“Yes,” replied Jack. “Do you have a scanning electron microscope?”
“Not officially, but the SEM operator here is heavily into the whole yeti/bigfoot/sasquatch noncontroversy and so could probably be swung.”
Jack showed him the gingerbread thumb, still in the evidence bag.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“It certainly is. I’d like you to see if there is anything unusual about it on the granular level. On the face of it, gingerbreadmen are usually passive victims at teatime and not homicidal maniacs, so I need to know more—and I need to know it now.”
“I’ll get onto it straightaway.”
They thanked Parks and walked out of the center.
“Why didn’t Copperfield think of doing that?” said Jack.
“Because he’s not NCD?” suggested Mary. “Or because he’s a twit?”
“Probably both.”
He pulled out his cell phone and called the NCD office.
“Hullo!” said Ashley cheerfully. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“The office has been bugged. When I got there, I could hear the buzz of the encoded binary radio transmission.”
“Tell me you’re not still in the office.”
“No. I’m in the roof space just behind the third-floor toilets reading the phone traffic as it leaves the exchange. It’s made me a bit tipsy. Did you know that Pippa has a bun in the oven?”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, she was talking to her mother all about it. And what’s more,” continued Ashley, “the father is Peck—you know, in uniform with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park?”
“What’s going on?” asked Mary.
“Pippa’s pregnant by Peck.”
“Pippa Piper picked Peck over Pickle or Pepper?” exclaimed Mary incredulously. “Which of the Peck pair did Pippa Piper pick?”
“Peter ‘pockmarked’ Peck of Palmer Park. He was the Peck that Pippa Piper picked.”
“No, no,” returned Mary, “you’ve got it all wrong. Paul Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked Peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound on Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Proctor from Pocklington.”
There was a pause.
“It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?” mused Jack.
“Yes,” agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. “I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”
Jack turned his attention back to Ashley. “Has Briggs called the office?”
“Several times. I told him Mary was down at the Bob Southey, and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, as I’m merely window dressing for better alien-sapien relations. More interestingly, Agent Danvers has called Briggs on several occasions.”
“You eavesdropped on Briggs’s private telephone conversations?”
“Not at all,” replied Ashley. “I’ve eavesdropped on everyone’s conversations. How did you think I found out about Pippa and Peck?”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” replied Jack, whose interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was becoming more elastic by the second. “What did Danvers want?”
“She wanted to know where you were so she could have a chat. Briggs was commendably evasive—said you were dangerously insane and safely on leave, where you could do no real harm except possibly to yourself.”
“Did he, now? Did you get anything on Hardy Fuchsia?”
“And how. Before he retired, he spent forty years in the nuclear-power industry.”
“He referred to Prong, Cripps, McGuffin and Katzenberg as colleagues,” observed Jack thoughtfully.
“Precisely. They all worked together at various times—in nuclear-fusion R&D.”
Jack told him he was a star, Ashley asked him which one, Jack said it didn’t matter and then rang off.
“Let’s get over to Sonning and talk to Fuchsia,” said Jack. “It looks like our scatty and mostly dead cucumber fanciers were all retired nuclear physicists.”
33. Hardy Fuchsia and Bisky-Batt
Least mysterious mysterious visitors: Following on from the UFO fraternity’s much-envied and highly mysterious Men in Black, other minority groups have also begun to claim visitations by “mysterious” groups of men. First the barely mysterious Men in Tartan, spotted either singing or insensible on Burns Night. Next come the hardly mysterious Men in Red that are usually sighted near talent contests at Butlins, then on to the only mildly mysterious Men in Yellow that gather around partially completed buildings. Least mysterious of all and the winners in this category are the Men in Blue that tend to gather around soccer matches and other potential areas of public disturbance.
There was no answer when they knocked on Fuchsia’s door.
“Keep trying,” said Jack. “I’m going to check around the back.”
After the third attempt, Mary entered the garden by the gate at the side and thumped even louder on the back door, then peered through the kitchen window. There was no sign of life, and the door was firmly locked.
“Over here!” yelled Jack from the greenhouse.
She found him kneeling near the empty bed that had once held Fuchsia’s collection of champion cucumbers. “Stolen?”
“Worse,” said Jack, pointing at the freshly disturbed earth.
Mary shivered. Poking up from the dirt were eight fingertips. They were held out in front of whoever was buried there in a position of terrified supplication. Jack donned a latex glove and scraped away at the dry earth with his fingertips. It was Fuchsia, barely six inches below the surface. His eyes and mouth were still open, and the soil was dark and heavy with blood.
“Damn and blast that Briggs!” cried Jack. “Why can’t he ever believe us?”
He stood up, and they quietly left the greenhouse.
“Cucumber extremists?” suggested Mary. “The Men in Green?”
“Except they didn’t blow it up. You’d better speak to Briggs while I do some house-to-house. If only he’d agreed to the twenty-four-hour surveillance!”
Mary spoke to Briggs, who told her—a bit sternly, she thought—to stay exactly where she was. She sat in the warm sun and stared at the body of Fuchsia until Briggs arrived. And he was in a seriously bad mood.
“Where’s Jack?” was the first thing he said, looking around.
“I’m not sure,” said Mary, trying to remain deniably ambiguous. “On leave, I think.”
“You,” he continued angrily, “are in deep trouble, Sergeant.”
Mary’s heart went cold. If Briggs could prove that she knew about Jack’s call to Bartholomew or the theft of the gingerbread thumb from the evidence store, she’d be as guilty as he was. The correct procedure would have been to arrest Jack, but that had been out of the question. They’d triumph or fall together.
“Have you found Bartholomew, sir?” she asked brightly, trying a spot of misdirection.
“It’s not your concern any longer. You are suspended from duty facing disciplinary action. I was a fool to think you might be responsible enough to head the NCD.”
She felt her shoulders slump. It was over. Even if she wasn’t charged as an accessory to Jack’s misdemeanors, she’d never get to stay in the force. And policing was all she’d ever wanted to do. But she wasn’t angry with Jack. It had been her decision.
“You’re to relinquish command of the NCD forthwith and take immediate leave pending further inquiries. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said in a resigned tone. “You know about the thumb, then?”
“Thumb?” echoed Briggs. “What are you blathering on about? But before you go, I want to know one thing: Who’s he?”
And he threw that morning’s copy of The Toad onto the garden roller. Mary frowned and looked at the black-and-white photograph on the front page. It was of a translucent globe hovering in space with two passengers—a woman and an alien. The woman was baring her breasts, and the alien, of course, was covering his eyes. The headline read SAUCY READING PC FLAUNTS HER ASSETS TO OUR LADS IN ORBIT.