The Big Over Easy (17 page)

The Grundy residence
was an exquisitely restored Jacobean mansion set above the river Thames, with scrupulously maintained oak parkland that stretched to the water’s edge. South facing and away from any built-up areas, it ranked alongside Castle Spongg and Basildon House as one of the finest examples of period architecture in the Reading area. As Jack and Mary motored down the long graveled drive, they could see that Maison Grundy had been erected on the site of something much older. The church behind the house was considerably older than the mansion itself, and the barns, outbuildings and stables older still. When they arrived in the courtyard at the rear, stable lads were busily grooming some fine-looking Thoroughbreds whose dark coats shone, even in the gray overcast.

They parked the car and got out to see a woman on a large bay horse come thundering across the parkland towards them, throwing up divots of sod behind her. She slowed her mount to cross the roadway, and as she drew closer, they could see she was dressed in a long skirt that seemed faintly Victorian with a high-collared blouse buttoned up to her throat; on top of this she wore a blue velvet riding jacket.

“Hullo!” she said, dismounting expertly from the sidesaddle and handing the reins to a stable boy. “Are you here about the deathwatch beetle?”

She was barely in her mid-twenties and was extraordinarily pretty in an English rose sort of way, with large eyes, a perky smile and a porcelain complexion. She was slightly flushed and out of breath from her ride.

“No, Mrs. Grundy,” said Jack, holding up his ID card. “We’re police. I’m Inspector Jack Spratt, and this is Sergeant Mary Mary. We’d like to talk to you about Humpty Dumpty.”

She looked shocked for a moment but quickly recovered. She smiled delightfully at them both and said, “Well, you better come inside, then,” adding to a stable boy, “Callum, have Stranger made ready for this afternoon and check Duke, would you? I think he might have thrown a shoe.”

As they walked towards the house, she placed her whip under her arm and removed her gloves. “We have a deathwatch beetle problem in the church,” she explained. “I was hoping you were here to have a look at it. Terrible things, you know, can eat a building away from the inside like cancer, so Solly tells me.”

They walked in through the front door to where four dogs of varying sizes and a footman were waiting to greet them. She patted the golden retriever and handed her whip and gloves to the footman, who gave a curt bow. She told him to bring tea into the drawing room and then led them down a hall bedecked with portraits of the Grundy family through the ages, all of whom—male or female—had the same pugnacious, bullnecked Grundy look. The dogs all followed, wagging their tails happily.

“The family resemblance is uncanny,” remarked Mary.

“Not really,” replied Mrs. Grundy with surprising directness.

“Solomon sat for them all. The Grundy family tree in reality leads nowhere—Solly was found wrapped in a copy of the
Reading Mercury
outside Battle Hospital sixty-nine years ago. It makes his achievements all that more remarkable.”

She ushered them into the large and opulent drawing room, flopped onto a sofa and put her feet up on an expensive coffee table. A terrier made itself comfortable on her lap and the other dogs jumped onto the various sofas.

“Please,” she said, “take a seat. Don’t be afraid to push Max off; he’s a brute—Down, Spike! Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“Just routine stuff, Mrs. Grundy,” said Jack. “We need you to confirm the whereabouts of your husband on the night of the Spongg Charity Benefit.”

“Is he a suspect?” she asked as she blinked her large eyes.

“We need to eliminate your husband from our inquiries, Mrs. Grundy.”

“Please,” she said as she removed her riding hat and a hair clasp to allow acres of luxuriant auburn hair to tumble into her lap, and the sofa, and the coffee table, and the floor, “call me Rapunzel.”

Jack and Mary exchanged glances as her long red tresses lapped at their feet like the incoming tide. They had the same thought: the twenty-eight-foot human hair found at Grimm’s Road.

“Very well, Rapunzel. You were with your husband that night?”

“Of course. I escorted him to the Spongg Charity Benefit as I do all social events. I stayed at his side the whole evening—as Solomon likes me to do.”

“Then you were with him when Humpty made the offer to sell his stake in Spongg’s?”

“I was. I think Mr. Dumpty was very drunk; in any event, the ten million he offered was quite correctly refused by Solly. It isn’t good form to talk business while drunk at a charity do.”

“And you were with Solomon until the morning?”

“Yes, here at the house.”

Jack thought for a moment. He wasn’t going to beat around the bush, and he knew it wasn’t likely he’d be able to talk to her again.

