Fourth Bear (19 page)

He found himself pacing the room, stopped, gave a wan smile, then seated himself with his hands under his thighs to keep them from fidgeting.

“Is that all you need to know?”

“I’m only just beginning,” replied Kreeper with a unpleasant smile. “Tell me about the beanstalk.”

“What beanstalk?”

“The one that grew in your mother’s garden. The one that grew after you swapped the Stubbs cow for the ‘magic’ beans. The one you chopped down to destroy that giant… thing.”

“Oh,
that
beanstalk.”

“Yes, that one. Doesn’t the whole scenario ring with even the slightest familiarity to you?”

“What do you want from me, Kreeper?”

“Nothing,” she replied evenly. “I’ve just been asked to do a psychiatric evaluation to see if you are mentally fit enough to continue your duties, and I think it’s important to understand why it is that you are so suited to nursery crime work.”

He stared at her, and she stared back. He took a deep breath and calmed himself. Something about her manner wasn’t right. She had brought her own selfish agenda to the meeting. This wasn’t an evaluation; it was simply a hurdle in the narrative. And as soon as he realized
that,
he knew he could go on the attack. He remembered some advice that DCI Horner had given him when he had passed the NCD reins across to him. “Remember, m’boy,” his old boss had said, eyes twinkling, “that if anyone tries to get the better of you, stand up straight and say to yourself in an imperious air, ‘I am the new Mrs. de Winter now!’ You’ll find it works wonders.” Jack stared at Kreeper and narrowed his eyes.

“Mrs. de Winter,” he murmured.

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing. In answer to your question as to why I’m so suited to NCD work: After many years working among the nursery characters living in Reading, I have grown to have an affinity with their way of thinking. Call it intuition if you like, but there it is, and I can’t explain it.”

Kreeper’s face fell at Jack’s recovery. She thought she’d gotten him. “Nothing else?”

Jack felt his heart stop thumping and was suddenly calmer.

“Nothing at all. Tell me, what kind of parents named Kreeper give their daughter a name like Virginia?”

She scratched her chin and looked away.

“Virginia Kreeper is a plant, isn’t it?”

“Possibly. But this interview isn’t about me, Inspector.”

“You’re wrong. It’s about
us,
And since you have to stand in judgment of me, I think I’m entitled to know just what sort of a person I’m dealing with and where you fit into the grand scheme of things. A tall, thin, beaky appearance with colored-frame spectacles. Pointlessly aggressive, doubtlessly single and seemingly without a clue as to the proper procedure for a psychiatric evaluation. From where I’m sitting, you look like a poorly realized stereotype, a one-dimensional character without backstory or future—and a name to match your bearing and position within the bigger picture.”

It was Kreeper’s turn to be flustered. She ran a hand through her lank hair, trembled for a moment and then said, “I… I… don’t know what you mean, I’m sure. A stereotype? Bigger picture? What are you suggesting?”

“Let’s put it this way,” said Jack, suddenly feeling a lot more self-assured. “You and I have perhaps more in common than you think. And you sitting behind that desk questioning my motivations smacks of the very worst kind of hypocrisy. Essentially, you’re nothing but a vehicle for a series of bad psychiatric jokes and a plot device to stop me from getting to the truth. A
threshold guardian,
whose only purpose in existence is for me to circumvent—which I’m doing right now, if you haven’t noticed.”

Kreeper stared back at him, trying to adopt a bemused air of condescension to disguise her sudden nervousness.

“A one-dimensional threshold guardian? No, no, you’re quite wrong. Look, here!” She opened her purse and passed him a picture of a teenager in pigtails and wearing glasses. “It’s my niece,” she explained. “I take her out on her birthday to all kinds of places. Last year we went to the Natural History Museum. So you see I’m not poorly realized at all—I’m flesh and blood and fully in command of my own destiny—and having a recollectable past proves I’m not one-dimensional.”

She glared at him hotly, but Jack had enough experience of PDRs and incidental characters to know one when he saw one.

“What’s her name?”

“Her…
name?
”

“Yes. Your niece has a name, I take it?”

Kreeper blinked at him, and tears started to well up in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said at last, breaking out in a series of sobs.
“I just… don’t…know!”

Jack felt sorry for her. It can’t be easy to have your entire life summed up in a few perfunctory descriptive terms, the sole meaning of your existence just a few lines in the incalculable vastness of fiction. Still, this was his career in the balance. If he didn’t deal with her, the Jack Spratt series was likely to stop abruptly at the second volume. No third book and
definitely
no boxed set.

“The only question we have here,” said Jack without emotion,

“is this: ‘Am I sane enough to be back on active duty?’ Do we understand each other?”

But Kreeper was in no state to say or do anything. Her shoulders heaved with silent sobs, and tears rolled down her cheeks. She buried her face in her notes and mumbled,
“Why?… Why?… Why? Oh, the echoing void, the meaninglessness of it all!”

Jack looked at his watch. This was becoming tiresome, and he had a journalist to find.

“Her name’s Penny,” he said in a quiet voice, “Penny Moffat. She’s your brother Dave’s second daughter. They have another daughter called Anne, who’s at Warwick. You and Dave were brought up in Hampshire, and once, when you were six and he was eight, you fell off your bike and cut your chin. That’s how you got that scar.”

Kreeper stopped sobbing and looked up. “Penny?” she said, picking up the photograph of her niece, then gently touching the small raised scar that had suddenly appeared on her chin.

“Yes. Your brother’s wife is called Felicity, and… she’s the best friend you have.”

