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:
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.
