The Big Over Easy (32 page)

Blast.
And he’d done so well up until now. If only he’d figured this out earlier, Humpty’s degenerate offspring wouldn’t be about to kill the only honest politician the planet possessed. He stopped.
Offspring.
Strictly speaking, the creature wasn’t anything of the sort, as Dr. Quatt had used Humpty only to
incubate
it, but then again…

Jack stood up and yelled:
“HUMPTY!!”

The creature paused momentarily, thought for a moment and then took a step closer to the Jellyman, who forgave the beast and closed his eyes. The creature raised a powerful arm in readiness to complete Dr. Quatt’s revenge when…a size-B egg hit it on the back of the head.

The effect was electric. The creature roared so loudly that some of Jack’s mother’s pottery animals vibrated off the display cabinet. The Jellyman thus momentarily forgotten, the beast swung around to face its new aggressor, its eyes fixing Jack’s in the sort of way a cat might fixate on a mouse. Jack had changed from being an annoyance—to being
prey.

Jack purposefully dropped an egg on the kitchen floor. It made that distinctive cracking ploppy noise, and the beast bellowed angrily and pawed the ground, its sharp talons cutting through the parquet flooring like margarine.

“Oh, dear!” said Jack. “What a
butterfingers
I am.” He pointed to his right and shouted, “Watch out!
A GIANT MONGOOSE!
”

The creature flinched and looked to where he had pointed, which gave Jack a chance to take the remainder of the eggs and run to the other end of the kitchen. The beast growled menacingly and took a step closer. Deep within its tiny one-track, kill-Jellyman mind, something vaguely familiar stirred. Small vestigial feelings that had been passed unseen from the egg who had died to give it life. Humpty’s worries—and his
fears.

“Oh, dearie me again,” said Jack as he dropped another egg on the floor and backed towards the shattered kitchen door. The creature gave a snort and a growl, took three quick steps closer and raised its arm to attack. But Jack was prepared. He pulled his mother’s egg poacher from the cupboard and brandished it the way you would a crucifix to a vampire. The creature backed off for a moment, then snapped and lunged, caught the poacher and sent it flying across the room.

“Then what about this?” asked Jack, grabbing the egg timer from beside the oven. “Three minutes for the perfect egg? Egg dippy fingers, anyone? With
hollandaise
?”

He backed out through the door and dropped another egg. The creature, enraged and confused, followed him into the back garden and snapped, growled and lunged while Jack taunted it with an egg whisk.

“Scrambled eggs on toast!” Jack yelled. “Fried, poached, boiled…
SOUFFLÉ!
”

He backed across the garden and yelled eggy insults until he walked into something hard and unyielding. It was the beanstalk. Shiny dark green, with a beautifully smooth trunk, it seemed almost impossible to resist.

“Tortilla!” he yelled as he threw the egg whisk at the beast with all his strength. The creature caught it in its teeth and then crushed it angrily.

Jack stuffed the three eggs that remained in his overall pocket and started to climb. It was easier than he had thought, and the leaves offered good handholds. But if he had hoped this would offer some sort of escape, he was wrong. The creature snapped the air once or twice when Jack shouted “Eggs en cocotte!”—and then followed him.

Jack clambered up, past the ripening beans and high enough to see the road—and the Jellyman’s Daimler being driven off at high speed. He breathed a sigh of relief, something that didn’t last long, as he suddenly realized that although His Eminence was safe, Jack personally still had to deal with five hundred pounds of dangerously pissed-off Humpty-beast.

“Actually,” said Jack, “I
hate
eggs.”

The beast snapped angrily at him again.

“No, no,” he added hurriedly, cursing his own stupidity, “I meant that by hating eggs, I don’t
eat
them. Meringues—yuck.”

It had no effect whatsoever. The creature leaped nimbly to the branch below Jack and swiped angrily at his foot. Jack grabbed the branch above him and pulled himself away—just too late. He felt a stab of pain course through his foot. He looked down. The creature had taken away not only the branch he’d been standing on but also his shoe, sock and, although he didn’t yet know it, his little toe. He winced with the pain and resumed the climb, favoring the arch of his damaged foot rather than the ball. He could hear the wail of sirens as the backup units approached, but they didn’t offer him much comfort. Within a few minutes, he had reached the red aviation warning light, and he stole a quick look below. He was about a hundred feet from the ground, and his mother’s house looked very small. There was a growl from below as the creature continued its pursuit, and Jack hurriedly climbed beyond the red light only to discover a new and dramatically unforeseen problem to contend with: The creature was no less angry, and Jack had just run out of beanstalk.