Kreeper’s eyes filled with tears again, but this time they were tears of
joy.
“She is, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Last year you all went to Cádiz on holiday. It was hot.”

“Very hot,” agreed Kreeper. “I got sunburned and had to spend the third day indoors.” She smiled to herself, then at him.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So… when do you put me back on the active list?”

She dabbed her eyes with Jack’s handkerchief and took a deep breath. “If it was in my power, I’d do it here and now, Jack.”

He raised an eyebrow. “But…?”

“But the whole self-repairing car issue is a continuing subplot and completely out of my hands. The best I can do is ask you for some sort of
proof
the car is doing what you say it is.”

“I give you my word, Kreeper.”

She looked around and lowered her voice. “Jack, you and I both know there are bigger forces at play here. If I don’t have proof about your car, I can’t give you a clean bill of health. You know how it works. Besides, cars don’t repair themselves.”

“This one does. I bought it with a guarantee from this guy named Dorian Gray over at Charvil. Ever heard of him?”

“No.”

Jack stared at her for a moment. She was right—this
was
the best she could do. He snapped his fingers as an idea came to him.

“Come with me.”

A few minutes later, they found themselves back in the underground garage, facing the shiny new Allegro Equipe. He showed her the oil painting of the busted-up Allegro, but she wasn’t impressed.

“So?” she said, hands on hips.

“I’ll break something on it, and you can see for yourself how it mends itself. Then you’ll understand and I’m sane, right?”

“No. I’d be as mad as you—which is the same thing, relatively speaking.”

Jack took the wheel brace from the trunk and with a single swipe took off the side mirror and put a dent in the door. The mirror fell to the ground with a tinkling of broken glass.

“Watch carefully,” he said. “The last time it happened, the whole car repaired itself from a total wreck in under a minute, so a side mirror should be a snap. Any moment now. Pretty soon. A few seconds.”

Kreeper folded her arms.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be watching it,” mused Jack after they had stared at it for more than a minute without the car’s giving even the
slightest
sign of repairing itself.

“Listen, I’ve been very patient over this—”

“Just turn around, Kreeper. We have to not be watching. That’s when it works.”

Jack turned around, and Virginia reluctantly joined him.

“I’m very busy,” said Kreeper, glancing at her watch, “and if you want, we can talk about this tomorrow.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Jack. “Just give it a moment.”

They waited a minute and turned around. The mirror was still broken, the dent still showing clean and crisp in the door. Jack rubbed his head. This wasn’t going so well.

“Listen,” said Virginia, resting a friendly hand on his shoulder, “being swallowed by a wolf has probably stressed you out more than you think. You work in an area of policing that requires giant leaps of imaginative comprehension, and perhaps… well, perhaps you’ve been at it too long.”

Jack sighed. “Then I’m not back on the active list?”

“No. Concede that this whole car-mending-itself nonsense was some sort of bizarre fiction-induced delusion, and I’ll suggest you return to work after a three-month rest.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“I’ll recommend retirement on grounds of mental ill-health, and they’ll put you in front of a board of medics—and they’ll be a whole lot less understanding than me. It’s a good deal, Jack—in effect a paid holiday.”

She was right. It
was
a good deal. But he hadn’t been seeing things.

“It happened, Kreeper.”

She sighed and stared at him. “I’ll leave you to think about it for a few days. My report doesn’t have to be with Briggs until Monday next. If you change your mind,” she announced with the closest thing she had to a kindly smile, “you know where to find me.”

And she walked off, leaving Jack staring stupidly at the door mirror he had just broken off. Perhaps Kreeper was partly right. Perhaps he
had
been overdoing it recently. But it didn’t matter. He’d get Dorian Gray to explain the nature of his “special” guarantee and be back on the active list. He was just annoyed that his reality had been questioned twice in twenty-four hours, when no one had even suggested he was anything but genuine flesh-and-blood for over a decade. He turned and headed back toward the NCD offices, deep in thought.

“How did you get along with Virginia Kreeper?” asked Mary a few minutes later.

“Like two peas in a pod,” replied Jack sullenly, sitting down heavily on his chair, unable to shift thoughts of clean platters, beanstalks and Madeleine from his head.

“So she’s going to give you a clean bill of health?”

“Not exactly. I’ve got to visit Dorian Gray again. Did you speak to the officer investigating Stanley Cripps’s death?”

“Yes,” she replied, “I told him about Goldilocks and the ‘It’s full of holes’ message, and he was
very
interested. Goldilocks hadn’t come forward after the blast, and he would be wanting to speak to her once we find her.”

“It won’t be the first time a reporter has committed the sin of omission,” mused Jack, dialing Dorian’s number only to receive the “disconnected” tone.

“I’ve found several links between these explosions,” said Ashley, waving the folder.

“You have?” said Jack excitedly. “What are they?”

“They all happened to humans—except the one in the Nullarbor Plain, which happened to sand.”

“Inspired. Anything else?”

“They all occurred on the planet Earth, the addresses all had an
A
in them, they all happened during the day except Obscurity, none of them occurred in Antarctica, each was within a thousand miles of human habitation, all of them—”

“Any
useful
links? Like something Katzenberg, Prong and Cripps had in common.”

“Aside from them all being killed in unexplained explosions?”

“Yes.”

Ashley consulted his list for a moment. “No. Not a single one. By the way,” he continued, “I’m still waiting for Bart-Mart to get back to me, and Goldy’s car hasn’t been reported abandoned or anything.”

“Thanks.”

“And Agatha Diesel dropped in to say hello while you were both out.”