—Editorial in Amazing Crime, February 23, 2001
Jack got to the station canteen for breakfast. He sat at an empty table and stared absently out the window at the traffic on the Inner Distribution Road. The IDR, as it was known, had been built to alleviate traffic but had exacted a price that the town could ill afford. Several fine streets had been demolished to build it, the heart ripped out of the old town. The whole scheme had rendered itself almost redundant when the M4 took most of the through traffic from the A4, a route that was, despite the huge road-building program, still bottlenecked.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, Baker. How are you?”
It was definitely the wrong sort of question to ask a hypochondriac, but it was too late.
“Not so bad, sir,” he replied, taking a plastic carton out of his knapsack and depositing a bewildering array of pills of all shapes, colors and sizes in a saucer. Jack could have sworn most of them were either Smarties, Skittles or Tic-Tacs, but he didn’t say so.
“The thing is,” continued Baker after swallowing several blue pills and knocking them back with a purple, “I woke up this morning with a runny nose and was, to tell the truth, rather worried.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes. I thought for a moment it might be TB, leprosy or tertiary syphilis.”
Jack humored him, for this was a common source of conversation with Baker. “I thought they checked you for leprosy last year?”
“They did, so it couldn’t be that. TB was out of the question, because I didn’t have a cough, and syphilis wasn’t likely, because I’m rather too young to have it end-stage without the bit in the middle.”
“So it was just a cold, then?”
“It certainly looked like it, but then I thought that maybe it wasn’t mucus coming out of my nose at all.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “No?”
“No, it could be cerebrospinal fluid. I played football on Sunday and had a hefty tackle. It’s possible that I might have a fractured skull.”
“Is that really likely?”
Baker looked down and took a few more pills. “No, not really.”
He looked up again. “Sir, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but Gretel, Ashley and myself would be more than happy to put in a bit of overtime if it meant having another crack at the three pigs.
I know they got off the murder rap and double jeopardy and all that, but if there is a chance of getting them with ‘intentional wounding’ or ‘boiling a large pot without due care and attention,’ then we’re up for it.”
“You know what Briggs says about NCD overtime.”
“We weren’t thinking of getting paid, sir.”
Jack looked at Baker, who was staring at him earnestly. He had even forgotten to sniffle, and the collection of pills and vitamin supplements he was making his way through was, for the moment, untouched.
“I appreciate that, Baker, but I think we’re going to have to just walk away from the porkers. We lost.”
A voice made them both turn.
“I suppose you think this is clever?”
It was Briggs, and he didn’t look very happy.
“Sir?”
Briggs slapped a copy of The Owl on the table in front of him.
“Page eight, Jack,” said Briggs testily. “Page eight, column four.”
Jack turned to the page Briggs had indicated. “‘Splotvian Minister of Antiquities Demands Return of Sacred Gonga’?”
“Below that.”
“‘Nursery Favorite Dies in Wall-Death Drama. Police Ask: Was He Pushed?’”
“It’s a good job it’s only on page eight,” said Briggs angrily. “If you’re trying to whip up some public interest to keep your precious division, I won’t be pleased. And I don’t think the budgetary committee will take to it very well either.”
“I didn’t breathe a word, sir.”
“Then who is asking if he was pushed?”
“No one. Media speculation. He killed himself. Very depressed around Easter—we spoke to his doctor and ex-wife, who confirmed it.”
“When do I see some paperwork?”
“As soon as I get a pathologist’s report from Mrs. Singh. There’s no story, so I think this article will be the first and last.”
Briggs seemed to accept this and nodded sagely. “Very well. Good work, Spratt—and not a dead giant in sight.”
“That’s not funny, sir.”
“Isn’t it? One other thing: Someone’s been spreading a practical joke around the station that you’ve applied to join the Guild of Detectives. Any idea who’s behind it?”
“It’s not a practical joke, sir.”
Briggs looked nonplussed for a moment, then said, “Does Friedland know?”
“What’s it got to do with him?”
“Everything. He’s on the Guild of Detectives’ selection committee for Southern England and probably won’t take very well to someone else at Reading attempting to steal his headlines. Still, he’s a fine and upstanding man. I expect he’ll view your application with all due impartiality.”
“I’m sure he will, sir.”
Briggs missed the sarcasm, stared at Baker and his pills, shook his head and then left, dictating a note to himself about using the offices vacated by the NCD as a possible trophy room for Chymes.
“What was that all about?” asked Mary as she walked up.
Jack shrugged and pointed at the newspaper.
“‘Mad Scientists Distill Pure Wag from Dog’?” she read.
“Above that.”
“Ah! ‘Nursery Favorite Dies in Wall-Death Drama.’”
“Read on.”
She cleared her throat and began: “‘Humpty Dumpty, well-known nursery character and large egg, was found shattered to death beneath his favorite wall in the east of town. His generous donations to charity had made him a much-loved figure in Reading, and his death will be greatly mourned. Four-time giant killer Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, former assistant to the great Friedland Chymes until demoted for incompetence and more recently noted for his misguided attempt to convict the three pigs of murder, is in charge—”
“I get the picture,” interrupted Jack. “Sounds like Chymes is trying to make life difficult for me already.”
