by Tom Holt
“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.