Most overdue manuscript: Although many writers have been known to be late with manuscripts, and the dialogue between editors and writers can at sometimes reach a fevered pitch of cordial dispute, the lateness of Gerald of Frome’s celebrated audit of the Reading Cathedral repairs of 1364 took 640 years to reach the publishers. Gerald’s successive ancestors cited many reasons for the delay, such as not having enough ink, the wrong sort of vellum, noisy peacocks and the dissolution of the monasteries. The descendants of the original publishers who commissioned the work were overjoyed to finally receive the beautifully illuminated manuscript handwritten in copperplate and bound in leather, and they returned it with a note saying that they “totally loved it” but suggested the emphasis of the work be moved away from a spider-vaulted North Arcade suffering from subsidence and more toward a single career woman obsessed with boyfriends and her weight.
“Let me get this straight,” said Briggs. “You want me to sanction the overtime for a twenty-four-hour surveillance operation on a cucumber?”
“Not just any cucumber,” said Mary, who was standing in front of Briggs’s desk an hour later. “This one is a world champion, and if you read the report on the blast at Obscurity—”
“It was an unexploded wartime bomb, Mary. Official. You don’t honestly expect me to believe that someone is going around bumping off the competition solely to win a cucumber championship?”
Mary bit her lip. It was almost exactly what Jack thought he’d say, but she had to try. “I’d like your refusal to be noted, sir.”
Briggs looked up at her. “That’s very impertinent, Sergeant.”
“It reflects my certainty that Fuchsia’s life is in danger, sir.”
“Your passion in this matter is certainly intriguing,” replied Briggs thoughtfully. “Tell me, is there a lot of money in cucumber championships? A six-figure payout or something?”
“A twenty-pound book coupon, sir—and a dented cup.”
He shook his head sadly. “You’re as mad as Spratt. Perhaps madder. Sonning isn’t far—if this Fuchsia fellow gets suspicious, he can call us. Just speak to beautiful Pippa and have him put on ‘expedite’ in the control room.”
“But, sir—”
“Before you go, Sergeant, one other thing. There seems to be a bizarre rumor making its way around the station that you’re going on a date with that alien. Is this true?”
Mary bit her lip. She still wanted to wriggle out of the date if she could, but she didn’t like Briggs’s attitude. Despite a few obvious failings, Ash was a good officer, and part of the team.
“Yes, sir,” she said defiantly, “it’s all true. And his name’s Ashley.”
“Well,” said Briggs with a patronizing air, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He returned to staring at several reports on his desk.
“Yes, sir.”
When Mary got back to the office she found Jack in conversation with Copperfield, who had aged five years since the Gingerbreadman inquiry had begun. His eyes were dark-rimmed and hollow, and he was chain-smoking again. There had been several near misses, but the Gingerbreadman had remained tantalizingly out of his reach, despite the buildup of almost three hundred troops and armed-response groups from as far away as Newcastle. You couldn’t walk anywhere in Reading without seeing somebody in uniform carrying a weapon standing at a street corner.
“Any leads on the crazy cookie?” asked Jack.
“No… and he’s a cake.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Jack firmly. “A cookie goes soft when—”
“And it’s not getting any better,” added Copperfield, who hadn’t the inclination to listen to Jack’s cookie/cake debate.
“We’ve got nothing, but nothing, to go on. We’re getting these twice a day, all mailed from the center of town—look.”
He passed a photocopied note to Jack, who read it carefully: “‘I’ll run and run and jump with glee. I’m the Gingerbreadman—you can’t catch me.’"
Jack passed it back to Copperfield, who said, “He’s taunting us, Jack. Mailed in Friar Street at two-thirty yesterday afternoon. Broad daylight, center of town. We’ve been staking out mailboxes, but somehow he always finds a way around us.”
“He wants you to know he can do what he pleases, and that he’s still around. He’s also telling you that he’s smart. And he is. Smarter than you or I.”
“That’s comforting to know. Listen, I realize I’ve been a bit of an ass for not seeking your advice, but now I really need some help. You’ve been NCD for years—how would you go about this?”