Mary was silent. Jack was doubtless correct. Chymes would have every reason to keep the story current and trash him if he was planning on wrestling the case from him. She swallowed hard and wondered if Jack was at all suspicious that she was, for all intents and purposes, working for Friedland. She looked across at him, but he was occupying himself by trimming all the fat from his bacon.
“Don’t like fat?”
“Hate it. My first wife loved it. It made us the perfect couple. All that was left of the joint was a bone.”
“Loved fat?” she asked incredulously.
“Yes. Never ate anything else.”
“Isn’t that very unhealthy?”
“Very. She died.”
Mary covered her mouth in embarrassment and went a deep shade of crimson.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay. It was ten years, seven months and three days ago. I’m completely over it—” He stopped talking as his mobile rang. It was Mrs. Singh. He listened intently for a moment and glanced at Mary and Baker in turn, then told her they’d be over straightaway.
Mary looked uneasy.
“Got a problem with morgues, Mary?”
“No, sir,” she answered truthfully. “I have no problems with morgues. It’s the dead people in them that I’m not too keen on.”
“Good,” said Jack cheerfully. “Finish up your deviled kidneys and we’ll go and view some corpses.”
The smell of formaldehyde reached them long before they had moved past the security desk of the small Victorian building two streets away, and the odor rose to a pungent crescendo as they pushed open the glass-paneled swinging doors. The pathology lab was set out open plan and was lit by a multitude
of strip lights that filled the room with a harsh, unnatural glare. In the center of the lab were four large, white-glazed dissecting tables with a stainless-steel trolley next to each laden with saws, scalpels and other instruments the use of which Mary didn’t really want to try to guess. A microphone dangled from the ceiling above each table, along with an angled theater lamp. It had been a quiet week; none of the tables had anyone on them—except Humpty. As they drew closer, they could see that Mrs. Singh and her assistant had both been busy reassembling Humpty’s shattered shell with surgical tape, the way one might hold a broken vase together while glue was drying.
Mrs. Singh looked up and smiled.
“So you’ve managed to do what all the king’s men couldn’t,” observed Jack in admiration.
An ordinary pathologist would have given Humpty the most cursory of glances, but Mrs. Singh was different. Nursery Crime Division work was all hers, and she wasn’t going to let any possibility of criminal activity slip through her fingers.
“Quite a puzzle,” breathed Mary.
“With one hundred and twenty-six pieces,” replied Mrs. Singh proudly. “They say dead men can’t talk, but this one has spoken volumes. Take a look.”
Humpty was lying on his side with his face away from them. She pointed with a forefinger at the area of his lower back, just next to a little lion tattoo. There was a patchwork of much smaller fragments with the cracks radiating out in different directions.
Jack raised his eyebrows. “This is where he landed?”
She said nothing but beckoned him around to the front and pointed to a more random pattern of breakage just above Humpty’s left eye, this time with no defined center. A myriad of small pieces made up what seemed to be a second small impact area.
“So he bounced, right?”
“No. Your turn, Mary.”
Mrs. Singh looked at Mary, who was taken aback; she wasn’t expecting this to be a quiz.
“A blunt instrument?” ventured Mary.
“Wrong. Look closely at the damage on the lower back again.”
They dutifully walked back around and peered closer. There was a definite point of impact, very small and discolored at the edges.
“Holy shit,” whispered Jack. “He was…shot.”
“Top of the class,” replied Mrs. Singh. “The discoloration is definitely gunshot residue. Someone came up from the other side of the wall and shot him. I’ve requested pathological information about the effect of bullets traveling through very large eggs, but the Home Office hasn’t really got much on the subject—for obvious reasons. I’m hazarding a guess, but as the bullet moved through his liquid center, it set up a hydrostatic shock wave. By the time the bullet exited, the cracks had already encircled his body and…pow. He exploded into fragments. He was dead before he hit the dustbins.”
“Oh, crap,” said Jack.
“What?”
“I just told Briggs that Humpty had committed suicide because of depression brought on by Easter. You’re sure, right?”
“Of course. People who are depressed can get murdered, you know.”
Jack sighed and walked to the front of Humpty’s patchworked corpse to look at the exit wound again. “Caliber?”
Mrs. Singh thought for a moment. “Difficult to say. Skinner will confirm this, but it would have to be a powerful handgun. The distance between entrance and exit is about four feet. Albumen has a high viscosity, so you’d need a powerful slug to get all the way through. If I was forced to an opinion, I’d say something like a .357 or a .44. The slug must have come to earth not more than fifty feet away; I think there will be barely a scratch on it. Find a weapon and ballistics will have a nice easy one for a change.”
“Anything else?”
“Not a lot. We can say for certain that he died between midnight and two in the morning, and you already have my report about the high alcohol levels. There was one other thing that puzzled me, though.” She pointed to his body. “It was this section of shell, here on his waistline—or neckline, if you prefer.”
