Flying Dutch полностью

Here is Marion Price, and she is talking to a pair of hopeless, incorrigible, dyed-in-the-wool optimists and their seven-year-old offspring.

“Boatyard?” says the male optimist.

“The oldest working boatyard in Dorset,” replies the tape recording that lives inside Marion Price’s larynx. “Boats are built there as they have been for the last five hundred years. Traditional crafts are lovingly kept alive by master shipwright Walter Jeanes and his two sons, Wayne and Jason. Nowhere else in Dorset can you more perfectly recapture the splendours of Britain’s age-old maritime heritage. A wide range of refreshments and souvenirs are also available.” And the very best of luck to you, my gullible friends. Why don’t you just go back home to Redditch and redecorate the spare room?

A long silence. Jean-Paul Sartre would have savoured it. “How do we get there, then?” says the female optimist.

“Let me draw you a map.” Nimble, practised cartographer’s fingers that have long since sublimated the last dregs of guilt draw a plan of the most direct route. The optimists depart. The rain falls. Time passes.

Jane Doland, being properly brought-up, wiped her feet before walking into the tourist information office. It was her last hope; she had tried the phone book, the post office and the hotel desk. If they couldn’t tell her here, she would give up and go back to her room.

“Excuse me,” she said, “can you tell me where I might find Jeanes’ Boatyard?”

“Certainly.” The woman behind the desk smiled at her. Thank God. It was wonderful to find someone actually helpful in this dismal place. “Shall I draw you a map?”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Jane. “I always forget directions, in one ear and out the other. Is it far?”

“Oh no,” said the woman behind the desk, drawing busily without seeming to look at the paper, like one of those machines in hospitals that draw charts of people’s heartbeats. “Have you been to Bridport before?” she asked. Jane said yes, once.

“It’s a lovely little town, isn’t it?” said the woman behind the desk. “Some people just keep coming back time and time again.”

Very true, Jane reflected, you don’t know how true that is. “This boatyard,” she asked, “is it very…well, old?”

“Yes, indeed,” the woman replied brightly. “Boats are built there as they have been for the last five hundred years.”

“As old as that?” Jane asked. “That’s quite a record, isn’t it? Well, thank you very much.” She looked at the map. “Which way is north?” she inquired. The woman pointed, and smiled again. Clearly she enjoyed her work. Just now, Jane envied her that.

As she waded through the puddles in South Street, Jane cast her mind over the events of the past week, starting with the slump on the markets. As soon as she had seen the report of the attempted sabotage at Dounreay and what had been painted on the wall there, she had set off for the North of Scotland as quickly as she could. It was no problem getting to see the protesters who had done the painting; she simply called the Inverness office of Moss Berwick and they fixed it, using their contacts with the lawyers who were defending them. It had not been an easy interview. None of the Germans spoke A-level German, only proper German (which is a quite different language) and all of them were clearly confused as to why they should be talking to an accountant when they were facing criminal damage charges. But the story had slowly coagulated there in the lawyer’s interview room, and when all was said and done, it didn’t get anyone terribly much further forward. All that Jane could say for certain was that one place that the Flying Dutchman was likely not to be was the North of Scotland, since he had just left there.

She arrived at West Bay at the same time as a television van, and the sight of it made her heart stop. For a terrible moment, she thought that the van might be there for the same reason as she was—after all, the link between the couple of sentences in the newspaper about goings-on at Dounreay and the dramatic slide on the world markets had yet to be sorted out; had some sharp-nosed ferret of an investigative journalist found out about the Vanderdecker policy? But the little mayfly of terror was soon gone as Jane remembered what she had heard on the car radio about some idiot boat-race at West Bay in the next day or so, and she dismissed it from her mind.