The Big Over Easy

  “No thanks,” said Jack quickly.

  Professor Tarsus grunted, then shuffled to one side of the room and pulled a sheet off a big glass cabinet. The lock had been forced, and inside the empty cabinet was a large cotton pad the shape of an inner tube. On the side were precise controls that monitored temperature and humidity. Jack’s nose wrinkled at the cheesy odor it exuded. Tarsus pointed at the empty case with a petulant air, as if they could somehow magically restore his property.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Jack, “I don’t have any details of your break-in. We’re investigating several murders in the Reading area, and we hoped you might be able to help.”

  Tarsus looked at them all suspiciously. “Murders? How can the Foot Museum be connected?”

  “Thomas Thomm, Professor,” said Mary, “we understand he used to work here?”

  “The name means nothing to me, Nancy.”

  “He worked as a lab assistant—sponsored by Mr. Dumpty. You might have known him as…Ronald.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so? Yes, I remember Ron very well. He was Dr. Carbuncle’s assistant. Left about a year ago.”

  “Dr. Carbuncle?” repeated Jack, making a note. “Is he here?”

  “He took early retirement,” replied Tarsus. “Ron even lived in his house for a bit, I understand. Nancy can tell you more. NANCY!”

  He bellowed it so loudly that Mary and Jack jumped. A small voice said, “Coming!” and presently “Nancy” appeared. She was about the same age as Tarsus but displayed none of his infirmities. She walked with a youthful step and wore bright red leggings, a T-shirt with a picture of a foot on it and a leather jacket. She looked like some sort of aged foot groupie.

  “Nancy, this is Ronald, Nancy and—er—Ronald. They’re police.”

  “Hello!” said Nancy. “It’s Fay Goodrich, actually.”

  They introduced themselves as she perched nimbly on one of the desktops. Tarsus looked on disapprovingly.

  “Did you ever meet Mr. Dumpty?”

  “Yes,” she said, as a smile crossed her lips, “he was a pal of Dr. Carbuncle. He used to come in here quite a lot.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “This and that, feet ailments mostly. They were good friends. Hump was staying at his house.”

  “Dumpty? With Dr. Carbuncle?”

  She nodded. “Humpty said he’d been forced to leave his apartment. Carbuncle was a widower; he lived alone in Andersen’s Farm, just on the edge of the forest. I expect he took in paying guests for the company.”

  Jack thought for a moment. “So when did Dr. Carbuncle retire?”

  “Three months ago. We had quite a party. Humpty was there with a tall brunette, and I think almost every chiropodist in the Home Counties turned up—Carbuncle was much respected. Spongg gave a warm speech and presented Dr. Carbuncle with one of his celebrated Bronze Foot Awards for services to the foot-care industry.”

  “And the break-in occurred…?”

  “Two days later,” said Miss Goodrich provocatively. The Professor shot her a fierce glance.

  “The two events are unconnected,” explained Tarsus. “Carbuncle would never have stolen it. I have known him for almost three decades.”

  Miss Goodrich muttered something and stared at the ceiling. This was obviously an argument that had been grumbling on for some time. Jack’s attention went back to the broken cabinet as Mary took Fay off for more information.

  “Perhaps you’d better tell me what was stolen?”

  “In here,” said Tarsus proudly, “was my life’s work. Thirty years ago I extracted it, nurtured it, fed it, kept it warm and damp, protected it from parasites, even defended it from financial cutbacks in the seventies. It was the greatest, most stupendous…verruca in the world.”

  He sat on a nearby chair and covered his face with his hands and sobbed loudly.

  “A verruca?” repeated Jack. “You mean that nasty little warty thing you get on your foot? That’s all?”

  Tarsus looked up at him angrily. “It wasn’t just any verruca, Ronald. Hercules was a thirty-seven-kilo champion. The biggest—and finest—in the world!”

  He shed twenty years as he spoke animatedly about what was obviously his favorite subject.

  “He was the son I never had. The only other verruca to come close was a lamentable twenty-three-kilo tiddler owned by L’Institute du Pied in Toulouse. Hernán Laso of Argentina claimed that he had a forty-seven-kilo specimen, but it turned out to be a clever fake made from papier-mâché and builder’s plaster.”

