Fourth Bear (23 page)

Inside the room were a dozen or so Quang-6000 computers with technicians hunched over them, doubtless trying to debug whatever problems with which SommeWorld was beset. In front of the consoles, a large window assured the operators an unimpaired view across the battlefield. As they watched, a flight of low-flying Sopwith Camels buzzed across the smoking battlefield and three separate explosions went off near the ruined church.

“No, no, no,” said the supervisor into a microphone. “We can’t get away with a simulated bombing run unless we actually
drop
something. Land and we’ll try something else.”

“Mr. Haig?” said Jack and Mary’s guide quite timidly. “The police would like a word.”

Haig looked up and strode over. His manner was abrupt but helpful.

“Good afternoon, Officers.” He caught sight of Mary’s tattered state. “My goodness! What happened to you?”

“I’m DS Mary Mary, head of Reading’s NCD, and this is Inspector Spratt. I want you to shut down the park.”

Haig knew better than to ask why. The park was a legal nightmare over public liability, and everyone had been told to cooperate fully with authority. He turned to the operators. “Code-red shutdown, disarm all air mortars.”

Within a couple of moments, the operators were leaning back from their terminals and stretching. To them this was a welcome break from a long and tiresome day.

“As simple as that,” said Haig, the impromptu emergency procedure a deft display of safety. “My name is Stuart Haig, overall supreme commander of control operations. We’re in the middle of a test firing. Is there a problem?”

“I need to search your park where it borders Andersen’s Wood.” Mary walked over to a large map that was hanging on the wall and tapped it where she’d found Goldy’s laptop. “Just about
here.
”

Haig did not display any emotion one way or the other. “Can I ask why?”

“We believe,” said Jack slowly, “that someone might have wandered into the park last Saturday morning.”

Haig frowned and tapped a few keys on a nearby keyboard. “Saturday?” he echoed, staring at the screen. “There was a test firing that morning at nine. An hour’s barrage at one hundred percent efficiency. I’d not like to think what might happen to someone caught in
that.
”

“We were caught in one ourselves over there not more than an hour ago.”

Haig scowled angrily, seemingly more concerned about the future of the park than their safety. “Didn’t you see the signs? How did you get in?”

“The fence has been breached. We were looking for someone when the barrage began.”

His manner abruptly changed. “I’m sorry about that, Officer. Thank heavens you’re unharmed. I can see we are going to have to increase perimeter security. I’ll take you out there, and we’ll have a look around.”

He picked a Motorola radio out of a rack, handed them each what looked like a large wristwatch and a hard hat, then led them out of the control room, back down the corridor and out through the turnstiles, which led them through a farmhouse, ingeniously built to look half shelled and with a camouflage net over the badly damaged roof. On the dusty road outside was the debris of battle. Old guns, shell cases, rolls of barbed wire, scrap dumps, wood, cart wheels, everything. The whole park had been dressed with meticulous care and the smallest attention to detail. Even the road signs had been made out of wooden shell crates. Haig jumped into a mud-spattered Daimler and invited them up. The car started easily, and they were soon driving along the bumpy road toward the bombed-out church.

“Kind of an odd idea for a theme park, isn’t it?” asked Jack.

“‘Unusual’ is more the word I would choose, Inspector,” replied Haig. “It’s been a personal dream of the Quangle-Wangle for quite some time now. As you probably know, he served with the Kent Fusiliers on the Somme, and the experience never really left him. ‘If this facility allows people to really understand what war was about,’ the Quangle-Wangle once told me, ‘then we are one step closer to a peaceful planet.’"

“Very noble words,” commented Jack, “but won’t a theme park dedicated to the Battle of the Somme just attract those wanting to glamorize war?”

“Those are
precisely
the people we want to attract, Inspector,” replied Haig with a smile. “It will be a sobering experience. All of our visitors are dressed in uncomfortable and badly fitting standard-issue British uniforms and sent up to the front with a full pack of supplies and an Enfield rifle. They are accompanied by a regimental sergeant major and two officers. We shell their position for two hours and then send them over the top. Nobody ever comes back wanting to glamorize
that.
”

“I see your point. What does the Quangle-Wangle say about it?”

“As far as I know, he’s pleased. We often send him videotapes of the progress here, but to my knowledge he has never visited. The Quangle-Wangle is an intensely private man. The joke goes that a group of recluses start to talk and one of them says, ‘Hey, has anyone seen the Quangle-Wangle recently?’" Haig laughed at his own joke and then added, “I’ve been working for him for fifteen years and only seen him once.”

“How do you do the artillery barrages?” asked Mary, who now had some firsthand experience and wanted to know just how dangerous it had been.

“We use air mortars,” replied Haig. “A sort of large funnel pointing straight up with an air reservoir attached. The whole battlefield is networked with high-pressure air pipes. We arm the mortar by filling up the reservoir with compressed air at anything up to five hundred atmospheres, then release the mortar as we wish. We can control the blast almost infinitely, calculating the pressure against the size of the blast required and the weight of soil over the mortar. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s just air,” added Haig grimly. “A ten-atmosphere mortar can take your arm off.”

“How do you stop fatal accidents, then?” said Mary, looking around nervously.

Haig smiled and drove on. “The wristwatch thing I gave you is a proximity alert. No air mortar will arm or fire with one of these within fifteen feet. It means that you can be in the front lines under heavy fire, be showered on by soil, smell the cordite, experience the battle yet be in no
real
danger.”

