The Big Over Easy (29 page)

“Hello, Jack,” Spongg said brightly. “Things aren’t going too well for me, are they?”

“What’s going on?”

Spongg laughed. “Things are rarely what they seem at Castle Spongg.” He looked around admiringly. “Caligari
was
a genius, you know.”

“Where’s Baker?”

“He’s fine. Not in any real danger.”

“Randolph Spongg, you are under arrest for the murder of Humpty Dumpty, William Winkie and Dr. Carbuncle. You do not have to say anything. But it may—”

Spongg laughed again. “You are tenacious, aren’t you, Jack? I had a terrier like you once. A Jack, too, a Jack Russell. It used to grab hold of something and wouldn’t let go. I admire that. You and I could have been good friends.” He picked an apple out of his pocket and bit into it.

Jack said, “The CCDC have declared both the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center and Andersen’s Farm category-A biohazard hot zones. Even without murder charges, you’re still looking at life imprisonment for the intentional spreading of a communicable disease. Why not make it easy for yourself?”

Spongg smiled. “I can hardly give myself up, Inspector. I don’t think prison would be terribly pleasant for me. I wouldn’t be allowed to take Ffinkworth, and the idea of twenty-five years in the clink without the benefit of pâté or grouse or champagne or any of the hundred and one luxuries that make our dreadful lives bearable seems positively depressing. Prison is for small people, Jack. I have no intention of going.”

“Why did you do it, Spongg?”

“Well,” began Randolph with a curious smile on his lips, “it all began when Tom Thomm
appropriated
the goose. He brought the goose to Humpty—Thomm worshipped him—and Humpty devised the scam with Dr. Carbuncle and myself. Without the cash to buy the shares, it would never have worked, but the potential profits were so large that Humpty just couldn’t resist it. He was never happy about the murders in Andersen’s Wood, but he was desperate to rebuild St. Cerebellum’s. No surprise: The old place had kept him sane for almost forty years. I don’t suppose any of us realize what it’s like to be a very large egg. Frightful, I imagine.”

He thought about this for a moment, smiled and continued. “Humpty got cold feet when he found out how potent Hercules had become. He was essentially a good man, and his heart wasn’t in it. I’d been planning to get rid of him for over a month.”

“And Dr. Carbuncle?”

“He supported Spongg’s and hated Winsum and Loosum, but murder wasn’t in his game plan. As soon as you started to investigate, he made a few assumptions and wanted to blow the whistle. Very regrettable. He was a brilliant research chiropodist.”

“And you, Spongg? Everything good that Spongg’s stood for. Why risk all that?”

Spongg’s eyes flashed angrily as he thumped his fist on the table.

“Don’t you understand? I did this to
protect
all that was great about Spongg’s. My factory, my workers, Castle Spongg, the Foot Museum, the two hundred charities I give money to every year. Winsum and Loosum would have taken all that and sold everything piece by piece. They had plans to turn this house into a theme park.
A theme park!
I did all this to stop the encroachment of damaging and selfish twenty-first-century business practices. Tell me honestly, Jack, which company did you prefer?”

“Yours.”

“Said without hesitation,” said Randolph triumphantly. “So you agree.”

“Not if murder is involved.”

Randolph threw his hands up in the air. “Murder?” he said in exasperation. “If I have to murder a few people, then that’s the price we have to pay. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, Mr. Spratt. You work in criminal law; you know the full meaning of that. To run the criminal-justice system, innocent people must, however regrettably, be occasionally sent to prison. It’s unfair, but it’s for the good of the many. To be efficient, the system can’t be fair; to be fair, it can’t be efficient. Business is the same. To make profits and benefit the community, then some people, however regrettably, will have to die. My Spongg charity homes look after thousands of retired people and offer better lives than they might enjoy under the government. How many lives do you think I’ve saved? Ten? One hundred? One thousand? When Spongg folds and the people I look after are cast out, a lot more people will die. You should look at the big picture.”

He swept his arms around, indicating the house, the grounds, everything. “All this, Mr. Spratt. How could I afford to let it go?” Spongg stared at him with a manic expression.

“That doesn’t explain how you’d get hold of Dumpty’s shares.”

As if on cue, the door opened behind Spongg. Lola Vavoom entered dressed in a sixties style catsuit. Jack looked around him, but he was still alone in the room; Randolph and Lola existed only in the reflection.

