A brief torchlight survey produced evidence that Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage had not been inhabited for many, many years by anything except small animals and birds. It was extremely unpleasant, and Jane found herself thanking Providence that she had been born with virtually no sense of smell. She picked her way tentatively across the floor to the middle of the one room that occupied the ground floor and peered round. She saw that the staircase had long since collapsed, along with large portions of the ceiling. She decided that it probably wasn’t terribly safe in there.
Just as she was about to leave, she saw a small tea-chest. It too contained envelopes. Having come this far and found so little, Jane made up her mind to investigate these. With extreme distaste, she fished out a handful of them and looked at them in the torchlight. They were all addressed to J Vanderdecker, and they contained invoices.
Whoever J Vanderdecker was, he had been a good customer of Jeanes’ boatyard for a very long time. Each invoice was marked “Paid with thanks” and related to some sort of repair done to a ship. A wooden ship, evidently; many references to tar, nails, boards, ropes, lines, sailcloth, as well as a mass of nautical technical terms which Jane did not pretend to understand. The earliest invoice, which was so sodden with damp and rot that it fell to pieces in her hand, was dated 1704. The most recent one was exactly two years old. By the time her torch battery died on her, Jane had traced the invoices back in an unbroken line, from the present day to the reign of Queen Anne, at twenty-one year intervals.
Jane fumbled about in the dark looking for the door, and eventually she found it. No the front door, with all the dead bank statements; the back door, which was also unlocked. Jane suddenly felt very nervous; something was going on, and from the facts she had at her command it looked as if it was something highly peculiar. Peculiar things, her common sense told her, are usually illegal. Perhaps she didn’t want to know any more after all. Perhaps she should forget all about it and go back to London.
One thing was definite, and that was that she needed a drink, quickly. From what she had seen of it, the Green Man was fractionally less unpleasant than the snake-pit in a Harrison Ford adventure movie, but it was close and the landlord might tell her something else about Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage. She went there.
“So they’re selling the cottage, are they?” said the landlord. “They’ll be lucky.”
The pub was virtually empty, and Jane wondered how the landlord made a living out of it. She looked at him and decided that he probably did a little body-snatching on the side.
“Oh yes?” she said. “Why not?”
The landlord looked at her. “Haven’t you been up there, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jane said, “just now. But even if the building’s all fallen down, the site must be worth something, surely.”
The landlord looked at her again, and Jane started to feel uncomfortable. “You sure you went there?” he said.
Jane described what she had seen, leaving nothing out except the bank statements and the invoices. “Is that the place you mean?”
“You didn’t notice the smell?”
Jane explained that she had a truly abysmal sense of smell. The landlord burst out laughing. When, after a long time, he regained a semblance of coherence, he explained. He said that the place had been deserted for as long as everyone could remember because of the worst smell in the entire world. The story went that a foreigner with a funny name had rented it for a week or so, years and years back, before anyone now in the village had been born, and that ever since he left nobody had been able to stay more than ten minutes in the place, because of the smell. Everything had been tried to get rid of it, but it persisted. An attempt to use it as a pigsty had failed when all the pigs died. After being on the books of Messrs Pardoes for fifty-two years it had been taken off the market and forgotten about.
“Didn’t they tell you that, then?” he concluded.
“No,” Jane said, “they didn’t mention it.”
“And you, not being able to smell, you didn’t notice it.”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” said the landlord, “if that doesn’t beat cock-fighting. That’ll be a pound five, for the gin and tonic.”
Jane drove back to Union Hotel and went to bed. She didn’t feel the lack of something to read. She was too preoccupied with thinking.
∨ Flying Dutch ∧
THREE
The slight misunderstanding concerning the legend of the Flying Dutchman came about like this.
