The only other information she had about the account, apart from the name Vanderdecker, J and the sum of £6.42, was an address: Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage, Melplash, near Bridport, Dorset. It followed that if there was anything else capable of being found out about this mystery, it would have to be sought there. She would go there this evening, she resolved, and everything would be explained; there
Came half-past six, and Jane was off in her W registration Ford Fiesta looking for Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage, a task marginally more difficult than finding the Holy Grail. Melplash is not on the street map of Bridport which the seeker after truth can buy at the newsagent; neither, if the truth be told, is most of Bridport itself. When it comes to Melplash, however, the stranger is definitely on his own. It is assumed that the only people who need have anything to do with Melplash are people who live there already, and of course they all know where Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage is. They have gone past it on their way to the pillar-box or the Green Man every day since they were six, and they don’t know it as Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage; they know it as “Davis’s” or “the old linney”, or even, rather metaphysically, “in over”. The postal address concerns nobody except the postman; and since he was up at half-past four this morning, he is presumably now in bed.
Jane was not one of those people who are too embarrassed to stop people and ask directions to places, but this facility wasn’t a great deal of use to her. Of the six people she stopped and asked, two were retired Midlanders who had only been living in Melplash for a year or so, two were informative but completely incomprehensible, and one gave her a set of clear and concise directions which, had she followed them, would have taken Jane to Liverpool. The sixth informant was the landlord of the Green Man. He asked if she was from Pardoes and were they going to do the old place up at last? Jane remembered the name Pardoes from For Sale boards, and said yes for the sake of a quiet life.
By the time Jane got to Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage—which is, of course, about as far from Lower Brickwood Farm as you can go without leaving the parish—it was nearly dark. The directions she had been given led her down an unmetalled road to a yard containing five fallen-down corrugated-iron sheds, which looked for all the world as if they were used for storing the proceeds of plundering expeditions against the neighbouring villages. There were in addition a spectacular collection of damaged tractor tyres, a burnt-out Ford Anglia with a small tree growing through the windscreen, several discarded items of farm machinery and a derelict stone structure of great age.
Jane would probably have given up at this point, for she was unused to such scenes; but she saw a crudely-painted sign on the derelict stone structure which said “Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage” and decided that this must be it. She walked up to the door and, being a well-brought-up young lady, knocked. A voice in the back of her mind called her an idiot, and she tried the door instead.
It wasn’t locked; indeed, it gave a couple of inches before coming to rest against something low and heavy and thereafter becoming immovable. It has previously been recorded that the book Jane Doland had been reading before she came to Bridport was a detective story, and it should be noted that Jane was a devotee of this genre of fiction. In many detective stories, the detective tries the door of the lonely house to find it open but obstructed in precisely this way. The obstruction, you can bet your sweet life, will invariably turn out to be a dead body.
The last thing Jane wanted to find was a dead body. However, the same inner voice that had called her an idiot only moments before urged her to push against the door, and when she did it opened. There was no dead body. Instead, there was a heavy snowdrift of envelopes, most of them extremely mouldy. Some of them had stamps with the head of Queen Victoria on them. All of them had come from the National Lombard Bank. Jane knelt down on a century’s worth of bank statements, invitations to take out credit cards, insurance company mail-shots and encomia of National Lombard Unit Trusts, and searched her handbag for her torch.
