Fourth Bear (17 page)

He then picked Jack up as though he weighed nothing at all and threw him bodily through the wooden doors of a nearby garage. He smiled again, gave a cheery wave and with a short run and a single leap cleared a nearby wall, then ran through the next five gardens as though they were a series of hurdles, vanishing over the last with a stylish Fosbury flop.

“Are you all right?” asked a kindly lady who had come out to see what the commotion was all about. Jack sat up among the remains of the garage door and blinked. He rubbed his neck and winced as his fingers discovered a painful cut at the back of his head.

“I’ll be all right—thank you.”

The kindly lady smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

The first of the squad cars arrived two minutes later as Jack emerged from the garage. It had been empty, which was perhaps just as well.

“Where did he go, sir?” asked Sergeant Fox.

“He’s long gone,” murmured Jack, leaning on a corner of his Allegro. “There’s nothing here but a bruised DCI.”

He carefully unclipped his tie and threw it onto the backseat of the Allegro, then executed a neat double take.
The car didn’t have a single scratch on it.
The front wheel was back on, the windshield mended, and the side that had scraped down the line of parked cars had miraculously mended itself. The car was perfect in every detail, with no evidence at all of the grueling punishment it had received not more than five minutes before. It seemed that Dorian Gray’s “guarantee” hadn’t been an idle boast. Jack was looking at the oil painting in the trunk—that of the even
more
wrecked Allegro—when Copperfield drove up with two other squad cars that disgorged police marksmen in a seemingly never-ending stream.

“You look as though someone insane just threw you through a door,” said Copperfield without any sense of irony.

“Funnily enough,” said Jack, shutting the trunk and sitting on the broken wall, “that’s exactly what he did.”

Copperfield whistled. He had read the reports about the Gingerbreadman’s phenomenal strength, but it had to be seen to be believed. He started to arrange a search pattern in nearby streets, but Jack wasn’t confident of any success. He had seen the Gingerbreadman run at speeds of up to forty miles an hour and not even be out of breath.

“I thought you were on sick leave?” said Copperfield. “And undergoing psychological assessment?”

“No secrets in the station, are there? It’s called
counseling.
And I just happened to be in the area with Mary.” He suddenly remembered and sat bolt upright. “Mary…?”

Jack jumped into the Allegro and made his way back to Radnor Road, where he found her sitting in the back of an ambulance with a red blanket draped across her shoulders.

“You all right?”

She nodded. “Bruised. He chucked a bathtub full of water at me.”

“How can he chuck a tubful of water?”

“With the bath still
surrounding
the water on most sides, quite easily. You?”

“He threw me into a lockup garage.”

“Lucky the doors were open.”

“They weren’t. I lost him a mile away.”

He sat down next to her as she related what had happened.

“The owner of the flat?”

“She’s dead—wallpapered over in the spare room. Good job, too. Despite the lumpiness, all the pattern matched up, and he’d bothered to line it first. No one does that anymore—not even the really class decorators.”

“Another one for the Gingerbreadman,” sighed Jack. “That makes one hundred and eight victims.” He thought for a moment.

“Any bears living here?”

“None—not even a small one. If Goldilocks was
the
Goldilocks, she kept herself to a conventional neighborhood.”

“Listen,” said Jack, “where NS-4 is involved, we can’t trust anyone. We keep the Goldilocks thing to ourselves. I was cadging a ride, and you were here checking on a potential ursine residential license infringement. You didn’t find anything.”

“Got it.”

She shook her head sadly. “Not really fair, is it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Getting the stuffing kicked out of us when it’s not even our investigation.”

The only known human able to speak binary:
Owing to the complexity of binary, the speed at which it is spoken and the way in which the rules of grammar and pronunciation change almost daily and for no apparent reason, few humans have ever progressed beyond simple phrases such as “hello,” “good-bye,” “Can you direct me toward galaxy C-672?” and “My aunt is comprised chiefly of stardust.” But utilizing a “total immersion” system of learning, Dr. Colin Parrot of Warwick University successfully mastered basic binary and can converse, but with a limited vocabulary and at only one-thousandth the speed. “Colin did jolly well,” said his teacher, friend and mentor, Adrian 1001010111111101010. “His language skills are about on a par with those of a programmable toaster. Given a couple of years more, he’ll be able to have an intelligent one-on-one with a dishwasher.”

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

Jack and Mary
were driven to the emergency room, where Jack had three stitches in his head. Copperfield and Briggs were waiting to question them when they got back to the station, the military and tactical firearms squads now very much in evidence.

The first thing Briggs said was, “I thought you were at home watching reruns of
Columbo
, Jack.”

“Mary was driving me to my counseling session and stopped off on the way—an NCD matter.”

Briggs turned to Mary. “Is this true?”

“Yes, sir. A possible ursine residential license infringement.”

“The Gingerbreadman is
not
an NCD investigation, Sergeant. You know that.”

“It was a coincidence, sir,” she responded confidently.

“Do you think I would be crazy enough to tackle him on my own?”

“Perhaps not you,” said Briggs, glancing at Jack. Briggs thought for a moment and narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t plot device number twenty-seven, is it?” he asked suspiciously.

“The one where my partner gets killed in a drug bust gone wrong and I throw in my badge and go rogue?” replied Jack innocently. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“No, not that one,” countered Briggs in a state of some confusion. “The one where you try and find the Gingerbreadman on the sly and make Copperfield and me look like idiots.”