“When did you visit Humpty’s offices at Grimm’s Road?”

She looked stunned for a moment and then glanced around to see whether any of the servants were within earshot. They weren’t, but she lowered her voice anyway.

“Solomon can
never
know!”

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” said Jack. “I just want to find who murdered Humpty.”

“So do I!” she cried, tears welling up in her eyes. “If I even
suspected
that Solly had him killed, I would be out of that door like a shot. No one knows Solomon as I do. He’s not as bad as everyone makes out. He might buy venerable old companies and strip their assets, causing numerous layoffs and the odd corporate suicide or two, but that’s business. Inside, he’s a big teddy bear.”

“If he does know about you and Humpty,” said Jack, “it gives him a very strong motive.”

“Rapunzel!” bellowed a voice from the hall. “Rapunzel, my dove!”

Jack and Mary froze. There was no mistaking the gruff voice of Solomon Grundy, even tempered by domesticity, and they both felt as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t.

“In here, my love,” called Rapunzel, staring unhappily at Jack and Mary. “I’ve just let my hair down in the drawing room.”

Solomon was smiling as he walked in, but the smile soon dropped from his face when he saw Jack and Mary.

“What the blazes are they doing here?”

“Eliminating you from their inquiries, honey-bunny.”

Jack and Mary stood up as Grundy marched across to them. He discarded his briefcase on the floor and stopped only inches from Jack’s face.

“I could have you both killed, buried, and they’d never find the bodies,” he growled menacingly, “but I won’t, because that’s not what I do.” He took a step back and rested a hand on Rapunzel’s shoulder; she held it tightly.

“How dare you come into my house? You’re an interfering meddling pain in the arse, Inspector.”

“It’s what I do, sir.”

“And very well, by the look of it.”

Grundy paused and thought for a moment. Then looked at Rapunzel.

“I know of my wife’s infidelities, Inspector.”

Rapunzel gave a small cry and put a hand to her mouth. He sat down next to her. His anger had left him, and the big man spoke now in gentler tones—almost compassionately.

“I am an old man with a young wife,” he said slowly, “and I know that younger women have needs. I knew all about her visits to Grimm’s Road, but I chose to do nothing. It’s better that way. I am sixty-nine and am not healthy—I have perhaps five years of life left in me. I want to spend it with a beautiful wife whom I would give anything to keep—even if it means turning a blind eye and being a cuckolded husband.”

“Oh, Solly!” said Rapunzel, pressing her cheek to his large hand and sobbing bitterly. “I’m so sorry!” Despite everything, she had a genuine affection for the man.

“If you want to know whether I had Humpty killed, the answer is a categorical
no.
I am a businessman. I cannot afford the luxury of violent revenge. I would have been happy to ruin him financially, but murder? I wouldn’t get my capital back, and I would inevitably end up in prison. I’m a logical man; I never invest money or time that I can’t afford to lose, and I certainly can’t afford to lose any years off my life. I found out long ago that you can make a fortune in this world far more efficiently by using the law to your advantage than by breaking it.”

He looked away from them and rested his cheek on his wife’s forehead. It was a tender moment between a bullying tyrant and an attractive woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Jack suddenly felt as though he were intruding.

“Are there any more questions, Inspector?” asked Solomon without looking up.

“No,” said Jack, rising to his feet. “Thank you for your time, Mr. and Mrs. Grundy. We’ll see ourselves out.”

They left the couple holding each other on the drawing room sofa, accompanied by four dogs and twenty-eight feet of the most beautiful hair either of them had ever seen.

“That was unexpected,” said Mary as they walked back to the Allegro.

“Shows that looks can be deceptive. I’m sure his business competitors would be surprised to know that old Grundy had a soft side to his nature. Extraordinary hair, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” replied Mary thoughtfully, then adding as a practical afterthought, “but think of all that brushing!”

They hadn’t been
wasting time back at the NCD offices. It was Ashley who had come up with the first good lead. He had put a name to the man in the photograph, the one in Humpty’s still-untraced Ford Zephyr.

“Who?” asked Jack.

“Thomas Timothy Thomm. DI Drood down at Missing Persons found him. I did you a printout of his record—but on
acetate
so you could still look at your desk while reading it.”

“Very…thoughtful of you, Ashley.”