He hooked a leg around one of the leaves and took the eggs from his pocket. But his hands were shaking, and he fumbled; the three remaining size-B free-range eggs fell from his grasp and dropped away into the darkness. And with them his last possible bargaining chip.

“Bollocks!” he muttered to himself. “What a day.”

The creature slavered, hissed and snapped and made another swipe. Jack tried to avoid the lunge and succeeded, but it was a short-lived escape. The beanstalk was smaller and weaker at this height, and the leaf Jack was holding came away from the main stalk. He made a wild grab for another, but this, too, came away in his hands. He overbalanced, lost his footing, and fell backwards into space.

He saw a glimpse of the Humpty-beast bathed in a red glow as he fell past, then a blur of beanstalk leaves and pods accompanied by a loud rushing noise. He just had time to experience a curious mixture of relief and renewed peril when he landed on the potting shed in an explosion of rotting wood, earwigs and perished roofing felt. He was momentarily stunned, and all he could see when he opened his eyes was a gaping hole in the collapsed shed and the beanstalk stretching away into the night sky. He picked himself up from where the remains of the roof had collapsed onto the three bags of wool, groaned and stumbled outside. He had a bad cut above his eye, and his foot and ankle were starting to throb badly. He had to think for a moment as his dazed mind tried to focus on what had just happened. It didn’t take long. He looked up and realized that it wasn’t a bad dream: The creature was beginning its descent.

Jack shook his head and staggered backwards, his hand falling onto the shaft of an ax that was resting in a block of wood. He knew what had to be done. He hobbled into the shed, rummaged under the broken wood and found his father’s old chain saw. He flicked the switch and pulled on the cord. It didn’t even fire. He pulled again and again as he walked around to the side of the beanstalk facing the road. If he felled it onto his mother’s house, he’d never hear the end of it. On the fourth pull, the chain saw burst into life, and the harsh staccato roar filled the quiet night. The chain saw bit easily into the hard stalk, and he had soon cut out a wedge and then swapped sides to make the final cut. He was halfway through and had already felt a few promising cracks and groans when there was a loud concussion, some sparks, and the chain saw stopped dead. Jack didn’t realize what had happened until a voice made him turn.

“I underestimated you,” snarled Dr. Quatt.

She stood facing Jack with a smoking automatic and looked as though she would be only too happy to use it again.

“I get underestimated a lot,” replied Jack with a wince, as the pain from the thousand and one cuts and bruises he had sustained began to kick in, “and by better people than you.”

“Interfering fool!” she spat. “The bastard Jellyman has escaped. Ten long years of planning for nothing. Do you know how long it took me to engineer my little friend up there?”

“You just said. Ten years—”

“Don’t patronize me!” she screeched, her eyes flashing dangerously. “My research was only to save lives!”

“And Humpty? Who saved
his
life?”

“Humpty was an egg,” she retorted. “What is an egg for—if not to create life?”

“How about an omelette?” suggested Jack with a grimace as a muscle twinged uncomfortably in his back.

“Come here, my child,” called Dr. Quatt to the Humpty-beast, still halfway down the beanstalk, which creaked and groaned under its weight. “One more for you.”

“But Humpty was your patient!”

“And the worthy recipient of my greatest research project,” said Quatt with pride. “I was initially worried that night when the gunman shot him, but he was fine. I just had to help the little darling to hatch.”

Jack shivered. She was nastier and more inhuman than he had thought.

“He survived the fall, didn’t he?”

“Oh, yes. He recognized me, you know, and asked for help, so I picked up a chair leg—”

There was a loud, dull metallic
clunk,
and Dr. Quatt abruptly stopped talking and pitched heavily forwards onto her face. Mary had struck her a glancing blow on the back of the head with a shovel.

Jack’s legs collapsed from under him, and he sat on the ground against the garden swing. The stalk creaked ominously. Mary kicked away Quatt’s pistol before running up to him.

