The Big Over Easy

by Jasper Fforde

  “—when Zeus, Poseidon and Hades had deposed Cronus, their father, they drew lots out of Poseidon’s helmet, the helmet of darkness, you remember, that had been given to him by Cyclops. Anyway, they drew lots to decide who would gain the lordship of the sky, the sea and the dark underworld.”

  “What about the earth?” asked Jerome.

  “That, young man, they decreed they would leave common to all. Hades won the underworld, Poseidon the sea and Zeus the sky. Poseidon set about building his underwater palace in the sea off Euboea, constructing magnificent stables to keep his chariot horses in, horses that were brilliant white and had brazen hooves and golden manes. When they pulled Poseidon in his golden chariot, storms would cease and sea monsters appear and play about them like young dolphins….”

  Jack shut the door silently.

  “Did you speak to your mother?” asked Madeleine. “She’s called about eight times.”

  “I’ll ring her later,” said Jack. “She’s probably mislaid one of her cats or—”

  Jack was interrupted by a loud groan of disappointment as Prometheus called a halt to his story. There was a pause, and then the kids trotted in to have a glass of warm milk before bed.

  “Is Prometheus going to stay for good, Jack?” asked Jerome, the milk giving him a temporary white mustache.

  “He can leave when he wants. He’s our lodger.”

  “You mean a prostitute like Kitty Fisher?”

  “No, not like that at all,” said Jack quickly.

  After milk, Jack and Madeleine herded them upstairs. They put them all to bed and kissed them one by one. Megan had to be kissed twice, “just in case” and they switched out the lights.

  They crept back downstairs, and Jack wandered through to the kitchen, where he found Ben, who was dressed up for a night on the town.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Clubbing,” replied Ben as he carefully combed his hair in front of the mirror.

  “Those poor seals. The leisure center really does cater for just about any minority sporting interests these days, doesn’t it?”

  Ben gave Jack a withering look. “The comedy never ends,” he said sarcastically. “You can be such a dweeb, y’know, Dad.”

  “Is it the harpist?” asked Jack. “I thought you’d lost her to the orchestra’s tuba.”

  “Not lost, but temporarily mislaid,” said Ben after a moment’s reflection. A car horn sounded, and he ran out.

  At that moment the back door opened and Ripvan blew in with a blast of cold air like some sort of furry tumbleweed. Following him was Pandora, who was well bundled up in a large down jacket. She had been at a talk given by a particle-physics professor from CERN, and the questions had gone on a lot longer than she had anticipated.

  “Hi, Madeleine. Hi, Dad.”

  “Is he still here?” she asked quietly as she peeled off layer upon layer of outer clothing.

  “Who?” replied Jack.

  “Who? Come off it, Dad. Prometheus, of course.”

  “He’s about somewhere. Why?”

  She looked at him demurely. “Oh, nothing. See you later.”

  She ran off upstairs after throwing her down jacket into the cloakroom. As she rounded the newel post, she and Prometheus met face-to-face.

  “Good evening,” he said with a disarming smile.

  “Hello,” she said uneasily, “I’m—”

  “Pandora. Yes, I know.”

  It seemed as though he had to force the name out.

  “I once knew someone of that name,” he continued sadly, “a long, long time ago.”

  Pandora stared at him, mumbled something incomprehensible that one might have expected to hear from Stevie and disappeared upstairs.

  Jack and Madeleine had been watching. Madeleine giggled, but Jack was more serious.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  “She’s not a child any longer. If she lived elsewhere, you wouldn’t treat her like an eight-year-old.”

  “I do not treat her like an eight-year-old.”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  The phone rang, and Jack answered it. It was his mother.

  “Jack?”

  She had her angry voice on. Apology time. “Mother, I’m really sorry about the Stubbs—”

  “I know that,” she said, interrupting him. “That was yesterday’s crisis.”

  “And today’s?”

  “It’s the beans I threw out the window.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’ve started to grow!”

  She had sounded distressed about the rapid growth of the beanstalk, and as Jack rang the doorbell twenty minutes later, he was expecting to find her in a state of acute anxiety. Strangely, she was precisely the opposite.

  “Hello, darling!” she warbled unsteadily. “Come on in!”

  She ushered him in, but by the time he had taken off his overcoat and hat, she had vanished.

  “Mother?” he called, walking past the gently ticking grand-father clock to the living room, which was full of his mother’s ancient friends, most of whom he knew and all of whom had asked him surreptitiously to get them off speeding fines.

  “New hip, Mrs. Dunwoody?” said Jack politely as he followed his mother towards the French windows, where he was waylaid by Mrs. Snodgrass. “Is that so?” replied Jack sympathetically. “You should eat more roughage.” He hadn’t got much further when Major Piggott-Smythe stopped him with the end of his pipe pressed on Jack’s lapel.

  “Don’t think much of these alien-visitor johnnies,” he said, his red nose almost a hazard to shipping. “Who invited them here anyway?”

  “We did,” replied Jack, “by transmitting all those seventies sitcoms. I think they wanted to find out why we never did a third series of Fawlty Towers. Excuse me.”

