“That’s very lyrical,” said Mary.
“Forests are like that,” answered Jeremy.
“Oho!” murmured Ashley a few minutes later. He knocked twice on the wall, and Jack emerged shortly after, looking about warily for Briggs.
“What have you got?”
“I just found Angus McGuffin,” said Ash, staring at his monitor, “and he’s in Reading: municipal cemetery plot 100101001-B1001.”
“He’s dead?”
“Killed in a lab accident 10000 years ago,” continued Ashley.
“I’ve got a copy of his death certificate.”
“10000? That’s… sixteen years. 1988. Was he big in cucumbers?”
“No, he was big in physics. He was Professor McGuffin, and he died in a lab accident at QuangTech.”
“QuangTech,” muttered Jack, “again. What kind of lab accident?”
“A violently explosive one. There weren’t any parts big enough to identify, so the coroner had to pronounce death without a body.”
“How convenient. See if you can’t get a full transcript of the inquest.” He turned to Mary. “Why do you suppose Goldilocks would tell Bartholomew that she’d be meeting a dead man for lunch on Saturday?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Me neither. Ash, I want you to find out more about McGuffin. In particular his work and the possibility that he’s not dead—and any news of Dorian Gray?”
“None, sir.”
“Keep on it.”
“What now?” asked Mary.
“We retrace her steps. Start at the very beginning.”
“The three bears’ cottage?”
“Earlier.”
21. Driven to Obscurity
Largest unexplained explosion (UK): Unofficial sources credit the sixteen separate explosions at the QuangTech facility in Berkshire between 1984 and 1988 as the largest series of unexplained explosions, the last and strongest of which resulted in the death of the supposed instigator, Professor Angus McGuffin. The blast was heard all over Reading, broke windows in a two-mile radius and even disturbed the peace at the Reading Gentlemen’s Club, where they responded by penning a stiff letter of reproach, which was then forwarded to the Quangle-Wangle.
“Welcome to Obscurity,” said the Vicar kindly, shaking their hands.
Jack and Mary had arrived at the village—after becoming hopelessly lost—two hours after leaving the NCD offices. The damage to Obscurity was readily apparent before they even reached the village. Fallen trees and hedges blackened by fires guided them the last half mile or so.
“As you can see, not many buildings were spared the damage of that night,” explained the Vicar, waving his arm in the direction of the vicarage. The windows had been boarded up, and blue plastic tarpaulins were draped across the roof. “I’m five hundred yards from Stanley’s house, and this is the result. Would you like some tea and a scone?”
“Maybe later.”
“They’re very good scones.”
“I’m sure they are. But this is a matter of some urgency.”
“Then I’ll show you around.”
They walked past the church, which had lost the top of its steeple and all its windows. The yew in the churchyard had burned where it stood, as had most of the surrounding trees, hedges and crops. This and the blackened texture of the stone walls and buildings gave the whole area a scorched, hell-on-earth look to it.
“Large graveyard,” observed Jack as he peered over the wall.
“You’d be surprised by the number of people who die in Obscurity,” observed the Vicar. “The gravediggers are rarely out of work.”
“What was Stanley Cripps like?” asked Mary.
“Quiet fellow. A brilliant man in his day, I understand—something big in the power industry. After his wife died, he immersed himself in vegetable growing in general and cucumbers in particular; he rarely showed anyone what he was doing, but I was once granted access to his cucumbertorium. This year’s effort was a remarkable sight.” He stretched his arms out wide in the manner of a hyperbolic fisherman. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He said it would take the world championships by storm.”
“They have cucumber world championships?”
“Indeed they do,” replied the Vicar. “He took his vegetables extremely seriously. After almost twenty years of work, it was a very great tragedy that Stanley didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits—or should I say vegetables?—of his labors.”
He laughed at his own joke for a moment, noticed that Jack and Mary hadn’t joined him and turned the laugh into a cough.
“Who knew him best? You?”
“I wish I could boast that, but no. As I understand it, he was closest to Mr. Hardy Fuchsia, his old colleague and only serious competitor in the cucumber extreme class. Despite Mr. Fuchsia’s preeminence in the field, I understood they spoke frequently. If you want to know more about Stanley, best call on Hardy.”
“They never found Mr. Cripps, did they?” asked Jack, who had read several accounts of the incident that morning, everything from the official government report to misinformation and half-truths in the self-appointed journal of the conspiracy world, Conspiracy Theorist.
“They found his dentures embedded in a tree a quarter mile away,” replied the Vicar. “It took a crowbar to get them out. But they don’t think he was wearing them at the time; his bedside lamp was also found close by.”
They walked past another house that had completely lost its roof and was abandoned, ready for demolition. The damage here was considerably worse, even though they had walked less than a hundred yards.
“The devastation increases exponentially the closer we get to the epicenter,” explained the Vicar, who had spent the days after the event talking to curious onlookers and had learned a few destruction-related buzzwords. “It was an unexploded Grand Slam wartime bomb, apparently. Look at the trees.”
They passed another house, this one almost flattened. The trees were indeed a good indication of the center of the blast—they had all been felled in straight lines radiating outward.
“Mr. Cripps’s last words were ‘Good heavens! It’s full of holes!’" said Mary. “Do you have any idea to what he was referring?
“Most puzzling,” confessed the Vicar. “He might have been referring to anything—the greenhouse, his cucumber, the plot—anything.”
“The plot?” echoed Mary.
“I mean the vegetable plot,” he said hurriedly. “A slip of the tongue. Vandals might have dug it up—holes, you know. Hmm.”
There were quite a few tourists wandering around, although there was precious little to look at, but this didn’t seem to bother them. Quasi-scientific-looking people dressed in lab coats were conducting experiments of an entirely spurious nature on anything they could find, and a local farmer was doing a brisk trade renting out a field for parking. On the verges and the village green, an eccentric and brightly colored collection of tents and yurts had been set up, offering refreshments and advice on spiritual matters. There seemed to be quite a few Druids kicking around, too.
They had reached the village’s one and only streetlamp next to its one and only telephone booth, or what was left of them. The cast-iron lamp standard had melted like a soft candle, and the phone booth had collapsed gently in on itself in the same manner.
“The glass from the phone-booth windows had melted and then cooled in midflow, like icicles,” explained the Vicar. “It was quite lovely—but most of it was taken by souvenir hunters. Neither of these will be replaced. We want to keep them as a memorial to Stanley.”
They walked on for a few moments into an increased density of aimless milling crowds.
“We’ve had thousands of people through here, but it all seems to be slackening off, praise the Lord.”