“Sorry, sir, but I thought we’d heard quite enough. Are you all right?”

“No, Mary, I feel like shit. I’ve just fallen a hundred feet and gone through a potting shed—and you need to get out of here.”

“Not without you.”

She tried to lift him, but he was surprisingly heavy, and weakened. He couldn’t stand.

“Go, Mary, before the—”

It was too late. The creature jumped the remaining fifteen feet and landed on Stevie’s tortoise-shaped sandbox with a crunch. It lashed its tail angrily and hissed menacingly at them both before looking down at the unconscious body of Quatt. It nudged her gently with its nose, made a quiet whining noise and then very tenderly picked her up. The beanstalk creaked and trembled as the stresses of the huge weight bore down on the badly weakened structure.

Mary grabbed the ax to use as a weapon, but Jack stopped her.

“Leave it,” he said shakily. “I think I know how this will all turn out. It’s an NCD thing.”

The beast hissed at them once more and then bounded clear over the garden fence with Quatt in its arms, snapping angrily at the officers who had just arrived. They weren’t armed, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they were.

“Tell them to leave it alone,” said Jack in a quiet voice.

“Step away from the beast!” yelled Mary. “It won’t get far—it’s an NCD thing.”

Jack nodded gratefully as the beanstalk cracked again, shook and gently started to fall, while the beast gathered speed in large strides down the road. It had almost reached the first police car and was about to leap over it to freedom when the beanstalk came crashing down on top of it, crushing the hapless creature and Dr. Quatt and scattering sleeping-bag-size bean pods around the neighborhood. The almighty thump reverberated through the ground, split the asphalt and lifted two drain covers. Four cars were cut virtually in half, and there was a spontaneous cacophony of car alarms.

“What do you know?” said Mary with admiration. “It got them!”

“That’s the beauty of Nursery Crime work,” said Jack, closing his eyes and smiling. “Things generally turn out the way you expect them to, even if the manner in which they do is a bit unpredictable.”

“Like who killed Humpty Dumpty?”

“Of course. Mrs. Dumpty thought she had shot him; Bessie thought she’d poisoned him. Grundy thought his hit man had got him, and Spongg wired his car. But none of them killed him, not even that lunatic Quatt. The giant beast that Humpty had become was killed by a man named Jack…when he chopped down a beanstalk.”

An ambulance picked its way through the outsized beans lying on the road and pulled up alongside the garden.

“You’re going to be okay, sir,” said Mary, yelling over her shoulder for a medic and placing her hand against a bad wound in his side.

“Call me Jack,” he whispered. “We’ve been through enough.”

“You’re going to be okay, Jack.”

“I’ll be honest, Mary—”

“You should call me by my first name too, Jack.”

“Sorry. I’ll be honest, Mary—”

“That’s better.”

“I thought you weren’t going to last the course.”

“Closer than you think. Y’know, I don’t know why, but I just feel that I
belong
here. Does that sound weird to you?”

“Nah,” said Jack. “I think Briggs, for all his faults, knew that when he sent you to me.”

“How do you think he knew?”

“I don’t know,” he replied with an almost imperceptible shrug as grateful unconsciousness, heavy and black, swept towards him. “Sometimes the name just fits.”

Humpty Dumpty
was buried that June. Thirty thousand people turned up to see his ovoid coffin being borne through the town. Hundreds of those whom he had helped in the past paid floral tributes, and noted among the guests were the Jellyman’s personal aide-de-camp, Mary Mary and Jack Spratt.

Jack Spratt
made a full recovery and returned to work at Reading Central. He was promoted to detective chief inspector and presented with the Jellyman’s Award for Outstanding Courage in the Face of Something Nasty. Despite numerous pleas from the Guild of Detectives, he has yet to join.

Mary Mary
still works with DCI Spratt. The investigation that became known as “The Big Over Easy” was serialized in
Amazing Crime Stories
and is soon to be made into a TV series. She has still not yet managed to dump Arnold.

Lola Vavoom
and
Randolph Spongg
were listed as “missing, presumed drowned.” Reports of sightings from Alice Springs to Chicago have been dismissed as “unsubstantiated.”