Fourth Bear (33 page)

The Gingerbreadman was only slightly stunned. He sat up on the forest floor and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Wow!” he murmured to himself, then chuckled, shook his head and looked around to see what had become of the sporting rifle. At the same time, not more than ten feet away on the other side of the tree, Jack and Mary cautiously pushed open the twisted doors of the Allegro and looked around warily to see what had become of the Gingerbreadman. They all quickly noticed one another.

“Inspector Spratt!” said the Gingerbreadman cordially. “We meet again! And you
still
not even attached to this inquiry. Briggs and Copperfield
will
have something to say!”

He got to his feet and started to look around for the Holland & Holland more seriously, talking as he did so. “I do so wish you were on the hunt for me,” he said with a grin. “I really don’t think that Copperfield chap is up to it.”

Jack rolled out of the car and grabbed a stout branch, swung it above his head and swiped the Gingerbreadman on the back of the head. The blow bounced off his cakey body without effect. The Gingerbreadman turned to him, oblivious to the impact.

“If he thinks a massive display of firepower will bring me down, he’s badly mistaken. This is the second time you’ve found me, Jack. People will think you have a hidden agenda.”

“Why shoot the Bruins?” demanded Jack, giving up on the branch and joining in the hunt for the Holland & Holland. Mary was putting out a call to the station to upgrade her backup to
armed
backup.

“I needed a place to hole up, Jack,” replied the Gingerbreadman in a deep, doughlike voice, his cherry eyes flicking this way and that as he searched the undergrowth for the gun. “You may not have noticed, but I’m public enemy number one at the moment.”

“It hadn’t escaped my attention,” replied Jack, “but why here and now? And blaming the attack on hunters. Since when were you
ever
ashamed of taking the credit for some utterly mindless display of violence?”

“You ask a lot of questions for a very puny and insignificant human, don’t you?” said the Gingerbreadman as he stopped the search for the gun and stared at Jack with just the kind of look you wouldn’t want from a psychopath.

“It’s my job,” replied Jack, sensing that if he didn’t find the gun and gain the high ground, he might be pushing up daisies quite soon.

“Who needs a gun anyway?” asked the Gingerbreadman, catching Jack by the wrist. He tried to pull away but was held fast in the big cookie’s iron grip. The Gingerbreadman smiled cruelly as he placed his other hand on Jack’s body, meaning to pull his arm off, just as you might twist the leg off a roast chicken on the dinner table.

“I like this bit,” he announced, his cherry eyes flashing cruelly. His grip tightened around Jack’s wrist, and he started to pull. He smiled. He
was
having fun. Jack’s face contorted with the pain, and he gave a cry of agony as he felt the tendons stretch tight in his arm.

But the Gingerbreadman didn’t pull his arm off. Abruptly, he relaxed his hold. Jack looked up at him, but the Gingerbreadman was looking past Jack, his licorice eyebrows raised in exclamation.

“Careful,” he said to Mary, who had found the Holland & Holland and was now pointing it at him. “You might hurt someone.”

Mary slid off the safety with a loud
click.
“That’s the idea.”

The Gingerbreadman’s licorice mouth drooped at the corners. “Be careful, miss,” he repeated as he let Jack fall into a heap at his feet. “That’s a .600-caliber elephant gun loaded with Nitro Express cartridges. It has a muzzle energy of over eight thousand foot-pounds—the recoil can dislocate a shoulder!”

“I’ll be careful,” replied Mary evenly. “Just step away from Jack and lie facedown on the ground with your arms outstretched.”

They were less than ten feet apart, and Mary couldn’t have missed. The Gingerbreadman took a step back but didn’t lie facedown. He stared at Mary and narrowed his eyes, wondering what course of action to take.

“Have you ever killed anyone, miss?”

“
JUST LIE FACEDOWN ON THE GROUND!”

“No,” said the Gingerbreadman simply. “I’ve been locked in St. Cerebellum’s for twenty years, and I’m not going back. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to fire.”

Mary’s finger tightened on the trigger. She was in no doubt that the Gingerbreadman would have killed her after he had dealt with Jack and would kill again, given the chance. There was no decision to make. She
would
shoot him. In the back, if necessary—and to hell with procedure.

The Gingerbreadman, despite his resigned attitude, was not out of tricks. He turned and jumped to one side, leaped back again and then ran away, zigzagging crazily. He knew, as Mary soon found out, that a heavy elephant gun wasn’t designed to follow a fast-moving object, and by the time Mary had him in her sights, he jinked out again. Mary gave up following him and held the gun still, waited for him to leap back into her sights, and then she squeezed on the trigger.

There was a concussion like a thunderclap, and for a moment Mary thought the gun had exploded. She was pushed violently backward, caught her foot on a tree root and fell over in an untidy pile. When the smoke had cleared, the forest was empty. She had missed; the Gingerbreadman had escaped.

“You all right, sir?”

“Fine,” said Jack, rubbing his shoulder and standing up as the distant wail of sirens brought the outside world once more into the forest. “What about you?”

“Pissed off I didn’t kill him, sir.”

“I can understand that.”

Mary reloaded the rifle from the cartridge belt the Gingerbreadman had discarded and walked slowly up the road to make sure that he wasn’t wounded and lying out of sight. She looked around carefully, satisfied herself that he was long gone and then picked something up from the ground before she returned to Jack.

“I didn’t miss after all,” she announced, showing Jack what she’d found. In her hand was a single gingerbread thumb.

