The Big Over Easy (7 page)

“Make yourself at home, Mary.”

She looked around at the close confines of the NCD offices. They were cramped and untidy. No. They were
worse
than that. They had gone through cramped and untidy, paused briefly at small and shabby before ending up at pokey and damp. Dented and chipped steel filing cabinets ringed the walls, making the room even smaller than it was. There was barely enough space for a desk, let alone three chairs.

“How long has the NCD been in these offices, sir?”

“Since they started the division. Why?”

“No reason. It just seems a bit…well,
close.
”

“I like it,” replied Jack mildly, taking a telephone from one of the filing cabinet drawers. “We have a room next door as well, but Gretel and the filing take up most of that. It’s generally okay, as long as we don’t all want to walk around at the same time.”

“Gretel?”

“She’s a specialist in forensic accountancy, but she helps us out when we’re short-staffed, so we consider her one of ours. You’ll like her. She’s good with numbers and speaks binary.”

“Is that important?”

“Actually, it is. Constable Ashley generally understands everything we say, but complex issues are best explained to him in his mother tongue.”

“Ashley’s a Rambosian?”

“Yes, first ever in uniform.”

There was a pause.

“Do you have any problems with aliens, Mary?”

“Never met one,” she replied simply. “I take people as I find them. What’s that smell?”

“Boiled cabbage. The canteen kitchens are next door. Don’t worry; by the third year, you’ll barely smell it.”

“Hmm,” murmured Mary, looking disdainfully around the small room and the piles of untidy case notes. “I might have an issue with the window.”

“What window?”

“That’s the issue.”

At that moment a cloud of cold germs loosely held together in the shape of a human being walked in through the door. This, guessed Mary, was another part of the NCD. She was right.

“Good morning, sir,” said the sickly-looking individual. He took a sniff from a Vick’s nasal spray and dabbed his red nose with a handkerchief.

“Good morning, Baker,” replied Jack. “Cold no better?”

Baker’s cold
never
got better. A semidripping nose seemed to be a permanent fixture since a bout of flu eight years earlier. He wore a scarf even when it was quite warm, and his skin seemed pale and waxy. Despite looking as if he had barely three weeks before a terminal illness mercifully carried him away, he was actually extremely fit—he passed his annual medical with flying colors and completed the Reading Marathon every June in a creditable time.

“This is Charlie Baker, the station hypochondriac. I call him the office terrier. I give him a problem to solve and he won’t let go until it’s done. He’s also convinced he has only a month to live, so he doesn’t mind going through the door first on a raid.”

“How do you do?” said Mary, shaking his hand.

“Not terribly well,” replied Baker. “The dizzy spells have got worse recently, I have a rash on my scrotum, and a twinge in the knee might be the onset of gout.” He showed her his forearm.

“Does this look swollen to you?”

“Have you seen Ashley or Gretel?” asked Jack, trying to change the subject before he
really
got started.

“Ashley’s burning some spinning wheels that were handed in as part of that amnesty thing,” said Baker as he squeezed a few drops of Visine into his eyes and blinked rapidly, “and Gretel is having the morning off—I think she’s being checked for Orzechowski’s syndrome, a curious disease that plays havoc with the central nervous system and causes rapid movements of hands, feet and eyes—incurable, you know.”

Jack and Mary stared at him, and he shrugged.

“Or maybe she’s just waiting in for a plumber.”

“Right. Mary, call St. Cerebellum’s and get the name of Humpty’s doctor, and, Baker, dig up some background info on Humpty—we should know what he’s been up to and if he has a record. I’ll be back in half an hour, and I take my coffee white with one sugar.”

Jack picked up the evidence bag that contained the shotgun and walked out the door.

