The Big Over Easy (2 page)

“That’s DI Jack Spratt, of the Nursery Crime Division. The NCD. You’ll be on his team. Or at least you and a few others will be the team. It’s one of our smallest departments.” He thought for a moment and then added, “Actually, it
is
our smallest department—if you don’t count the night shift in the canteen.”

“And his
Amazing Crime Stories
rating? What about that?”

“He’s not rated,” replied Briggs, trying to make it sound all matter-of-fact and not the embarrassment that it was. “In fact, I don’t think he’s even in the Guild.”

Mary stared at the shabby figure and felt her heart fall. All of a sudden DI Flowwe didn’t seem quite so bad after all.

Jack Spratt looked around the room. Most of the newsmen had by now left, and aside from Briggs and a woman Spratt didn’t recognize at the door, there were only two journalists still in the room. The first was a large man named Archibald Fatquack, who was the editor of the Reading weekly gossip sheet
The Gadfly
. The second was a junior newshound from the
Reading Daily Eyestrain,
who appeared to be asleep, drunk, dead or a mixture of all three.

“Thank you all for attending this press conference,” announced Jack in a somber tone to the as-good-as-empty room. “I’ll try not to keep you any longer than is necessary. This afternoon the Reading Central Criminal Court found the three pigs not guilty of all charges relating to the first-degree murder of Mr. Wolff.”

He sighed. If he was intending it to be a dramatic statement, it wasn’t, and it didn’t help that no one significant was there to witness it. He could still hear the excited yet increasingly distant chatter of the newsmen as they filed down the corridor, but it was soon drowned out by Chymes’s 1932 Delage D8 Super-Sport, which started up with a throaty roar in the car park. Jack waited until he had gone, then continued on gamely, the extreme lack of interest not outwardly affecting his demeanor. After nearly twenty years, he was kind of used to it.

“Since the death by scalding of Mr. Wolff following his ill-fated climb down Little Pig C’s chimney, we at the Nursery Crime Division have been following inquiries that this was
not
an act of self-defense but a violent and premeditated murder by three individuals who, far from being the innocent victims of wolf-porcine crime, actually sought confrontation and then acted quite beyond what might be described as reasonable self-defense.”

Jack paused for breath. If he had hoped his misgivings over the outcome of the trial would be splashed all over the paper, he was mistaken. Page sixteen of
The Gadfly
was about the sum total of this particular story, sandwiched ignominiously between a three-for-two Hemorrelief advert and the Very Reverend Conrad Poo’s weekly dental-hygiene column.

“Mr. Spratt,” began Archibald, slowly bringing himself up to speed like a chilled gecko. “Is it true that Mr. Wolff once belonged to the Lupine Brotherhood, a secret society dedicated to traditional wolfish pursuits such as the outlawed
Midnight Howling
?”

“Yes, I understand that to be the case,” replied Jack, “but that was over fifteen years ago. We do not deny that he has been invesigated over various charges of criminal damage arising from the destruction of two dwellings built by the younger pigs, nor that Mr. Wolff threatened to ‘eat them all up.’ But we saw this as an empty threat—we produced witnesses who swore that Mr. Wolff was a vegetarian of many years’ standing.”

“So what was your basis for a murder prosecution again?” asked Archie, scratching his head.

“We believed,” replied Jack in exasperation, as he had made the same point in the same room to the same two uninterested journalists many times before, “that boiling Mr. Wolff alive was quite outside the realm of ‘reasonable force’ and the fact that the large pan of water would have taken at least six hours to reach boiling point strongly indicated premeditation.”

Archibald said nothing, and Jack, eager to go home, wrapped up his report.

“Despite the not-guilty verdicts, we at the NCD feel we have put up a robust case and were fully justified in our actions. To this end we will not be looking to reexamine the case or interview anyone else in connection with Mr. Wolff’s death.”

Jack sighed and gazed down. He looked and felt drained.

