Fourth Bear (7 page)

Jack walked up between the ranks of the cars, being careful not to touch them, as they were all covered with a thin film of dust; it didn’t seem the dealer sold that many. He was looking around for the Allegro when a young man stepped out of the office. He was impeccably dressed in a morning suit, bow tie, high collar and starched cuffs. From the bloodred carnation in his buttonhole to his shiny patent leather shoes, the young man carried with him the haughty air of undeniable superiority—and incongruity. He looked as though he were dressed for a society party, not selling cars. He regarded Jack with suspicion and then forced a smile onto his thin lips.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“I hope so,” replied Jack. “I called yesterday. You had an Allegro—”

The car salesman’s manner changed abruptly, and a genuine smile supplanted the bogus one. “Detective Chief Inspector Spratt?”

Jack nodded, and the salesman put out a well-manicured hand for him to shake.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” he said excitedly, giving off wafts of expensive aftershave as he moved. “I followed the Humpty case with enthusiasm.
Extremely
impressive. My name is Gray, Dorian Gray—but you
must
call me Dorian. I for one do not believe a word when Josh Hatchett refers to you as ‘a bad joke’ or ‘a stain upon the good name of the Reading police force.’"

“You’re very kind,” said Jack a bit uneasily.

“Think nothing of it!” replied Dorian happily. “I’ve wanted to meet you for
such
a long time, but my diary is
so
very full. It was lucky, in fact, that you caught me when you rang. Society is
such
a drain on one’s energy. Would you follow me?”

He led Jack through the collection of battered wrecks that had nothing over two hundred pounds written on their windshields and on to a small lockup garage at the back of the lot. Dorian smiled again, carefully donned white gloves and pulled the doors open with a loud
sqraunch
of long-forgotten hinges.

Gray must have seen Jack looking doubtful, for he added quickly, “It has been in storage for a number of years, yet I don’t believe it has aged significantly.”

The garage opened to reveal an immaculate 1979 Allegro Equipe two-door sedan. It was painted silver with orange and red stripes down the sides and had alloy wheels and twin headlamps at the front. The paintwork glistened as though it had only just rolled off the production line. Dorian got in, started it at the first attempt and drove it into the sunshine.

“Remarkable!” said Jack after a pause.

“Isn’t it just?” answered Dorian as he got out, unlatched the hood and revealed an engine bay that didn’t have a spot of dirt or oil on it anywhere.

Jack smiled and got into the car. He could smell the freshness of the factory, and the orange velour seats still had the fuzz on them. He looked at the odometer. It had only 342 miles recorded.

“Where did you find it?” asked Jack incredulously. “This belongs in a museum. None would take it, of course, but it does.”

Dorian Gray looked to left and right and lowered his voice. “It’s not quite so strange as you think, Inspector. You see, every now and then I sell a car to a favored customer with my own…
ahem…
unique guarantee.”

Jack sensed a scam of some sort and narrowed his eyes. “Guarantee?”

“Yes. I guarantee that this car will never rust or even age significantly.”

“Waxoil and underseal, eh?”

“Better than Waxoil, Inspector. Allow me to demonstrate.”

They walked around to the back of the car, and Dorian opened the trunk. Inside was a finely painted oil of the same car, but in much shabbier condition. The car in the picture had rust holes showing up through the bodywork, a peeling vinyl roof, the trim was missing, and there was an unsightly scrape on the left rear, which had taken the bumper off. In short, a bit of a wreck. Jack looked at Dorian quizzically.

“See the rear windshield in the painting, Officer?”

Jack looked. It seemed normal enough. Dorian smiled again, removed the wheel brace from the trunk and shattered the rear window of the Allegro with one strong blow. Jack took a shocked step back at this apparently motiveless act of vandalism. Dorian, however, merely smiled.

“Look at the painting, Mr. Spratt.”

Jack frowned. He was certain that the car in the picture had
not
had a broken rear windshield before, but now it
did.
His frown deepened, but Dorian had another surprise for him.

“Look at the car.”

The rear window was intact.

“
How…?”

Dorian Gray put the wheel brace away, shut the trunk and smiled the enigmatic smile of a conjuror who has just caught a speeding bullet in his teeth and no way on hell’s own earth was going to let on how he did it.

“Everything you do to the car happens to the picture, Inspector. It never needs cleaning, repairing or servicing. It will stay new
forever.
You may want to have rear seat belts fitted and replace the AM push-button radio, but I feel those are small inconveniences when you consider the vast savings this car has to offer.”

“Forever?”

Dorian stared absently at his perfectly manicured nails.

“
Nothing
lasts forever,” he said carelessly, “but yes, for the foreseeable future.” He smiled disarmingly. “I’ve offered this warranty to only six other people, and do you know I’ve not had a single complaint?”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred guineas.”

“I’ll take it.”

Dorian was quite happy to accept a check and moved several cars so Jack could drive out, the engine purring like a kitten brought up on cream. Jack was just signing a buyer’s agreement, in Dorian’s red pen and thinking he had gotten the bargain of the century, when Mary knocked on the window in a state of some agitation. She was holding her cell phone and waved it at him.

“I need to speak to you as a matter of some urgency, sir.”

“Don’t worry.” Jack smiled. “I won’t insist you drive it all the time.”

“It’s not the Allegro. It’s the Gingerbreadman.”

“What about him?”

“He’s escaped.”

Jack laughed.

