The Big Over Easy (9 page)

They pulled up
at the curb, and Mary switched off the engine. It rattled on for a bit before it finally died.

“
Must
get that seen to.”

They climbed out of the car and looked at the glass-and-steel structure built on Forbury Gardens. If it had been anything other than the dreary day it was, the sun’s rays would doubtless have cascaded from the many-faceted glazed roof and given an effect as magical and wondrous as the treasure the building was built to house. As it was, the only thing cascading from anywhere was the rainwater running into the drains from the downpipes.

“Ugly as sin if you ask me,” said Jack.

“Beautiful piece of architecture,” said Mary, precisely at the same time. “We agree to differ,” she added. “A fine building should always court controversy. Isn’t that traffic warden staring at you?”

“Oh, shit,” said Jack. “Keep moving and pretend you haven’t seen her.”

But it was too late. The traffic warden, a woman about Jack’s age but whom the years had not blessed as kindly as, say, Lola Vavoom, trotted up to him. And she didn’t look very happy.

“Jack!” she said with an overblown sense of outrage. “You
never
call me!”

“Hello, Agatha,” said Jack with as much politeness as he could muster. “You’re looking well.”

“Don’t try and sweet-talk me, worm. Think you can just toss me aside like a…like a…like a used thing that needs tossing aside?”

“Steady on, Agatha.”

Mary stared curiously at the uniformed bundle of hot indignation—the overdone mascara and lipstick looked more like warpaint.

“Don’t you ‘steady on’ me, Jack. You don’t call, you don’t write—”

“Agatha, it’s
over.
It’s been over for a long, long time.”

“Maybe for you,” she said angrily. “What about if I came and told your wife, Sarah, about it? What would she say, huh?”

Jack sighed. “Sarah is…no longer in the picture. I remarried—”

“Remarried?” she asked in a shocked tone. “When?”

“Five years ago. And listen, you and I were finished
long
before I even met Sarah.”

“Do you have any idea how this makes me feel?”

“No,” said Jack, who had resisted the temptation of humiliating her with a restraining order, since she happened to be Briggs’s partner, “I have no idea at all. How’s Geoffrey?”

“Not half the man you are. The trombone’s driving me nuts—and he wants to change his name to Föngotskilérnie.”

“You have my sympathies. I’m busy, Agatha.”

She cheered up, blew her nose on a light mauve handkerchief, leaned closer, gave him a coy smile and walked her fingers up his tie.

“I’ll be waiting for your call, Jack. Anytime. I’ll be waiting. For your call. Whenever.”

“Good day, Agatha.” And he turned quickly and moved away.

“Yikes,” he said in an aside to Mary. “That was Agatha Diesel. Makes Dr. Quatt seem a picture of rationality.”

“There’s nothing mad about being miffed at rejection,” said Mary, who thought that even people like Agatha needed a champion in their corner.

“A week’s passion in 1979,” he replied wearily, “twenty-five years ago. And
she
called it off for a fling with Friedland. She doesn’t pester him because he has a hundred-yard restraining order out on her.”

“Ah,” said Mary, suitably contrite. “You’re right: mad as a March hare.”

They approached the main doors of the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center, which had been cast in a bronze relief that depicted in detail the turbulent history of Splotvia, from the earliest days of Splotvane I “The Unwashed” all the way through the medieval civil wars to the modern socialist republic, still coming to terms with itself after the overthrow of Splotvane XIV “The Deposed” in 1990.

The heavy doors were locked and bolted, so they walked around the side to the service entrance. This was also shut tight, but at least there was an entry phone and TV camera. Jack picked up the phone and announced themselves. Without a word the door slid open, and they were admitted to an inner cubicle to which there was no exit other than the way they had come or through a second door shut tight in front of them. To their right a uniformed guard sat behind a thick sheet of bulletproof glass. The door shut noiselessly behind them.

“Welcome to the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center,” said the guard in a marked Splotvian accent. “Can you place your IDs in the drawer, please?”