“Hello, Inspector dahling,” she cooed, threading an arm round Spongg’s waist. “I never liked the idea of a comeback, but for you I’d be willing to make an exception.”

She laughed as Jack looked at her in disbelief.

“You two…?”

“Yes, Inspector,” replied Lola. “Humpty and I were married; it wasn’t hard to persuade him—he
adored
me. I was to own thirty-eight percent of Spongg’s following my husband’s untimely death in the Zephyr, everyone catches verrucas with help from the Sacred Gonga, and before you can say
Hallux valgus,
Spongg’s is back on top!”

“Just through verrucas?”

“At first,” said Spongg. “Dr. Carbuncle was working on a corn serum to contaminate Britain’s water supply. Athlete’s-foot spore was to be introduced into the initial stages of sock manufacture. In under a year, Mr. Spratt, I could have bought out those sniveling dogs at Winsum and Loosum. Sold their company piecemeal as they were going to do to us and then fired all the executives after promising to take them on at increased salary—and then Lola and I could be married again!”

“Again?”

“Indeed,” Lola replied slowly, “it will be for the fifth time. Randolph was my third, seventh, tenth, fifteenth and soon my eighteenth husband. It’s an on-off sort of romance.”

They kissed aggressively on the lips.

“What about Willie Winkie? He saw you at Grimm’s Road?”

“I think we’ve talked enough,” said Randolph. “So it’s time for you and me to bid each other good-bye.”

“Why don’t we just call it au revoir?”

Randolph thought for a moment.

“No, let’s call it good-bye. My grandfather built a pneumatic railway that leads off beyond the perimeter of the grounds. There I have a Hornet Moth aircraft that will take Lola and myself to Europe. I have friends in Switzerland, and we will be in Geneva in time to hear of my own—and yours, of course—demise on the ten o’clock news. You, the house, that officer upstairs and unfortunately the Ffinkworths will be consumed by the detonation of this device.”

He opened a Tupperware container that had been lying on the table and took out a small triangular sandwich on a cardboard plate. It had a piece of foil on its two furthermost corners. Spongg connected each one by way of a crocodile clip to a battery and then in turn to a detonator stuck into six sticks of dynamite bundled together. He then laid a hair dryer on the table, pointed it towards the sandwich and set it to “hot.” The sandwich immediately started to curl, and Jack could understand the fiendish simplicity of the device. In a few minutes, the sandwich would curl up completely, the two corners would touch, set off the dynamite and—He shuddered.

“It’s a London and North East Railway garlic and lettuce special. They curl more than any others. We were approached in the sixties by the railways to find an anticurling agent. We developed one from our trench-foot remedies. It affected the taste, but that was not a primary consideration. This sandwich, Mr. Spratt, has
not
been treated. If you think this amount of dynamite won’t be enough, I have another ton of the stuff under the table. All that will be left of Castle Spongg will be a smoking hole in the ground.”

Spongg opened the door on his side of the reflection.

“Adieu!” he said with a cheery wave. “If it’s any consolation, I seriously underestimated you. I wouldn’t have dared try this with Friedland as head of the NCD. I thought you were just another plod. Oh, well, pip-pip!”

He and Lola walked out and closed the door quietly behind them.

“I’ve been underestimated before,” growled Jack under his breath.

He ran to the door and tried the handle, but it was no use—it had been firmly locked. He checked the chimney, but that was too small. Then he walked back to the mirror and stared as the reflection of sandwich curled some more. At the rate it was going, he had possibly five minutes—maybe less. He thought of yelling, but that might bring Mary and the others into the house, and that would be disastrous. He sighed, drew out a chair and sat down. He pulled off the vest, which had grown uncomfortable and was now redundant, and let it fall to the floor. He thought about Madeleine and the kids and regretted that he hadn’t been able to say good-bye. He’d miss Stevie’s birthday. All of them. He was just thinking of some way to leave a message for them that wouldn’t be destroyed when his eye fell upon a servant’s call button next to the marble fire-place. It was worth a try. After all, Ffinkworth was a gentleman’s gentleman, and he did say to call him if he needed anything. Jack ran to the wall and pressed it. Deep in the bowels of the house, a bell sounded, and less than thirty seconds later, Ffinkworth appeared through a trapdoor in the floor, which would not have seemed out of place on a stage. His reflection, Jack noted, did the same.

