The Big Over Easy

by Jasper Fforde

  “Word gets around, doesn’t it?”

  “I know it’s not likely you’ll get in, but if by the remotest chance it happens, you will remember your friends at The Gadfly when Amazing Crime rejects the manuscript?”

  “You have the nicest way of putting things, Archie.”

  “So it wasn’t stealing gems in Ogapôga,” murmured Mary as they walked back to the NCD offices. “It was gunrunning to rebels.”

  “His crimes never seem to benefit himself, do they?” Jack nodded his head thoughtfully.

  “Diddling the City financial establishments out of forty million pounds in the name of freedom and democracy has the nub of a fine joke about it,” continued Mary.

  “I agree. It looks as though the egg had a social conscience—and he didn’t mind risking everything if he thought it would do some good.”

  “Like a Spongg share scam that liberated fifty million pounds for the rebuilding of the woefully inadequate and outdated St. Cerebellum’s mental hospital?”

  “Could be. He might be a crook—but with a noble purpose.”

  Gretel was hunched over papers and a calculator when Jack and Mary walked in. She gave a cheery wave without turning around.

  “Have they found the bullet at Grimm’s Road?” asked Jack.

  “Not yet.”

  “I couldn’t remember whether you liked tea or coffee,” said Ashley, bringing in a steaming mug for Jack, “so I brought both.”

  “Thank you.”

  “In the same cup.”

  Jack sighed. Ashley was still having trouble getting used to the way things were done.

  “Thank you, Ashley. Next time it’s coffee, white, one sugar—yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mary was talking to a uniformed officer at the door. After taking a few notes, she thanked him and walked back into the office.

  “Bessie Brooks has done a runner,” announced Mary, trying to find somewhere to sit in the cramped offices and eventually perching on the table edge. “They had a look around her flat, but she’s not been there for a couple of days. Suitcase missing and clothes scattered everywhere from a hurried pack. Can I issue an arrest warrant? It would make things easier if we’re to try and track her down though credit cards.”

  The phone rang and Mary picked it up. She listened for a moment and winced. “Thanks for calling. We’ll be straight there.”

  She put the receiver down and looked up at Jack.

  “I’ve got a feeling this is bad news,” he said slowly.

  “It’s Mrs. Dumpty.”

  “At last! When can we talk to her?”

  “Never—unless you know a good spiritualist. There’s been an accident down at the Yummy-Time Biscuits factory. She’s…dead.”

  21. RIP, Mrs. Dumpty, and “the Case…Is Closed!”

  CHYMES TO ATTEMPT WORLD SLEUTH RECORD

  Global number-two-ranked Amazing Crime sleuth DCI Chymes will attempt to challenge Inspector Moose’s two-hour, thirty-eight-minute world speed-solving record set last July for a case involving a triple murder, a missing will, blackmail and financial impropriety. “I think we can manage to shave a few minutes off Moose’s record,” said DCI Chymes confidently as he went into training for the attempt. Because murders cannot be undertaken to order—even for speed trials, Chymes will have to wait until a suitable slaying arrives on his doorstep. “I’ve never been more ready,” he declared.

  —Editorial from Amazing Crime Stories, June 7, 2002

  “She was on an inspection of the chocolate digestive production line,” explained a very shaken executive less than half an hour later down at the Yummy-Time factory, a clean and efficient facility full of clanking machinery, stainless-steel vats and the smell of baking and hot sugar.

  “During our afternoon tour, she asked me to fetch her shawl from her office. When I returned, I found a group of workers clustered around the industrial food mixers. It was no use, of course; Mr. Aimsworth said he saw her jump into the main dough mixer—not just for the digestives but for the entire range of biscuits, all the way from custard creams to Abernethys.”

  He broke down and gave out a muffled sob, then blew his nose on a bright yellow hankie.

  “She’d been a leading light of Yummy-Time since she took over from her father ten years ago,” said the executive. “She knew shortbread fingers like the back of her hand and upside-down cakes back to front.”