A steel drawer opened beneath the glass, and they did as he requested. He slid the drawer to his side, and after he’d studied the IDs for a moment and compared their likenesses with those on his database, the door to the building opened in front of them.

“Thank you,” said the guard as he handed their IDs back. “If you take a seat, Professor Hardiman will be with you shortly.”

Mary looked cautiously around. The interior of the building was modernist but subtly mixed with the geometric motifs that one usually associated with Splotvian architecture. It was pleasing, and she liked it.

“DI Spratt?” came a voice from the other side of the room. They turned and rose to meet the Professor, a small and dapper man who had the rosy red cheeks of outdoorsy good health. “My name is Bruce Hardiman. It was my grandfather’s expedition that discovered the Sacred Gonga. And you must be DS Mary. How do you do?”

He shook hands with both of them and thanked them profusely for giving up their lives, if necessary, to protect the historic artifact.

“To protect and serve,” replied Jack dryly.

“How very
Gonga
of you,” observed Hardiman respectfully. “To die in the service of the Sacred Gonga is to die a worthy death indeed.”

“Professor,” said Jack, “we’re not actually
planning
on dying at all; we’re just here to protect it. I’m sure nothing will go wrong.”

“You must excuse me. I get carried away sometimes. As you can see the Sacred Gonga is housed in a state-of-the-art museum-cum-strongroom that is gasproof, bombproof, thiefproof, shock-proof and antimagnetic. It is completely self-contained in every way. Inertial batteries housed beneath our feet can give power for up to three weeks in the event of a power failure, and all air-conditioning, humidity control, halon antifire systems and CCTV security monitoring are masterminded from within the confines of its walls. Let me show you around.”

He walked across to a panel on the wall and pressed his thumb onto a small illuminated square, then entered a code on a touch pad. The door slid open, and they found themselves in a large chamber with the bronze front doors behind them and a full history of the Sacred Gonga on the walls with other examples of early Splotvian art.

“This is the part open to the public,” explained the Professor.

“The doors to the street open behind us, and the queues form in this outer chamber here. As the eager visitors get closer to the Sacred Gonga Containment Chamber, they are searched by guards at these tables and scanned by metal detectors hidden in the walls. They then move through these secure double doors, which gives us an opportunity to close down the facility quickly and easily in the event of an emergency.”

He pressed another thumbprint panel, entered a second code, and the three-foot-thick vault door slowly opened.

“One way in, one way out. Floor, walls, ceiling—all of steel two feet thick encased by a concrete outer shell. Bare feet, please.”

They sat on the bench and removed their shoes and socks. Sacred Gonga protocol demanded it. Hardiman was wearing loafers without socks and, after slipping them off, he walked barefoot into the chamber before the vault door was fully open. Once they had joined him, they could see that the room was octagonal and paneled in red marble picked out in obsidian trim. In the middle and encased within a large glass dome was the Sacred Gonga itself. It was illuminated from below, and the rest of the room was quite dark, which added to the mystical effect.

“Behold,” said Hardiman grandly, stretching his arms out wide, “the Most Sacred Gonga.”

Neither Mary nor Jack had ever seen the Sacred Gonga up close. They’d seen numerous pictures, of course, but nothing ever quite prepares you for the firsthand experience.

“It’s…it’s…
amazing,
” said Mary. “What’s that bit there that looks like a map of Wales upside down?”

“Ah!” said Professor Hardiman. “That’s the Pwaarl, which connects the Qussex to the Limbrell. As you can see, three of the eight Limbrells are missing. It is said that when the eight Limbrells are rejoined within the influencing sphere of the Sacred Gonga, the true Gonga will be revealed to the world. I see you are admiring the Prizzucks, Inspector?”

“So that’s what a Prizzuck looks like,” murmured Jack. As the light caught them, they sparkled and danced. “Why are they undulating in that strange manner?”

“The strange undulation of the Prizzucks is only one of the many mysteries of the Sacred Gonga.” The professor smiled. “Let me show you something.”

He positioned Jack on one side of the room and Mary on the other so the Sacred Gonga was directly between them and told them to close their eyes.

