The Big Over Easy (24 page)

“What’s your prose like, Mary?”

“Rusty—but not too bad.”

“Good. There exists the faintest possibility that I might make it into the Guild. If I do, I want you as my Official Sidekick.”

“I’m flattered of course, sir—but Chymes is on the selection committee. How would you get him to change his mind?”

“Need-to-know basis, Mary. What news?”

“Mrs. Singh sent up the initial autopsy report on Winkie.”

Jack took it from her and read. There was nothing that had changed dramatically since her initial ideas the night before. One cut, very savage, leading to death from shock and loss of blood. The look on Winkie’s face, partial rigor and the fact that he had urinated on himself might relate to his witnessing something terrifying.

“Terrifying?” queried Jack. “I suppose someone coming at you with a broadsword
would
be terrifying.”

Jack handed the report back. It seemed unusual, but what in this inquiry wasn’t?

“Okay, boys and girls,” Jack announced to the NCD officers who had waited patiently and a little nervously for him to return from almost certain suspension at the hands of the IPCC, “it’s the end of day four. The body count is rising, and we’re no closer to finding out who killed Humpty. Here’s the story so far: Mr. and Mrs. Christian, the woodcutter and his wife, find a missing consignment of gold. Ashley, any luck on this?”

“Nothing recently stolen, sir—just the usual urban myths of missing Nazi bullion.”

“Keep on it. Small-time criminal opportunist Tom Thomm murders them both with the Marchetti shotgun we find at Humpty’s and steals the gold. He takes it to his old friend and mentor Humpty Dumpty, who starts to sell the gold to buy shares in a company that’s rapidly going down the tube. All goes well until Humpty comes home to his flat six months later to find Tom Thomm shot dead in the shower. He correctly assumes it was his ex-wife, Laura, and the shots were meant for him, so he goes to earth. Where, we don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he report it?” asked Otto.

“Probably because he’s in over his head laundering money from the original theft. It would make him an accessory.”

“Ah.”

“He then buys shares in Spongg’s with the laundered gold money, but not even Randolph Spongg has any idea how he could raise the share value—the company has been sliding downhill for years. Humpty has a jealous mistress named Bessie Brooks, who tries unsuccessfully to kill him, and this afternoon we learn from her that he remarried sometime in the past two weeks.”

He paused for a moment.

“His will had ‘all to wife’ written on it, so until Humpty’s Spongg shares are worthless, she is a wealthy woman and a thirty-eight percent shareholder of Spongg’s. On Sunday, Humpty breaks cover and is seen drunk at the Spongg Charity Benefit, offering to pledge fifty million to rebuild the woefully outdated and inadequate St. Cerebellum’s mental hospital, somewhere he has been an outpatient for nearly forty years. He offers to offload his shares to Grundy, who refuses. That night someone kills Humpty. It’s likely that William Winkie saw the murderer from his kitchen window and tried to blackmail whoever it was. So he’s killed, too.”

“It was a Porgia MO, wasn’t it?” observed Gretel.

“It was,” conceded Jack, “but I’m pretty sure he had nothing to do with it.”

Mary nodded in agreement.

“The killer might have done that to send us off looking in other directions, a logical inference of which is that we just might be looking in the
right
place,” said Jack.

Then he paused for a moment.

“We need to know several things: who his new wife is and where he’s been living for the past year. Grimm’s Road was just his office. He might have spent a few nights there on his wall, but not more. Grundy says he turned down Humpty’s offer of ten million, and Grundy’s wife, Rapunzel, was having an affair with Humpty—something Grundy knew about and sanctioned. Humpty’s car is still missing, and then there’s the bird shit.”

A brief titter went round the room.

“It’s not funny. If he had enough shit on his shoes to bring it all the way to Grimm’s Road, he must have been wading in it. And wherever the bird shit was will be the place he’s been living the past year. Ashley, any leads on the car?”

“Not good, sir. We spoke to his garage. He had his car serviced three months ago—so we know it’s probably still around.”

“Okay, what about Humpty’s marriage?”

Ashley and Gretel shook their heads. They had exhausted all the registrars in Berkshire and Oxford and were moving farther afield. As Gretel pointed out, he might have got married in Las Vegas.