  Jack looked at the broken case again, and Tarsus continued. “It was used primarily for research. Dr. Carbuncle was working with it when he retired; some sort of genetic engineering, I believe. Experimenting with a new viral strain of superverruca.”

  Suddenly things started to come into sharp and terrible focus.

  “Isn’t that unbelievably dangerous?”

  “Not if conducted properly. Anyway, it didn’t bear fruit. He’d been on the project for nearly two years and eventually called a halt and retired. I came in the following week to find Hercules gone. Its only value is in research. Without precise heat and humidity control, it will dry out and die. And I think, Ron—may I call you Ron?—that even you can appreciate the uselessness of a dead verruca.”

  “Of course,” said Jack uneasily. “I need Dr. Carbuncle’s address.”

  Tarsus grasped Jack’s elbow, drew him close and whispered, “You will find Hercules, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” replied Jack. “He was the son you never had, right?”

  As Jack, Mary and an increasingly uncomfortable Brown-Horrocks drove towards Andersen’s Wood and Dr. Carbuncle’s house, they could see a throng of traffic heading into the city center. It was still only ten, and the Jellyman’s dedication wouldn’t be until midday. That done, he would be driven on a parade route around the town, open several hospitals and an old-people’s home, meet members of the community and then have dinner over at the QuangTech facility with the mayor and a roomful of Reading’s luminaries, Spongg, Grundy and Chymes among them.

  “Hercules is the answer,” said Jack as they drove rapidly down the road. “I think I know what Humpty’s plan was—I’m just not sure how he was going to execute it.”

  “You don’t think…?”

  “I do,” replied Jack grimly.

  “You do?” echoed Brown-Horrocks, folded up in the backseat. “How, exactly?”

  41. Dr. Horatio Carbuncle

  DETECTIVES SLAM GENETIC DATABASE PLANS

  Plans for a national genetic database could be shelved if the Guild of Detectives gets its way, it has emerged. “Cerebrally based deduction of perpetrators has fallen over the years,” wrote Guild member Lord Peter Flimsey in a leaked document to the Home Office funding committee, “and we all have a duty to protect the traditional detecting industry against further damaging loss.” MPs were said to be “sympathetic” to the Guild’s cause, but Mr. Pipette of the Forensic Sciences Federation was less receptive. “Quite frankly, they’ve been moaning ever since DNA advances narrowed their field of methodology.” A Guild spokesman angrily dismissed the accusation. “We’ve been moaning a lot longer than that,” said Mr. Celery Clean at a hastily convened press conference last night. “If we continue to allow intrusive and narratively boring work practices to flood the detecting business, we could see an undesirable shift of emphasis from detecting to forensics—which none of us want.”

  —Extract from The Toad, March 14, 1997

  Andersen’s Farm was a small, two up/two down, redbrick farmhouse with a thatched roof, surrounded by a vegetable plot and several outbuildings in various states of dilapidation. There was a lean-to extension on the back, and the fields that made up the smallholding had twenty or so miserable-looking sheep scattered upon them. An ancient gray mare stood in a muddy pasture and tossed her head as the Allegro approached, but since she was badly myopic, it might have been a lime green elephant for all she knew. She blew out twin
blasts of hot breath in the cold morning air and thought about the good old days when she chased across fields with lots of other horses, leaping hedges and galloping after something that her rider wanted her to catch but rarely did. She watched the green elephant drive slowly past and then leaned sleepily against the gatepost.

  They drove into the yard and pulled up next to a ramshackle barn that contained an ancient Austin Ten up on blocks. There was no other car anywhere to be seen, and it didn’t look as though anyone was at home. As they got out, Mary drew Jack’s attention to a ladder leaning up against a wall with a lot of discarded beer cans at the base. Humpty had definitely been here.

  Jack approached slowly and knocked on the front door. After getting no reply, he thumped again, this time louder.

  He cupped his hand to look through the window, but there was no sign of life. He beckoned the others to follow him and then walked around to the back of the house where the lean-to section housed the kitchen. He knocked again, then tried the door handle. It was locked.