“Now think of a number,” whispered the Professor in Jack’s ear.

“Eight,” said Mary as soon as he thought of it. “Four. Six. Twelve.”

“Was she right?”

“Quite right. How does it do it?”

“We have no idea. The Sacred Gonga has many secrets, good and bad. Thousands of lives have been lost over the years in the effort to find out. Despite the demands of the Splotvian minister of antiquities, the Sacred Gonga is going to stay here in Reading.”

Jack pointed at the clear dome covering the Sacred Gonga. “What’s that made of?”

“Toughened glass. It will withstand a grenade, eighty kilos of Semtex, an .88 artillery round. A thief would have to somehow get through the glass, take the Sacred Gonga and be out again in under thirty seconds—always assuming he was not apprehended by the four armed guards or rendered unconscious by the quick-acting nerve gas we can introduce at will.”

“Looks like you’re not leaving anything to chance.”

“Absolutely not. The dedication ceremony will take place in here at midday. At 1400 hours we open to the public. We expect ten thousand visitors that afternoon and over one million in the first six months. It’s not surprising; since the attempted theft three years ago, the Sacred Gonga’s not been on public display.”

They put their shoes and socks back on and were escorted to the exit.

“The Jellyman Security Service will take command from 0900 hours to midday; the rest of the time, security will be down to you and me and the four armed guards on the museum floor.”

“Looks like we won’t have much to do,” observed Jack.

“
Exactly
what I said to Superintendent Briggs,” said Hardiman with unwelcome directness. “I told him I could make do with lobotomized monkeys if he had any.” He clapped his hands together, indicating that he had used up enough of his valuable time. “Well, thanks for coming around, and I’ll see you on Saturday at 1330, but if you’re late, don’t worry—I’m sure we can manage.”

They exited by way of the secure double doors and were soon back out on the street, which felt cold and damp after the precise humidity-controlled environment of the visitors’ center.

“Ever felt redundant?” asked Jack as they walked back towards the car. “I think it’s Briggs’s way of easing me into the pain of losing the NCD.”

Mary didn’t answer. It was probably
exactly
what Briggs had in mind.

“Let’s go and see what Dr. Quatt has to say for herself. Blast. Agatha’s given me a ticket.”

The outdated
St. Cerebellum’s mental hospital had been constructed in 1831 and was considered modern for its day. With separate wards for unmarried mothers, sufferers of milk allergies, unwanted relatives and the genuinely disturbed, St. Cerebellum’s once boasted a proud record of ill-conceived experimental treatment. With the high level of fee-paying curiosity seekers the litmus test of its success, St. Cerebellum’s even outstripped Bedlam as those requiring lunatic-based entertainment flocked to Reading in droves. But the days when you could pay sixpence to view someone who thought he was Napoleon were long gone, and despite continued and relentless modernization, it was still an anachronistic stain on Reading’s otherwise fine record of psychiatric treatment.

Jack and Mary entered the hospital at the main reception area and, after being issued with passes to avoid any more embarrassing accidental incarcerations, were escorted along the plain whitewashed corridors by a burly nurse with a two-way radio and a bunch of keys on his belt.

“You’ve heard about the plan to rebuild St. Cerebellum’s?” asked the male nurse.

“Sure,” replied Jack. “Fifty million should do it, yes?”

“And none too soon. We are both an outpatient center and a secure hospital for the criminally unhinged—even though the two halves never meet, it would be better for everyone to separate the two.”

“Doubtless,” replied Mary as some weird and maniacal laughter echoed up the corridors.

“Dr. Quatt is a brilliant woman,” said the nurse as they took a clanking lift to the third floor. “The popular view is that she’s as mad as a barrel of skunks, and many people see her as a perverter of all the decent virtues that bind society together, but they said the same about Galileo.”

“I must say I don’t remember the bit where Galileo grafted sheep’s hooves onto amputees,” mused Mary.

“Or subjected toads to Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’ so loud they exploded,” added Jack.

“All her work was to alleviate suffering,” retorted the nurse defensively. “When they banned her, a dark veil fell over the medical-research community. We don’t expect outsiders to
truly
understand her brilliance.”