The Nursery Crime Division, it seemed, didn’t generate many headlines—the framed news clippings that hung on the wall were just short, faded sections of newsprint culled from the few papers that carried the stories. There were clippings about Bluebeard’s arrest, Giorgio Porgia, the notorious crime boss, and several others, going back over four decades. Uniquely, there was one regarding the Gingerbreadman from the front page of
The Toad
, but since it described Jack as “Chymes’s assistant,” Mary could understand why it was the least prominent.

“I figured you were a coffee person,” said a voice. Mary turned to find the young constable she had seen earlier at Grimm’s Road doing house-to-house. They had spoken, but only about work. She didn’t even know his name.

“Thank you,” replied Mary, taking the coffee gratefully and waving a hand at the press cuttings. “What do you know about all this?”

“Before I was even born,” replied Tibbit, “but according to Gretel, the Giorgio Porgia collar was more DI Spratt’s than Chymes’s. The Super got funny about it when things got dirty. No one gives a damn about the nurseries as long as they kill one another. Porgia made the mistake of taking out
real
people. The Guv’nor had all the evidence, but Chymes closed the case—and got the credit.”

“No wonder Jack doesn’t like him.”

“It goes back further than that. He doesn’t talk about it much.”

Mary’s mobile started ringing. She dug it out of her pocket and looked at the Caller ID. Arnold
again.

“This is a guy named Arnold,” said Mary, handing the still-ringing phone to Tibbit. “Can you tell him I’m dead?”

Tibbit frowned doubtfully but took the phone and pressed the answer button anyway.

“Hello, Arnold?” he said. “PC Tibbit here. I’m afraid to tell you that DS Mary has been killed in an accident.” He winced as he said it, and there was a pause as he listened to what Arnold had to say. “Yes, it
was
very tragic and completely unexpected.” He listened again for a moment. “That’s no problem, I’ll tell her. Good day.”

He pressed the end-call button and handed the mobile back.

“He said he was very sorry to hear about your accident and he’ll call you later. I don’t think he believed me.”

“No, it’s going to take more than my death to put him off, but thanks anyway. What’s your name?”

“Constable Tibbit.”

“Sergeant Mary Mary,” said Mary, shaking Tibbit’s hand,

“pleased to meet you.”

The young officer thought hard for a moment, then said, “Arrange a…
symmetry.
”

Mary arched an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

He didn’t answer for a moment but again thought hard and finally said in triumph, “Many…
martyrs
agree.”

“Are you okay?”

“Of course!” replied the young constable brightly. “It’s an anagram. If you take ‘Sergeant Mary Mary’ and rearrange the letters you get ‘Arrange a symmetry’ or ‘Many martyrs agree.’ The trick is to have them make sense. I could have given you ‘My matey arrangers’ or ‘My artery managers,’ but they sort of
sound
like anagrams, don’t you think?”

“If you say so.”

She had thought that perhaps Tibbit might have been a life raft of normality that she could somehow cling to for sanity, but that hope was fast retreating. It was little wonder he had been allocated to the division.

“It’s a palindrome,” continued the young constable.

“Sorry?”

“Tibbit. Easy to remember. Reads the same backwards as forwards.
Tibbit.
”

Mary raised an eyebrow. “You mean, like ‘Rats live on no evil star’?”

He nodded his head excitedly. “I prefer the more subtle ones, myself, ma’am, such as ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.’”

Mary sighed. “Sure you’re in the right job?”

Tibbit appeared crestfallen at this, so Mary changed the subject.

“How long have you been here?”

“Six months. I was posted down here for three months, but I think they’ve forgotten about me. I don’t mind,” he added quickly.

“I like it.”

“First name?”

“Otto,” he replied, then added by way of explanation, “Palindrome as well. My sister’s name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times world Scrabble champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score. He spent the greater part of his life campaigning to have respelt those words that
look
as though they are spelt wrongly but aren’t.”

“Such as…?”

