by Tom Holt
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 a
cross 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 pho
ne 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.”