The Daimler drove past the abandoned church and on up the hill to the area where Mary and Jack had been earlier. The terrain had changed since they were there, and several new craters had opened up. At the bottom of one, they could see the air mortar itself, a cylindrical iron tube half filled with soil.

“Do you have any idea who wandered into the park?”

“We have some ideas. We’re going to have to sift through this soil, Mr. Haig. It may take some time.”

Haig seemed unperturbed. It wasn’t his theme park, after all.

“I’d better alert QuangTech,” he said, taking out his cell phone and pressing a few keys. “They like to know what’s going on.”

He turned away to speak on the cell phone, and Jack and Mary started to look around for anything of Goldilocks. After twenty minutes Jack made the first discovery. It was a woman’s shoe, with the foot still inside it.

Mary called Briggs, and he reluctantly agreed to send in the whole forensic machinery. Within an hour the area was crawling with paper-suited Scene of Crimes officers, who divided the ground into sections and started a minute search while Jack and Mary stood by and watched. In two hours they had found several parts of her bag, assorted scraps of clothing, eighty-seven parts of her laptop and sixty-two pieces of gristly bone, the only recognizable parts of which were her foot, a finger and half a jaw, all of which were sent to the labs.

“Will you be in early tomorrow?” asked Jack as he and Mary prepared to part for the evening.

“At sparrow’s fart,” she replied. “I’ve asked Mrs. Singh to expedite that identification, and I’d like to have the news as soon as possible.”

“Will you tell Josh as soon as you have confirmation?”

“Of course.”

“In charge of your first NCD murder inquiry. How does it feel?”

“We don’t
know
it was murder, Jack.”

“It’s murder all right,” he replied. “Take my word for it. Grown women don’t wander into well-posted and extremely hazardous theme parks accidentally.”

“Do you think the three bears have told us the truth?”

“Yes. It’s all turned out pretty much as expected. I wasn’t sure if she was
the
Goldilocks to begin with, but I was in good company: Neither did she. One thing’s for certain, though: The moment she entered the three bears’ house, everything just started to slot into place. She couldn’t have stopped the trail of events even if she’d wanted to. Her visit could only end in one way: with her running out of the bears’ house and into the forest, never to be seen again.”

Worst newspaper (Berkshire):
The Toad
appears at first glance to be the worst, but since it can’t be strictly classed as a “newspaper” owing to its obsession with celebrity exposés and shameless tittle-tattle, the mantle of “worst newspaper” falls to the
Reading Daily Eyestrain
, which uses the “news” stories of road traffic accidents and law court reports merely to give some sort of vague notion of informed credibility to the pages of ads for escort agencies, premium-rate chat lines and dodgy loan shark operations.

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

“
Hello, sweetheart,”
said Madeleine as Jack walked in the door. “What did your psychiatric evaluator have to say?”

“I’m only mad if my car isn’t. If my car is mad, then I’m sane—but I have to
prove
that my car is insane for me to be seen as sane. Is that clear?”

“As mud.”

“And I think we’ve found Goldilocks—or bits of her anyhow.”

“Murder?”

“Possibly. Have you seem Jerome’s pet whatever-it-is today?”

“There was a gnawing sound from behind the hot-water tank,” she replied, “but I didn’t see anything.”

“And the Punches?”

“They are the neighbors… from hell,” she replied coldly.

Jack looked at the partition wall. All was silent. “They seem pretty quiet to me.”

“They’re taking a breather,” replied Madeleine, consulting the kitchen clock. “Since they got in from work, I’ve noticed they have a strict schedule to their arguments—fifty minutes of violent squabbling, then ten minutes’ rest. Regular as clockwork.”

“Oh, come on!” said Jack. “No one fights to a schedule.”

“Three seconds from now,” said Madeleine, donning a set of earplugs. Megan, who was doing her homework on the kitchen table, did the same. Almost immediately there was a thump and a crash from next door, all the pictures on the wall shook, and tiny trails of dust fell from the ceiling. There was silence for a moment, then a scream of laughter and another crash.

Madeleine looked at her husband and raised an eyebrow.

“See?”

“I wonder how they got rid of them in the last neighborhood.”

“Sorry?” said Madeleine, pulling out one of the earplugs.

“I said, ‘I wonder how they got rid of them in the last neighborhood.’"

Madeleine raised a finger in the air. “Good point. I Googled them and found www.hatepunch.co.uk, which is a Web site dedicated to assisting anyone unlucky enough to live near them.”

“And?”

“The Punches are pretty canny and know how to keep quiet as soon as the law or social services come around, and they can drag noise-pollution proceedings out for months—sometimes years. The only sure way to get rid of them quick is to pay them off with a cash ‘gift’ of twenty grand.”

“That’s extortion and possibly demanding money with menaces,” announced Jack. “I can have them for that.”

“Apparently not,” replied Madeleine. “They never
ask
for the money and deny they want it if asked—you just push it through their mail slot, and a week later they decide to move on.”

“Hmm,” said Jack with a grudging respect, “good scam.”

“It’s the
perfect
scam. The residents’ association has already raised half the fee. They want to move fast, before the word gets around that Punch is in the neighborhood.”

“Property prices!” snorted Jack, “Sometimes I wonder if they think of nothing else. But listen: All we’re doing is passing the problem on to somebody else.”

“I think the residents’ association knows that, sweetheart. And what’s more, I don’t think they care.”

“
I
care,” he replied. “There must be
something
we can do.”

There was another crash from next door, which set the ceiling light swinging.

“On the other hand,” he added, “they
are
pretty annoying.”