—The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition
It was midmorning when they found Dr. Parks at Reading University’s Charles Fort Center for Cosmic Weirdness. He was giving a lively lecture to a packed auditorium. Pseudoscience had become a popular degree subject in recent years, and Reading University, always eager to provide popular coursework and with its finger pressed hard on the pulse of the zeitgeist, had added the three-year master’s to their roster of unconventional B.A.’s, along with cryptozoology, crop circles and the study of extraterrestial life, which went down quite well with Rambosians, who knew most of the answers anyway—except what all those previous UFO things were, as it certainly hadn’t been them, nor anyone they knew.
Jack and Mary stood near the door and let the talk go over their heads. It was mostly about the feasibility of using the solar wind as a power source for telekinetics, the theoretic possibilities of the existence of a chronosynclastic infundibulum and the likelihood of capturing ball lightning in large glass jars to use as an indefinite light source. Jack and Mary applauded with the others when the talk ended, and they approached Parks as the students filed out.
“Inspector!” said Parks with a friendly smile. “I was meaning to call you.” He shook them both by the hand and started to pack up his notes and the carousel of slides that had accompanied his talk.
“You were?”
“Yes, I found some information about the blast on the Nullarbor Plain. In October 1992 a seismic survey on a routine oil exploration reported an explosion of some sort to the National Parks Authorities. They sent out a survey team, expecting to find a meteorite strike. Instead they found glass.”
“Glass?”
“Glass. Fused sand, to be precise. Circular in shape, about the size of a soccer field; the glass was four inches thick in the center and thinned out toward the edge. A few hundred thousand degrees for a very short time.”
“What do you think it was?”
Parks took the small piece of fired earth from the padded envelope. “I think it was the same type of blast we saw at Obscurity. Intense heat, very little radiation. Some form of advanced thermal weapon, tested clandestinely in the Nullarbor. If you wanted to sterilize an area of land quickly and easily, a heat bomb of the description I’ve given you would be just the way to do it. And if you didn’t want your competitors to figure out what was going on, you’d make damn sure you removed the evidence.”
“QuangTech,” murmured Jack. “Perhaps they didn’t disband their Advanced Weapons Division after all.”
“That would be good news for the conspiracy industry if true,” said Parks excitedly, adding after a moment’s thought, “or even if not true. Did you want to see me about something?”
“Yes,” replied Jack. “Do you have a scanning electron microscope?”
“Not officially, but the SEM operator here is heavily into the whole yeti/bigfoot/sasquatch noncontroversy and so could probably be swung.”
Jack showed him the gingerbread thumb, still in the evidence bag.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“It certainly is. I’d like you to see if there is anything unusual about it on the granular level. On the face of it, gingerbreadmen are usually passive victims at teatime and not homicidal maniacs, so I need to know more—and I need to know it now.”
“I’ll get onto it straightaway.”
They thanked Parks and walked out of the center.
“Why didn’t Copperfield think of doing that?” said Jack.
“Because he’s not NCD?” suggested Mary. “Or because he’s a twit?”
“Probably both.”
He pulled out his cell phone and called the NCD office.
“Hullo!” said Ashley cheerfully. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“The office has been bugged. When I got there, I could hear the buzz of the encoded binary radio transmission.”
“Tell me you’re not still in the office.”
“No. I’m in the roof space just behind the third-floor toilets reading the phone traffic as it leaves the exchange. It’s made me a bit tipsy. Did you know that Pippa has a bun in the oven?”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, she was talking to her mother all about it. And what’s more,” continued Ashley, “the father is Peck—you know, in uniform with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park?”
“What’s going on?” asked Mary.
“Pippa’s pregnant by Peck.”
“Pippa Piper picked Peck over Pickle or Pepper?” exclaimed Mary incredulously. “Which of the Peck pair did Pippa Piper pick?”
“Peter ‘pockmarked’ Peck of Palmer Park. He was the Peck that Pippa Piper picked.”
“No, no,” returned Mary, “you’ve got it all wrong. Paul Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked Peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound on Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Proctor from Pocklington.”
There was a pause.
“It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?” mused Jack.
“Yes,” agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. “I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”
Jack turned his attention back to Ashley. “Has Briggs called the office?”
“Several times. I told him Mary was down at the Bob Southey, and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, as I’m merely window dressing for better alien-sapien relations. More interestingly, Agent Danvers has called Briggs on several occasions.”
“You eavesdropped on Briggs’s private telephone conversations?”
“Not at all,” replied Ashley. “I’ve eavesdropped on everyone’s conversations. How did you think I found out about Pippa and Peck?”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” replied Jack, whose interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was becoming more elastic by the second. “What did Danvers want?”
“She wanted to know where you were so she could have a chat. Briggs was commendably evasive—said you were dangerously insane and safely on leave, where you could do no real harm except possibly to yourself.”
“Did he, now? Did you get anything on Hardy Fuchsia?”
“And how. Before he retired, he spent forty years in the nuclear-power industry.”
“He referred to Prong, Cripps, McGuffin and Katzenberg as colleagues,” observed Jack thoughtfully.