  He found his mother standing on the lawn staring at the beanstalk. It was a cold, clear night, and the moon had come up, which somehow made the plant seem all the more remarkable. Just next to the potting shed, five separate dark green stalks had grown from the earth and fused into what appeared to be a large and complex plait that reached almost twelve feet into the air. Already leaves had started to unfurl on smaller stalks that radiated from the main trunk, and small pods had appeared with tiny vestigial beans inside.

  “Isn’t it just the most beautiful thing ever?” asked his mother, her breath visible in the crisp air.

  Jack took an eager step forward and then stopped himself. For a fleeting moment he’d felt a strange impulse to climb it. He shook himself free of the urge and said, “Stupendous! All this growth in one day?”

  She nodded.

  “And the party?”

  “You know, I was fearful at first about the beanstalk. I thought of the harm it could do to the foundations, the value it might take off the house, that kind of thing. But then all of a sudden I thought, What the hell! and woke up to how extraordinary it was. And do you know, I’m really quite fond of it. I’m having a botanist here tomorrow to have a look.” She glanced around at her friends. “Someone brought over some hooch. I’m afraid to say we’re all a little tipsy.”

  Jack sighed. “Does this mean you want to keep it?”

  “Why not? Is it doing any harm?”

  Jack had to admit that it wasn’t—yet. They both gazed at it for a moment. It quivered every now and then as growing stresses were released; they could almost see it grow larger in front of their eyes. His mother shivered in the cold air, and Jack draped his jacket over her shoulders.

  “Do you think it’s self-pollinating?” she asked.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. Are you sure you want to keep it?”

  Mrs. Spratt patted her son’s hand reassuringly “Let’s leave it a couple of days. We can make a decision then.”

  They went indoors, where his mum’s friends harangued him about the positioning of speed cameras until he was finally able to tear himself away.

  When he got home, everything was peaceful. The young childr
en were all asleep, Madeleine was in her darkroom, and Pandora was reading in the living room. Apart from the quiet sound of Prometheus playing a sad lament on his lute in the spare room, all was calm in the Spratt household. Jack went into his study, switched on his desk lamp and stared at his iQuang computer. It took him another hour to finish his report. The next morning at ten, he would present it to Briggs and officially close the case.

  Or so he thought.

  23. Mary’s Doubts

  DOG WALKERS FACE BODY-FINDING BAN

  Citizens who find a corpse while walking their dog may be fined if proposed legislation is made law, it was disclosed yesterday. The new measures, part of the Criminal Narrative Improvement Bill, have been drafted to avoid investigations looking clichéd once they reach the docudrama stage. Other offenses covered by the act will be motorists declaiming in a huffy tone, “Why don’t you catch burglars/real criminals for a change?” when caught speeding, if there is a documentary crew in attendance. Civil libertarians, motorist groups and dog walkers are said to be “outraged.”

  —From Amazing Crime Stories editorial, December 9, 1997

  Mary couldn’t sleep. She sat in the bedroom of her dilapidated flying boathouse and watched the rippled patterns the light made on the ceiling. Chymes seemed confident that the Humpty case hadn’t ended, and that bothered her. It shouldn’t have been any of her business, and that bothered her, too. At six-thirty she got up, showered and drove into Reading while it was still dark, the languid movements of late revelers and the bustle of early tradesmen the only activity in the sleeping town.

  She had a coffee with the end of the night shift and at 8:00 A.M. went over to the Forensic Department to see if Skinner was by chance an early riser. He wasn’t, but she wanted to speak to him, so she sat outside his office until he arrived, coffee and papers in hand. He still had his bicycle clips on.

  “I’m DS Mary,” she said. “I’m working with DI Spratt.”

  She had expected a smirk when she said it but didn’t get one. Skinner was one of the friendlies.

  “A fine man is Jack. Come on inside.”

  He unlocked the door and let them both in. The strip lights flickered on, making Mary blink after the dinginess of the corridor.

  “So,” said Skinner, guessing her intention almost immediately, “more questions over the Humpty murder? Or is it about Mrs. Dumpty?”

  “Both.”

  He pulled off his bicycle clips. “Shoot.”

  “Five shots had been fired from Mrs. Dumpty’s .32,” she began,

  “yet we can only account for one. What happened to the other four?”

  But Skinner didn’t seem particularly puzzled.

  “The fact they were missing from the clip means nothing, Mary. She might never even had loaded them.”

  “So it’s not suspicious?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What about not finding the spent cartridge in Winkie’s garden?”

  “Shells are often picked up by astute criminals, Mary. It’s fairly common knowledge that we can match a cartridge to a gun as easily as we can match a slug—often easier. Perps often use revolvers for just that reason.”

  “What about a .32 caliber being able to destroy Humpty?”

  He scratched his head. “I tend to agree with Mrs. Singh—I would have thought a larger caliber. He was very badly damaged. But we’re both guessing. Data on bullets going through large eggs is a little bit in short supply, as you might imagine.”

  “But if we had the spent slug?”

  “Oh, yes.” Skinner smiled. “If we had that, we could know for sure.”

  Mary thanked him and moved to go, but Skinner laid a hand on her wrist.

