“Saturday,” said Mrs. Bruin from the other side of the room.
Ed looked around. “I think it was Friday, actually, dear.”
“Saturday,” she growled. “We had to go to the vet about your worms.”
There was a ghastly pause. Ed looked at Jack with an expression of acute embarrassment etched upon his features. He smiled sheepishly.
“Thank you, darling,” said Ed sarcastically. “I’m sure Inspector Spratt has better things to do than hear about my ailments.”
“If you hadn’t been rummaging in the trash, you never would have got them in the first place,” replied his wife airily.
I was not in the trash,” he said indignantly. He lowered his voice and turned to Jack. “Worms can happen to almost anyone. Even,” he added, nodding in his wife’s direction, “to the trouble and strife.” He nodded his head triumphantly, checked to make sure she hadn’t heard and then sat back in his chair. “What were we talking about?”
“Goldilocks.”
“Oh, yes. It was last Saturday. My good lady wife had made some porridge for breakfast—again, strictly quota—and we all went for a walk in the forest while it cooled.”
“Is that normal procedure?”
“Yes, indeed; it’s completely true what they say about bears and forests. Our morning constitutional, as it were. The forest speaks, you know, Inspector. Every morning it has changed in some small way. By the way the trees sway and the birds sing and the leaves—”
“That’s very interesting, Mr. Bruin,” interrupted Jack, “but what happened about the porridge?”
“Oh, well, we came home to find that my son’s porridge had been eaten. He was most upset about it.”
“Goldilocks?”
He held up a claw. “Wait a minute. Then we noticed that my son’s chair had been sat on and broken.”
“This one here?”
“Yes, I’ve tried to mend it, but it’s never quite the same, is it?”
“And then?”
“We went upstairs and found that woman asleep in my son’s bed!”
The bear stared at Jack as though he should be as outraged as Ed was.
“Then what did she do?”
“Isn’t that enough?” asked Ed angrily. “You would have thought that finally, after two thousand years of being hunted, kept in grotty zoos, made to ride motorcycles and dance to some forgettable tune played by a repulsive and usually toothless Eastern European, we members of the Ursidae family had won the right to be left alone.”
“She broke a chair, but surely that’s not the end of the world?”
“It’s the thin end of the wedge,” he replied indignantly. “How would you like it if a bear wandered into your house when you were out, ate your breakfast, destroyed your property and then had the barefaced cheek to fall asleep—naked—in your bed?”
“I see your point. Why didn’t you report it?”
“What’s the use? Most of the police I’ve ever met have been ursists.”
“Not in my department.”
Ed sighed. “You may not think you’re ursist, Inspector, but you are. You said to me earlier, ‘What’s your name, bear?’ Is that how you treat other men? ‘What’s your name, human?’”
Jack could see his point. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”
Ed harrumphed. Since he occupied the moral high ground for the moment, he thought he would carry on.
“We’ve had a pretty checkered history with humans, you know. But the way I figure it, you lot can’t seem to make up your minds about us at all. On the one hand, you name constellations after us, make us deities and use us as strong national symbols, and on the other hand you hunt us to near extinction.”
“Bears are not exactly alone in that category.”
“Agreed, but you also name athletic teams after us, create in our image tremendously popular characters like Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington and Yogi, and every child has a teddy bear of some sort, yet up until 1835 it was considered a fun day out to pay good money to see my kind either being torn apart by dogs or blinded and then beaten with a stick. Your first Queen Elizabeth liked nothing better than to watch us being tormented in some highly imaginative way.”
“I can only say that I hope we have made up for it,” replied Jack, unable to defend the indefensible but loyally trying to apologize for his own species’ treatment of bears over the years. “The Animal (anthropomorphic) Equality Bill was quite far-reaching.”
“Equality is not what we want, although it is a start,” said Ed slowly, flicking away a fly that was trying to get at the honey spilled down his front. “Any creature that wants to be the equal of a human has set its sights way too low. We have an ursine saying, Inspector, that goes something like this: ‘If you crap with your ass in the mountain stream, the poo won’t stick to your fur.’ Do you see what I mean?”
“Not really.”
Ed frowned. “Yes, I guess it loses something in the translation.”
“Tea?” inquired Mrs. Bruin, placing a tray of steaming cups on the table in front of them. “I’m sorry the mugs are a bit large, Officer. I won’t be upset if you don’t drink it all.” She smiled sweetly and tickled her husband affectionately behind the ear.
The mugs held about a gallon of tea each, and Jack could hardly even lift his. As soon as his wife was back at the cooking range, Ed greedily ate up the honey sandwich that Mrs. Bruin had put in front of Jack.
“Well, I’m sorry for all that, but my chief interest at the moment is Goldilocks.”
“Who?” asked Ed, who could be dense at times.
“The one who broke the chair.”
“Oh, her. Well, like I said, it’s not the damage, it’s the principle. An apology would help.”
“I’ll see what we can do,” asserted Jack, wondering whether Goldilocks was in a fit state to apologize—or do anything at all.
“Why was she asleep in your son’s bed?”
“Tired, I guess,” said Ed simply. “We quizzed her, of course. She said that my porridge was too hot and Ursula’s was too cold, but Junior’s was just right.”
“So she ate it up?”
“Right. Then she said she tried my chair but it was too hard, my wife’s but it was too soft, but Junior’s again was just right.”
“And she broke it?”
“As you can see.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then she said she was tired, so she went upstairs to bed. Again, my bed was too hard, my wife’s too soft—so she fell asleep on Junior’s. I’ve never heard of anyone so fussy.”
Jack paused for a moment. “And she was asleep when you found her?”
“Right.”
“What time was this?”
“Half past eight.”
“And how long had you been out of the house?”
“Half an hour,” put in Mrs. Bruin. “We usually stay out for longer, but we had to go to the vet.”
“Thank you for bringing that up again, dear,” said Ed meekly.
“Then what happened?”
“She got dressed and ran out of the house.”
“Did she have anything with her?”
“A bag. One of those work bag things.”
“And that was the last you saw of her?”
“Never saw her again, and good riddance. She had a damn lot of cheek, Inspector.”
“But she was fine when she left here?”
He laid a claw over his heart. “We never touched her. We were going to write a letter to The Toad. Their Henrietta Hatchett is a Friend to Bears and has done a great deal for ursine equality.”
“Sorry?” said Jack, taken aback at this latest development.
“Miss Hatchett would have done something about it,” he replied. “She has done a lot of good work for us in the past.”
“Had you ever met her? I mean, if you saw her would you recognize her?”
“No—why?”
“This,” said Jack, holding up the picture of Goldilocks, “is Miss Hatchett.”
Ed’s eyes opened wide, and he looked at his wife, who dropped a teacup.
“That was Hatchett?” she said, turning from the sink.