It seemed that Thomm was the son of the Reading Philharmonic’s premier flautist. Unable to stop an unexplained compulsion to steal pigs, he was sent at age sixteen to a young offender’s institute to “straighten him out.” It achieved the opposite, and after being in and out of jail for a number of offenses, he was eventually sentenced to fifteen years for armed robbery. He had been released on parole two years previously.

“Looks like he’s prime NCD jurisdiction,” murmured Jack.

“They should have sent him through to me. Where is he now?”

“That’s the thing,” observed Ashley. “He’s not been seen
at all
for over a year. Didn’t turn up for parole meetings—there is an outstanding arrest warrant, and his parents have put him on the Missing Persons register. I’m trying to contact his parole officer and see what else I can learn.”

“More questions!” said Jack in exasperation. “It’s about time we had some bloody answers!”

Baker had been in town making inquiries but had drawn a blank. No one had seen Humpty for over a year, leading some wag in Humpty’s old local to remark that he was surprised to find that Humpty was still alive to be murdered. Baker questioned him further, but it seemed that the man was only reflecting Humpty’s slightly downmarket business reputation. “Shady” was the word the man used, although neither he nor anyone else could say who had actually fallen foul of him. Indeed, everyone Baker met commented on how much he was liked. Humpty’s womanizing was well known, but Baker didn’t find out much more.

“Out of sight for over a year?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Baker. “Apart from his neighbors around Grimm’s Road, no one’s seen anything of him at all.”

“In hiding?” murmured Jack, half to himself.

“It would explain the drab office at Grimm’s Road. No one would expect to see him at that end of town. But if he’s in hiding, why pop up blind drunk at the Spongg Charity Benefit?”

“Prometheus said he thought Humpty was saying good-bye to him the last time they met. Perhaps Humpty knew he wasn’t long for this world. He offered all his shares to Grundy for ten million. Sounds pretty last-ditch to me. Anything on Bessie Brooks?”

“Still nothing. She withdrew two hundred pounds in cash last night from the city center, so she’s still in the area.”

“I’ll release her name and picture to the press.”

“Sir?”

It was Gretel. Jack walked into the filing room that she was using as her office. The small room was awash with papers, faxes and financial reports.

“What news?”

She put her pen down and leaned back in her chair. “Complex, sir, very complex.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s about gold.”

“Gold?” queried Jack “What is it?”

“It’s a yellow-colored precious metal. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

“Old joke, Gretel. What about it?”

“Well, eighteen months ago Mr. Dumpty comes into a large quantity of bullion. No assay marks, the finest available.”

She held up a receipt.

“He sells it to buy shares in Spongg’s. He does the same thing a week later, then a week after that. He claims it is scrap and it requires no documentation. As he sells more and more, the markets in London get suspicious—they start to offer him a lower price, as they think it might be stolen. He eventually finds a ready market in Wozbekistan, Malvonia, Woppistania and a few other tattered remnants of the former Soviet Union where no questions are asked. Except there’s a problem. They can’t give him the hard currency he needs. He swaps it for copper, scrap, béarnaise sauce, strawberries, anything that can be sold in the West and realize its value. If you turn up his passport, I think you’ll find he has enough frequent-flier miles to go to Jupiter. He’s been all around the world selling gold, solely to purchase Spongg shares. Every time he had some cash, he went to Pewter.”

“How much gold has he sold?” asked Jack.

“About two and a half million pounds’ worth.”

“That’s a lot of gold. Where do you think he got it?”

“How about another illegal spinning-straw-into-gold den?” suggested Baker.

“Not since we banged up…what was his name again?”

“Rumplestiltskin?”

“Right. But check he’s still inside, just to make sure. Any other gold missing?”

Gretel shook her head. “That’s the problem. Nothing of this volume has been stolen recently, but muse on this: The first batch of Spongg shares was bought four days after the woodcutters’ murder.”

“So you’re saying the woodcutters found some gold, were murdered, then Dumpty—he might not be the actual killer—starts to sell it himself?”

“It’s a possibility,” observed Gretel.

“Hmm,” murmured Jack. “It wouldn’t be the first time that anyone was killed over a piece of yellow metal. Good work, Gretel. I owe you several large drinks for this. See if you can find out where he got the gold from. Missing bullion consignments—anything. Go back fifty years if you have to.”

Mary had joined them.

“I spoke to Tom Thomm’s father. Get this: Tom was sponsored for early release…by Humpty.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?”

“He got Tom a job as a lab assistant in Goring two years ago. Six months after that, Tom leaves the job and comes into some cash. Buys his father a new car and his mother a new hip. Then, about a year ago, he vanishes from sight.”

