“Although I swore to do unsfzpxkable things to you twenty years ago when you caught me,” he whispered in Jack’s ear, the pungent smell of his gingery breath almost overpowering, “I’m not going to.”
“Why not?” grunted Jack.
“Only the Sicilians know how to do vengeance properly,” he said. “The rest of us are really just groping in the dark, to be honest. Random homicide, on the other hand, has a wonderful arbitrary feel to it, don’t you think? The choice between giving or taking life is the ultimate exercise of power, and for you, today, here and now, I choose… life. Cross my path again and you won’t find me so charitable.”
He then picked Jack up as though he weighed nothing at all and threw him bodily through the wooden doors of a nearby garage. He smiled again, gave a cheery wave and with a short run and a single leap cleared a nearby wall, then ran through the next five gardens as though they were a series of hurdles, vanishing over the last with a stylish Fosbury flop.
“Are you all right?” asked a kindly lady who had come out to see what the commotion was all about. Jack sat up among the remains of the garage door and blinked. He rubbed his neck and winced as his fingers discovered a painful cut at the back of his head.
“I’ll be all right—thank you.”
The kindly lady smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”
The first of the squad cars arrived two minutes later as Jack emerged from the garage. It had been empty, which was perhaps just as well.
“Where did he go, sir?” asked Sergeant Fox.
“He’s long gone,” murmured Jack, leaning on a corner of his Allegro. “There’s nothing here but a bruised DCI.”
He carefully unclipped his tie and threw it onto the backseat of the Allegro, then executed a neat double take. The car didn’t have a single scratch on it. The front wheel was back on, the windshield mended, and the side that had scraped down the line of parked cars had miraculously mended itself. The car was perfect in every detail, with no evidence at all of the grueling punishment it had received not more than five minutes before. It seemed that Dorian Gray’s “guarantee” hadn’t been an idle boast. Jack was looking at the oil painting in the trunk—that of the even more wrecked Allegro—when Copperfield drove up with two other squad cars that disgorged police marksmen in a seemingly never-ending stream.
“You look as though someone insane just threw you through a door,” said Copperfield without any sense of irony.
“Funnily enough,” said Jack, shutting the trunk and sitting on the broken wall, “that’s exactly what he did.”
Copperfield whistled. He had read the reports about the Gingerbreadman’s phenomenal strength, but it had to be seen to be believed. He started to arrange a search pattern in nearby streets, but Jack wasn’t confident of any success. He had seen the Gingerbreadman run at speeds of up to forty miles an hour and not even be out of breath.
“I thought you were on sick leave?” said Copperfield. “And undergoing psychological assessment?”
“No secrets in the station, are there? It’s called counseling. And I just happened to be in the area with Mary.” He suddenly remembered and sat bolt upright. “Mary…?”
Jack jumped into the Allegro and made his way back to Radnor Road, where he found her sitting in the back of an ambulance with a red blanket draped across her shoulders.
“You all right?”
She nodded. “Bruised. He chucked a bathtub full of water at me.”
“How can he chuck a tubful of water?”
“With the bath still surrounding the water on most sides, quite easily. You?”
“He threw me into a lockup garage.”
“Lucky the doors were open.”
“They weren’t. I lost him a mile away.”
He sat down next to her as she related what had happened.
“The owner of the flat?”
“She’s dead—wallpapered over in the spare room. Good job, too. Despite the lumpiness, all the pattern matched up, and he’d bothered to line it first. No one does that anymore—not even the really class decorators.”
“Another one for the Gingerbreadman,” sighed Jack. “That makes one hundred and eight victims.” He thought for a moment.
“Any bears living here?”
“None—not even a small one. If Goldilocks was the Goldilocks, she kept herself to a conventional neighborhood.”
“Listen,” said Jack, “where NS-4 is involved, we can’t trust anyone. We keep the Goldilocks thing to ourselves. I was cadging a ride, and you were here checking on a potential ursine residential license infringement. You didn’t find anything.”
“Got it.”
She shook her head sadly. “Not really fair, is it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Getting the stuffing kicked out of us when it’s not even our investigation.”
12. Gingery Aftertaste
The only known human able to speak binary: Owing to the complexity of binary, the speed at which it is spoken and the way in which the rules of grammar and pronunciation change almost daily and for no apparent reason, few humans have ever progressed beyond simple phrases such as “hello,” “good-bye,” “Can you direct me toward galaxy C-672?” and “My aunt is comprised chiefly of stardust.” But utilizing a “total immersion” system of learning, Dr. Colin Parrot of Warwick University successfully mastered basic binary and can converse, but with a limited vocabulary and at only one-thousandth the speed. “Colin did jolly well,” said his teacher, friend and mentor, Adrian 1001010111111101010. “His language skills are about on a par with those of a programmable toaster. Given a couple of years more, he’ll be able to have an intelligent one-on-one with a dishwasher.”
—The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition
Jack and Mary were driven to the emergency room, where Jack had three stitches in his head. Copperfield and Briggs were waiting to question them when they got back to the station, the military and tactical firearms squads now very much in evidence.
The first thing Briggs said was, “I thought you were at home watching reruns of Columbo, Jack.”
“Mary was driving me to my counseling session and stopped off on the way—an NCD matter.”
Briggs turned to Mary. “Is this true?”
“Yes, sir. A possible ursine residential license infringement.”
“The Gingerbreadman is not an NCD investigation, Sergeant. You know that.”