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?”
“
“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 matinee 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
