He reached over and kissed her affectionately. “That sounds like a beautiful idea, Pookums. Can it be a really serious punch-up? Like we used to have in the good old days?”
“You’re just a sweet romantic at heart, aren’t you?” she replied tenderly. “I’ll ring up the Green Parrot for a reservation, book a couple of beds at the hospital and alert the finest emergency trauma team in Berkshire—and it’s my treat.”
Jack and Madeleine went back inside and upstairs to bed, shooing Caliban out the door when he tried to follow them. They were both fast asleep a half hour later, the best and deepest sleep for them both in many weeks. And as they slept, Mr. and Mrs. Punch donned their evening dress and knuckle-dusters, Agatha had a heart-to-heart with her husband, and below on the street outside, a single rust bubble popped up on the paintwork of the otherwise pristine Allegro.
31. The Truth Is Out There
Largest flying boat ever: In 1934 the Soviet Union decided to enter the global-travel world with the mighty Ilyushin-95. With a wingspan of 520 feet and weighing in at almost two hundred tons, this monstrous behemoth of the skies was powered by no fewer than sixty-eight Vokspod-87 290-horsepower radial engines. The first and only attempt to fly it was on June 15, 1934, when it was tugged out into the Caspian Sea, filled with fuel and the pilot and crew told not to return until they “had brought glory on the motherland.” With all engines roaring, the flying boat vanished over the horizon and into legend. Nobody knows what became of it, but it is thought that after failing to get airborne it made landfall in Turkey, where the crew, too worried about the repercussions of failure, quietly sold it for scrap.
Jack woke with a start at 5:30 A.M. He and Madeleine were still entwined, and he carefully unraveled her sleeping form from his before donning a dressing gown and walking into the bathroom. He examined the bruise on his chin where Briggs had thumped him and the one on his head from the rolling pin. He swallowed a couple of Tylenol, relieved himself and went downstairs.
Jack sighed deeply. He had told Briggs he was on a three-month rest, although in reality he was anything but. There were at least two murderers loose in Reading, a mother of all conspiracies was unfolding unseen in front of him, and if what he thought was true, the geopolitical future of the world was very much in the balance. Perhaps. He made some coffee and tapped in to toad-news.com to see if the Gingerbreadman had been caught or shot. He hadn’t.
“Can I come to work with you?”
It was Caliban, sitting on the kitchen table.
“I’m on leave.”
“Sure you are.”
“I am. And get off the table.”
“Please?” implored Caliban as he jumped to the floor.
“There is no place for you in—Hang on,” he added, suddenly thinking of something. “You’re a thieving little swine, aren’t you?”
“One of the finest,” replied Caliban proudly, puffing out his chest.
“Then I may have a job for you.”
“Sorry,” said the ape, wagging a finger at him. “I never steal to order—that would be immoral. I only do it for fun.”
“Okay, then—do you want to have some seriously good fun?”
Caliban nodded vigorously, and Jack ran upstairs to get dressed. He kissed Madeleine, who mumbled something in her sleep along the lines of “Knock ’em dead, tiger.”
Forty minutes later Jack was bumping down the track to the gravel pit and Mary’s Short Sunderland flying houseboat. It was still not yet six-thirty, and the lake was a flat calm. Not so much as a ripple broke the broad expanse of silver, and when Jack walked along the jetty, he could see fish feeding in the gin-clear shallows. It was almost idyllic, and hard to believe that, as likely as not, a ten-mile radius would encompass not only this picture of calm and tranquillity but also a raging psychopath and a fugitive member of Parliament wanted for murder.
Jack knocked twice on the hull door, and after a few minutes it was opened by Mary, who was wrapped up in a dressing gown. She blinked sleepily.
“Shit, Jack, what’s the time?”
“Early.”
“What happened to your face?”
“This one was Briggs,” he said, pointing to his chin, “and this one was Madeleine.”
“Madeleine?”
“It’s all right—we made up. Can I have some coffee?”
“You know where it is. I’ll get dressed.”
Jack walked through the main part of the hull and up into the flight deck, where he lit the gas and put on the kettle. He sat in the copilot’s seat and stared absently at the view. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but he hoped he could fit all the pieces together before the shitstorm really began.
Mary reappeared a few minutes later, drying her damp hair with a towel.
“You have an alien stuck to the ceiling,” observed Jack.
“I know,” said Mary, pouring some coffee. “He needed somewhere to stay.”
“How did the date go?”
“Probably the oddest I’ve ever been on. I think our two species are so fundamentally different that any form of physical bond between us is almost inconceivable. Still, he’s fun to be with—and his family is completely nuts. His brother’s called Graham, he has a dopey sister named Daisy, and he—”
Mary realized that she had been gushing a little too much and stopped. Jack hid a smile, and she took a sip of coffee.
“So… what’s going on Jack?”
“Everything. If we don’t get to the bottom of it all within the next twelve hours, then I’m a dead man.”
Mary’s eyes narrowed. “You were serious about all that Bartholomew-being-innocent stuff last night?”
“Absolutely. There’s something rotten in the city of Reading, and it’s up to the NCD to do something about it.”
“So where does the twelve-hour death thing enter into it?”
“Because that’s how long it’ll be before Danvers or Briggs starts checking Bartholomew’s phone records and… and… finds out that it was me who tipped him off.”
Mary was stunned. She couldn’t quite believe it.
“You called him so he could escape?”
“I did.”
“Jack—that’s not good. In fact, it’s very much worse than not good—it’s illegal. Really illegal. You’ll be bounced out of the force and banged up into the bargain.”
“I had to do it to save his life. He didn’t kill Goldilocks. He’s the patsy, the fall guy. And like all fall guys in a frame-up, he won’t live twenty-four hours. If I hadn’t told him to run, we would have found him hanging by his pajama cord with a convenient confession close by. Everyone walks away, and Goldilocks’s murderer goes free. More important, the reason for her death remains secret.”
“So… she wasn’t killed over illegal porridge quotas?”
“Of course not. They were both good friends to bears. They were into that harmless little scam together—easing the burden of the average bear by free handouts of porridge midmonth. They were working together when photographed at the Coley Park Bart-Mart—and with Vinnie Craps in the background, monitoring them.”
“I get it. So who framed him?”
Jack paused for a minute. “NS-4. I thought at first they were protecting him, but they weren’t—they were setting him up to take the blame for Goldy’s death. They planted the Post-it note in the three bears’ house about Bartholomew meeting Goldilocks on Saturday morning, and they knew he wouldn’t have an alibi for that time period.”