Mary lived on the next mooring to Nemo in an old Short Sunderland flying boat, an ex-civilian version that she had bought from a bankrupt theme restaurant in Scotland, dismantled and shipped to the lake on the back of two flatbed trucks. She spent her spare time converting the inside to a comfortable home and had recently managed to get the number-three engine started, the only one still in position. Madeleine and the children had come down for a barbecue that day and cheered as the old radial burst into life, belching clouds of black smoke, frightening a flock of geese and straining the old airplane at its moorings until Mary feathered the prop.
“Anyone home?” shouted Jack through the open door.
“I’m on the flight deck!” said a voice that echoed down through the flying boat.
Jack stepped inside the hull and picked his way over the heaps of building materials and rolls of insulation that were piled up inside the cavernous hull. She had as yet converted only the prow. Jack climbed the spiral staircase to the navigator’s office that Mary used as a kitchen.
“There’s some coffee on the stove!” she called out. He helped himself and joined her on the flight deck, a large room roofed in sun-clouded Plexiglas. Mary was sitting in the left-hand seat with her feet up on the remains of the instrument panel.
“Good morning,” said Jack. “How’s the acting head of the NCD?”
“She’s fine,” replied Mary with a smile. “How’s the NCD’s unofficial full-time consultant?”
“He’s all right.”
Jack sat down on the copilot’s seat and balanced his mug on the throttle quadrant. They were at least twelve feet above the water level and were afforded a good view of the lake. To the left of them they could see Captain Nemo hanging up his socks on a makeshift washing line strung between the conning tower and tail of his rusty craft, and to their right was the lake, a full mile of open water, the glassy surface interrupted only by the marker buoys for the dinghy racing. It was quiet and peaceful, and Jack could see why people would forgo the luxuries of land-based dwelling for a life on the water.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” murmured Mary. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else for all the money there is.”
Jack took a swig of coffee. “I think you’re right. Me, I’d worry about the kids falling in the drink.”
“If you brought them up to regard water the same way as they regard roads, I don’t think you’d have a problem.”
“I suppose so.”
“Everything okay at the office?” asked Jack.
“Fine. We were sorting through the statements for the Scissor-man’s pretrial hearing after you left. The prosecution has asked for more witnesses and the thumbless victims of previous scissorings to try to create a cast-iron case against him.”
“Anything else?”
“I think Ashley was serious about that date.”
Jack shrugged. “So? It only has to be a drink or something.”
“Do aliens drink?” she asked, not really knowing much about Rambosians, never having really considered them at all. “I mean, what if he tries to kiss me or something?”
“Then call it off. After all, you’re something of an expert when it comes to wriggling out of dates.”
Mary smiled. “I am, aren’t I? So… what’s with this early visit, Jack?”
“I bumped into Josh Hatchett at the Déjà Vu last night.”
She made a face. “What joy. I hope you wished him all the worst.”
“He has a missing sister.”
“If I were his sister, I’d post myself missing, too.”
“And we’re going to find her.”
Mary stared at him. “We’re going to help the person instrumental in your enforced sick leave and effective demotion? Who got you reprimanded over the Scissor-man case? Are you nuts?”
“Yes, yes and quite possibly, in that order. Look upon it as a long-term strategic operation to bring about a quantum change in press relations as regards the continuing effectiveness of the NCD.”
“We’re cozying up to Josh to get better press coverage?”
“More or less. I think it might be an NCD case. Her name’s Goldilocks.”
“So? She could be a Goldilocks, not the Goldilocks. There’s probably hundreds of people with that name.”
“We have a vague bear connection—and she’s fussy.”
“Ah. A not-too-hot-not-too-cold-just-right sort of fussy?”
“In one. She may have found out some answers about the blast at Obscurity and three other unexplained explosions around the globe.” He handed her the manila folder that Josh had given him.
“Hmm,” she said, looking at the “Important” written on the front, “this could be important.”
“I did that joke already.”
“Sorry.”
She opened the folder. It contained newspaper clippings. The most recent explosion was at Obscurity, and it had attracted a lot of competing theories from news sources of varying reliability. The Obscurity “event” had been catnip for conspiracy theorists, who generally liked things going bang for no clearly explained reason. Mary flicked through the clippings to find an article about a detonation in the Nullarbor Plain, a lonely area in the vast emptiness of the Australian desert.
“September 1992,” she observed, “twelve years ago.”
“The Australian government denied that any tests had been undertaken,” said Jack, who had been reading the clippings the previous evening, “and no explanation was forthcoming.”
Mary turned over another clipping to reveal a faxed extract from the Pasadena Herald dated March 1999. It, too, described an explosion, this time in a neighborhood on the edge of town. The detonation had shattered windows up to three miles away and tossed debris over a thousand feet into the air. The owner of the house, who died, had been retired mathematician Howard Katzenberg. There were more clippings about a blast in Tunbridge Wells, where someone named Simon Prong had perished in an unexplained fireball, and that was it. Four explosions with no link that they could see other than that they were all reported as “strange” or “unexplained.”
“What do you think?” asked Mary.
“No idea. Josh seemed to think she was looking for a link between them.”
“And how is this related to bears?”
“I’m not sure. On Monday she meets up with Cripps in Obscurity. Six hours later he’s dead in the blast. She tells her brother she’s onto something big, and he last hears from her Thursday afternoon.”
Mary shrugged. “She might be on holiday.”
“And she might not.”
They both sat in silence and watched a pair of swans attempt a long and slow takeoff from the surface of the lake. As soon as they were airborne, they landed again with a flurry of spray. It seemed a lot of effort to travel three hundred yards.
“I don’t like station politics,” said Mary a half hour later. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Listen: The longer that twit Copperfield is playing hunt-the-cookie, the more victims there will be. Look upon it as a back door to the natural order of things.”
“I don’t like it, Jack.”
“It’s NCD, Mary. It’s what we do.”
“No, I mean I don’t like your car.”
They were driving across Reading toward Shiplake and the industrial unit that Tarquin had told them was the place where he had picked up the porridge oats. It was the first time that Mary had driven the new Allegro.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Couldn’t I explain what’s right with it? It’ll take a lot less time. Why don’t you get a proper car?”
“A car without porous alloy wheels that let the tires go flat overnight?” asked Jack, smiling. “A car whose drag coefficient is better forward than in reverse? A car whose rear window doesn’t pop out when you jack up the back tires?”
“Anything. I’d prefer to be seen in a wheelbarrow.”