Most coincidence-prone person:
Mrs. Knight (née Day) of Wargrave, Berkshire, holds several world records for the quantity and quality of the coincidences that assail her every waking hour. “It’s really more of a burden,” she replied when interviewed. “Every wrong number I get turns out to be a lost relative or something. I can’t walk in the street for fear of bumping into an endless parade of long-forgotten school friends.” Her powers of coincidence question the very dynamics of time, leading some scientists to theorize that cause and effect are actually two sides of a cosmic scale that have to be in balance—and that Mrs. Knight may be a beacon of effect where orphaned causes flock, like moths to a lamp.

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

“
You better have
a good explanation for this, Spratt—how many times do I have to tell you the Gingerbreadman is
not
your inquiry?”

Briggs wasn’t in a terribly good mood. True, he was never
really
in a good mood, but right now he was less so than usual. He liked to think that there existed a strong feeling of trust between his officers and that they wouldn’t go against what he had told them. He had trusted Jack more than most, which annoyed him especially.

“I know this might seem a bit hard to swallow, sir, but this is a coincidence as well.”

“Oh, yes?” replied Briggs, “And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t arrest you for working while suspended?”

“Because you like me and I’m good and I’m the only chance you’ve got to catch the Gingerbreadman.”

Briggs fell silent. He’d begun to think exactly the same. They were standing outside the three bears’ cottage. The trauma team from the Bob Southey Medical Center had turned up promptly and without getting lost; they were an immediate blur of action upon arriving at the scene, successfully stabilizing Ed and Ursula before gently transferring them into ambulances and vanishing back to Reading in a blare of sirens.

The human contingent took a little longer to get there, as they
did
get lost, but wasted no time as soon as they arrived: Police photographers covered every angle of the two shootings as the white-overalled SOCO officers went through the small cottage to find anything that might show either where the Gingerbreadman was going or where he had been. Jack sat and glowered at all the activity; if the Gingerbreadman hadn’t been involved, then Mary would have had to go begging to Briggs for resources, as usual.

As if the whole thing weren’t bad enough already, NS-4 had turned up in a shiny black Ford Scorpio, and Agent Danvers insisted her “associates” have a good look around. Even more annoyingly, Danvers also wanted to hear Jack’s appraisal of the situation. Briggs declared that this was a police matter but was swiftly overruled by Danvers, who called the Chief Constable personally.

“How is the attempted murder of two bears a national security issue?” asked Jack.

“It just is,” replied Danvers shortly. “Mr. Demetrios
himself
has requested that we attend.”

“No good can come of squabbling,” announced Briggs, “so why don’t you tell us what you know, Jack, and we can take it from there. Let’s face it, this is one hell of a mess. Berkshire has the best record of Ursidae equality in the European Union. When the Animal Equality Federation gets hold of this, the shit’s really going to hit the fan.”

“At least you know who did it.”

“I suppose so. What were you doing out here anyway?”

“Ed Bruin called me. He said he wasn’t happy and needed to talk.”

Jack felt Danvers’s eyes bore into him but pretended not to notice.

“About the Gingerbreadman?” asked Briggs.

“About Goldilocks.”

“Her death wasn’t an accident, was it?”

“No, sir.”

“Sir,” said Mary as she walked up and handed Jack two clear plastic envelopes. One had a note handwritten in highly distinctive ursine-styled cursive script, the other a photograph. “I thought you’d better see these—I found them on Ed Bruin’s desk.”

Briggs and Copperfield leaned over his shoulder to read the note.

"‘Mr. Curry, Sat., 8:15 A.M., Andersen’s Wood,’" read Briggs.

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Jack slowly, thinking carefully, “that ‘Mr. Curry’ was to meet Goldilocks the morning she died.”

“And who’s Mr. Curry?” asked Copperfield.

“It was a code name for Goldilocks’s boyfriend. A man named…
Sherman Bartholomew.
”

Briggs started as though stuck with a cattle prod, and Danvers beckoned to one of her minders and whispered something in his ear.

“Are you nuts?” asked Briggs. “That’s one of the least likely things I’ve ever heard.”

“I thought so, too,” replied Jack, “but it’s true—they’d been seeing each other for more than a year.”

“Why meet here?”

Jack showed Briggs the photograph Mary had just passed him. It was of Mr. and Mrs. Bruin with baby bear as a cub-in-arms. They were outside the cottage with a grinning Sherman Bartholomew. It had been taken over ten years ago, and beneath was written “Feb. 4th 1993, the Ursine Suitable Housing Bill gives us a home shortly after adopting Junior. L–R: Ed, Ursula, Nigel, Bartholomew.”

“Sherman was their barrister in his pre-parliamentary days, sir. It was hardly any wonder they let him use their house for his little trysts. They
owed
him.”

“Okay, you’ve got a link with the Bruins and a note from father bear
without
Bartholomew’s name. That’s not a burning bush, Jack.”

“There’s more, sir. Bartholomew can’t account for his movements until nine-thirty on Saturday morning, and then there’s Ed Bruin’s note on the floor in his own blood. ‘SOB dnt trst.’
S
herman
O
scar
B
artholomew.”

Briggs rubbed his temples. Bartholomew was close with the Mayor and the Chief Constable, and if there was any sort of error, the repercussions would ripple down the ranks like dominoes.

“So… how does the Gingerbreadman fit into all of this?” asked Copperfield, who wasn’t pleased that Jack’s inquiry had significantly progressed while his hadn’t.

“Bartholomew defended him at his trial. Perhaps he felt he was indebted in some way.”

“He got four hundred years without parole,” said Briggs. “How would you thank your barrister for that?”

“Bartholomew had the sentence reduced from five hundred. It’s not much, but Ginger must have taken it to heart.”

“Okay,” said Briggs, “you’ve got a dying bear who etched Bartholomew’s initials in blood, a note placing him in the forest at the same time and a cake who owed him favors—it’s a bit circumstantial, and you know how the the prosecutors have trouble understanding NCD cases. Give me something
concrete,
Jack—like a motive.”