“Personally,” said Briggs in an aside, “I didn’t think the jury would go for it. The problem is that small pigs elicit a strong sympathetic reaction and large wolves don’t. There was a good case for self-defense, too—Mr. Wolff was trespassing when he climbed down the chimney. It really all hinged on whether you believed that the pigs were boiling up a huge tureen of water to do their washing. And the jury did. In only eight minutes. Do you want me to introduce you?”

“I’d prefer tomorrow, once I am officially on duty,” said Mary quickly, thinking she might have to go outside and scream or something.

Briggs picked up on her reticence.

“Don’t underestimate the Nursery Crime Division, Mary. Spratt does some good work. Not high-profile, you understand, but important. His work on the Bluebeard serial wife killings case was…
mostly
good solid police work.”

“That was Spratt?” asked Mary, something vaguely stirring in her memory. It hadn’t been in
Amazing Crime,
of course, just one of those “also-ran” stories you usually find dwelling in the skim-read part of the dailies, along with city prices, dog horoscopes and “true-life” photo stories. It had been under the subheading “Colorfully hirsute gentleman kills nine wives; hidden room contained gruesome secret.”

“That’s him. Jack was onto Bluebeard and was well ahead of events.”

“If nine wives died, he couldn’t have been
that
good.”

“I said it was
mostly
good police work. More notably, he arrested Rumplestiltskin over that spinning-straw-into-gold scam and was part of the team that captured the violently dangerous psychopath the Gingerbreadman. You might have heard about Jack in connection with some giant killing, too.”

Something stirred in Mary’s memory again, and she raised an eyebrow. Police officers weren’t meant to kill people if they could help it—and giants were no exception.

“Don’t worry,” said Briggs, “it was self-defense. Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“The last one he ran over in a car.”

“The last one?”
repeated Mary incredulously. “How many have there been?”

“Four. But don’t mention it; he’s a bit sensitive over the issue.”

Mary’s heart, which had already fallen fairly far, fell farther.

“Well, that’s all I have to say,” said Jack to the sparsely populated room. “Are there any more questions?”

Archibald Fatquack stirred, scribbled in his pad, but said nothing. The reporter from the
Reading Daily Eyestrain
had moved slowly forward during Jack’s report, until his head was resting on the seat back in front. He began to snore.

“Good. Well, thank you very much for your time. Don’t all rush to get out. You might wake Jim over there.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” said Jim, eyes tightly closed. “I heard every word.”

“Even the bit about the bears escaping into the Oracle Center and eating a balloon seller?”

“Of course,” he murmured, beginning to snore again.

Jack picked up his notes and disappeared through a side door.

“Are there usually this few people for his press conferences?” asked Mary, horrified at the prospect of the career black hole into which she was about to descend like a suicidal rabbit.

“Good Lord, no,” replied Briggs in a shocked tone. “Often he has no press at all.”

He looked at his watch. “Goodness, is that the time? Check in with me first thing tomorrow, and I’ll introduce you to Jack. You’ll like him. Not
exactly
charismatic, but diligent and generally correct in most…
some
of his assumptions.”

“Sir, I was wondering—”

Briggs stopped her midsentence, divining
precisely
what she was about to say. The reason was simple: All the detective sergeants he had ever allocated to Jack said the same thing.

“Look upon it as a baptism of fire. The NCD is good training.”

“For what?”

Briggs had to think for a moment. “Unconventional policing. Your time won’t be wasted. Oh, and one other thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Welcome to Reading.”