Jack cocked his head to one side and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The date of Thomm’s enrichment matched the date of the woodcutters’ death, and it seemed likely that if Humpty didn’t kill the woodcutter and his wife, then perhaps Tom Thomm did.

He addressed the NCD office.

“Listen up, everyone. We have a definite lead and a time scale that seems to fit. Here it is: Tom Thomm and Dumpty meet two years ago when Humpty is sponsoring him for early release. Dumpty gets Thomm a job, which he keeps until the same time as the woodcutter and his wife are murdered.”

He paused for a moment.

“I’d say almost certainly that Tom Thomm killed the woodcutter and brought the gold to Dumpty to sell.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Baker?”

“I thought the Russian mafia killed the woodcutter? Chymes’s investigation of the case was well documented in
Amazing Crime
.”

“Then let’s say Tom
stumbles
across the gold
after
the Russian mafia kills the woodcutters and takes it to Humpty. Yes, Ashley?”

“Could Tom Thomm have killed Dumpty?”

“It’s possible, but why? Tom Thomm wouldn’t have been able to sell the gold any more efficiently than Dumpty. Either way, we need to find this Thomm fellow. He’s a strong link in the whole inquiry. Yes, Baker?”

“Rumplestiltskin is still inside,” he said, turning from the Police National Computer terminal. “He didn’t supply the gold.”

“Good. Where was I?”

“Buying Spongg shares?”

“Right. Humpty uses the gold to buy thirty-eight percent of Spongg stock, but for the last year he has been in hiding at Grimm’s Road. On Sunday night he has a voluble argument with a Miss Bessie Brooks, who we can’t find, goes to the Spongg Charity Benefit, gets completely plastered and offers his entire Spongg holding to Solomon Grundy. Grundy turns him down flat, and Humpty tells him that his stock will be worth a lot more ‘this time next year.’ Humpty then blurts out that he will pledge fifty million to rebuild St. Cerebellum’s, is taken home in Randolph Spongg’s own car and six hours later he’s shot dead.”

“He thought the share price would go up,” observed Mary.

“Exactly. Spongg prices are dropping daily, but he’s still buying, so he knows something we don’t. He goes to sit on his wall to sleep off the booze, and someone comes up behind him and shoots from a range of three to four feet with a .44 caliber. What did Mrs. Singh say the time of death was?”

“Between one and three
A.M
.”

“Right. Humpty collapses stone dead into the backyard of 28, Grimm’s Road, where he is discovered by his landlady at seven-thirty
A.M
. It was raining, so a lot of evidence has been washed away. The following day his ex-wife confesses to his murder and then kills herself—she didn’t do it but must have
thought
she had. The twenty-eight-foot-long hair came from Mrs. Grundy, who was having an affair with Humpty. Grundy knew about it and said he didn’t mind, which kind of throws the jealous-husband motive out the window.”

He stopped and looked at them all.

“I don’t think we’re halfway there yet. Any questions?”

“Wee Willie Winkie,” said Gretel.

“A good point. Winkie was Humpty’s next-door neighbor and is violently murdered early this morning. It’s possible he saw something and tried to blackmail them, but we don’t know for sure. Same as this white van that was seen outside Humpty’s and also where we found Winkie. Bear it in mind, but it could be nothing.”

“Don’t Winsum and Loosum’s use white vans?”

“Yes—and half the companies in Berkshire. Any questions?”

There weren’t. They all knew what they had to do.

“One other thing,” said Jack. “A certain DCI named Friedland Chymes wants to take over this investigation and will do almost anything to do so. I want all approaches from him or a member of his staff reported to me. Let’s keep gossip to a minimum, too. Okay, that’s it. Find me Thomm and where Humpty has been living this past year, and we need to speak to Bessie Brooks.”

There was an unseemly rush for the only available chairs. Gretel, as usual, won.

“What do you think about Winkie?” asked Jack.

“I’m not sure,” replied Mary. “If he’d been shot with a .44 caliber, I might be a bit more positive. He might simply have been mugged; the fifty-pound notes could have been his.”

“I agree. Listen: If we can discover Humpty’s plan for raising his share value, we’ll find the motive for killing him.”

“Then why don’t we speak to Spongg again?” suggested Mary. “After all, he stood to gain far more than Humpty ever did from a hike in the share prices.”