“Sure he has. I do this joke to Madeleine all the time, and she…”

He stopped talking as he noticed that Mary was doing everything
but
laughing and that Dorian Gray had turned on the television, where a news bulletin was under way. The volume was off, but it didn’t matter; the grim face of the anchorman with a stock picture of the gingery lunatic said it all. Jack felt a heavy hand fall on his heart. Not
again.
He and Friedland Chymes had captured him the first time around. Jack and Chymes had survived, Wilmot Snaarb had not. Jack could still see Snaarb’s look of agony as he had his arms torn from their sockets, his cries of pain and terror mixed with the maniacal cackle of the psychopathic snack. If Jack hadn’t tricked him into a shipping container, the Gingerbreadman would have stayed at liberty for longer. He was delivered to prison still inside the container, and it took fourteen men in riot gear to subdue him. It was nursery crime at its very worst.

“Who called you?” asked Jack, suddenly alert.

“Ashley,” replied Mary. “He said the whole station was in an uproar; Briggs was running around barking orders at people—and sometimes just barking.”

“And that’s what worries me,” said Jack, thanking Dorian and walking briskly from his office.

“That Briggs is rusty when it comes to panic?”

“No. I was the original arresting officer. The Gingerbreadman is clearly NCD—why didn’t they call us first?”

Most dangerous baked object:
A hands-down win for the Gingerbreadman, incarcerated at St. Cerebellum’s secure hospital for the criminally deranged since 1984. He is currently serving a four-hundred-year sentence for the murder and torture of his 104 known victims; his crimes easily outrank those of the second-most-dangerous baked object, a fruitcake accidentally soaked in weed killer instead of sherry by Mrs. Austen of Pembridge, then served up to members of the Women’s Federation during a talk about the remedial benefits of basket weaving. The final death toll is reputed to have been 62.

—
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records
, 2004 edition

Jack insisted they
take his new Allegro, and a few minutes later they were heading out of town to the south and the little village of Arborfield. Mary tuned in the wireless and heard a news bulletin on RadioToadReading informing everyone exactly why they should be panicking and what form this panicking should take. The broadcasts were uncannily successful, and in a few short hours a state of fear had descended on the town, with normally sensible citizens running around like headless chickens and generally behaving like idiots.

Because of this the roads and streets were spookily empty. Mary and Jack passed almost no one until they arrived at a police roadblock just outside the village, from where they parked the car and walked past TV-network vans and police mobile-incident trucks. They ducked under a Do Not Cross barrier and after a few hundred yards were met by such a scene of unrestrained violence and aggression that Mary, with never the strongest stomach, had to do a rapid about-face and tell Jack she’d see him later.

The St. Cerebellum’s van that had transported the Gingerbreadman was lying on its side with the rear doors torn off. The bodies of the three who died instantly were still there, uncovered, being photographed. Already SOCO had started to record everything at the crime scene. The Gingerbreadman had undertaken the gruesome attack with a ferocity at least equal to or even greater than when he was last at liberty. A torn-off arm lay in the street, and the body of a man in a suit lay in an awkward position, half out of the passenger seat of the van. It looked as though he had been twisted until he broke.

“Shit,” muttered Jack under his breath. It was worse than he imagined. The memories of twenty years came back in a flurry of painful, unwanted images.

“Spratt?” said a familiar voice behind him. It was Superintendent Briggs, Jack’s immediate superior. A middle-aged man with a well-developed paunch, he had kindly eyes and one of those anachronistic comb-over hairstyles to disguise the fact he was going bald, but it fooled no one. Although Jack was head of the NCD, Briggs acted as his liaison with the rest of the force and had the power to tell him to drop any case he didn’t feel was worth pursuing. Their relationship usually swung between hot and cold, and Briggs had made it his sworn duty to suspend Jack at least once during any investigation, more for dramatic effect than anything else.

“Good morning, sir, we came as quick as we could,” responded Jack, noticing that Briggs was with DI Copperfield, a contemporary of Jack’s who worked CID at Reading Central.

“We?” asked Briggs, looking around.

“Mary’s not too good with bodies, sir—I think she’s honking up in the bushes. Good morning, David.”

“Jack,” replied Copperfield cheerily. He was the same age as Jack but looked younger than their shared forty-five years. His boyish good looks and absence of gray meant he could easily pass for thirty, and frequently did.

“You caught him the last time,” Briggs said to Jack. “Your experience in this matter might be invaluable.”

“When did he escape?”

“Ninety-seven minutes ago,” replied Copperfield. “Killed two male nurses and his doctor with his bare hands. The other three orderlies who accompanied him are critical in the hospital.”

“Critical?”

“Yes. Don’t like the food, beds uncomfortable, waiting lists too long—usual crap. Other than that they’re fine.”

This was big. Bigger than anything Jack had handled. The last time the Gingerbreadman was at large, Jack was partnered with Friedland Chymes. But ex-DCI Chymes was now gone—retired under accusations of cowardice. This was up to Jack and Jack alone. Or so he thought. He took a deep breath.

“I’m going to need more manpower,” he began, counting off the items on his fingers, “more than we’ve ever had on an NCD inquiry. Plus forensic resources, overtime and…”

His voice trailed off as he saw Briggs stare at the ground. He knew then why they hadn’t called him.

“Jack,” said Briggs slowly, “this won’t be your investigation.”

Jack looked at Briggs, then at Copperfield, who looked away, faintly embarrassed.

“I don’t understand.”

“Which part of ‘not your investigation’ don’t you understand?” asked Briggs with well-practiced acerbic wit. He was learning it at night school.

“The ‘not your investigation’ part. I’m Nursery Crime Division. This is the Gingerbreadman.
My
jurisdiction. The NCD has much experience in these matters.”

“Unarguably,” replied Briggs uncompromisingly, “which is why I want you to give Copperfield all the help you can.”