Fourth Bear (40 page)

“Then it was the fourth bear and not Bartholomew who ordered the Gingerbreadman to kill the Bruins?”

“I believe it was. And if he was diddling Ursula under Ed’s nose without being killed, he’s dominant.
Very
dominant.”

“Ed Bruin was ranked sixty-eight in the Reading Ursa Major Bear Hierarchy,” said Mary. “They’re very big on male dominance. Which leaves us with sixty-seven more suspects than we need right now.”

They all sat in silence for a moment, digesting the latest revelations.

“So… continue your scenario?” said Mary.

“Okay. Goldilocks arrives at the cottage about eight-ten, and she’s hungry, so she eats the porridge, accidentally breaks a chair and then undresses to wait for Bartholomew in bed. She falls asleep because she has been up all night working on her story, and she might have been dispatched there and then,
except
the three bears return half an hour early because of Ed’s appointment with the vet. They don’t realize who she is. She gives a truthful account of herself and runs off into the forest.”

“And is never seen again—at least, not alive,” murmured Mary.

“Precisely. Her flight from the cottage is watched by her assailant, who has seen the three bears return and elects to stay hidden—they don’t know he’s arranged this little meeting. He follows her, kills her and dumps the body in SommeWorld, where it is hoped she will either not be found or it will be assumed she died accidentally.”

“Then what?” asked Mary.

“It all goes fine until we start to ask questions and connect Goldy with Obscurity and the cucumber-related deaths. But Ed Bruin is deeply disturbed that a Friend to Bears has died and is suspicious about the fourth bear being in the cottage that morning. He decides to call me, but the fourth bear acts quickly: He orders the Gingerbreadman to kill them and plant the note on Ed’s desk about meeting Bartholomew. If all had gone according to plan, we would arrest and charge Bartholomew and he’d be silenced shortly afterward, and the killings would have looked like an unrelated ursist attack.”

“Had we not got to the forest as quick as we did.”

“
Exactly.”

“Are you saying the Gingerbreadman, the fourth bear and NS-4 are all connected?”

“I’m not sure, but muse on this: Ginger’s been on low-security transportation for over six years yet chooses to break out
exactly
at this time and place. He’s being controlled by someone, I’m almost positive.”

“How do you control the Gingerbreadman?”

“I don’t know. He was in St. Cerebellum’s when Goldilocks died, so that rules him out from the actual murder.”

They all went silent for a moment.

“This is the plan,” announced Jack. “We find out the story Goldilocks was working on. If it was big enough to have her killed, then it’s as big as she boasted. Four unexplained fireballs with world-class cucumber growers at the center of three of them.”

“You think Cripps and the other cucumberistas were murdered and their champions stolen?”

“I do. Cripps must have entered his greenhouse that night and come across an empty sight—holes where his plants had been.”

"‘Good heavens! It’s full of holes.’" murmured Mary. “His final words. Bisky-Batt said the nutritional value of a giant cucumber is almost zero, but perhaps Cripps and the others were working on giant cucumbers to then cross-pollinate with other foodstuffs that
would
be useful. Since GM research is banned in the UK, maybe QuangTech was having a bunch of well-meaning amateurs do their work for them—and occasionally ‘lending a hand’ with visits from the Men in Green.”

“You’re right,” replied Jack. “Fuchsia mentioned something about the MIGs taking core samples and clippings and so forth—and if McGuffin didn’t die and is supervising the research…”

They thought about all this for a while, as it was quite far-fetched, but then NCD investigations generally were, as a rule.

“It’s a solid theory,” said Jack finally, “but we need to know more—and we’ve got a good place to start.”

“Where?”

“The Gingerbreadman. Find him and with a bit of luck he’ll lead us to the fourth bear.”

“We’re going to do a plot device number twenty-six after all,” observed Mary with a smile. “One small thing: How do we find Mr. G. when Copperfield and six hundred officers are running around Reading without a clue?”

Jack said nothing but took a paper evidence package from his jacket and showed it to her.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the gingerbread thumb you shot off.”

“You
removed
evidence from the evidence store? How the hell did you manage that?”

“I have a good friend who steals things for me. This is what we’ll do: Mary, you’ll be with me and we’ll take this broken cookie to Parks. Ashley, I want you to go into the office and pretend everything is as normal. If Briggs or anyone else asks what’s going on, you’re to tell them that Mary is looking into a minor domestic bear incident down at the Bob Southey.”

“You mean lie to a ranking officer?”

“Yes,” said Jack, “and do it well. But remember: no elephants, no pirates.”

Ashley was halfway out the door before Jack called him back.

“What?”

“You’d better get dressed if you’re going to work.”

“Of course,” said Ashley, and he dashed off into the hull of the flying boat.

Strangest degree course:
Gone are the days when only traditional academic disciplines were offered for further study. A quick trawl of UK prospecti reveals that Faringdon University offers a three-year B.A. in Carrot Husbandry, a course that is only mildly stranger than Nuffield’s Correct Use of Furniture or Durham’s Advanced Blinking. Our favorite is the B.A. offered by the University of Slough in Whatever You Want, in which you spend three years doing… whatever you want. Slough has reported, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the pass mark is 100 percent.