St. Cerebellum’s seemed like a little world unto itself.

A crackling message came over the nurse’s radio. He unclipped it and waved them to a stop. There was an almost unintelligible rasp of dialogue about a “patient in transit,” and he acknowledged the call before he turned to a nearby room, selected a key and unlocked the door.

“We are moving one of our secure patients,” explained the nurse as he ushered them into what had once been a small cell.

“It’s safer to lock ourselves in while he’s being transported.”

The lock clunked shut, and the nurse spoke briefly on the radio. Up and down the corridor, they could hear doors slamming and locks being thrown.

“Who is it?” asked Jack.

The nurse indicated the small glass porthole in the door. “Take a look.”

Jack peered out cautiously, which seemed daft, considering the door was iron-banded oak. After a few moments, he caught sight of six burly nurses who surrounded a tall figure wrapped in a strait-jacket and bite mask. Each of the six nurses held the patient by means of a long pole that was connected to a collar around his neck. As they drew closer, Jack could see the dark brown cakey texture of the prisoner’s skin, and with a shiver he knew
exactly
who it was. He had hoped never to see him again but was thankful at least that Cerebellum’s was taking no chances. As they walked past, the patient looked at Jack with his glacé-cherry eyes and his thin licorice lips curled up into a cruel smile of recognition. He winked at Jack, and then they were gone.

Jack stepped away from the window, his palms damp with perspiration. Images of the night he and Wilmot Snaarb had tackled the Gingerbreadman filled his head. He could still see Snaarb’s look of pain and terror as the cakey psychopath playfully pulled his arms out of their sockets.

“Are you okay, sir?” asked Mary.

“Yes, yes, quite well.”

The male nurse laughed and went to the window to check for the all-clear.

“Believe me, you really don’t want to get any closer to Ginger than
that,
” he said, placing the key in the door and pausing. “He’d kill you as soon as look at you.”

“I know,” replied Jack. “I was the arresting officer.”

“Nah,” said the nurse, “everyone knows that was Friedland Chymes.”

They were led into Dr. Quatt’s office, a light and airy room with a good view of Prospect Park through large floor-to-ceiling windows. There were testimonials and letters of support hanging on the walls, and bottled specimens that contained misshapen creatures covered every work surface. Jack and Mary looked more closely and winced: The carefully bottled specimens looked like some bizarre form of animal “mix and match.”

A few moments later, an elegantly dressed woman of Jack’s age walked brusquely in from an anteroom, removed a pair of surgical gloves and tossed them in a bin. Under her white lab coat, she was dressed in a wool suit and blouse with a ring of pearls high on her neck. Her features were delicately chiseled, she wore only the merest hint of makeup and had her hair swept up in the tightest bun Mary had ever seen. She didn’t
look
as mad as a barrel of skunks; she looked quite sophisticated.

“Dr. Deborah Quatt?” said Jack. “My name is Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division, and this is Detective Sergeant Mary Mary.”

“Jack Spratt?” she asked, staring at him quizzically. “Have we met before?”

“We were in the same year at Caversham Park Junior School,” replied Jack, astounded that she remembered.

“Of course we were. You always insisted on being the pencil monitor—a policeman at heart, clearly.”

She said it with a slight derogatory air that he didn’t like.

“And you were expelled for sewing the school cat to the janitor.”

“The joyous experimentation of children,” she declared, laughing fondly at the memory. “What fun that was! Did you come all this way for a reunion?”

“Not at all. We wanted to talk to you about one of your patients—a Mr. Dumpty.”

Dr. Quatt shook her head slowly. “I never discuss patients’ records, Inspector. It is a flagrant breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. However, I could stretch a point given some form of fiscal reparation. Shall we say fifty pounds?”

“Doctor, you do know that he’s dead?”

“I was nowhere near him,” declared Dr. Quatt haughtily. “If you want to try me for malpractice, you’ll have to mount a good case. I’ve plenty of experience defending them, believe you me.” She stared at Jack for a moment. “Mr. Dumpty?
Dead?
What a pity. A very, very great pity.”

