The Fourth Bear полностью

“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.”

There was no answer when they knocked on Fuchsia’s door.

“Keep trying,” said Jack. “I’m going to check around the back.”