Fourth Bear (20 page)

“Did she?” said Jack, making a face. “What did she want?”

“It was most odd,” said Ashley thoughtfully. “She
said
she wanted to talk to you about a charity benefit in aid of distressed gentlefolk she was planning, but I think she just wants you to put your—” He stopped, looked at Mary, gave a shrug and then placed a single sucker digit on Jack’s forehead.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” agreed Jack after a moment, “and most graphically realized, too.” He pushed away Ashley’s digit, which detached with a faint
pop.
“And please, don’t do that mind-merging stuff on me, okay?”

“Sorry. Do you find it intrusive?”

“Not at all—it’s just that I can see what you’re thinking in the background.”

“Oops,” gulped Ashley, flicking a look toward Mary, who thankfully wasn’t paying much attention. “Right you are, then.”

The phone rang.

“Spratt, NCD…”

It was Briggs, so Jack just carried on talking.

“…isn’t in right now, but if you’d like to leave a message when you hear the tone, please do so….
Beeeeep.
”

“That old pretending-to-be-an-answering-machine stuff doesn’t fool me, Spratt,” said Briggs angrily.

“Sorry, sir.”

“What are you doing in the office?”

“I was with the quack for my psychiatric evaluation, sir. I just popped in to brief Mary about the Rumpelstiltskin parole hearing.”

“Hmm. Well, put her on.”

He handed the phone to Mary, who listened for a moment and then said, “Yes, sir, I was very impressed you didn’t fall for the answering-machine gag.”

She looked up at Jack, who made a sign for her to call him and then crept out the door. Briggs had been known to walk around the building on a cell phone pretending he was in his office, and Jack had just about had his fill of threshold guardians for the day.

Jack walked down to his car and noticed that the door mirror had mended itself in his absence. He drove out of the garage, meaning to visit Dorian Gray and have a word with him in person. He’d called him several times, but had continued to get the “number disconnected” tone.

A few miles down the road, and after the brief annoyance of a military checkpoint looking for the Gingerbreadman, Jack’s cell phone rang.

“I’m going home to watch
Columbo
, sir,” he said without waiting to hear who it was. “Oh, sorry, Mary—what’s up?”

He slowed the car as he listened, then pulled into a lay-by.

“Excellent,” he said at last. “I’ll meet you at the northern entrance in twenty minutes.”

He tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, signaled and pulled out into the afternoon traffic, heading rapidly off in the direction of Andersen’s Wood. As he did so, he noticed for the first time that the odometer on the Allegro was going
backward
—and the fuel gauge was still on the three-quarters mark. He shrugged. Clearly a glitch of some sort.

Largest unmapped area in the United Kingdom:
There are several areas of the UK that still defy any serious attempt at cartographic interpretation, but the largest by far is Andersen’s Wood, a six-thousand-acre tract of forest to the southwest of Reading, Berkshire. The heavy oak canopy defeats conventional aerial photography, and cartographic expeditions have known to become hopelessly lost, sometimes for weeks. A quick glance at the ordnance survey map of the area reveals only an irregular area of green with the legend, “Here be trees.”

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

Andersen’s Wood
was remarkable not only for its mature hardwood but for its
isolation.
Apart from one narrow asphalt road running north to south there were no roads at all, just unmarked logging tracks meandering around the ancient woodland. It wasn’t unusual for people to become lost while walking through its leafy trails, and there were even rumors of a dilapidated and forgotten castle hidden somewhere within its heavy canopy, protected by an almost impenetrable wall of brambles.

Mary was waiting for Jack when he arrived outside the northern entrance to the wood, and she jumped into his car as soon as he pulled up.

“So what have we got?” he asked.

“Cell phone records,” she replied. “She had a ‘number blocked’ call at 6:04 A.M. on Saturday morning that she answered. There was another one at 9:56 that she didn’t, and several of the same all through the afternoon. Josh Hatchett’s home number calls her that evening and at regular intervals throughout the next five days. Seventy-six calls in total and about half with number withheld. None of them were answered.”

“Quite a few people withhold their numbers,” mused Jack,

“but her last
answered
call was the Saturday 6:04 one?”

“Yup. From there we can track her cell phone as it began to move a half hour later. It crossed eight coverage cells until it stopped in Andersen’s Wood at 7:32. The signal faded three days later, probably as a result of a dead battery.”

“That doesn’t really help us,” murmured Jack. “Towers are few and far between in the country, and cells can get pretty big—it will be like looking for the proverbial needle.”

“We got lucky,” said Mary. “In the three days Goldy’s phone was doing nothing but firing off the occasional ident, it switched to another cell and back again six times.”

“It was moved?”

“I don’t think so.”

She showed Jack a local map that had been faxed from Goldilocks’s phone company with two intersecting polygons sketched upon it.

“Goldy’s phone was at the
boundary
of a cell, and the ident was bounced back and forth between two masts; by looking at where the cells potentially share coverage, we can get a vague idea of where her phone is.”

She showed him the approximate overlap of the two irregular cells and pointed to an area less than eight hundred yards wide and about three hundred deep that fell in a sector on the western side of the wood.

“Let’s just hope,” said Jack, “she’s still got her phone with her.”

Jack started the car and drove slowly into the arboreal charm of the wood. He had often come here for picnics when a child, and its ancient splendor was one of Berkshire’s three jewels, along with the Sacred Gonga and Castle Spongg.

They drove slowly down the main road and then took a graveled logging track, with Mary navigating—or trying to. She got them lost at least twice before they turned a corner and Jack abruptly stopped the car.

“Bingo,” he breathed.

“Gotta love those cell-phone records,” replied Mary.