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

It was midmorning
when they found Dr. Parks at Reading University’s Charles Fort Center for Cosmic Weirdness. He was giving a lively lecture to a packed auditorium. Pseudoscience had become a popular degree subject in recent years, and Reading University, always eager to provide popular coursework and with its finger pressed hard on the pulse of the zeitgeist, had added the three-year master’s to their roster of unconventional B.A.’s, along with cryptozoology, crop circles and the study of extraterrestial life, which went down quite well with Rambosians, who knew most of the answers anyway—except what all those previous UFO things were, as it certainly hadn’t been them, nor anyone they knew.

Jack and Mary stood near the door and let the talk go over their heads. It was mostly about the feasibility of using the solar wind as a power source for telekinetics, the theoretic possibilities of the existence of a chronosynclastic infundibulum and the likelihood of capturing ball lightning in large glass jars to use as an indefinite light source. Jack and Mary applauded with the others when the talk ended, and they approached Parks as the students filed out.

“Inspector!” said Parks with a friendly smile. “I was meaning to call you.” He shook them both by the hand and started to pack up his notes and the carousel of slides that had accompanied his talk.

“You were?”

“Yes, I found some information about the blast on the Nullarbor Plain. In October 1992 a seismic survey on a routine oil exploration reported an explosion of some sort to the National Parks Authorities. They sent out a survey team, expecting to find a meteorite strike. Instead they found glass.”

“Glass?”

“Glass. Fused sand, to be precise. Circular in shape, about the size of a soccer field; the glass was four inches thick in the center and thinned out toward the edge. A few hundred thousand degrees for a very short time.”

“What do you think it was?”

Parks took the small piece of fired earth from the padded envelope. “I think it was the same type of blast we saw at Obscurity. Intense heat, very little radiation. Some form of advanced thermal weapon, tested clandestinely in the Nullarbor. If you wanted to sterilize an area of land quickly and easily, a heat bomb of the description I’ve given you would be just the way to do it. And if you didn’t want your competitors to figure out what was going on, you’d make damn sure you removed the evidence.”

“QuangTech,” murmured Jack. “Perhaps they didn’t disband their Advanced Weapons Division after all.”

“That would be good news for the conspiracy industry if true,” said Parks excitedly, adding after a moment’s thought, “or even if not true. Did you want to see me about something?”

“Yes,” replied Jack. “Do you have a scanning electron microscope?”

“Not officially, but the SEM operator here is heavily into the whole yeti/bigfoot/sasquatch noncontroversy and so could probably be swung.”

Jack showed him the gingerbread thumb, still in the evidence bag.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“It certainly is. I’d like you to see if there is anything unusual about it on the granular level. On the face of it, gingerbreadmen are usually passive victims at teatime and not homicidal maniacs, so I need to know more—and I need to know it
now.
”

“I’ll get onto it straightaway.”

They thanked Parks and walked out of the center.

“Why didn’t Copperfield think of doing that?” said Jack.

“Because he’s not NCD?” suggested Mary. “Or because he’s a twit?”

“Probably both.”

He pulled out his cell phone and called the NCD office.

“Hullo!” said Ashley cheerfully. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“The office has been bugged. When I got there, I could hear the buzz of the encoded binary radio transmission.”

“Tell me you’re not still in the office.”

“No. I’m in the roof space just behind the third-floor toilets reading the phone traffic as it leaves the exchange. It’s made me a bit tipsy. Did you know that Pippa has a bun in the oven?”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, she was talking to her mother all about it. And what’s more,” continued Ashley, “the father is Peck—you know, in uniform with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park?”

“What’s going on?” asked Mary.

“Pippa’s pregnant by Peck.”

“Pippa Piper picked Peck over Pickle or Pepper?” exclaimed Mary incredulously. “Which of the Peck pair did Pippa Piper pick?”

“Peter ‘pockmarked’ Peck of Palmer Park.
He
was the Peck that Pippa Piper picked.”

“No, no,” returned Mary, “you’ve got it all wrong.
Paul
Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked Peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound on Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Proctor from Pocklington.”

There was a pause.

“It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?” mused Jack.

“Yes,” agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. “I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”

Jack turned his attention back to Ashley. “Has Briggs called the office?”

“Several times. I told him Mary was down at the Bob Southey, and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, as I’m merely window dressing for better alien-sapien relations. More interestingly, Agent Danvers has called Briggs on several occasions.”

“You eavesdropped on Briggs’s private telephone conversations?”

“Not at all,” replied Ashley. “I’ve eavesdropped on
everyone’s
conversations. How did you think I found out about Pippa and Peck?”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” replied Jack, whose interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was becoming more elastic by the second. “What did Danvers want?”

“She wanted to know where you were so she could have a chat. Briggs was commendably evasive—said you were dangerously insane and safely on leave, where you could do no real harm except possibly to yourself.”

“Did he, now? Did you get anything on Hardy Fuchsia?”

“And how. Before he retired, he spent forty years in the nuclear-power industry.”

“He referred to Prong, Cripps, McGuffin and Katzenberg as colleagues,” observed Jack thoughtfully.

“Precisely. They
all
worked together at various times—in nuclear-fusion R&D.”

Jack told him he was a star, Ashley asked him which one, Jack said it didn’t matter and then rang off.

“Let’s get over to Sonning and talk to Fuchsia,” said Jack. “It looks like our scatty and mostly dead cucumber fanciers were all retired nuclear physicists.”