Try the other channel, said a little voice inside Jane’s head. It’ll be just as bad, but the recipe may be different. She tried the other channel and found the index number for News Update. She pressed the necessary buttons. She got the Australian Football results.
A person could make a fortune, she decided, reinventing the carrier pigeon. Or smoke signals. Craftily, she went back to the main index and keyed in the code for the recipe. There was a flicker of coloured light, the television sang “I Did It My Way” and she got the Australian Football results. Melbourne, it seemed, was having a good run this season. Come on, you reds.
Perhaps, Jane reflected, it won’t be on the news at all. What if Harvey and his colleagues have organised a total news blackout? Was that why he had driven away in such a hurry just after the helicopters took off? Jane was a child of the media age, and there lurked in the back of her mind the instinctive belief that if a thing wasn’t on the news, it couldn’t really have happened after all. So if Harvey could keep it off the air, perhaps the whole thing could unhappen, like a film projector with the film in backwards. No. Unlikely.
Jane put down the remote control and wandered over to the window. Outside it was raining, that slow, gentle, extremely wet Cotswold rain that once used to turn watermills and was somehow or other connected with the rise of the wool trade. History had never been her best subject at school, and the wool trade had been the armpit of History as far as she was concerned, and so she found it hard to remember the details. What could rain possibly have to do with wool? Did it make the ground so soggy that you couldn’t keep cows because of foot-rot, so you had to keep sheep instead? Was rain connected with the wool trade at all? Had there ever been a wool trade? Yes, because she had met someone who had been involved in it. The Wool Trade, the Hanseatic League, the Spanish Netherlands, all that bit between Richard the Lion-Heart and Charles I, in the margins of which she had drawn little racing-cars. Strange, to think that one man could have seen all that.
There was that song, she remembered. We joined the Navy to see the world, and what did we see? We saw the sea. And the Atlantic isn’t romantic and the Pacific isn’t terrific and the Black Sea isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The poor man. It must have been awful for him.
One thing in history that had registered with her was Robert the Bruce and the spider, because she was terrified of spiders. Back to the Ceefax, then, and let’s have one more go. Carefully, Jane selected the required index numbers for the Australian Football results and keyed them in. She got the Australian Football results, while the unseen orchestra played “They Call The Wind Maria”.
Like St Paul on the road to Damascus, Jane suddenly understood. Nobody else did, but she understood. Standing there in her stockinged feet in a sitting room outside Cirencester, Jane Doland had single-handedly solved one of the most inscrutable mysteries of the twentieth century. She knew why they played background music to Ceefax, and the principle by which it was selected.
All she needed to find now was the Professor’s decoder, but that wasn’t going to be easy. Given Montalban’s love of camouflage, it could be anything; the Georgian tea service, the Dresden shepherdess, the ormulu clock, the little black box labelled “Decoder’…”
With trembling hands, she plugged it in and switched it on. As the television set launched into “Thank Heaven For Little Girls”, there was a buzzing noise from the box, a whistling, a hissing, and then a mechanical Dalek voice started to speak.
“Melbourne,” said the voice, “sixteen. Perth nil.”
“Damn,” said Jane, and in a sudden access of fury she snatched up the remote control and dashed it to the floor. There was a snowstorm of coloured lights on the screen, and the news headlines appeared.
Jane peered at them. Latest on Dounreay crisis. Evacuation proceeding in orderly fashion. No cause for alarm as yet. Questions in the House. So that was how Harvey was handling it. How terribly unimaginative of him.
Then she caught the subdued muttering of the Dalek in the black box. It was urging the world to buy. Buy equities, it was saying. Buy gilts. Buy municipal bonds. Buy short-dated government stocks. Buy breweries, industrials, communications, chemicals, entertainments, even unit trusts. Buy.
Jane’s jaw dropped, and then she picked up the remote control, made a wish, and threw it at the wall. She got the City News. So that’s how it’s done.
Share prices, she discovered, were going through the roof. FT All Share Index reaches all time peak. Dow Jones explodes in buying frenzy. Hang Seng hangs loose. What, Jane asked, is going on?
