Fourth Bear (39 page)

“What’s going on?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“A misunderstanding, sweetness—but it’s all right now.”

“Ahhhhh!” she murmured, watching them both and holding out her hand toward Mr. Punch, who took it and caressed it gently.

“I like an argument with a happy ending. Actually, I just like an argument.” Then she looked at her husband with a coquettish smile and said, “It’s still early. Why don’t you and I get all togged up and have a meal, an excellent bottle of wine and then a stand-up row and a punch-up down at the Green Parrot?”

He reached over and kissed her affectionately. “That sounds like a beautiful idea, Pookums. Can it be a really
serious
punch-up? Like we used to have in the good old days?”

“You’re just a sweet romantic at heart, aren’t you?” she replied tenderly. “I’ll ring up the Green Parrot for a reservation, book a couple of beds at the hospital and alert the finest emergency trauma team in Berkshire—and it’s my treat.”

Jack and Madeleine went back inside and upstairs to bed, shooing Caliban out the door when he tried to follow them. They were both fast asleep a half hour later, the best and deepest sleep for them both in many weeks. And as they slept, Mr. and Mrs. Punch donned their evening dress and knuckle-dusters, Agatha had a heart-to-heart with her husband, and below on the street outside, a single rust bubble popped up on the paintwork of the otherwise pristine Allegro.

Largest flying boat ever:
In 1934 the Soviet Union decided to enter the global-travel world with the mighty Ilyushin-95. With a wingspan of 520 feet and weighing in at almost two hundred tons, this monstrous behemoth of the skies was powered by no fewer than sixty-eight Vokspod-87 290-horsepower radial engines. The first and only attempt to fly it was on June 15, 1934, when it was tugged out into the Caspian Sea, filled with fuel and the pilot and crew told not to return until they “had brought glory on the motherland.” With all engines roaring, the flying boat vanished over the horizon and into legend. Nobody knows what became of it, but it is thought that after failing to get airborne it made landfall in Turkey, where the crew, too worried about the repercussions of failure, quietly sold it for scrap.

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

Jack woke with a start
at 5:30 A.M. He and Madeleine were still entwined, and he carefully unraveled her sleeping form from his before donning a dressing gown and walking into the bathroom. He examined the bruise on his chin where Briggs had thumped him and the one on his head from the rolling pin. He swallowed a couple of Tylenol, relieved himself and went downstairs.

Jack sighed deeply. He had told Briggs he was on a three-month rest, although in reality he was anything but. There were at least two murderers loose in Reading, a mother of all conspiracies was unfolding unseen in front of him, and if what he thought was true, the geopolitical future of the world was very much in the balance. Perhaps. He made some coffee and tapped in to toad-news.com to see if the Gingerbreadman had been caught or shot. He hadn’t.

“Can I come to work with you?”

It was Caliban, sitting on the kitchen table.

“I’m on leave.”

“Sure you are.”

“I am. And get off the table.”

“Please?” implored Caliban as he jumped to the floor.

“There is no place for you in—Hang on,” he added, suddenly thinking of something. “You’re a thieving little swine, aren’t you?”

“One of the finest,” replied Caliban proudly, puffing out his chest.

“Then I may have a job for you.”

“Sorry,” said the ape, wagging a finger at him. “I never steal to order—that would be immoral. I only do it for fun.”

“Okay, then—do you want to have some seriously good fun?”

Caliban nodded vigorously, and Jack ran upstairs to get dressed. He kissed Madeleine, who mumbled something in her sleep along the lines of “Knock ’em dead, tiger.”

Forty minutes later Jack was bumping down the track to the gravel pit and Mary’s Short Sunderland flying houseboat. It was still not yet six-thirty, and the lake was a flat calm. Not so much as a ripple broke the broad expanse of silver, and when Jack walked along the jetty, he could see fish feeding in the gin-clear shallows. It was almost idyllic, and hard to believe that, as likely as not, a ten-mile radius would encompass not only this picture of calm and tranquillity but also a raging psychopath and a fugitive member of Parliament wanted for murder.

Jack knocked twice on the hull door, and after a few minutes it was opened by Mary, who was wrapped up in a dressing gown. She blinked sleepily.

“Shit, Jack, what’s the time?”

“Early.”

“What happened to your face?”

“This one was Briggs,” he said, pointing to his chin, “and this one was Madeleine.”

“Madeleine?”

“It’s all right—we made up. Can I have some coffee?”

“You know where it is. I’ll get dressed.”

Jack walked through the main part of the hull and up into the flight deck, where he lit the gas and put on the kettle. He sat in the copilot’s seat and stared absently at the view. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but he hoped he could fit all the pieces together before the shitstorm
really
began.

Mary reappeared a few minutes later, drying her damp hair with a towel.

“You have an alien stuck to the ceiling,” observed Jack.

“I know,” said Mary, pouring some coffee. “He needed somewhere to stay.”

“How did the date go?”

“Probably the oddest I’ve ever been on. I think our two species are so fundamentally different that any form of physical bond between us is almost inconceivable. Still, he’s fun to be with—and his family is completely nuts. His brother’s called Graham, he has a dopey sister named Daisy, and he—”

Mary realized that she had been gushing a little too much and stopped. Jack hid a smile, and she took a sip of coffee.

“So… what’s going on Jack?”

“Everything. If we don’t get to the bottom of it all within the next twelve hours, then I’m a dead man.”

Mary’s eyes narrowed. “You were serious about all that Bartholomew-being-innocent stuff last night?”

“Absolutely. There’s something rotten in the city of Reading, and it’s up to the NCD to do something about it.”