  Jack and Mary peered cautiously into one of the vast mixing vats, which, they had been informed earlier, held almost five tons of dough mixture. Of Mrs. Dumpty they could see only a foot and part of a blue dress. Already firemen had put a ladder into the vat and were wading through the sticky mixture to try to retrieve what was left of her.

  “You better get a statement from the fellow who saw her jump, Mary. I’m going to look at her office.”

  He was escorted off the factory floor by the executive, who bemoaned the loss of Mrs. Dumpty and her biscuit expertise. They stepped into the spotless interior of the administration side of the building, up two flights of steps and on to Mrs. Dumpty’s office, which would have afforded a fine view of Reading if low clouds hadn’t been scudding across the city.

  “This is her office,” said the executive. “What a terrible thing to happen! I didn’t think she would want to…you know…herself. She seemed in such fine fettle.”

  Jack walked around her desk and noticed a picture of her and Humpty in a gilt frame. There was a computer, telephone, correspondence. He stopped. There, on the blotter, was a single piece of paper folded once, with his name written clearly on the front. He took out a fountain pen and pocketknife to avoid touching it, delicately opened the note and read it. He read it again, to make quite sure.

  DI Spratt,

  I know you will be the officer to read this, and I want you to know that what I did was out of love, not hate. We had been moving towards a reconciliation, and all was going well—until I saw him with a bimbo and my blood boiled. I went to his home and prayed for God to forgive me as I pulled the trigger. Your visit yesterday made me realize that there would be no escape from retribution. Perhaps I am just saving everyone a lot of time and bother.

  PS: Please tell Mr. Spatchcock that I won’t be able to make my 9:30 appointment this evening.

  It was signed Laura Garibaldi-Dumpty. Jack opened her desk diary and compared the handwriting. It was quite distinctive and there was no doubt in his mind that she had written it. He looked at last week’s entries in the diary, but there was nothing of interest, just dinner dates, tennis, that sort of thing. She hadn’t been planning anything out of the ordinary.

  Mary appeared at the doorway as Jack was going through the desk drawers.

  “Have a look,” he said, indicating the note.

  She read it and gave a low whistle.

  “So she did kill him.”

  “Probably with this,” replied Jack, pointing at a small nickel-plated .32 automatic pistol he had discovered hidden under some papers. “Better get SOCO over here to take possession of the evidence. We’ll need to double-check the handwriting on the note and check the pistol for prints and residue. It kind of surprises me she has a gun, though.”

  “I don’t think so,” replied Mary, pointing to one of the many pictures on the wall. It depicted a smiling Laura celebrating a win at the British Small-Bore Rifle Championships. Humpty was in the group, holding a bottle of champagne—and Randolph Spongg was there, too. Pistols, it seemed, were not as alien to her as one might have supposed.

  “What did Mr. Aimsworth say?”

  “He saw her climb over the barrier, pause for a moment and then jump. By the time they had hit the emergency stop, it was already too late.”

  SOCO arrived within half an hour, but there wasn’t much to do. The note was taken away with three other examples of her handwriting, and one of the officers named Shenstone gently lifted the pistol from the bottom drawer. There were five cartridges missing from the clip, but nothing else that could be found. The t
eam was gone in under forty minutes. It was different on the main biscuit-manufacturing level. It took eight firemen, Mrs. Singh and her two assistants the best part of six hours to find all of Mrs. Dumpty. Biscuit manufacture wouldn’t restart for another week.

  “It seems fairly clear-cut,” said Mary as they drove back to the office in the Allegro.

  “Keep talking.”

  “She kills him early yesterday morning, realizes after we visit her that she will be first in the frame, has a fit of remorse and then…kills herself.”

  “It seems a bit too perfect.”

  “How can it be too perfect?” said Mary, wondering whether Chymes would still want her on his team without the Humpty investigation to poach. “She wrote the note, didn’t she?”