Jack surveyed their faces. “Any questions?”

There weren’t any.

“Okay. Make yourselves comfortable, because we’re going to run over tomorrow’s job from midday to 1530 hours: looking after the visitors’ center for the Sacred Gonga.”

He went over what they’d be doing with the aid of a drawing on a flip chart and a hastily photocopied plan. There wasn’t much to say, but he tried to make it as important and serious as he could. Besides, there was an outside chance they might get a look at the Jellyman. They all listened to Jack but soon realized they were supernumerary to the Sacred Gonga security staff.

“We’re there to make up the numbers, aren’t we?” asked Gretel.

“It’s orders, so we do our best,” replied Jack. “Mary will take questions. That’s it for now. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

As Jack drove
towards home, he could see the beanstalk illuminated by two searchlights that swept lazily to and fro, crisscrossing the night sky with their powerful beams. Curious, he altered course and drove up to his mother’s, where the streets had been closed and crowds of curious sightseers milled around the neighborhood, taking in the extraordinary spectacle of a giant beanstalk growing in the back garden of an ordinary suburban house.

He parked as near as he could and elbowed his way through the crowd. The closer he got, the more impressive the beanstalk looked. It had entwined itself into a tightly woven, self-supporting stalk of a dark green color and was now at least seventy feet in height. Big umbrella-size leaves like canopies drooped out of the main stalk as it spiraled skywards, and the bean pods were already the size of dachshunds. Jack could understand the crowd’s interest. The whole thing was clearly unprecedented; he wondered what the botanists would make of it. As he stared, he once again had the strange feeling that he should climb it, but it soon passed.

“Jack!” said his mother as soon as he had walked up the garden path and knocked on the door. “What a stroke of luck!” She beckoned him through to the kitchen, where a neatly dressed man was sitting at the table holding a brown briefcase. He had small wire-rimmed glasses, seemed to be sweating even though it wasn’t hot and had oily black hair combed backwards from the crown.

“This is Percival Quick of the Reading Planning Department. Mr. Quick, this is my son, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt.”

“It’s just plain Mr. Spratt,” said Jack, knowing full well how bureaucrats hate having rank pulled on them. “What seems to be the problem?”

Mr. Quick laid his briefcase on the table as several of Mrs. Spratt’s cats shot past his feet in a blur.

“As I was saying to your mother, there is a maximum size of structure that can be permitted to be built without recourse to a planning application. This…er…‘thing’…”

“It’s a beanstalk, Mr. Quick,” said Mrs. Spratt helpfully.

“Precisely. This ‘beanstalk’ exceeds those guidelines quite considerably. I’m sorry to have to say that you are in contravention of planning regulations. We will be issuing a summons and require you to have it demolished at your own expense—there might be a fine, too.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“I don’t make the rules,” said Quick, “I just enforce them.”

They all stopped as a large bear of a man in a tweed suit and deerstalker hat entered the room. He was barefoot and sported a long, shaggy beard that appeared to have several rare strains of lichen growing in it. Under his arm he was carrying a giant beanstalk leaf.

“This is Professor Laburnum from the British Horticultural Society,” explained Mrs. Spratt. The Professor rolled his eyes but seemed uninterested in anything but the plant. Jack noticed that he had dirt not only under his fingernails but under his toenails, too.

“Just in time for tea, Professor!” exclaimed Mrs. Spratt. “What have you found out?”

“Well, it’s difficult to say,” he began in a deep baritone that made the teacups rattle in the corner cupboard, “but what you have here is a
Vicia faba,
or common broad bean.”

Mrs. Spratt nodded, and the Professor sat down, clutching the large leaf lest anyone try to take it away from him.

“For some reason that I have not yet fathomed, it is at least fifty times bigger than it should be. It has a complex root structure and from first indications would seem to be capable of reaching a height in excess of two to three hundred feet. It is quite unprecedented, unique even—extraordinary!”

“And the planning authority,” Jack added provocatively,

“wants to demolish it.”