“His death was tragic, I agree,” admitted Jack.

“Death comes to us all, Inspector. No, it’s a pity the patient-confidentiality clause is null and void—I could have done with fifty pounds. The price of lab equipment these days is simply scandalous.”

She looked around, lowered her voice and leaned forwards. “Did you know that I have successfully grafted a kitten’s head onto a haddock?”

“Should you be telling me this?” asked Jack, also in a quiet voice.

She leaned back and raised an eyebrow. “It’s not against the law—I just can’t get any funding to do proper research because of that damnable Jellyman and his outdated moral principles. In the world of cutting-edge genetic research, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

“Which brings us back to Mr. Dumpty,” said Jack. “How long had you been his doctor?”

“For five years,” she said as she sat behind her large desk and indicated for them to be seated, “ever since I arrived in this dump. I was a psychiatrist before I moved into genetic research. What do you want to know?”

“His state of mind.”

“Ah!” she said, getting up to rifle through a rusty filing cabinet. “You are considering suicide, Inspector?”

“It is possible.”

“Indeed it is,” replied Dr. Quatt, looking at the files carefully.

“Physically, he was in a pretty ropy state. He was a lifelong salmonella sufferer, with frequent recurrences; when he had a bad bout, it was most debilitating. He drank more than was good for him, frequently overate and didn’t get much exercise—he never could walk far on those short legs.”

“And mentally?”

“Not good—but functional. He suffered from a sense of extreme low worth that manifested itself in frequent and self-destructive binges of drinking and womanizing. He also had depressive fits that sometimes lasted for days; all he could do was sit on his wall. Aside from that, he sometimes had problems differentiating reality from fantasy. He was particularly fearful that a giant mongoose was after him, was phobic about soufflé, meringue, and egg whisks, and had a recurring nightmare of being boiled alive for
exactly
three minutes.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Six days ago. Easter was a bad time for him, as you can imagine, with all those chocolate eggs being eaten and real ones dyed—he was a virtual prisoner in his own home. We had two sessions last week, and I think we really made some headway.”

“Did he talk about his work?”

She shook her head. “Never. It was all purely domestic.”

“But could he have been suicidal?”

Dr. Quatt thought for a moment. “I’m sorry to say that I can’t rule it out, despite my best attentions.”

Jack nodded slowly. It was what he had been expecting to hear.

“One more thing: How long had he been coming to St. Cerebellum’s?”

“For forty years, Inspector. It was almost his second home.”

Jack got up. “Thank you, Dr. Quatt; you’ve been most helpful. Tell me—and this is just personal curiosity—were you serious when you said you’d grafted a kitten’s head onto a haddock?”

Dr. Quatt’s eyes lit up, and she looked at them in turn, her youthful enthusiasm boiling to the surface. “Do you want to see?”

“That was pretty gross, wasn’t it?” announced Mary as they drove away from St. Cerebellum’s a few minutes later.

“Yes, but fascinating in a prurient, icky, dissecting-frogs, brains-in-jars kind of way. I thought keeping the collar and bell was an inspired touch, and it was kind of cute watching it try to play with that soggy ball of wool inside the tank.”

“Sir!”

“Just kidding. Yes, it
was
gross, and Dr. Quatt is definitely as mad as a barrel of skunks. And listen, I
never
insisted on being a pencil monitor at school. Where can I drop you?”

He left her outside the front of Reading Central Police Station. They bade each other good night, and she walked into the car park to retrieve her BMW, thinking that perhaps, given the direction of her new career, she should simply drive straight to Basingstoke and give Flowwe another whack with the onyx ashtray—just to be even-steven.

But when she got to her car, there was something unexpected waiting for her: an envelope carefully tucked under her windshield wiper. She thought it might be from Arnold, but it wasn’t. She read the note again, then a third time. She thought for a moment and then trotted into the station’s changing rooms to check herself in the mirror. If you are invited to the Reading branch of the Guild of Detectives by DCI Chymes
himself,
you should always look your best.