“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:
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