“Oh, skiing, vacuum, freest, eczema, gnu, diarrhea, that sort of thing. He also thought that ‘abbreviation’ was too long for its meaning, that ‘monosyllabic’ should have one syllable, ‘dyslexic’ should be renamed ‘O’ and ‘unspeakable’ should be respelt ‘unsfzpxkable.’

“How did he do?”

“Apart from the latter, which has met with limited success, not very well.”

Mary’s eyes narrowed. She feared she was having her leg pulled, but the young man seemed to be sincere.

“Okay. Here’s the deal. You stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours. Get me St. Cerebellum’s number and make Jack a cup of coffee.”

The armory and ballistics
division was run by George Skinner. He was a large man with a bad stoop, graying hair and a permanent hangdog expression. He wore pebble specs and a shabby herring-bone suit that seemed as though he had inherited it from his father. Looks can be deceptive and were definitely so in Skinner’s case. Not only was he an inspired ballistics and weapons expert, able to comment expertly and concisely on everything from a derringer to a bazooka, he was also highly watchable in the documentaries that often followed one of Chymes’s investigations. But despite his somewhat sober appearance, he was also a lively fixture of Reading’s nightlife. He could outdrink almost anyone, and if there was a report of someone dancing naked on the tables down at the Blue Parrot, you could bet safe money it was Skinner.

Jack knocked on the open door. “Hello, George.”

“Come in, Jack,” said Skinner without turning around.

Jack walked over and watched him for a moment. Like Mrs. Singh, Skinner was one of the few officers who didn’t treat the NCD with the derision that seemed to hallmark Jack’s association with the rest of the station. Friedland swore by Skinner, and Friedland expected the best—it galled him something rotten that Skinner was so chummy with Jack. Jack waited patiently while Skinner finished what he was doing, and then he produced the sawed-off shotgun.

“What do you make of this?” he asked.

“Ah!” said Skinner thoughtfully, signing the evidence label before removing the gun and carefully checking to make sure it was empty. “I make this a Marchetti twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Illegal, as all pumps are, and shortened like this, it’s a nasty piece of work.”

Skinner replaced his glasses, making his eyes appear twice as big as they were. He peered at Jack for a moment and then pulled a file off a shelf. He looked up the make against reported stolen or missing guns.

“Oh,” he said in a tone that made Jack nervous.

“What?”

He looked at the frame number again.

“Bingo. Jack, meet the weapon that was stolen from Mr. Christian. It could be the murder weapon in the Andersen’s Wood murders. That was one of Friedland’s, wasn’t it?”

“One of the many,” replied Jack with a sigh.

The wood murders had all the characteristics of the sort of drama that Chymes liked to unravel. Mr. Christian had been murdered along with his wife eighteen months earlier in Andersen’s Wood, a large forest to the west of Reading. The only possible motive was connected to the substantial amount of cash that had been found at their humble dwelling on the edge of the forest. Mr. Christian was a poor woodcutter, yet close to seven thousand pounds was found in their house, and no clue as to how they came by it. Friedland, in a typical display of bravado, had uncovered a sinuous trail of money laundering that led from East Malvonia and involved several hitherto unheard-of and only marginally plausible secret societies and ended up implicating the Vatican. During a daring raid on an address in Cleethorpes, the two prime suspects were killed and a large quantity of arms and cash recovered. The investigation was so complex that it had to be published as an annotated two-parter in
Amazing Crime Stories
. The only survivor of the raid confessed a few weeks later and was currently doing time in Reading Gaol.

“This gun was used to kill the Christians?”

“No, this gun
belonged
to the woodcutter. I can tell you if it was the one used to kill them by comparing the two spent cartridges they found at the scene. Who had it?”

“Humpty Dumpty.”

“As in ‘sat on a wall’?”

“No, as in ‘had a great fall.’ He was found dead this morning.”

“Ah,” replied Skinner knowingly. “I thought murdered woodcutters were NCD jurisdiction?”

“Friedland insisted they were
real
woodcutters, and Briggs agreed with him. As it turned out, he was right. Thanks, Skinner, you’ve been a lot of help.”