Jack drove home
that evening with a feeling of frustration that would have been considerably worse had it been unexpected. He and the prosecution had tried to present the pig case as well as they could, but for some reason the jury didn’t buy it. Briggs hadn’t said anything to him yet, but mounting prosecutions such as
The Crown v. Three Pigs
was undeniably expensive, and after the failed conviction of the con men who perpetrated the celebrated emperor’s new-clothes scam the year before, Jack knew that the Nursery Crime Division would be under closer scrutiny by the bean counters. Not that the NCD was consistently racked with failure—far from it—but the fact was that few of his cases attracted much publicity. And in the all-important climate of increased public confidence, budget accountability and
Amazing Crime
circulation figures, Friedland’s crowd-pleasing antics were strides ahead of Jack’s misadventures—and hugely profitable for the Reading police force, too. But all of this was scant comfort to Mr. Wolff, who went to his casket unavenged and parboiled.

He drove along Peppard and took the left fork into Kidmore End.

“Shit,” muttered Jack under his breath as the whole wasted six-month investigation sank in. He didn’t
want
murder cases, of course—he would be happier not to have any, ever—but there was a slight frisson that went with them that he welcomed. The NCD, after an early rush of celebrated cases, had settled down into something of a workaday existence. There is a limit to how many lost sheep you could track down, how many illegal straw-into-gold dens you could uncover, how many pied pipers arrived in town trying to extort money from the authorities over pest control and how often Mr. Punch would beat his wife and throw the baby downstairs. He knew there was not much prestige, but there was an upside: He was left pretty much to his own devices.

He stopped the car outside his house and stared silently into his own kitchen, where he could see his wife, Madeleine, attempting to feed the youngest of their five children. They had brought two children each from previous marriages—the two eldest, Pandora and Ben, were Jack’s, and Megan and Jerome were Madeleine’s. As if to cement the union further, they had had one that was entirely down to the pair of them—Stevie, who was a year old.

“This is why I do this,” he muttered under his breath, opening the car door. Pausing only to place a block of wood under the rear wheel to stop his Allegro from rolling down the slope, he picked up his case, bade good evening to his neighbor Mrs. Sittkomm, who was glaring suspiciously at him from over the fence, and took the side entrance to the house.

“Honey,” he yelled without enthusiasm as he dumped his case on the hall table, “I’m home!”

She coo-eed from the kitchen, and the sound of her voice made all the stresses of the day that much more bearable. They had been married almost five years, and neither of them had any regrets over their choice. She bounded in from the kitchen, gave him a kiss and hugged him tenderly.

“Otto called me about the Wolff thing,” she whispered in his ear. “Bum deal. The pigs deserved to fry. I’m sorry.”

And she hugged him again.

“I’d say ‘you win some,’ but I don’t seem—”

She placed a finger on his lips and took him by the hand to walk him through to the kitchen, where Stevie was attempting to reduce his dinner to a thin film that might, through careful skill, be made to cover the entire room.

“Hi, kids!” Jack shouted, summoning a small amount of enthusiasm.

“Hullo!” said Jerome, who was just eight, was enthusiastic about everything and smelt strongly of fish fingers. “I can wiggle my ears!”

He then attempted to demonstrate his newfound skill, and after about a minute of grunting and going bright red and with his ears not wiggling even the tiniest bit, said, “How was
that
?!”

“Awesome,” replied Jack, rolling his eyes dramatically. “Wiggle them any more and you’ll be able to fly.”

“Jack!” began Megan, her mouth full. “My teacher Miss Klaar eats…puppies!”

“And how do you know that?”

“Johnny said so,” she replied intensely, all curls and big questioning blue eyes the color of a Pacific lagoon.

“I see. And does Johnny have any corroborative evidence?”

“Of course,” said the ten-year-old, knowing a few technical police terms herself. “Johnny said that Roger told him that a friend of his who lives next door to someone who knows Miss Klaar said it’s a fact in her street. Do we have a case?”

“Oh, yes,” agreed Jack. “I often go to court with far less.”

“Da-woo!” screamed Stevie, waving a spoon as he scattered food around the room, much to the pleasure of the cat, with whom, it was generally agreed, Stevie had an “understanding.” Ripvan—as in “Winkle,” naturally—was the laziest cat that had ever lived,
ever.
She would sleep in corridors, roads, paths, puddles, gutters—anywhere she suddenly felt tired. She would rather sit in the cold and have to be revived from near hypothermia with a hair dryer than trouble herself to use the cat flap. If she hadn’t had the sense to lie on her back under Stevie’s high chair with her mouth open, she would probably have starved.

