The Fourth Bear полностью

“You should have seen it last week,” said the Vicar with a smile. “There was a mile-wide no-go zone while the area was made safe. As soon as the cordon was lifted, it was like a plague of locusts. For a moment we thought we might have to change the village’s name to ‘Popularity.’"

The Vicar chuckled at his own joke.

“Well, this was Stanley’s property,” he said, waving his hand at a flat piece of hard-packed soil that had been roped off and contained nothing except a white-coated individual who was passing some sort of humming sensor over the ground. “That’s Dr. Parks. He’ll answer questions if you find him in a good mood. Do drop in for tea before you go, won’t you? My wife does a mean scone.”

He smiled, shook their hands, and was gone.

Jack and Mary stared at the expanse of well-trodden ground among a group of forty or so others doing exactly the same.

“It’s not the original soil,” said a man dressed in tinfoil overalls and holding a crystal.

“No?”

“No. The crater was fully excavated by government inspectors, who then filled in the hole with eighty tons of new topsoil.”

“That was charitable of them,” remarked Jack.

“Charitable be damned,” said their new friend. “All it did was hamper the investigations of the independent scientists who arrived as soon as they could.”

They learned from several other passersby who seemed to be in the know that the government’s interventions had given the conspiracy theorists a field day, and six books with equally bizarre and implausible explanations were being hurried to the bookshops, the most popular concept being some sort of modern battlefield-size nuclear device delivered accidentally by a fighter-bomber, although the lesser theories were still considered quite seriously: a meteor strike, an unprecedented ball-lightning explosion, the planned arrival of an asteroid made entirely of sapphire, an attack by French cucumber terrorists intent on sabotaging the opposition, the arrival of Lucifer to cleanse man’s wickedness or even—if you really stretched your imagination—an overlooked wartime Grand Slam bomb that had spontaneously detonated.

They walked over to Dr. Parks, who was absorbed in his work and didn’t hear them approach. When Jack spoke, he jumped and then glared at them testily. He was aged about thirty and looked tanned and fit, for an academic. It was soon apparent that he didn’t place government agencies, police included, in very high esteem.

“Dr. Parks?” asked Jack. “May we have a word?”

He looked them both up and down. “Police?”

“Well, yes,” replied Jack, a bit miffed that it should be so obvious. “I’m DCI Spratt. This is Sergeant Mary.”

The scientist chuckled to himself. “You’re a bit late. I got here as soon as the government would let me, and even then I was too late. Which theory do you guys adhere to?”

“We’re not so much interested in the phenomenon as in a journalist who was investigating it.”

“Which journalist? There must have been dozens.”

Jack showed him a photo of Goldilocks. He stared at it for a moment, then at Jack and Mary.

“Yes, I remember her. She was one of the first in once the government lifted the cordon on Wednesday morning. She sticks in my mind because she didn’t treat any of us out here on the outer fringes of science as loonies and geeks. Everyone else does.”

“Did you know she was talking to Cripps the day before the explosion?”

“If she was,” replied Parks, “there’s a lot of people who’d like to speak to her.”

“They’ll be disappointed. She died on Saturday morning.”

“Murdered by the government?” he asked excitedly, his conspiratorial leanings springing to the fore. “Now, that would be good.”

“From my experience of government departments,” said Jack,

“they couldn’t order the right size of staples, let alone succeed in anything as bizarrely complex as a murder and then subsequent cover-up.”

“Yes,” agreed Parks sulkily, “it’s where that particular mainstay of conspiracy theory falls down. I hate to admit it, but governmental deviousness is usually better explained by incompetence, vanity and the need to protect one’s job at all costs. Still, I liked her.”

“What else can you remember about her?”

“Not much,” said Parks after a moment’s thought, “except…”

“Except what?”

“Except she was the only one who asked me about… McGuffin.”

“Professor Angus McGuffin?”

Parks registered surprise that they knew about him. “You’ve heard of him? Not many people have, outside the pseudoscience elite. He’s been dead these past sixteen years, a great loss to the conspiracy industry. When Guff was around, there was always lots of wild conjecture to try and dress up as serious scientific study.”

“What sort of work did McGuffin indulge in?” asked Jack.