Sitting by the side of the road and dappled with the sunlight filtering through the trees was an immaculate Austin Somerset in all its 1950s curvy, pressed-steel glory. The color was green and the registration 226 DPX. It was Goldilocks’s car.

“We’ll approach from the left in case this is a crime scene,” said Jack, getting out of the Allegro and walking slowly toward the Austin, which was covered with a smattering of leaves and broken twigs. There was a branch lying on the hood that had dented the panel.

“When was the last windy night?” he called over his shoulder.

“Sunday,” answered Mary. “I feel them more than most on the lake.”

Jack nodded. The fact that a car could sit undiscovered for more than a week demonstrated the solitude of the forest. The interior of the car was dark, and it wasn’t easy to see inside, so with heavily beating heart Jack tried the handle. It was unlocked, and he opened the door, expecting the worst. He breathed a sigh of relief. The car was empty; Goldilocks was nowhere to be seen. Her cell phone, its battery exhausted, was lying on the passenger seat.

“Anything?” called out Mary.

Jack checked the trunk to make quite sure, and aside from a travel rug and a spare bottle of antifreeze, there was nothing.

“She’s not here,” said Jack, and Mary cautiously approached in the same direction Jack had taken.

“What do we do?” she asked. “There’s still no crime, so I can’t see Briggs agreeing to a search of the area. Not for the NCD anyway.”

“Call Baker and Gretel,” he said, rummaging carefully in the glove box, “and see if they can’t make an excuse to get out or something. Look at this.”

He handed her a receipt for fuel, neatly attached to several others in a bulldog clip.

“Theale Services, dated last Saturday and timed at 7:02 A.M.,” murmured Mary. “Theale’s a thirty-minute drive from here, which puts her in the forest around 7:30 at the earliest.”

“And Theale is itself thirty minutes from her house,” added Jack. “It all backs up the cell-phone record. She received a call at 6:04 and took, say, half an hour to get out of her house, half an hour to the services and then on to here. If I’m not mistaken, whoever called her on her mobile arranged to meet her here, in the forest—and as soon as possible.”

They looked around. All about them the forest stood heavy and lush in the summer’s glorious embrace. It was like living in another world, or another age, when England was covered in dense oak forest and humans were few. It would have been a haven for wild boar, elk and
bear.

“Somewhere out there,” said Jack, “is Goldilocks.”

“That sounded ominous,” remarked Mary, rummaging for her own cell phone. “I’ll get onto Baker and Gretel.”

“Do that. I’m going to have a look around.”

He walked slowly into the forest, the crisp detritus underfoot sounding inordinately loud in the solitude. As soon as he stepped among the trees, the high canopy of overlapping leaves shut out the daylight almost entirely, leaving just occasional spots of sunlight on the forest’s ferny floor. Jack walked for a couple hundred yards and then stopped. Not a bird stirred, not an animal dared show itself. He could see no sign of Goldilocks, nor any sign of humans at all. There was nothing to be gained by meandering aimlessly in the forest, so he walked back in the direction of the car. After five minutes, and with no sign of the car, Mary or even the road, he realized he was lost. He’d heard the rumors about the forest’s high lostability index but had not believed them until now. He continued walking in what he thought was the right direction and after about ten minutes came across a small thatched cottage in the middle of a clearing.

It was a low building with a neat whitewashed facade and a green door and shutters. The garden path was decorated with scallop shells, and the humble abode had a cottage vegetable garden on either side. The whole was surrounded by a neat picket fence, and a couple of fruit trees stood close by. There were several hives of honey near the back door, the gentle buzz of bees adding a musical accompaniment to the idyllic scene. Neither telephone nor electrical cables led into the house, and on the breeze there hung the unmistakable smell of freshly baked bread.

He opened the garden gate and walked briskly up the path, noticing that there was a hammock swinging gently on the veranda. But that wasn’t all. Inside the hammock and snoring loudly, with a brown derby hat over his eyes, was a bear. A large male bear dressed in purple breeches and a blue waistcoat. Jack paused. He knew that a few bears lived in the wood, but he’d never met them. These must be the traditionalists among them—most bears he knew preferred the comforts of the Bob Southey. Yesterday’s copy of
The Owl
was lying on the bear’s massive chest, and the remains of a honey sandwich and a huge mug of tea rested on a table nearby.

“Hey!” said Jack, knocking on one of the wooden uprights that supported the roof over the veranda.

The bear didn’t wake. He just yawned and displayed a huge set of sharp white teeth and a tongue the size of Jack’s forearm.

“Hey, wake up!” repeated Jack, this time louder.

When this didn’t elicit an answer, he tapped the sleeping bulk with his foot. There was a grunting and a stirring, and the bear licked his chops, coughed politely with his fist in front of his mouth and said, in a deep, gravelly baritone, “Is it dinner?”

“Police,” said Jack, holding out his ID.

The bear pushed up the brim of his hat with one claw, squinted at the document and then looked up at Jack. He lowered his hat again and clasped his paws together over his stomach. “So, Mr. Policeman, what do you want?”

Jack put his ID away. “The name’s Detective Chief Inspector Spratt. I want to talk to you about a missing woman.”

The bear made no answer, and Jack thought he had gone back to sleep. He was about to repeat the question when the bear said, “You’re a city cop, Inspector. I can smell the exhaust and concrete on your clothes. You had bacon for breakfast, buy your toiletries at the Body Shop and once owned a cat. You work closely with a woman who is not your wife, you did number two less than an hour ago and you’re lost—I can smell several different areas of the forest on you, which tells me you didn’t come here in a straight line.”