“So where does the twelve-hour death thing enter into it?”

“Because that’s how long it’ll be before Danvers or Briggs starts checking Bartholomew’s phone records and… and… finds out
that it was me who tipped him off.
”

Mary was stunned. She couldn’t quite believe it.

“You called him so he could escape?”

“I did.”

“Jack—that’s not good. In fact, it’s very much worse than not good—it’s illegal.
Really
illegal. You’ll be bounced out of the force and banged up into the bargain.”

“I had to do it to save his life. He didn’t kill Goldilocks. He’s the patsy, the fall guy. And like all fall guys in a frame-up, he won’t live twenty-four hours. If I hadn’t told him to run, we would have found him hanging by his pajama cord with a convenient confession close by. Everyone walks away, and Goldilocks’s murderer goes free. More important, the
reason
for her death remains secret.”

“So… she wasn’t killed over illegal porridge quotas?”

“Of course not. They were
both
good friends to bears. They were into that harmless little scam
together
—easing the burden of the average bear by free handouts of porridge midmonth. They were working together when photographed at the Coley Park Bart-Mart—and with Vinnie Craps in the background, monitoring them.”

“I get it. So who framed him?”

Jack paused for a minute. “NS-4. I thought at first they were protecting him, but they weren’t—they were setting him up to take the blame for Goldy’s death. They planted the Post-it note in the three bears’ house about Bartholomew meeting Goldilocks on Saturday morning, and they knew he wouldn’t have an alibi for that time period.”

“How did you know it was a plant?”

“Easy. The note referred to ‘Andersen’s
Wood.
’ Ed never called it a wood. It was
always
a forest.”

“As you say,” breathed Mary, feeling a bit stupid that she hadn’t spotted it, “easy. But NS-4? That means this is all wrapped in that dodgy beast known as ‘national interest.’"

“National interest be damned,” replied Jack. “Goldilocks is dead, and the Bruins are fighting for their lives. I tell you, someone’s going to go down for this.”

“Are you going to take it to Briggs?”

Jack sighed. “I can’t. He’s a good cop, but he’s politically motivated. He’ll blab to the seventh floor, and the shutters will bang down tight. As long as NS-4
thinks
we’ve bought into the whole Bartholomew/porridge scenario, then we’re safe. Any hint that we’re not and the pair of us could find ourselves in a trillion pieces at SommeWorld—or somewhere equally imaginative.”

“Good morning,” said a voice from the door. It was Ashley, dressed only in a pair of yellow boxer shorts. “The short pauses and nervous intakes of breath woke me up.”

“There’s some cooking oil in the cupboard,” said Mary. Ash poured himself a glass of oil and sat down.

“So if Bartholomew didn’t kill Goldilocks,” said Mary, “who did?”

“There was
someone else
in the cottage that morning.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because of the porridge temperature differential. It’s been bothering me for days. How could the three bears’ porridge be at such widely varying temperatures when it was all poured at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” said Mary. “Because… of the different bowl sizes?”

“The Guv’nor’s right,” remarked Ashley. “From a
thermodynamic
point of view, that’s just not possible. The bowl with the smallest volume would cool fastest, making Junior’s the coolest—yet his was warmer than Mrs. Bruin’s.”

“Perhaps it’s about surface area?” suggested Mary.

“If that was the case, then Ed’s would have been cooler,” replied Ashley.

“
Exactly,”
said Jack. “This is the scenario as I see it: Goldilocks is investigating the murder of champion cucumber growers around the globe. She is talking to someone who may or may not be a long-dead scientist named McGuffin, who, aside from taking a cheery delight in blowing things up, also dabbled in cucumbers and was connected for a time to QuangTech. Every serious world-championship contender has had his cucumber strain destroyed and himself with it. She is about to go public with what she found out—but someone wants to keep her quiet at all costs and lures her to the three bears’ cottage on Saturday morning by telling her Bartholomew will be waiting for her.”

“How do you know they used Bartholomew as the lure?”

“She was naked in bed when the three bears found her.”

“Of course. And the porridge?”

“I’m coming to that. Her assailant tells her to be there at eight-fifteen, and he arrives just
after
the three bears left for their walk but just
before
Goldilocks arrived. He waits—but the smell of porridge is too tempting, and he eats the coolest porridge—baby bear’s. Then he refills it. But… he’s still hungry, so he eats father bear’s porridge, too. And then he refills
that.
”

“I get it,” said Mary. “So when Goldilocks arrives and tastes the porridge, father bear’s is too
hot
because it’s just been poured, mother bear’s is too
cold
because it was the original pouring, but baby bear’s was just right—and that’s the one she ate.”

“But then… who
was
there that morning?” asked Ashley.

“Who can’t resist porridge?”

“Bears.”

“But there’s a problem,” observed Mary. “Bears are essentially peaceful, and Goldy’s Friend to Bears status would have protected her. And besides, why didn’t they tell you about him? His scent would have been all over the house.”

“Because… he was sleeping with Ed’s wife.”

“You can’t tell that from the porridge, surely?”

“No. Do you remember the three bears all had their own beds? I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but Punch mentioned it last night, and all of a sudden it made sense. Mr. and Mrs. Bruin were sleeping separately because there were
serious
marital problems within the bear family. The interloper in the cottage that morning was another bear, a
fourth
bear.
He
was the one that ate and repoured the porridge.
He
was the one sleeping with Ursula Bruin.
He
was the one waiting for Goldilocks.
He
was the one that killed her—and
he
was the one Ed wanted to tell me about.”