“Precisely. They all worked together at various times—in nuclear-fusion R&D.”
Jack told him he was a star, Ashley asked him which one, Jack said it didn’t matter and then rang off.
“Let’s get over to Sonning and talk to Fuchsia,” said Jack. “It looks like our scatty and mostly dead cucumber fanciers were all retired nuclear physicists.”
33. Hardy Fuchsia and Bisky-Batt
Least mysterious mysterious visitors: Following on from the UFO fraternity’s much-envied and highly mysterious Men in Black, other minority groups have also begun to claim visitations by “mysterious” groups of men. First the barely mysterious Men in Tartan, spotted either singing or insensible on Burns Night. Next come the hardly mysterious Men in Red that are usually sighted near talent contests at Butlins, then on to the only mildly mysterious Men in Yellow that gather around partially completed buildings. Least mysterious of all and the winners in this category are the Men in Blue that tend to gather around soccer matches and other potential areas of public disturbance.
—The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition
There was no answer when they knocked on Fuchsia’s door.
“Keep trying,” said Jack. “I’m going to check around the back.”
After the third attempt, Mary entered the garden by the gate at the side and thumped even louder on the back door, then peered through the kitchen window. There was no sign of life, and the door was firmly locked.
“Over here!” yelled Jack from the greenhouse.
She found him kneeling near the empty bed that had once hel
d Fuchsia’s collection of champion cucumbers. “Stolen?”
“Worse,” said Jack, pointing at the freshly disturbed earth.
Mary shivered. Poking up from the dirt were eight fingertips. They were held out in front of whoever was buried there in a position of terrified supplication. Jack donned a latex glove and scraped away at the dry earth with his fingertips. It was Fuchsia, barely six inches below the surface. His eyes and mouth were still open, and the soil was dark and heavy with blood.
“Damn and blast that Briggs!” cried Jack. “Why can’t he ever believe us?”
He stood up, and they quietly left the greenhouse.
“Cucumber extremists?” suggested Mary. “The Men in Green?”
“Except they didn’t blow it up. You’d better speak to Briggs while I do some house-to-house. If only he’d agreed to the twenty-four-hour surveillance!”
Mary spoke to Briggs, who told her—a bit sternly, she thought—to stay exactly where she was. She sat in the warm sun and stared at the body of Fuchsia until Briggs arrived. And he was in a seriously bad mood.
“Where’s Jack?” was the first thing he said, looking around.
“I’m not sure,” said Mary, trying to remain deniably ambiguous. “On leave, I think.”
“You,” he continued angrily, “are in deep trouble, Sergeant.”
Mary’s heart went cold. If Briggs could prove that she knew about Jack’s call to Bartholomew or the theft of the gingerbread thumb from the evidence store, she’d be as guilty as he was. The correct procedure would have been to arrest Jack, but that had been out of the question. They’d triumph or fall together.
“Have you found Bartholomew, sir?” she asked brightly, trying a spot of misdirection.
“It’s not your concern any longer. You are suspended from duty facing disciplinary action. I was a fool to think you might be responsible enough to head the NCD.”
She felt her shoulders slump. It was over. Even if she wasn’t charged as an accessory to Jack’s misdemeanors, she’d never get to stay in the force. And policing was all she’d ever wanted to do. But she wasn’t angry with Jack. It had been her decision.
“You’re to relinquish command of the NCD forthwith and take immediate leave pending further inquiries. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said in a resigned tone. “You know about the thumb, then?”
“Thumb?” echoed Briggs. “What are you blathering on about? But before you go, I want to know one thing: Who’s he?”
And he threw that morning’s copy of The Toad onto the garden roller. Mary frowned and looked at the black-and-white photograph on the front page. It was of a translucent globe hovering in space with two passengers—a woman and an alien. The woman was baring her breasts, and the alien, of course, was covering his eyes. The headline read SAUCY READING PC FLAUNTS HER ASSETS TO OUR LADS IN ORBIT.
“Shit,” said Mary. “I didn’t know they had a camera.”
“That’s the best you can do? ‘I didn’t know they had a camera’? Now, again: Who is this person? I can’t recognize him with his hands over his eyes.” Briggs pointed a finger at Ashley in the photograph.
“I…I don’t know,” she said at last, not sure whether to be relieved Jack was still in the clear or annoyed and embarrassed that she had appeared topless on the cover of The Toad. “I’d only met him a few hours earlier.”
“Humph,” replied Briggs, jerking his head in the direction of the garden gate. “Go on, get out of my sight. We’ll take over this investigation from here.”
“Thank you, sir.”
And she hastily made her way into the street. She looked around desperately for Jack and eventually found him sitting in his Allegro a little way up the road.
“What news?”
“I’ve been suspended as well.”
Jack shook his head sadly. “The lengths these guys will go to.”
“No,” said Mary as she blushed, “this was unrelated to the inquiry. A small…indiscretion on my behalf.”
And she told him, very quickly, about what had transpired. Jack wasn’t amused, nor impressed.
“Good timing, Mary. This lowers our authority to absolute zero.”
There was silence in the Allegro for a few minutes as they watched more squad cars arrive.