  “Pass me that walking stick, would you?” said Jack.

  Brown-Horrocks raised his eyebrows and scribbled a note as Mary passed the stick over. Jack cleared the windowpane with a few well-placed blows of the stick, the sound of shattering glass cutting harshly through the peace of the surroundings. He climbed into the kitchen, checked the back door for any booby traps, then let the others in.

  “This is highly questionable procedure,” warned Mary. “Anything we find here and want to use as evidence will be disallowed.”

  “I’m trying to stop a serious crime from being committed,” said Jack. “We’ll worry about convictions afterwards.”

  They moved into the front room and nearly jumped out of their skins when a large and very angry goose honked at them and beat its wings in a highly agitated manner. They took a step back as it settled down again on the sofa and hissed at them angrily. The floor was covered in goose shit.

  “A goose?”

  “It explains the bird shit in Humpty’s office.”

  “Yes, but why indoors?”

  As they watched, the goose made itself more comfortable and a flash of something yellow pierced the gloom from within the nest it had made on the sofa. Mary moved forward and rolled up her sleeve. The goose opened its beak and hissed at the intrusion, but Mary made clicking noises with her tongue and very gently pushed her hand under the bird. Jack looked at his watch. He didn’t have a lot of time for farm animals; he was more used to seeing them wrapped in plastic at the supermarket or flanked by roast spuds and carrots.

  Mary withdrew her hand, and the egg shone brightly even in the relative gloom of the living room. The egg was gold. Solid gold. Jack’s jaw dropped open. Mary smiled triumphantly, and the goose hissed again as she passed it over to him. The egg was surprisingly heavy and still warm.

  “So that’s where he got the gold,” said Jack. “I should have guessed. The woodcutters found the goose but weren’t too clever about keeping it quiet. Tom Thomm was living here. He hears about it, follows them into the wood, greed overcomes him and pow—that was it.”

  There was nothing else down here, so Jack turned his attention to the stairs, stepping softly up the treads until he reached the upstairs corridor, which had a narrow carpet running down the center with bare boards on either side. At the opposite end was a leaded-glass window. To the left and right were doors leading off into the bedrooms. The first room they visited was a jumble of chemistry equipment: retorts, dirty beakers and racks of test tubes. There was a pungent smell of decayed cheese in the air, and in the far corner, upon a grimy sofa and surrounded by two three-bar electric fires, was what appeared to be something child-size curled up beneath a dirty bedsheet. It stirred ever so slightly as they watched, and Jack, using his best authoritarian voice called out: “Police! You, under the sheet—move out slowly!”

  There was no response, so Jack advanced and slowly pulled the sheet off. But it wasn’t a child. It was something that closely resembled a large and very rotten misshapen potato, but about the size of two watermelons. The smell of sweaty feet rose up to greet them, and they all gagged.

  “What the…?” murmured Jack, staring at the strange object that seemed to shudder as he watched. He covered his nose and mouth with a hankie and put out a curious hand to touch the gently heaving object. Just as he was about to make contact, Mary’s hand deftly grabbed his wrist. He looked up at her with a quizzical expression, but she merely nodded at a warning sign that read:

  BIOHAZARD—EXTREME CAUTION!

  “Good Lord!” muttered Jack, glad that Mary had stayed his hand. “It’s Hercules, Professor Tarsus’s champion verruca. Would you look at the size of it!”

  Mary nodded sagely and passed him an empty bottle that had been lying on a table nearby. It was unused but had been labeled, and Jack shuddered as he read:

  CONCENTRATED LIVE VERRUCA SPORE.

  USE RATIO 1:100 IN HUMIDITY CONTROL

  RESERVOIR EVERY WEEK FOR MAXIMUM INFECTION .

  There was another bottle that confirmed Jack’s fears. It was labeled:

  SUPERVERRUCA: ANTIDOTE

  Humpty hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d drunkenly boasted that his shares would be worth a fortune in a few months’ time—with an outbreak of verrucas that only Carbuncle and Humpty knew how to cure, they could ask what they wanted for the antidote. With the cure sold to Spongg, Humpty’s shares in the ailing foot-care empire would be worth a hundred times what he paid within a few months.