“That would be a twenty-nine, wouldn’t it?” put in Mary, who wasn’t going to miss out on the fun.

“No, no,” said Jack, “Briggs means a twenty-six. A twenty-nine is where the bad guy turns out quite inexplicably to be the immediate superior.”

“A twenty-six,” said Briggs, “yes, that’s the one.”

“What about it?”

“You’re not doing one, are you?”

“No, sir,” replied Jack. “I’m suspended awaiting a psychological appraisal, and I don’t know what plot device
that
is.”

“Got to be well over a hundred,” suggested Mary helpfully.

Briggs looked at them both for a moment. He shrugged, seemingly satisfied. “Okay. Copperfield has some questions.”

He left them to the Inspector, who took infinitely detailed statements. The Gingerbreadman had been at liberty for less than twenty-four hours and had already killed once.

“Do you have any idea where he is now?” asked Jack, who wanted to keep abreast of what was going on.

“We’re searching the local area,” replied Copperfield in a businesslike tone. “He won’t get far.”

“He’s long gone,” said Jack with a sigh. “He’ll run and run and you won’t catch him. No one will
ever
catch him. He has to make a mistake—or be tricked.”

“How would you know that?” asked Copperfield.

“I’m NCD. I know these things. It will take more than a platoon of highly trained killing machines to bring him down.”

Copperfield leaned closer. “What then?”

“Get inside his head. Think what he thinks. Figure out what
you
might do if you were a gingerbreadman.”

Copperfield stared at Jack, then burst out laughing. “You’re kidding, right? Thanks for nothing. You can go.”

Ashley was waiting for them when they got back to the NCD office, and when he saw them, he went even bluer that he usually was.

“I’m glad to see you’re not mutilated in any way,” he said. “A missing arm might ruin your symmetry. Personal asymmetry where I come from is a big taboo and brings great shame on the family and sometimes even the whole village.”

“Do you then have to kill yourself over it or something?”

“Goodness me, no! The family and village just have to learn to be ashamed—and nuts to them for being so oversensitive.”

“I see. Well, thanks for relaying the messages.”

Jack sat down and looked at the eighty or so pointless e-mails that were in his in-box while Ashley scuttled up to Mary.

“And you are well, too, Mary?”

“I’m fine, Ash. A bit bruised, but I’ll live. Um… were you serious about that date?”

He blinked again. “Yes—weren’t you?”

“Of course,” replied Mary, her nerve failing her.

Jack deleted the e-mails en masse and said, “Ash, did you find out anything about Goldilocks’s friend Mr. Curry?”

The alien produced a sheet of paper covered with ones and zeros. Of course, he
could
write in English and readily agreed it was more efficient and helpful to do so, but he found binary more relaxing, despite the fact that it can take over two sides of closely written ones and zeros to ask for two extra pints from the milkman—and a single zero in the wrong place made it unintelligible, even to Ashley.

“1000100 Mr. Currys,” read Ash, “100000 of which were either under 1000 or over 111100. 10 were in prison, which leaves 100010. I copied those addresses down in English—here.”

Jack examined the thirty-four names closely. Sadly, none of them were bears—which would have been a long shot, but worth a look nonetheless. He dialed Josh Hatchett’s number, but it was busy.

“I called the Bart-Mart superstore about the security tapes,” said Ashley, “and they told me they’d be happy to release them as long as we sent them a letter of request—it’s for the QuangTech lawyers, apparently.”

“QuangTech? What have they got to do with Bart-Mart?”

“They own them,” remarked Ashley. “Everyone knows that.”

“It’s not common knowledge, Ash.”

“I think it is. Mary?”

“Yes?”

“Who owns Bart-Mart?”

“QuangTech,” she replied without thinking. “Everyone knows that.”

“They do
not,
” replied Jack, reflecting upon the Quangle-Wangle’s heavy financial cloak that seemed to have fallen over most of Berkshire. “It was a fluke, you both knowing.”

Ashley handed him a sheet of paper.

“This was the request I was going to send. As you can see,
not one pirate.
What do you think?”

Jack quickly read it. “Fine,” he said handing it back, “just leave out the bit about the elephants. And I need some info on Goldilocks’s car. An Austin Somerset, registration 226 DPX. And we should consider tracing her cell phone—and look through these explosions and see if you can find a link.”

Jack tossed the file marked “Important” across the desk to him. Ashley picked it up and said:

“Somerset… cell phone… link explosions… lose the elephants. Got it.”

He took the draft letter and walked up the wall to the ceiling, where he sat cross-legged and upside down at his workstation. It was an efficient use of space in the small office, and by the ingenious use of Post-its and Velcro and a telephone screwed to the ceiling, usually quite safe.

Jack tried to dial Josh Hatchett again, but his phone was still busy. He looked at his watch. He could still make his appointment at the shrink’s, show them he wasn’t a wild-eyed loon and be back on active duty by teatime. But something else was bothering him.

“Mary, can I show you something?”

They walked down to the garage beneath the station where Jack’s Allegro was parked. As they approached the car, they could see someone on his hands and knees peering intently at the pristine front fender of the car.

“What are you doing, Marco?”

Ferranti jumped up guiltily. He was a pale man with thin lips and very little hair covered by a bad wig. He was not in the force but worked for it—as a claims assessor who looked into any damage inflicted by the police in the course of their duties. He strove to have any claims dealt with quickly and efficiently, sometimes irrespective of fault—lawsuits were in nobody’s interest. He wasn’t generally liked, for obvious reasons.