  “Be careful, Mary.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just that things are sometimes not always what they seem.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re new to Reading and new to Jack. Don’t underestimate him. He’s a better man than most people give him credit for.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  Skinner stared at her through his thick pebble spectacles.

  “Some people at Reading are too powerful for the good of the service,” he said slowly, pointing at a buff envelope on his desk, right next to the evidence bag with the two weathered shotgun cartridges that needed to be returned, “and people talk out of turn at their peril. You can take the cartridges with you, but I wouldn’t want you to make a mistake and take that buff envelope as well. Do you understand?”

  She frowned but nodded her agreement, wished him good day and dutifully took both the evidence bag and the envelope.

  She had a look when she was in her car. The envelope contained crime-scene photographs of the Andersen’s Wood murder, and pretty gruesome they were, too. She went through them once, then again. If there was something going on, she was definitely missing it. She replaced the pictures inside the envelope, stuffed it under the seat of her car and headed off towards Spatchcock’s Gymnasium.

  Mr. Spatchcock was giving a morning keep-fit lesson to a group of women who were all a bit puffed and had begun to go red. She could almost hear the silent pleas for him to stop or at least slow down. She was glad to be able to help. She tapped on the glass and hoped Spatchcock recognized her. It didn’t do to start flashing police badges around people’s place of work—unless you needed to make a point, of course.

  But he did recognize her. He told his class to take a much-welcome break and trotted up to where Mary was waiting for him.

  “It’s DS Mary, isn’t it?”

  “It is, Mr. Spatchcock. I’d just like to ask you a few more questions.”

  “Of course. I was very sorry to hear about Mrs. Dumpty. She had been a client for about two years and, like many of my personal charges, a driven woman with appetites the same as anyone else.”

  “You were intimate?”

  “If that is how you like to phrase it, yes. You may not approve of what I do, but no one is hurt by it, and I fulfill an important role. Laura was a lot better than most; I think we even had an affection of sorts for each other. Anyway, I have a friend in the pathology lab who told me they thought Humpty had been murdered, so naturally I thought Laura would be in the frame. Of course, I knew she hadn’t killed him—and that’s why I called you straightaway.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Which part?”

  “The ‘hadn’t killed him’ part.”

  “Well, Sergeant,” he said in a quieter voice, “I was with her the night of the Spongg Charity Benefit. I have no proof, of course, but that’s why I contacted you.”

  “Wait,” said Mary, “I haven’t spoken to you at all since we met at the Cheery Egg on Tuesday morning.”

  “I know that. You weren’t there, so I spoke to the other officer.”

  “DI Spratt?”

  “No, the one who is always on TV with that annoying chirpy cockney sidekick.”

  “Friedland Chymes?”

  “That’s the one. I told him all about it. Did he not tell you?”

  “No,” replied Mary, suddenly feeling confused. She thanked him and walked outside to her car. If Flotsam had known about Spatchcock when she spoke to him at the coffeehouse the previous evening, why didn’t he tell her? Wasn’t she part of their team? Chymes, she knew, conducted his investigations in a strange way—perhaps this was part of some bigger plan—and Flotsam followed orders, just like her. But what if there was another reason for it? What if Chymes was waiting until Jack had closed the investigation before he reopened it? That would fit into his dramatic way of doing things. She pulled out her mobile and started to dial Jack, then snapped it shut again. She needed more information. She started the car and drove rapidly across to Grimm’s Road.

  She parked in the alleyway and, after consulting the diagram Skinner had sketched for her, attempted to find out where the spent slug had returned to earth. It seemed simple enough. Lining up Humpty’s entrance and exit wounds gave Mary a zo
ne of probability the shape of a wedge with a twenty-degree spread up to a hundred feet from where Humpty was sitting when he was killed. She worked from the sharp edge of the wedge back, scouring the earth, rubbish and junk in the back alleyway that the simple plan had indicated. She searched for forty minutes in an increasing state of agitation until a sudden thought had her standing on an upturned dustbin to check in the guttering—and there it was, looking small, gray and innocuous. It had been only slightly deformed—an almost perfect specimen for Skinner to work with. Better than that, it was a .44 caliber. Even if Spatchcock had lied—and there didn’t seem any reason for him to do so—then Mrs. Dumpty had killed her ex-husband with another gun. Not out of the question, but out of the ordinary. The two facts together would be enough to keep the investigation open.

  “Well, well. DS Mary.”

  She turned around quickly. Standing in the alleyway was Friedland Chymes.

  “Sir,” she said, trying to hide her feelings of nervousness, and jumping down, “what are you doing here?”

  “The same thing as you, I suspect,” he replied. “Trying to get to the bottom of Humpty’s death. What have you discovered?”

  She stared at him, and he stared back. She had stumbled, but she had not yet fallen. She prayed she wouldn’t blow it.

  “I spoke to Mr. Spatchcock this morning.”

  Chymes wasn’t fazed for even a second. He smiled again.

  “You figured there was something hokey about the whole thing on your own, Mary? I’m very impressed. Jack’s about to roll over and wee on himself in Briggs’s office, but you’re out here hunting down the truth. I can’t begin to tell you how valuable I think you would be to my team.”