The Big Over Easy, Page 2

  She didn’t have time to muse upon the imaginative shortcoming of Basingstoke’s criminal fraternity any longer, as there was a sudden hushing of the pressmen and a burst of spontaneous applause, as a handsome man in his mid-fifties strode dramatically from a side door.

  “Goodness!” said Mary. “That’s—”

  “Yup,” said Briggs, with the pride of a father who has just seen his son win everything at sports day. “Detective Chief Inspector Friedland Chymes.”

  Friedland Chymes! In person. There was a hush as the famous detective stepped up to the lectern. The assembled two dozen newspapermen readied themselves, pens poised, for his statement.

  “Thank you for attending,” he began, sweeping back his blond hair and gazing around the room with his lively blue eyes, causing flutters when they lingered ever so slightly on the women present in the room, Mary included. She found herself almost automatically attracted to him. He was strong, handsome, intelligent, fearless—the most alpha of alpha males. Working with him would be an honor.

  “It was the small traces of pastry around the gunshot wound on Colonel Peabody’s corpse that turned the case for me,” began the great detective, his sonorous tones filling the air like music,

  “minute quantities of shortcrust whose butter/flour ratio I found to be identical to that of a medium-size Bowyer’s pork pie. The assailant had fired his weapon through the tasty snack to muffle the sound of the shot. The report heard later was a firecracker set off by a time fuse, thus giving an alibi to the assailant, who I can reveal to you now was…”

  The whole room leaned forward in expectation. Chymes, his only apparent vanity a certain showmanship, paused for dramatic effect before announcing the killer.

  “…Miss Celia Mangersen, the victim’s niece and, unbeknownst to us all, the sole beneficiary of the missing will, which I found hidden—as expected—within a hollowed-out statuette of Sir Walter Scott. Yes, Mr. Hatchett, you have a question?”

  Josh Hatchett of The Toad newspaper had raised his hand in the front row.

  “What was the significance of the traces of custard found on the Colonel’s sock suspender?”

  Chymes raised a finger in the air.

  “An excellent question, Mr. Hatchett, and one that pushed my deducting powers to the limit. Bear with me if you will while we go through the final moments of Colonel Peabody’s life. Mortally wounded and with only seconds to live, he had somehow to leave a clue to his assailant’s identity. A note? Of course not—the killer would find and destroy it. Guessing correctly that a murder of this magnitude would be placed in my hands, he decided to leave behind a clue that only I could solve. Knowing the Colonel’s penchant for anagrams, it was but a swift move to deduct his reasoning. The sock suspender was made in France. ‘Custard’ in French is crème anglaise—and an anagram of this is ‘Celia Mangerse’—which not only correctly identified the killer but also told me the Colonel died before he was able to finish the anagram.”

  There was more applause, and he quietened everyone down before continuing.

  “But since anagram-related clues are now inadmissible as evidence, we sent the pork pie off for DNA analysis and managed to pinpoint the pie shop where it was purchased. Guessing that Miss Mangersen might have an affinity for the pies, we staked out the shop in question, and yesterday evening Miss Mangersen was taken into custody, whereupon she confessed to me in a tearful scene that served as a dramatic closure to the case. My loyal, and annoyingly chirpy, cockney assistant and biographer DS Flotsam will of course be writing a full report for Amazing Crime Stories in due course, after the formality of a trial. Ladies and gentlemen: The case…is closed!”

  The assembled journalists rose as one and burst into spontaneous applause. Chymes dismissed the adulation with a modest wave of the hand and excused himself, muttering something about needing to open a hospital for orphaned sick children.

  “He’s amazing!” breathed Mary, somehow convincing herself—as had all the other women present—that Chymes had winked at her across the crowded room.

  “I agree,” replied Briggs, standing aside as the newsmen filed out, eager to get the stories into the late editions. “Don’t you love that ‘the case is closed!’ stuff? I wish I had a catchphrase. He’s an asset not only to us here at Reading but also to the nation—there aren’t many countries that haven’t requested his thoughts on some intractable and ludicrously complex inquiry.”

