remarkable lack of effect the collision had had on her victim. It was the vague but definite notion that she had met him before. Not seen him, heard him, a long time ago.

An hour later, she pulled up in front of Cousin Shirley’s bungalow in the picturesque but extremely windy village of Mey, put on the handbrake and flopped. She needed a moment to pull herself together before meeting her least favourite kinswoman again. She had hoped that when Shirley married the burnt-out advertising executive and went off with him to Caithness to keep goats and weave lumpy sweaters that they would never meet again this side of the grave. She remembered something from an A-Level English set book about something or other that made vile things precious, but she couldn’t remember what the something was and let it slip by.

She was just bracing herself to go in and have done with it when the door of the car opened. She looked round, expecting to see Shirley, but it wasn’t Shirley. Perhaps you are now in a position to judge the significance of the fact that she would far rather have seen Shirley than the person she actually saw.

“Jane Doland?” said the mystery door-opener. A tall, fat man with grey hair and a face that did nothing to reassure her. She looked round quickly at the passenger door, but that had been opened too.

“My name is Clough,” said the door-opener, “and this is my partner Mr Demaris. We want to talk to you about Bridport.”

The cat arched its back by way of acknowledgement to the sun, and curled up to go to sleep. It had had a long day chasing cockroaches in the shunting yard, and if it didn’t get forty winks now and again it was no good for anything. The live rail was pleasantly warm against its head, and the sleepers were firm under its spine. An agreeable place to sleep.

The 16.40 from Madrid is an express, and it doesn’t usually stop before Cadiz. It stopped all right this time, though. It stopped so much that all the carriages jumped the rail and didn’t stop slithering until they reached the foot of the embankment. It was a miracle nobody was seriously hurt.

The cat took it in its stride, the way cats do. It wasn’t in the least nonplussed by waking up to find an express train running over its head, and when the last sprocket had bounced off its ear and gone spinning away into the air it got up, licked its paws and set out to find somewhere a bit less noisy. On the way it caught a large brown rat, which offered remarkably little resistance. It just curled up in a ball and squeaked once or twice. That had happened a lot in the last four hundred years, and the cat found that it took all the fun out of hunting.

Three days later, some men in gas masks lured it into a cage with a saucer of milk and some catnip and took it away to a large building with lots of clean white paintwork and scientific equipment. It was dull there, but the food was good and you didn’t have to chase it if you didn’t want to. The men in gas-masks tried to get the cat to play some very silly games with funny lights and big metal cylinders that went round and round, but after a while they gave up. A day or so after that, they put the cat in a basket, took it to the airport and put it on a flight to Inverness.

Everyone was amazed that a man could exist and survive to maturity who would willingly marry Cousin Shirley; but since the idiot groom proposed to take her off to the northernmost tip of Scotland as soon as he had finished getting the rice and the confetti out of his hair, everyone kept extremely quiet—Aunt Diana, in fact, attributes the arthritis in her fingers to keeping them crossed throughout the six months of the engagement. On the other hand, it seemed to everyone that Julian was a nice young man once you got used to him, and it really wasn’t fair, and they ought to tell him. But they didn’t. Shirley was a sullen bride, and when Julian fumbled putting the ring on her finger she clicked her tongue so loudly that her mother thought all would yet be lost. But the service proceeded to its tragic close, and Shirley went away. To judge by the wedding presents she received—a tin opener from her parents, a reel of cotton from Jane, three paper-clips from Paul, Jenny and the twins, a paper bag from Uncle Stephen—it seemed likely that contact would not be maintained between the newly-weds and the rest of the House of Doland. Distance, however, is a great healer, and everybody remembered to send Julian a card on his birthday.

Jane had, obviously, never been to see Mr and Mrs Regan in their new home-cum-workshop only a long mortar-shot from the romantic Castle of Mey, but she could guess what it would be like inside. Miserable. It was.

Cousin Shirley’s greeting to Jane and the two senior partners of Moss Berwick was nothing if not characteristic.

“You’re late,” she said. “Wipe your feet.”

Mr Demaris was a tall man in his late forties with the face of a debauched matinée idol. He had charm, which on this occasion thoroughly failed to have any effect. His partner Mr Clough, just as tall but alarmingly fat, thatched with a sleek that of senatorial grey hair and blessed with a voice that they could probably hear in Inverness, also had charm. Astoundingly, Cousin Shirley seemed to like him, for she gave him a pleasant smile. The three were permitted to enter.

