Fourth Bear (22 page)

“What time was this?”

“Half past eight.”

“And how long had you been out of the house?”

“Half an hour,” put in Mrs. Bruin. “We usually stay out for longer, but we had to go to the vet.”

“Thank you for bringing that up again, dear,” said Ed meekly.

“Then what happened?”

“She got dressed and ran out of the house.”

“Did she have anything with her?”

“A bag. One of those work bag things.”

“And that was the last you saw of her?”

“Never saw her again, and good riddance. She had a damn lot of cheek, Inspector.”

“But she was fine when she left here?”

He laid a claw over his heart. “We never touched her. We were going to write a letter to
The Toad
. Their Henrietta Hatchett is a Friend to Bears and has done a great deal for ursine equality.”

“Sorry?” said Jack, taken aback at this latest development.

“Miss Hatchett would have done something about it,” he replied. “She has done a lot of good work for us in the past.”

“Had you ever met her? I mean, if you saw her would you recognize her?”

“No—why?”

“This,” said Jack, holding up the picture of Goldilocks, “is Miss Hatchett.”

Ed’s eyes opened wide, and he looked at his wife, who dropped a teacup.

“That was Hatchett?” she said, turning from the sink.

Jack nodded, and Ursula walked briskly over to them.

“YOU…
FOOL!
” she screamed at her husband, who looked terrified and tried to back away, which is tricky to do if you’re already sitting down. He gave out a whimper, and she replied with a snarl. There followed a protracted and very one-sided conversation in Ursine, which resembled a series of growls, whimpers and low barks. As they argued, Jack looked out the window, where he could see some cars pulled up outside. Mary had arrived in his Allegro, and behind her, Gretel and Baker bumped up the grassy track in his Volvo.

“I’d like a statement from both of you,” said Jack, having to almost shout to make himself heard above the cacophony of growly noises.

They stopped arguing, and Ursula answered in a sweet tone, “Of course, Inspector.”

Ed nodded in agreement, and they both looked at the two cars unhappily. Machines, like humans, weren’t that welcome in the forest.

Jack walked out of the house and met Mary on the garden path.

“Hello, sir,” she said. “Any luck?”

“Goldilocks was here on Saturday morning—but ran away into the forest at about eight-thirty.” He turned back to Mr. Bruin, introduced Mary and then said, “Can you show me the bed you found her in?”

Ed shrugged a bit despondently and took Jack and Mary up the narrow stairs to the single bedroom, which was in the roof space. He nodded toward three beds of varying sizes.

“This one,” he said, pointing at the smallest.

“Did you wash the sheets?”

“Of course,” he said, shocked at the suggestion that they might not have.

Jack looked around. There didn’t seem much more to be gained for the moment. They walked back downstairs.

“Baker, I’d like you to take statements from Mr. and Mrs. Bruin and wait for their son to come home, then do the same with him.”

Baker wrinkled his nose.

“Problems?” asked Jack.

“They’re bears, sir.”

“I can see that.”

“Animals, sir.”

“So are we.”

“They’ve probably got fleas.”

Jack pulled him aside and whispered in his ear, “Listen, Baker, I’ve been in there for half an hour and I’m not scratching. Tell the others and heed this yourself: If I hear of any ursism in my division, I’ll have you up on disciplinary charges. Do you understand?”

Baker nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Which way did Goldilocks go?” asked Jack. Ed pointed a claw toward a small path leading up the hill to a ridge.

“Gretel?”

“Sir?”

“You and Baker should follow us up when you’re done. Mary and I are going on ahead.”

They walked out of the clearing and back into the forest, this time following the path Ed had indicated. The trees were younger and smaller, letting in enough light to permit a thick carpet of grass to grow.

“How did you find me?” Jack asked Mary.

“A woodsman told me he saw you over here. The bear’s house is only five hundred yards from Goldy’s Austin.”

Jack shook his head. He must have been walking in circles.

They followed the path up to the top of the ridge, where they found a high and very sturdy wire-mesh fence. Beyond this was a muddy landscape, a thousand acres of churned earth and stunted, shattered trees. A quarter of a mile away in the muddy wastes, the remains of a small church nestled in a slight hollow near some leafless trees. On the hillside below the church, the zigzag pattern of a trench was readily apparent, the web of rusty barbed wire an impenetrable barrier in front of it. Behind this first trench was a support trench, and beyond this a battery of guns sat in supposed readiness. Behind them was the visitors’ center, unfinished and of modern brick and steel. The wasteland was totally incongruous to the green setting of Berkshire and an ugly scar on the land. Its construction had been fought at every step, but the theme park had gone ahead regardless. Jack and Mary looked up and read the threatening notice board that faced them. The message was clear:

“SommeWorld,” muttered Jack. “That’s all we need.” They walked slowly along the perimeter until Mary noticed a gap in the fence. She went and had a closer look as Jack went on ahead.

“Jack, I think you better look at this.”

“It’s probably kids,” he said, retracing his steps, “wanting to have a look at the park before it opens.”