  “He’s remarkable,” agreed Mary.

  “Indeed,” went on Briggs, seemingly swept up in a paroxysm of hagiographic hero worship. “He’s also a hilarious raconteur, has a golf handicap of two, was twice world aerobatic champion and plays the clarinet as well as Artie Shaw. Speaks eight languages, too, and is often consulted by the Jellyman himself on important matters of state.”

  “I’m going to enjoy working with him, I can see,” replied Mary happily. “When do I start?”

  “Chymes?” echoed Briggs with a faint yet unmistakably patronizing laugh. “Goodness gracious, no! You’re not working with Chymes!”

  “Who then?” asked Mary, attempting to hide her disappointment, and failing.

  “Him.”

  Mary followed Briggs’s outstretched finger to an untidy figure who had taken his turn at the lectern. He was in his mid-forties, had graying hair and one eye marginally higher than the other, giving him the lopsided look of someone deep in thought. If he was deep in thought, considered Mary, it was clearly about something more important than his personal appearance. His suit could have done with a good pressing, his hair styled any way but the way he had it. He might have shaved a little less hurriedly and made more of an attempt to exude some—any—confidence. He fumbled with his papers as he stared resignedly after the rapidly vanishing press corps.

  “I see,” said Mary, sounding a great deal colder than she had intended. “And who’s he?”

  Briggs patted her arm in a fatherly manner. He could sense her disappointment, but it wasn’t up to him. Chymes picked his own people.

  “That’s DI Jack Spratt, of the Nursery Crime Division. The NCD. You’ll be on his team. Or at least you and a few others will be the team. It’s one of our smallest departments.” He thought for a moment and then added, “Actually, it is our smallest department—if you don’t count the night shift in the canteen.”

  “And his Amazing Crime Stories rating? What about that?”

  “He’s not rated,” replied Briggs, trying to make it sound all matter-of-fact and not the embarrassment that it was. “In fact, I don’t think he’s even in the Guild.”

  Mary stared at the shabby figure and felt her heart fall. All of a sudden DI Flowwe didn’t seem quite so bad after all.

  Jack Spratt looked around the room. Most of the newsmen had by now left, and aside from Briggs and a woman Spratt didn’t recognize at the door, there were only two journalists still in the room. The first was a large man named Archibald Fatquack, who was the editor of the Reading weekly gossip sheet The Gadfly. The second was a junior newshound from the Reading Daily Eyestrain, who appeared to be asleep, drunk, dead or a mixture of all three.

  “Thank you all for attending this press conference,” announced Jack in a somber tone to the as-good-as-empty room. “I’ll try not to keep you any longer than is necessary. This afternoon the Reading Central Criminal Court found the three pigs not guilty of all charges relating to the first-degree murder of Mr. Wolff.”

  He sighed. If he was intending it to be a dramatic statement, it wasn’t, and it didn’t help that no one significant was there to witness it. He could still hear the excited yet increasingly distant chatter of the newsmen as they filed down the corridor, but it was soon drowned out by Chymes’s 1932 Delage D8 Super-Sport, which started up with a throaty roar in the car park. Jack waited until he had gone, then continued on gamely, the extreme lack of interest not outwardly affecting his demeanor. After nearly twenty years, he was kind of used to it.

  “Since the death by scalding of Mr. Wolff following
his ill-fated climb down Little Pig C’s chimney, we at the Nursery Crime Division have been following inquiries that this was not an act of self-defense but a violent and premeditated murder by three individuals who, far from being the innocent victims of wolf-porcine crime, actually sought confrontation and then acted quite beyond what might be described as reasonable self-defense.”

  Jack paused for breath. If he had hoped his misgivings over the outcome of the trial would be splashed all over the paper, he was mistaken. Page sixteen of The Gadfly was about the sum total of this particular story, sandwiched ignominiously between a three-for-two Hemorrelief advert and the Very Reverend Conrad Poo’s weekly dental-hygiene column.