Madeleine sidled up to where Jack was absently staring at the children gorging themselves and wrapped an arm around his waist.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Deflated,” he replied. “And Friedland got another standing ovation at the press conference.”

“Don’t worry about Friedland,” said Madeleine soothingly. “He only gets the good cases because he’s in the Guild of Detectives.”

“Don’t talk to me about the Guild. Heard the saying ‘If you’re in, you’re made. If you’re out, you’re traffic’?”

“Many times. But you’re not traffic.”

“Check in again a week from now.”

“Did you apply like we discussed, darling?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“No. Listen, I’m not really Guild material. How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?”

“If you were in the Guild, maybe lots.”

“Well, I’m not so sure. The Guild won’t want someone like me. The NCD conviction record is…well,
shit.
”

“That’s because the force doesn’t appreciate what you’re doing. If you were Guild, Briggs and the Crown Prosecution Service would soon change their tune.
Aside
from that, Ben and Pandora will
both
be at university in two years, so we could do with the extra cash.”

“That’s true. The cost of mac and cheese, subsidized beer and cannabis these days is simply scandalous—think I can get a cheap deal from the drug squad?”

“I’m serious, Jack.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll apply tomorrow, I promise.”

“You won’t need to. I took the liberty of doing it for you. Here.”

She handed him a sheet of paper.

Jack accepted it with misgivings, unsure of whether to be angry at Madeleine’s intervention or glad that she had taken the burden of responsibility from him.

“It’s a conditional acceptance,” he said, reading the short letter twice to make sure he understood what was going on. “They need a day’s observation in order to calculate my sleuthing quotient—if it’s higher than a six point three, they’ll put my name up to the board.”

He turned the sheet over. “It doesn’t say when this observation day will be.”

“I think it’s done on a random basis in case detectives try to ‘spice things up a bit’ with a head in a bag or something,” observed Madeleine. She was quite correct. Desperate Guild-wannabe detectives had been known to borrow cadavers from medical schools and then dump them in a chest freezer for later “discovery” to impress Guild observers.

“Well,” said Jack, “I’m just amazed that I got even as far as a conditional acceptance.”

“That’s easily explained,” she replied. “I told them you were a chain-smoking vintage-Rolls-Royce-driving divorced alcoholic with an inability to form lasting relationships. And with a love of Puccini, Henry Moore and Magritte. And a big pipe.”

“What about a deerstalker hat?”

“No—do you think I should have?”

“Absolutely not. Why did you tell them all that?”

“I had to write
something
interesting about you. If your investigations are going to be written up in
Amazing Crime Stories,
you’re going to have to have a few interesting foibles. I don’t think ‘happily married father of five’ quite cuts the mustard these days.”

He sighed. She was right.

“Well,” he said, giving her an affectionate hug, “if I’m going to be a womanizing, pipe-smoking opera fanatic with a vintage car and a drinking problem, I better practice getting into character. I could make a start chatting up that new assistant of yours—what was her name again?”

“Diane? Sure, you could try that. She said yesterday she thought you were really nice.”

“She did?”

“Reminded her of her dad, she said.”

“Hmm. What sort of pipe did you have in mind for me?”

They laughed. The Guild. What the hell. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

“Bums!” said Madeleine, glancing at the wall clock. “I’m late.”

“Late for what?”

“The Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit. It’s on the calendar.”

Jack walked over to look. It was there in black ballpoint. He didn’t look closely enough at these things and was always being caught out.

“Schmoozing or snapping?”

She slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Snapping, you dope. Someone has to take pictures of all the dazzling Reading socialites shaking hands with whatever D-class celebrity Lord Spongg has managed to dredge up.”