  Jack shrugged. Mary was right. The case was as clear as it could be, and that was good, because that was what he was there for. But from a purely selfish viewpoint, he felt somehow cheated. Murder inquiries didn’t come around every week, and he had hoped this one would make up for the pig fiasco. It had welcomed him in with open arms, only to spit him out half chewed. The mystery—such as it was—had rapidly devolved to just another crime of passion, an act of desperation that destroyed two lives and ruined countless others. The investigation was over and with it, as likely as not, him and the NCD. He imagined that this was how Friedland felt when a plum mystery collapsed into a simple case of robbery in front of him. And feeling like Chymes made him feel even worse. Besides, he needed a case like this more than at any time before. To prove to Briggs and his blasted budgetary meeting, if not to himself.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Sir?”

  “Shit,” he reiterated slightly louder, “and bollocks.”

  He sighed, finally coming to terms with the fact that the inquiry was over.

  “There are always a few unanswered questions at the end of an investigation, Mary. But this one’s over, and I’d be clutching at straws to think otherwise. Now, I’d better get this sewn up all nice and neat, just as Briggs wants it.”

  To say that Ashley, Baker and Kandlestyk-Maeker were disappointed would be a severe understatement. This investigation was a holiday from their usual dull duties, and they grumbled and moaned as Jack told them the news.

  “We’re waiting for the results of handwriting analysis before we can officially close the case, so I want all notes spick and span by ten tomorrow.”

  “Sir—” began Ashley, but Jack silenced him with a gesture.

  “Is this a pertinent question regarding the inquiry?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, then. Let’s just keep ourselves to ourselves for a bit and catch up on paperwork. Where’s Otto?”

  “Still trying to ID the man in those photographs we found in Humpty’s desk, I think.”

  “Better get him back.”

  Ashley and Gretel looked at each other and sat down quietly to do his bidding, as Mary slipped out the door.

  Jack flicked through the message slips stuck to his telephone. There was a request from Bo-peep, who had once again lost her sheep, and another message from the Allegro Owners’ Club asking whether he had checked the torque settings on the wheel bearings. There were several from his mother, the last one of which was marked “urgent.”

  Blast! he said to himself. He had forgotten to do anything about the bean refund. He picked up the phone and rang the Paint Box and was informed by a very helpful assistant that Mr. Foozle had departed unexpectedly and at very short notice to London, where he was to attend a Stubbs auction; he wouldn’t be back until Friday. She knew nothing about the beans and had no idea why Foozle would be going to a Stubbs auction, at short notice or otherwise. Jack put the receiver down and stared at his computer terminal blankly. Something about the whole Humpty affair felt wrong, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Sadly, “hunches” and “feelings” didn’t really sit well with Briggs—unless you were Guild, in which case you could base a thousand-man-hour investigation on one.

  “1000 010011 1010010 10010,” said Ashley in hushed tones on Gretel’s phone in the next room. “10010 11010 00100111 1011.”

  “Are you talking to your mother on the office phone?” bellowed Jack.

  “Sorry,” said a sheepish voice, and all was quiet. Jack stared at his “four-and-twenty blackbirds” screensaver in a desultory manner until he left to go to the Jellyman security briefing.

  While Jack was attending the briefing along with all the other officers of inspector rank and above, Mary was sitting in the Platters Coffeehouse, feeling a bit nervous—and annoyed. From the way things looked, her chances of working with Chymes had been seriously scuppered, and she might have risked her reputation for being trustworthy for nothing if Chymes decided to drop her. If it got out that she had acted behind the back of her senior officer, she’d probably have to transfer to the sheep-theft unit in Lerwick or something. Chymes must have been wrong about the Humpty case, but it didn’t matter. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain—she hoped he would fulfill his. She took a sip of coffee and flicked through her notes. She had even photocopied Mrs. Dumpty’s confession.

  “Mary?” said Flotsam, who was approaching with a coffee of his own. “You don’t mind me calling you Mary? You can call me Eddie if you want.”

  She smiled and invited him to join her.

  “How’s it going?” asked Flotsam.

  “Haven’t you heard? The ex-wife killed him. Motive, opportunity and, best of all, a note.”