  “Mr. Spratt,” began Archibald, slowly bringing himself up to speed like a chilled gecko. “Is it true that Mr. Wolff once belonged to the Lupine Brotherhood, a secret society dedicated to traditional wolfish pursuits such as the outlawed Midnight Howling?”

  “Yes, I understand that to be the case,” replied Jack, “but that was over fifteen years ago. We do not deny that he has been invesigated over various charges of criminal damage arising from the destruction of two dwellings built by the younger pigs, nor that Mr. Wolff threatened to ‘eat them all up.’ But we saw this as an empty threat—we produced witnesses who swore that Mr. Wolff was a vegetarian of many years’ standing.”

  “So what was your basis for a murder prosecution again?” asked Archie, scratching his head.

  “We believed,” replied Jack in exasperation, as he had made the same point in the same room to the same two uninterested journalists many times before, “that boiling Mr. Wolff alive was quite outside the realm of ‘reasonable force’ and the fact that the large pan of water would have taken at least six hours to reach boiling point strongly indicated premeditation.”

  Archibald said nothing, and Jack, eager to go home, wrapped up his report.

  “Despite the not-guilty verdicts, we at the NCD feel we have put up a robust case and were fully justified in our actions. To this end we will not be looking to reexamine the case or interview anyone else in connection with Mr. Wolff’s death.”

  Jack sighed and gazed down. He looked and felt drained.

  “Personally,” said Briggs in an aside, “I didn’t think the jury would go for it. The problem is that small pigs elicit a strong sympathetic reaction and large wolves don’t. There was a good case for self-defense, too—Mr. Wolff was trespassing when he climbed down the chimney. It really all hinged on whether you believed that the pigs were boiling up a huge tureen of water to do their washing. And the jury did. In only eight minutes. Do you want me to introduce you?”

  “I’d prefer tomorrow, once I am officially on duty,” said Mary quickly, thinking she might have to go outside and scream or something.

  Briggs picked up on her reticence.

  “Don’t underestimate the Nursery Crime Division, Mary. Spratt does some good work. Not high-profile, you understand, but important. His work on the Bluebeard serial wife killings case was…mostly good solid police work.”

  “That was Spratt?” asked Mary, something vaguely stirring in her memory. It hadn’t been in Amazing Crime, of course, just one of those “also-ran” stories you usually find dwelling in the skim-read part of the dailies, along with city prices, dog horoscopes and “true-life” photo stories. It had been under the subheading “Colorfully hirsute gentleman kills nine wives; hidden room contained gruesome secret.”

  “That’s him. Jack was onto Bluebeard and was well ahead of events.”

  “If nine wives died, he couldn’t have been that good.”

  “I said it was mostly good police work. More notably, he arrested Rumplestiltskin over that spinning-straw-into-gold scam and was part of the team that captured the violently dangerous psychopath the Gingerbreadman. You might have heard about Jack in connection with some giant killing, too.”

  Something stirred in Mary’s memory again, and she raised an eyebrow. Police officers weren’t meant to kill people if they could help it—and giants were no exception.

  “Don’t worry,” said Briggs, “it was self-defense. Mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “The last one he ran over in a car.”

  “The last one?” repeated Mary incredulously. “How many have there been?”

  “Four. But don’t mention it; he’s a bit sensitive over the issue.”

  Mary’s heart, which had already fallen fairly far, fell farther.

  “Well, that’s all I have to say,” said Jack to the sparsely populated room. “Are there any more questions?”

  Archibald Fatquack stirred, scribbled in his pad, but said nothing. The reporter from the Reading Daily Eyestrain had moved slowly forward during Jack’s report, until his head was resting on the seat back in front. He began to snore.

  “Good. Well, thank you very much for your time. Don’t all rush to get out. You might wake Jim over there.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” said Jim, eyes tightly closed. “I heard every word.”

  “Even the bit about the bears escaping into the Oracle Center and eating a balloon seller?”

  “Of course,” he murmured, beginning to snore again.

  Jack picked up his notes and disappeared through a side door.

  “Are there usually this few people for his press conferences?” asked Mary, horrified at the prospect of the career black hole into which she was about to descend like a suicidal rabbit.