They peered closer at what would appear to be a small hole.
“Any ideas?” asked Jack.
“It is exactly one-quarter of an inch in width, so I am thinking it was drilled in him—and deliberately, too.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There was a Band-Aid covering it.”
“Drug abuse?”
“Quite possibly. I’ve run the usual tests. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.”
She handed Jack her preliminary report. It wasn’t thick, just a few typewritten pages and a diagram of Humpty’s body with the bullet track marked in red pen.
“You’re a marvel, Mrs. Singh.”
“No,” she replied wearily, “I just do long hours.”
They walked down the corridor deep in thought. Jack was wondering where he was going to start on the investigation and Mary was thinking about how amazed she was that Chymes had been correct. Humpty’s murder was a lot more involved than Jack had thought. If anyone could handle it, Friedland could. They had got used to the smell of the formaldehyde, and the streets of Reading smelled sweeter than they ever had before.
17. The Inquiry Begins
ALIENS BORING, REPORT SHOWS
An official report confirms what most of us have already suspected: that the alien visitors who arrived unexpectedly on the planet four years ago are not particularly bright, nor interesting. The thirteen-page government document describes our interstellar chums as being “dull” and “unable to plan long-term.” The report, which has been compiled from citizenship application forms and interview transcripts, paints a picture of a race who are “prone to put high importance on inconsequential minutiae” and are “easily distracted from important issues.” On an entirely separate note, the aliens were reported to be merging into human society far better than has been expected—the reason for this is unclear.
—Extract from The Owl, June 4, 2001
As they walked back into the office, they found Tibbit standing guiltily by Jack’s chair, which was still moving. He looked like a puppy that had been caught sleeping on the sofa. Jack hid a smile.
“Red rum, Tibbit,” he said.
“Murder?”
“So it appears. Humpty didn’t fall, and he didn’t jump. Mary, we should speak to his ex-wife again.”
Mary picked up the phone, and Jack looked at the photograph of Humpty talking to Charles Pewter, the stockbroker. Humpty’s illogical purchase of Spongg shares seemed as good as anyplace to start an inquiry. He looked at the snap of Humpty with Solomon Grundy. Jack had dismissed him earlier, but now anyone who had a vested interest in the financial health of Spongg Footcare PLC had to be a suspect. He pinned the picture of Humpty and Solomon on the board and stared at it.
Tibbit held up a small evidence bag with two spent twelve-bore cartridges in it.
“These came down from Chymes’s office, sir. DS Flotsam himself brought them in. And do you know what? He’s not really chirpy or cockney at all!”
“It’s an act for Amazing Crime, Otto. Run them across to Skinner, would you? He knows what they’re for.”
Mary opened her notebook and selected a blank page for Chymes’s benefit, then wrote “Grundy,” “.44 caliber,” “28-foot auburn hair” and “Mrs. Dumpty.” She then snapped it shut guiltily and looked up. But no one was watching her.
At that moment two officers walked into the room. One was short and the other long.
The shorter of the two was pale blue in color and had the body layout of a human except with elbows and knees that bent both ways and three fingers and two opposable thumbs on each hand. His police uniform was tailored to fit, but even so he still looked uncomfortable in it. Although Mary had seen pictures of aliens, she’d never actually witnessed one up close before and found herself staring.
“What are you looking at?” asked Ashley innocently, blinking laterally at her, which is unnerving the first time you see it done.
&nbs
p; “Nothing,” mumbled Mary, trying hard not to stare, and she looked away, which felt awkward and more rude, so she looked back and then felt she was staring—and the whole cycle went around again.
She felt herself begin to flush, but Jack, whether sensing her discomfort or not, rescued her by saying, “PC 100111 is a Rambosian. His full name is 1001111001000100111011100100, but that’s a bit of a mouthful, so we just call him Ashley. Ashley, this is DS Mary Mary.”
“Hullo!” said Ashley, putting out a hand for Mary to shake. His hand was unusually warm and adhered to her palm with a dry stickiness that was odd but not unpleasant. As soon as she touched him, however, she had a fleeting and extremely vivid glimpse of herself and this strange creature rolling naked in a slimy and passionate embrace in a shallow marsh under twin setting suns. Ashley quickly pulled his hand away, went bright blue and blinked nervously.
“Is that the time?” he said quickly. “I’ve just remembered there’s something I need to do. Good-bye.”
And he darted out the door.
“Rambosians sometimes project their inner thoughts with touch,” explained Jack. “Did you see anything?”
“Nothing,” replied Mary, a little too firmly for anyone to believe her.
“A good lad,” continued Jack, peering out the door to see if Ashley was out of earshot and lowering his voice. “He’s here as part of the alien equal-opportunities program. No one else would work with him, so he came down to us.”
“Can he do that thought thing in reverse?” asked Mary. “It might be useful.”
“I never asked,” replied Jack. “Why don’t you bring it up with him? But be careful. The first thing you learn about aliens is that they don’t quite…get it.”