  Flotsam didn’t seem overly concerned. “Knowing the Guv’nor, tricky—but not insurmountable. He’s resurrected more dropped investigations than I’ve had hot dinners. All that ‘cold case’ stuff is really popular these days. Just the sort of thing for the Amazing Crime Summer Special—now, what have you got for us?”

  “This is a copy of the confession note, and these are copies of her handwriting. I’ve made a few notes and will talk you through it, if you want.”

  “Well done,” he enthused. “The Guv’nor will be pleased—you’re definitely backing the right horse here.”

  So for the next half hour she talked about the investigation and all the pertinent points that she felt had been raised. All the while Flotsam nodded and took voluminous notes and mentioned every now and then how the Guv’nor would like that or the Guv’nor would do something with this, and when she had told him everything she knew, he thanked her, told her they would be in touch and left, leaving his coffee undrunk.

  She waited a few minutes to gather her thoughts, then walked back to the NCD offices just as Jack was returning from the Jellyman briefing.

  “Ah, Mary. I’ve told Briggs it’s a murder/suicide, and I’ll be seeing him tomorrow at ten to wrap up the Humpty case. I’ll need everyone together tomorrow morning for a heads-up on this Sacred Gonga protection-duty operation, so better make it sometime after that. Yes?”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “Good. I’m going home.”

  And he left her alone to her thoughts in the tiny offices. Annoyingly for her, they weren’t good thoughts. She was about to start a career with Chymes, something she had always wanted—but it somehow just didn’t seem right. The price tag had been high—and might become even higher.

  22. Titans and Beanstalks

  BUTLER DID DO IT SHOCK

  In a shocking result that has put the world of professional detecting into a flat spin, the butler of the deceased Lord Pilchard was discovered to have actually committed the murder. “You could have knocked me down with a feather,” said the Guild-ranked Inspector Dogleash. “I’ve been investigating for thirty years, and I’ve never heard of such a thing.” The overfamiliar premise of “the butler did it” has ensured that any butler on the scene could be instantly eliminated from inquiries. No longer. Miss Maple, who deduced the butler’s guilt, was unrepentant. “Goodness me, what a fuss I seem to have caused!” she commented, before returning to her knitting.

  —From Amazing Crime editorial, August 22, 1984
>
  As Jack stepped into the house, he noticed that even though it was nearly the children’s bedtime, things were unusually quiet.

  “Hello…?”

  Amazingly, the telly was off. The children usually watched it in shifts, and since it was the only one, fights were not uncommon.

  Madeleine was in the kitchen. He kissed her and slumped in his big chair at the head of the table.

  “The Dumpty case just folded.”

  “Solved?”

  “Through no skill on my behalf. His ex-wife killed him. She just topped herself over at the Yummy-Time factory. I’d avoid chocolate digestives for a while if I were you.”

  Jack unclipped his tie and removed one of Stevie’s toys from the small of his back.

  “What does that mean for the NCD?”

  Jack shrugged. “Disbanded, I should imagine. I’ll be entitled to a full pension in four years. I’ll only be forty-eight. Perhaps it’s time to think about a new career.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Name one.”

  Jack thought about this for a while but couldn’t really come up with anything. Police work was his life. There was nothing he’d rather do. This was too depressing. He decided to change the subject.

  “How are things with you?”

  “Good. Prometheus said he’d never seen a photographer at work, so he came and helped me do a portrait of Lady Elena Bumpkin-Tumpkinson. He was telling us all about his life before his banishment to the Caucasus. The kids love him; why he can’t get British citizenship, I have no idea. The Home Office must be bonkers.”

  “Not bonkers—just scared. It’s not a good idea to get on the wrong side of Zeus, what with all those thunderbolt things he likes to chuck around. Where is Prometheus at the moment?”

  “Have a look for yourself.”

  She pointed to the connecting door to the living room. Jack opened it a crack and looked in. Prometheus was standing in front of the TV, supplanting and outranking it for the evening. He was miming all the actions as he told the children a story, and Megan, Jerome and Stevie were sitting in an attentive semicircle in front of him. Ben sat on a chair close by and pretended to read a copy of Scientific American but was actually as enthralled as they were. No one moved or uttered a sound.