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I just felt we were getting somewhere, that’s all.”
“That reminds me,” said Mary. “I had a quick look around his house and found this.”
She handed him a photo. It was a lineup of six men, all grinning and holding a giant cucumber between them. Written below the huge vegetable was “1979 Nationals.”
“That’s Fuchsia, Cripps, Prong, Katzenberg, McGuffin…and Bisky-Batt,” murmured Jack, pointing at the individuals in turn. “All dead except Bisky-Batt and McGuffin, and he’s meant to be. We need some answers out of QuangTech. But with both of us suspended…!”
“Bisky-Batt won’t know yet.”
“Mary, assuming the authority of an officer while suspended is impersonation. Add that to stealing evidence and perverting the course of justice, and I’m going to go to prison for a very long time.”
“We’re NCD,” said Mary, remembering something that Jack had told her not that long before. “This is what we do. We get suspended, battered, beaten and almost arrested. But the bottom line is we hunt for the truth and bring justice to the nursery world. No matter what.”
“No matter what,” repeated Jack as he switched on the engine. “Want to know what I found out on door-to-door?”
They pulled into the road and headed off toward QuangTech.
“Tell me.”
“Men in Green. Three of them. They were here an hour before we arrived moving ‘rolls of carpet’ into a red van. They must have killed him and taken his cucumbers—all of them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I think Bisky-Batt has some talking to do.”
“Yes, that was the 1979 cucumber growers’ national championships,” he said with a smile. “I remember it well.”
Somehow it wasn’t the reaction they were hoping for. Evasive, difficult, unpleasant—any of those might have given some sort of hint that Bisky-Batt knew more than he said, but he was none of those things. As usual, he was helpful, open and pleasant. They turned up unannounced, and he agreed to see them without a murmur.
“And why were you there?” asked Jack.
“I was giving out the trophy on behalf of the Quangle-Wangle. The QuangTech trophy for overall winner has been a mainstay for a number of years now.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Just one of many associations and organizations that Quang-Tech supports, Inspector. Can I help with anything else?”
Jack and Mary looked at each other. This wasn’t going at all well.
“Your Advanced Weapons Division,” said Jack, frantically clutching at straws. “Is it possible that you were developing some sort of thermal heat bomb?”
“As I think I told you,” replied Bisky-Batt with infinite patience, “the QuangTech weapons division has been disbanded for over a decade.” He smiled. “It sounds as though you have been talking to someone on the fringes of science over at that Obscurity blast. No matter what we say, there will always be others who promote a conspiracy. I suggest that these people have a yeti-shaped hole in their lives that needs to be filled in some manner, whether sensible or not. We at QuangTech are concerned more with tangible realities.”
“Like Project Supremely Optimistic Belief?”
“Canceled, as I told you. The Quangle-Wangle saw the light after McGuffin’s unhappy tenure.”
“What about the Gingerbreadman?”
“What about him?”
“He’s popping up with a regularity that I find disturbing,” said Jack. “I wonder if he had ever contacted you or the Quangle-Wangle?”
“Absolutely not,” replied Bisky-Batt emphatica
lly. “If he had, I would have been straight on the phone to the police. Really, Inspector, I have to say that your line of questioning seems very haphazard. Can I assist with anything else?”
“GM experiments on cucumbers,” said Jack, getting desperate. “Unable to do your own experiments, you had McGuffin clandestinely conduct them on cucumber growers here in the UK.”
“This is ridiculous,” snapped Bisky-Batt, his patience suddenly wearing out. “If we wanted to conduct GM experiments, we most certainly would, in one of the many nations where it is legal. McGuffin, quite aside from being dead, was an expert in physics. Genetics is an entirely different discipline. Do you have any more wild accusations, or do I have to complain about your conduct to the Chief Constable?”
“That’s all the wild accusations we have for now,” said Jack loftily, attempting to pull some remnant of dignity from the wreckage. “Is it possible to speak to the Quangle-Wangle?”
“The answer is still no, Inspector. Good day to you.”
Jack and Mary mumbled something about “ongoing inquiries” and were seen firmly to the door.
“He knows,” said Jack as soon as they were outside the Quang-Tech Building.
“Knows what?”
“Knows that we’ve been suspended. But he’s doing nothing about it. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack looked back at the huge industrial complex. Somewhere within, safe from prying eyes, was the Quangle-Wangle.
Mary’s cell phone rang.
“Yes, sir,” she said, flicking a glance at Jack. “I’ll be sure to find him and tell him.”
“Developments?” he asked as she snapped the phone shut.
“You could say that. Briggs wants us both at the Bob Southey immediately. Bartholomew’s holed up inside, and the bears won’t give him up.”
34. Return to the Bob Southey
Most secret arm of Britain’s Secret Service: It is said that NS-4 is the least transparent or accountable of all Britain’s secret services, but this isn’t known, as there are no figures to back it up. The director-general is possibly someone high up, who may or may not run the disputed department from “somewhere in the country.” The organization’s function (if it has one) is unknown, and success on past missions is open to dispute. Funding is likely to come from government, but this is not known for sure, and the scope of its work involves several things that remain conjecture at this time.
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