Professor Laburnum went a deep shade of purple and glared dangerously at Mr. Quick, who seemed to inflate himself like a puffer fish, ready to ward off an attack.

“Not,” growled Professor Laburnum dangerously, “if we have anything to do with it!”

“The rules are very clear on this matter,” said Mr. Quick indignantly, “and I have a fourteen-volume set of planning regulations to back me up.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Laburnum as he got to his feet.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for helping out,” said his mother as she showed him to the door. Behind them in the kitchen they could still hear Quick and Laburnum screaming obscenities at each other. A brief bout of fisticuffs had been succeeded by a series of prolonged and increasingly loud and vulgar name-callings.

“I didn’t really do much, Mother. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Pandora was talking to Madeleine when Jack walked in through the side door of his own house less than ten minutes later.

“A creationist, of course, but what an intellect!”

“If he’s a creationist,” said Madeleine, “what did he make of the fossil record?”

“Created to maintain our curious nature. He said it was useful to strive for knowledge even though there is no end to the knowledge that we could gain. It might take two hundred years more to figure out how the universe came about, or five hundred to devise a grand unifying theory. But when we finally crack those questions, they will still remain a sideshow, a mere exercise, he said, to offer us valuable groundwork to solve even greater problems of incalculable complexity.”

Madeleine frowned. “Such as?”

“Why the toast always falls butter side down. Why you can look for something for hours and then find it in the first place you looked. These are the
real
puzzles that will face humanity. There is, he claims, a single theory that will explain not only why the queue you choose at a supermarket is always the slowest but why trains always leave on time when you are late and leave late when you are on time.”

“There isn’t an answer to those,” murmured Madeleine doubtfully. “It just happens.”

“That’s what they used to say about lightning,” replied Pandora, “and rainbows.”

Jack greeted them both, took a satsuma from the fruit bowl and walked through to the living room. He stared out the window and peeled the fruit. He had bested Friedland and stopped him trying to pinch the Humpty investigation, but he didn’t feel as good as he thought he would. By unmasking Chymes as a charlatan, he had the feeling that he might have let the genie out of the bottle when it would have been better for everyone concerned to keep it in. Was Chymes the only one, or did
all
Guild detectives make up their investigations? Since Inspector Moose began at Oxford, there had been a huge upswing in the number of intricately plotted murders around the dreaming spires. And what about Miss Maple and the previously quiet village of St. Michael Mead? It was now almost a bloodbath, with every household harboring some form of gruesome secret. Coincidence? Or just some skillful invention by a talented sidekick?

“Your daughter is an exceptional woman.”

It was Prometheus. He was standing at the door with the light behind him. He looked ethereal, unreal almost.

“She takes after her mother.”

“And her father.”

“I was being overprotective last night, and I apologize,” said Jack as Prometheus moved forward into a pool of light thrown by the reading lamp.

“I’d be the same, Jack. I want to marry her.”

“What?”

Prometheus repeated it, and Jack sat on the edge of a table.

“But you’re immortal, Prometheus. I’m not sure I want my daughter marrying someone who will stay young as she grows old.”

“It’s more of a partnership than a marriage,” he explained. “I can get British citizenship and then we can—”

“So it’s a marriage of convenience?”

“Let me explain. Remember I told you about the ills of the world that the first Pandora let out of the jar?”

“Sure.”

“Your Pandora wants to put them back in!”

Jack frowned. “It seems quite a task.”

“A titanic one.” Prometheus grinned. “Mythology has been static for too long, Jack, I’ve decided we’ve got to get it moving again—and Pandora is the one to help me.”

Jack took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. “I never thought I’d have a Titan for a son-in-law. Promise me one thing.”

“Name it.”

“Renounce your immortality.”

“I shall, after we locate the ills or, failing that, on Pandora’s fiftieth birthday. We’ve got it all planned.”

Prometheus smiled, and Jack put out his hand. As he grasped it, a strong feeling of power seemed to emanate from the Titan. There were so many questions still unanswered about him, but now there was plenty of time.

“Drink?” said Jack.

“Nah,” said the Titan, “Friday night is strippers night down at the Blue Parrot—Just kidding. Let’s have that drink. Let’s have several.”