Jane noticed that Julian, who was sitting by the fireside weaving something, had changed since the wedding, in roughly the same way as a slug changes when you drop it in a jar of salt. In another year, Jane reckoned, you would be able to see right through him. His reason for giving up a thriving career in advertising in order to make primitive garments out of goats’ wool had not been a desire to test the theory that a fool and his money are soon parted, but a feeling that the pace of life in the rat-race was wearing him out. Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Jane considered, just for a moment, throwing herself on Julian’s protection and asking him to send the nasty men away, but a glance at her cousin-in-law disillusioned her. His reaction to the intrusion of two startling strangers into his living room was to say hello and go on weaving. Mr Clough sat down in the least uncomfortable chair, Mr Demaris leaned against the mantelpiece, and Jane subsided onto the footstool. She noticed that Cousin Shirley had left the room, and thanked heaven for small mercies.

If Jane had expected an awkward silence she was wrong. Men who charge over three hundred pounds an hour for their time are rarely silent for longer than it takes to breathe in.

“You weren’t at the office today, then,” said Mr Clough.

“No,” said Jane. “I had some holiday coming.”

“That’s fair enough,” said Mr Demaris. “Next time, though, perhaps you should clear it with Craig Ferrara first.”

“You didn’t come all this way,” said Jane shakily, “to tell me that. Or were you just passing?”

Cousin Shirley was back in the room again. She had brought Mr Clough a cup of tea. Just the one cup. She hadn’t stirred it, and the milk lay about a quarter of an inch under the surface like a grey cloud.

“We’re flying back to London tonight,” said Mr Demaris. “We’ll give you a lift, if you like.”

“That’s very kind,” Jane said, “but I don’t want to put you out in any way.”

There was a shuffling noise and Cousin Shirley was with them again. She was offering Mr Clough a plate of very hard biscuits. He took one without looking down at the plate, popped it into his large mouth and said, “You’ve done well on the Bridport matter, but I think we should work together on it from now on.” Then he reached out, took another biscuit, and smashed the one already in his mouth into powder with one movement of his powerful jaws.

“I do think that would be best,” said Mr Demaris, “don’t you? Don’t get me wrong, we’re very impressed with how you’ve handled it, but this is something where we have to be very careful, don’t you think?”

Jane had intended to fight, but her willpower had melted like a candle in a microwave. “How did you find me?” she asked.

“Right then,” said Mr Clough, standing up and smiling, “now that’s settled we’d better be on our way. Thank you for the tea, Mrs Regan, and we’ll be in touch about that other matter in due course.”

This remark jerked Jane out of her comatose state. “What other matter?”

Cousin Shirley gave her a look of pure scorn. “Mr Clough is our accountant,” she said.

“We’re thinking of making the business into a limited company,” said Julian unexpectedly. “But George thinks we should wait another year, because of the tax implications.”

That, as far as Jane was concerned, was that. She went quietly.

Mr Clough explained it to her on the drive to the airport. It was very simple. Moss Berwick were the accountants for the advertising agency where Julian had worked, and since the agency was such an important client, Mr Clough had acted for them personally; at least, he let his subordinates do the work but personally attended the more important lunches. When Julian had decided to get out of advertising and into authentic knitwear, he had mentioned this fact to Mr Clough over the nouvelle cuisine. Mr Clough, whose greed for clients was pathological, immediately appointed himself accountant to the projected enterprise, obtained a cheque for a thousand pounds on account of initial costs, and handed the matter on to the YTS girl. Accordingly, when Mr Clough turned up on the doorstep half an hour before Jane’s arrival and started talking loudly about rollover relief and Section Thirty elections, Julian and Shirley hadn’t been at all surprised. They simply handed him a cheque for another thousand pounds and believed everything he told them, the way people do when they talk with their professional advisers.

“So now what?” Jane said.

“Mr Gleeson will explain,” said Mr Demaris.

Jane stared and was incapable of speech. Mr Gleeson was the senior partner. Mr Gleeson, it was widely rumoured, did the accounts for God. In fact, so the story went, it was Mr Gleeson who first gave God the idea of organising the Kingdom of Heaven into a properly integrated group of holding companies. The idea of actually talking to him was more than Jane’s mind could hold.

“Really?” she said.

“He’s waiting for us at the airport,” said Mr Clough. While Jane’s mind did another series of forward rolls, Mr Demaris was considering something. “I’ve heard people say,” he said, “that you’ve got no sense of smell. Is that true?”

Jane admitted that her sense of smell was none too good. Mr Clough looked at Mr Demaris.

“I think it’s about time we reviewed your salary,” he said.