  “Get on the phone,” said Jack, “and speak to Briggs. Tell him to contact the Communicable Disease Control Center and declare the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center a hot zone—he needs to have it checked by a biohazard squad before we can even think of the Jellyman dedicating it.”

  “What!?” said Mary.

  “It all makes sense. Don’t you see? The Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center is the ideal place to spread the verruca virus. Air-conditioned and with precise humidity control—and everyone having to walk with reverential bare feet. Ordinary verrucas are bad enough, but this monster is capable of anything.”

  “Professor Hardiman was expecting ten thousand visitors this afternoon and more than a million over the next six months,” observed Mary, dialing feverishly.

  “And every single one of them taking home ultrainfectious superverrucas to spread around their homes. No wonder Humpty was confident he could pledge fifty million to St. Cerebellum’s.”

  “So who killed Mr. Dumpty?” asked Brown-Horrocks.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Jack replied. “Dr. Carbuncle. They were partners. Humpty buys the shares, and Carbuncle supplies the virus. Only Carbuncle gets greedy. He kills Humpty in order to keep all the shares for himself. Winkie tries to blackmail him, so Carbuncle kills him, too. Then we get too close for comfort, so he wires the Zephyr. He was good, but not quite good enough.”

  Brown-Horrocks ticked a few boxes and scribbled a note. “So who did Humpty marry?”

  Jack stopped and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Not sure about that yet—but when we find Carbuncle, we’ll find her, too.”

  “Then I suppose congratulations are in order,” said Brown-Horrocks. “I’ll be honest. When I first met you, I thought you were a complete imbecile. But now I’m very glad to be present at the conclusion of what must have been at times a very tricky investigation.”

  “Well,” said Jack modestly, “it was touch and go for a moment there.”

  “Sir?” said Mary in a hoarse whisper.

  “Not now, Mary. So, Mr. Brown-Horrocks, how does your report read?”

  “I’m really not at liberty to discuss it, Inspector, but—”

  “Sir!”

  “Excuse me for a moment.”

  Jack went out into the corridor and joined Mary. “What is it?”

  “It’s Dr. Carbuncle.”

  “Where?”

  She jerked a thumb in the direction of the second bedroom. “In here.”

  Jack glanced at Brow
n-Horrocks, but thankfully he was engaged in making some notes. Jack stepped into the bedroom and stopped. Lying on the floor with a single bullet hole in his chest was Carbuncle.

  “Shit! Are you sure it’s him?”

  “Quite sure. Look at the picture.”

  He compared it to the photo Professor Tarsus had given them. There was no mistake.

  “Blast! I’ve just told Brown-Horrocks that it was Carbuncle who killed Humpty!”

  “Problems?” asked Brown-Horrocks, who was wondering what they were talking about.

  “Not really,” said Jack, “I just might have been a little over-hasty with the summing up I gave you.”

  “It’s Carbuncle in there, isn’t it?”

  There didn’t seem any point in hiding it, so Jack gave up on the possibility of becoming Guild and had a good look around the house. In the room where they found Carbuncle, there was also Humpty’s bed, a large divan with an oval cut out of it. There were magazines scattered about, a lot of copies of The Financial Toad and several prospectuses that outlined the St. Cerebellum’s rebuilding appeal. He pulled up the mattress and found a few love letters from Bessie Brooks but not much else. He walked despondently outside to await SOCO and the biohazard team. Brown-Horrocks was making some notes, and Mary was on the phone. Jack still wasn’t there yet. He had missed something. But what?

  He looked up at the sky, which was covered by a thick layer of stratus clouds that moved slowly across the landscape. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the sun. Then, to the south, a small hole opened up in the cloud and a beam of light spilt to earth, warm and welcoming after the prolonged winter and dismal spring. The pool of bright sunlight fell to earth two fields away, startling some sheep who had forgotten they possessed shadows. Then the hole closed again, and soft, directionless light once more settled on the earth.

  “He lied to us,” said Jack quietly to himself as something clicked in his head. “He lied to us all along. He had all the motive anyone would ever need. I was a fool not to see it!”