  “Good Lord, no,” replied Briggs in a shocked tone. “Often he has no press at all.”

  He looked at his watch. “Goodness, is that the time? Check in with me first thing tomorrow, and I’ll introduce you to Jack. You’ll like him. Not exactly charismatic, but diligent and generally correct in most…some of his assumptions.”

  “Sir, I was wondering—”

  Briggs stopped her midsentence, divining precisely what she was about to say. The reason was simple: All the detective sergeants he had ever allocated to Jack said the same thing.

  “Look upon it as a baptism of fire. The NCD is good training.”

  “For what?”

  Briggs had to think for a moment. “Unconventional policing. Your time won’t be wasted. Oh, and one other thing.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Welcome to Reading.”

  2. Jack Spratt

  The Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives was founded by Holmes in 1896 to look after the best interests of Britain’s most influential and newsworthy detectives. Membership is strictly controlled but pays big dividends: the pick of the best inquiries in England and Wales, an opportunity to “brainstorm” tricky cases with one’s peers, and an exclusive deal with the notoriously choosy editors of Amazing Crime Stories. The Guild’s legal department frequently brokers TV, movie and merchandising deals, and membership usually sways juries in tricky cases. It seems to work well. The only people who don’t like the system are the officers who are non-Guild.

  —Excerpt from Inside the Guild of Detectives

  Jack drove home that evening with a feeling of frustration that would have been considerably worse had it been unexpected. He and the prosecution had tried to present the pig case as well as they could, but for some reason the jury didn’t buy it. Briggs hadn’t said anything to him yet, but mounting prosecutions such as The Crown v. Three Pigs was undeniably expensive, and after the failed conviction of the con men who perpetrated the celebrated emperor’s new-clothes scam the year before, Jack knew that the Nursery Crime Division would be under closer scrutiny by the bean counters. Not that the NCD was consistently racked with failure—far from it—but the fact was that few of his cases attracted much publicity. And in the all-important climate of increased public confidence, budget accountability and Amazing Crime circulation figures, Friedland’s crowd-pleasing antics were strides ahead of Jack’s misadventures—and hugely profitable for the Reading police force, too. But all of this was scant comfort to Mr. Wolff, who went to his casket unavenged and parboiled.

  He drove
along Peppard and took the left fork into Kidmore End.

  “Shit,” muttered Jack under his breath as the whole wasted six-month investigation sank in. He didn’t want murder cases, of course—he would be happier not to have any, ever—but there was a slight frisson that went with them that he welcomed. The NCD, after an early rush of celebrated cases, had settled down into something of a workaday existence. There is a limit to how many lost sheep you could track down, how many illegal straw-into-gold dens you could uncover, how many pied pipers arrived in town trying to extort money from the authorities over pest control and how often Mr. Punch would beat his wife and throw the baby downstairs. He knew there was not much prestige, but there was an upside: He was left pretty much to his own devices.

  He stopped the car outside his house and stared silently into his own kitchen, where he could see his wife, Madeleine, attempting to feed the youngest of their five children. They had brought two children each from previous marriages—the two eldest, Pandora and Ben, were Jack’s, and Megan and Jerome were Madeleine’s. As if to cement the union further, they had had one that was entirely down to the pair of them—Stevie, who was a year old.

  “This is why I do this,” he muttered under his breath, opening the car door. Pausing only to place a block of wood under the rear wheel to stop his Allegro from rolling down the slope, he picked up his case, bade good evening to his neighbor Mrs. Sittkomm, who was glaring suspiciously at him from over the fence, and took the side entrance to the house.

  “Honey,” he yelled without enthusiasm as he dumped his case on the hall table, “I’m home!”

  She coo-eed from the kitchen, and the sound of her voice made all the stresses of the day that much more bearable. They had been married almost five years, and neither of them had any regrets over their choice. She bounded in from the kitchen, gave him a kiss and hugged him tenderly.

  “Otto called me about the Wolff thing,” she whispered in his ear. “Bum deal. The pigs deserved to fry. I’m sorry.”