Jack walked back into the station, stepped into the lift and pressed the button to go down to the basement. The lift, however, was already programmed to go up, so he went on an excursion to the seventh floor. The shotgun puzzled him. Humpty was undeniably shady, but he’d never been
violent.

The lift stopped at the sixth floor, where Jack’s least favorite person at Reading Central walked in: Friedland Chymes. They had once been partners together at the NCD until Friedland thought it was beneath him and jumped into the fast lane of the Guild of Detectives on the back of two cases that were more to do with Spratt. It had been Jack and Wilmot Snaarb who caught the Gingerbreadman that night, not Friedland, as he liked to claim. So it was no surprise that they didn’t even look at each other. Friedland pressed the first-floor button and then stared at the indicator lights above the door. After a twenty-year enmity, the best either of them could manage was a single-word greeting.

“Jack.”

“Friedland.”

But, Friedland being Friedland, he couldn’t resist a small dig.

“I knew the pigs would walk, old sport,” he said loftily. “I didn’t think the premeditation argument solid enough.”

“It
was
solid,” retorted Jack. “The defense had the jury loaded with other pigs. I wanted a wolf in the box, but you know how busy they are.”

“You can’t play the speciesist card every time you lose a case, Jack.”

They were silent for a moment as the lift passed the fourth floor.

“I understand you’ve applied to join the Guild,” remarked Chymes with a small and patronizing chuckle.

“Any officer can
apply,
Friedland.”

“No need to get defensive, old boy.”

“I’m not getting defensive.”

“What will be your figurehead case? Finding sheep for Bo-peep? A failed conviction of three pigs?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“Of course you will. I hear Humpty took a nosedive. Suicide?”

“It’s early days,” replied Jack quickly, not wanting to relinquish any details, no matter how trivial.

“Humpty…wall…suicide…
murder,
” muttered Chymes thoughtfully. “Sounds like it could be a corker. Want me to take over?”

“No.”

“I’ll swap it for a strangling over in Arborfield.”

“I said no, Friedland.”

“Okay, the strangling in Arborfield
plus
a botulism poisoning by a vicar—with potential sexual intrigue thrown in. Proper stuff, Jack. None of your dozy nurseries.”

“The answer’s still no. You couldn’t wait to get out of the NCD. Where were the offers of help when Mr. Punch was beating his wife? What about Bluebeard? I could have done with some assistance
then.
”

“Listen,” said Chymes as the friendly horse-trading banter vanished abruptly, “let’s cut the crap. I want this investigation—and I
will
have it.”

“Which part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

“Is that your final word?”

“You don’t want to hear my final word.”

“Well,” said Chymes with a condescending smile, “I hope you won’t regret your decision.”

The lift stopped at the first floor. Friedland walked out, turned to Jack and said, “Just a spot of advice from an old soldier—don’t build the case up. Word in the station says they should have left some room in Mr. Wolff’s coffin for the NCD.”

He started to walk away, but Jack wasn’t done.

“I found the woodcutter’s shotgun,” he said in a low voice. “I want to check to see if it was the murder weapon in the woodcutter case.”

Friedland halted abruptly, pressed the “door-hold” button and stared at Jack.

“I don’t think that’s very likely. Haven’t you read the write-up in
Amazing Crime
? It was the Kiev mafia trying to muscle in on the Reading drug trade via Cleethorpes with the help of several all-powerful and unfeasibly ancient secret societies. It’s a done deal, Jack—Max Zotkin is doing time as we speak.”

Jack was unfazed. “Even so, I’d like to check. Do you have the cartridges from the murder scene? Skinner can check them against the gun we found.”

Chymes stared at him for a moment, then appeared to soften. “I’ll have them sent down. Good-bye, Jack.”

The doors slid shut. Jack closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Suddenly, he remembered why he had never really wanted to be in the Guild.