“Is that an improvement on the Thames Valley Fruit-Growers Ball, where you were merely photographing ‘low-grade celebrity wannabes’?”

“Of course, dear—it’s called upward mobility. By the summer I could be doing portraits of chinless twerps at the Henley Regatta.”

“Well, you’d better dress up a bit, then.”

“All in good time, husband dearest. Can you take Megan to Scouts?

“Sure. When is it again?”

“Seven,” said Megan, and excused herself from the table.

“What did you do at school, Jerome?” asked Jack when Madeleine had gone upstairs to change into something a little smarter. It didn’t do well to turn up at a charity bash dressed scruffy, even if you were only the photographer.

“Nothing much.”

“Then it’s a bit pointless sending you, isn’t it? Why don’t we just cancel school, and you can stay at home and—I don’t know—just eat chocolate and watch TV all day?”

Jerome perked up at this gold-edged scenario. “Really?”

“No, not really.”

His shoulders slumped. “But school’s
sooooooo
boring.”

“Agreed. But it’s almost perfect training for a career at Smileyburgers.”

“But I’m not going to work at Smileyburgers.”

“You will if you do nothing much at school.”

“Da-woo!!” yelled Stevie, jumping up and down. In the absence of anything more productive to do, he grasped large handfuls of scrambled egg and squeezed until it oozed between his fingers like yellow toothpaste.

“Yag,” said Jerome, “and you tell
me
off for picking my nose!”

“It’s not the picking,” explained Jack, who secretly liked a good dig himself and didn’t want to be a hypocrite, “it’s the
eating.
”

Talk abruptly halted as Ben walked into the kitchen looking very self-conscious in his college orchestra uniform. He was sixteen, gangly and awash in a toxic sea of hormones. He had joined the orchestra less through the love of music than the love of Penelope Liddell, who played the harp.

“It’s those slender fingers plucking on the strings,” he had explained while confessing the object of his adoration to Jack a few days before, “and that
concentration
! Hell’s teeth! If she looked at me like that, I think I’d explode.”

“Well, mind you don’t,” Jack had replied. “It could be very messy.”

Ben was actually a very competent tuba, but since the tuba player is about as far away as you can get from the harp and the tuba doesn’t exactly
ooze
macho sexuality—except, perhaps, to another tuba—he had joined the percussion section to bring him closer to the object of his affections. He dragged two heavy cases out from the cupboard under the stairs and put on a parka.

“Do you need a hand with those?” asked Jack.

“Thanks, Dad. My ride will be here soon.”

A car horn sounded outside.

Jack tried to pick up one of the cases, but it was so heavy it felt as though it had taken root.

“What the hell have you got in here?”

“We’re doing
Il Trovatore,
” Ben explained. “Mr. Moore said we should experiment—so I’m using
real
anvils and
real
hammers.”

Between the two of them, they managed to drag the cases across the floor and heave them over the doorstep and down the path to the trunk of the waiting car, which sank alarmingly.

Half an hour later, Madeleine came back down dressed in a strapless red ball gown kept up by nothing but faith. All eyes were on her as she did a twirl for them in the kitchen.

“How do I look?”

“Whoa!” said Pandora who had just walked in. “Maddy’s in girl clothes!”

“Beautiful,” said Megan wistfully, clasping her hands together and holding them at her chin, dreaming of a time when
she
could dress up in ball gowns, go to parties and be kissed by a handsome prince—although she would accept a knight, if there were problems regarding availability.

“It’s very bright,” was Jerome’s only comment.

“Da-woo,” said Stevie.

“I thought you were the one doing the photographing,” said Jack. “I mean, how do you actually get in your own photographs? Press the shutter and then run around
really
fast?”

“It
is
the Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit, darling. While I’ve still the tattered remnants of youth and good looks, I might as well use them to drum up some work. Debs’ parents pay good money for portraits.”