Late Delivery by JRL Anderson

Author:JRL Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

VII

A Green Fiat

PIET FOUND Mr Evans of the Post Office waiting for him. ‘I’m glad you got back, because I’ve got to go in a few minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to come without notice, but I spent the morning with the stamp printers, and they have remembered something that happened last year, though whether it means anything or not, I don’t know. On the face of things it shouldn’t.’

‘We can’t tell what anything means at the moment. The important thing is to have facts, whether they are relevant or not.’

‘Yes, that’s why I came to see you straightaway. Are you familiar with the process of stamp printing?’

‘Not in any detail. Essentially, I suppose, it’s much the same as any other form of high-grade printing.’

‘Near enough, though there are one or two special techniques. The machines are fed from paper on a reel, which passes over inked plates to produce the printed stamps. The stamps are printed on a sheet, and the perforations that separate stamp from stamp are cut by a toothed roller during the process. It is the perforation system that concerns us at the moment. Stamp paper is of high quality, and strong, but you will understand that with machines working at high speed it happens occasionally that something may break. Since the paper is security paper with secret marks in it, any paper break during printing has to be recorded. There was an occasion in August last year when the toothed roller making perforations jammed, and a section of the printing paper was torn. The machine was stopped, the toothed roller that had caused the trouble replaced. The press was then re-threaded with fresh paper from the reel, everything checked, and the machine started up again. The whole incident took about ten minutes, and was regarded as a minor matter. But it was duly recorded by the foreman.’

‘What happened to the damaged paper?’

‘Any security paper that becomes unfit for use is put in a locked room for later examination. It may sometimes happen that there is a defect in the paper itself, in which case the papermakers are called in and the cause of the defect established so that it can be put right, and any batches of paper with a similar defect that may have been sent out, recalled. In this case there was nothing wrong with the paper, which had torn because the perforating roller jammed. Any piece of security paper that is too small for use has to be burned. This was a small section, partly damaged, not more than a yard or two. The paper is expensive and waste is kept to a minimum. When the roller jammed, the machine was stopped at once and only just enough paper cut from the reel to allow for re-threading. The managing director is sure that the damaged piece of paper was duly burned, but records of such destruction are not kept in the machine room log, and he hasn’t had time to find out precisely what was done.

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