Ffinkworth brushed himself down and straightened his jacket. “Can I be of any assistance, sir?”

“I need to get out of this room.”

“Quite impossible, sir. The door is firmly locked—I made sure of it myself.”

“What about your trapdoor?”

“I’m afraid to say, sir, the mechanism for its operation is down below.”

Jack looked over at the sandwich. It was now almost completely curled up, only half an inch separating the two corners. He pointed at the mirror.

“Do you see that, Ffinkworth? On the table. It’s a bomb. If you don’t help me, we’ll all be blown to kingdom come.
NOW, HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS ROOM?”

Ffinkworth maintained perfect calm. “Prison is a depressing place, I am told, and certainly not the place for a man such as his lordship. He explained it to us both. We think that this is for the best.”

Jack was amazed at the man’s coolness. He was just about to die, yet he was being loyal to his master to the end.

“Ffinkworth, I—”

Jack stopped and stared at the gaunt butler, who looked ahead of him dispassionately.

“‘Us both’?”
said Jack, the light beginning to dawn. “Who’s ‘us both’?”

Ffinkworth looked unnerved for the first time, and his eyes flicked across to his reflection. In that instant Jack knew.

“Tell your brother to duck,” said Jack, picking up a large marble ashtray and hurling it for all his might at the mirror. Ffinkworth’s brother dived for cover, while the Ffinkworth next to Jack raised a hand to his worried face.

Jack ran up to where the glass had been and jumped through into the identical room behind what he had thought had been a mirror. The illusion had been perfectly realized. Even the painting of the Relief of Mafeking had been copied in reverse to create the perfect waking hallucination. Jack didn’t stop, his feet crunching and squeaking on the shards of broken glass as he ran up to the table and placed his Allegro Owners’ Club card carefully in between the jaws of the sandwich as they clicked shut. He breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the detonator from the dynamite. The second Ffinkworth picked himself up and gingerly brushed himself down. He had been slightly cut by flying glass but was otherwise unhurt. The first Ffinkworth peered through from the room Jack had just come from.

“Will that be all, sir?” the identical Ffinkworth twins asked in unison.

“Yes,” replied Jack as he breathed a deep sigh of relief, “except that you’re both under arrest.”

The Ffinkworths bowed again and also looked relieved.

“As you wish, sir.”

Jack brought Baker out of Castle Spongg, and Gretel and Mary and two paramedics ran up to help him.

“If I don’t pull through,” said Baker in a whisper, “tell Susie that I love her.”

“Baker,” said Mary, “it’s barely a scratch. Don’t be such a fusspot.”

“You mean I’m not going to die?” he asked the paramedics.

“Not today,” remarked the first medic, looking at Baker’s inconsequential wound.

“Did you see or hear a light aircraft recently?” asked Jack.

“Circled the building and then headed south about five minutes ago,” said Mary. “Was that Spongg?”

“And Lola, on their way to Geneva.”

“Lola?”

“It’s complicated. I need to speak to Briggs. Anyone got a phone?”

“Well,” said Brown-Horrocks a few minutes later, after Jack had reported Spongg’s escape and explained everything to him and Mary, “I suppose that wraps up the investigation. Spongg murders Humpty, Carbuncle and then the witness Winkie, attempts to raise the share price of his failing foot-care company by infecting everyone with verrucas. It’s not exactly standard
Amazing Crime
material, but I daresay it might be a welcome change for the readership. We may have to play down the identical-twin aspect, but it’s not all bad.”

“Yes,” said Jack thoughtfully, “I suppose you’re right.”

He got up and walked towards Gretel’s car as the two Ffinkworths gave themselves up. They had even changed out of their frock coats and packed two identical suitcases. Brown-Horrocks looked at them disapprovingly as Jack checked his watch. It was almost midday.

“What happened at the visitors’ center?”

“Cordoned off to a two-hundred-yard radius,” said Mary. “You wouldn’t believe the complexity of a biohazard response—everyone turned up, from DEFRA to the Met Office to the Environment Agency. Briggs gave a press conference on your behalf explaining the reason. There isn’t going to be a riot or anything; everyone’s just hoping there won’t be any lasting damage to the Sacred Gonga.”