“Well,” Jack said slowly, glad that Copperfield had finally seen sense, “we need to know more about him, so I’d start at the very beginning. First, I’d be looking for an oven big enough to have baked him. Secondly, there can’t be many rolling pins large enough to have rolled him out, and someone must remember building a cutter that size and shape. Perhaps a local steel fabricator might know something. And you’d need a bakery with an overhead crane to lower the cutt—”
David gave an indignant snort and stood up. “Thanks for nothing, Jack. I plead with you for help, and all you do is just muck about. Good day.”
And he left without another word.
“Some people just don’t want to be helped,” said Mary as she sat down in the chair vacated by Copperfield.
“He’ll come around to us eventually,” Jack said. “I just hope the gingery lunatic hasn’t killed too many people before he does. Let me guess: Briggs told you to stick the cucumber stakeout in your ear?”
“In one. You didn’t really think he’d go for a twenty-four-hour cucumber stakeout, did you?”
“To be honest, no. Have a look at these.” He pushed a couple of photos across to Mary. “This is a picture of Stanley Cripps, and this is McGuffin. I thought they might be the same person, but they’re not.”
“Do you think McGuffin’s alive?”
“If he is, he’s bloody well hidden.”
“Hellooo,” said Ash as he walked in carrying a manila envelope. “Want to see what I’ve found?”
He laid a photograph on the desk. It was from the security cameras at the Coley Park Bart-Mart, and the date in the bottom corner showed that it had been taken ten days earlier. The picture was slightly grainy and a bit blurred, but the figure pushing the shopping cart piled high with bags of value-pack porridge oats was unmistakable.
“Bartholomew,” breathed Jack. “An MP involved in overquotaing to bears?”
“He gets it at discount, too,” said Ashley. “Bart-Mart is the family business. Although it’s controlled by QuangTech, the Bartholomew family still holds thirty-eight percent.”
Jack rubbed his head. “I suppose it makes some kind of sense,” he said finally. “Perhaps he felt he was somehow indebted to them for his not being able to pass the Ursine Self-Defense Bill.”
“There’s more,” said Ashley, laying down another picture.
The relevance of this one wasn’t so clear until he pointed it out.
“This was taken two minutes before the one with Bartholomew—that’s Goldilocks’s Austin Somerset parked in the background.”
They peered closer. It was. This complicated matters.
“Anything else?” asked Jack.
“Only this,” said Ashley, laying down a third picture on the desk and pointing at someone astride a motorcycle near the trolley park. The figure was so far in the background as to be barely a smudge. A blowup that Ashley had printed didn’t really help. “It’s possible that this motorcyclist is Vinnie Craps,” said Ashley, “but I couldn’t say for sure—it might just be someone very bulky.”
Jack leaned back in his chair and twiddled absently with a pencil while Ash and Mary stared at him.
“What does it mean?” asked Mary.
“I’m not sure,” said Jack. “Goldilocks and Craps in the parking lot while Bartholomew is on a porridge buy. It might mean a lot of things—or nothing.”
Jack put down the pencil, held his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Explosions, cucumbers, porridge, missing scientists, QuangTech. Nothing seemed to make any sense at all.
“Anything on Gray?” he asked, still hopeful.
“No,” replied Ashley. “He isn’t on the voting register. I went through the births, marriages and deaths record, and I’m not sure he really is Dorian Gray—the only person I could find of that name was born in 1878.”
“A false name?” muttered Jack. “That’s all I need. Without Gray I’m almost certainly up for the ‘retirement on mental grounds’ review board. Perhaps I should cut my losses now and take the three-month sabbatical Kreeper so kindly offered me.”
“Hmm,” said Mary, glancing at Ashley, who blinked twice at her. Privately they had talked about this, and although they trusted Jack’s judgment, there was a strong possibility he had been overdoing things. Neither of them truly believed that the Allegro could mend itself.
The phone rang.
“Spratt, NCD…. Good afternoon, Mr. Bruin,” said Jack.
“Yes, I imagine it must be very difficult to dial with claws.” He grabbed a piece of paper and, with the telephone jammed in the crook of his shoulder, started to scribble as Mary looked over his shoulder. “Okay… but why don’t you tell me now?… Right. We’ll be over as soon as we can.”
He put the phone down.
“Ed said he didn’t know it was Goldilocks and would never have scared her out of the house if he’d known. He wants to tell us something—something he felt bad about and has to tell us in person. Hold the fort, Ash—Mary and I are heading back into the forest.”