“Look,” said Mary, pointing at a small scrap of cloth stuck on the chain-link fence. “It’s a scrap of blue-patterned dress.”

“Goldilocks wore a dress of that sort,” murmured Jack as they both stared into the silent park. It wouldn’t open for another three months. “Thinking what I’m thinking?”

Mary nodded, and they carefully climbed through the hole and looked around. The pockmarked damage of the shelling began about thirty yards in from the fence. The First World War theme park had been a major news story over the past six years, and the biggest problem the designers faced was to make the park “guests” undergo a two-hour-long artillery barrage, but with zero danger. No one knew how they managed it, but they had been testing for a number of months, and all, apparently, was well. Jack and Mary picked across the freshly tossed earth and came across a large crater with battle debris scattered about and the remains of some barbed wire. The wire was real, and it tore a hole in Jack’s trouser leg. He was just surveying the disjointed landscape and thinking that perhaps Goldilocks was sunning herself on a foreign shore somewhere when Mary reached down and pulled something from the freshly pulverized earth.

“What do you make of that?” she asked.

It was not from the First World War, or even close. It was a small piece of white plastic the size of a Scrabble tile with the letter
M
printed on one side. But it wasn’t a Scrabble tile. It was a computer key.

“Her laptop?”

“Could be.”

They had both started to search the ground for anything more when there was a loud
whompa!
noise and a plume of earth shot high in the air less than thirty feet away. They ducked as the soil and debris fell around them and coughed in the cloud of dust that drifted across.

“What was
that?
” said Mary, rubbing her eyes.

Before Jack could answer, there were two more dull thuds and two more plumes of earth shot skyward, this time with greater force—and closer. The search momentarily forgotten, they dashed for the fence amid a barrage of increasing violence, with earth, roots and small stones cascading down around them.

Jack reached the fence first and threw himself through the gap.

“Well, Mary, that was—”

He stopped. Mary wasn’t with him. He stared back into the barrage, the rising column of soil and the pebbles bouncing on the ground in front of him and the dry dust in the summer heat drifting like a smoke screen, making him blink and hiding the scene from his view. He had run over his previous sergeant with his wife’s Volvo and killed him. It was an accident, of course, but to lose one sergeant is a misfortune. To lose two would be considered…

He was just about to dash back toward the destruction to look for her when a small figure stumbled from the barrage, which even now was beginning to wane. She was covered in dirt, her hair was sticking almost straight up, and she had lost a sleeve off her jacket. She fell to the ground quite out of breath, but with a smile on her face.

“What happened to you?”

“I… saw… this,” said Mary in between breaths. She passed him a large section of broken laptop. “I… thought… it… important!”

Jack turned the casing over. Written on the bottom, in indelible marker, were Goldilocks’s name and phone number.

Most pointless loss of life in the First World War:
The Somme Offensive makes a good claim to this title, but competition is pretty stiff. Begun along a fifteen-mile sector of the Western Front at dawn on July 1, 1916, the attack followed a weeklong artillery bombardment of an unprecedented 1.5 million shells that achieved little except warn the German High Command of the impending attack. There were 19,240 British dead on that first day—for a gain of only a thousand yards. Despite numerous “pushes” to effect a breakthrough, little was accomplished aside from more loss of life, and the battle was abandoned three months later. There had been a Franco-British gain of five miles for a total casualty list on all sides of 1.3 million. An obscenely profligate waste of human life? Undoubtedly.
Totally
pointless? Maybe not. Historians agree that the German army never recovered from the losses, and it is likely that “the foundations of the final victory on the Western Front were laid by the Somme offensive of 1916.”

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

Jack and Mary
drove into the car park at SommeWorld a half hour later and parked in front of the theme park’s buildings. Most of the visitors’ center was finished, but the roof had yet to go on to the auditorium, and the canteen hadn’t even been started. Builders were toiling around the clock in order for the construction to be over by Christmas. That was four months away, but there was still a lot to do. Two years behind schedule and ten years in the planning, the bizarre theme park was the longtime personal dream of the Quangle-Wangle, the reclusive industrialist, computer and shipping billionaire whose own experiences on the Somme had been the basis of what he called “the only safe real-life war experience in the world.”

They parked the car, entered the impressive dome-roofed visitors’ center and were directed up the stairs to the park operations center. They walked along the partially finished corridors until they found the correct door, and Mary pressed the entry buzzer. She stuck an index finger in her ear and waggled it.

“I don’t know how those explosions work, but the concussion is for real. One went off a couple of yards from me, and I felt my ears pop like a champagne cork.”

The door opened to reveal a young man of about twenty with a goatee and matching SommeWorld T-shirt and baseball cap. He looked at them both in turn.

“Can I help you guys?”

“Police,” said Mary. “We want to see whoever’s in charge.”

“Sure,” said the young man, leading them into the spacious control room perched on the upper floors of the visitors’ center.

“What’s this all about? Someone complaining about the noise again?”