“What’s happening, Spratt?” he asked.
“You tell me, Vinnie. Where are you?”
“Look up.”
Jack did as he was bid, and high up on the building, looking out of a window, was a well-dressed figure in a tweed suit. He waved a paw.
“There was a fourth bear in the house the morning of Goldilocks’s death,” Jack told him. “Any ideas?”
“Nope,” came the reply after a short pause. “There’s not a single bear in Reading that would knowingly harm a hair on her head. All that work she did on the right to arm bears and the illegal bile tappers. Goldilocks was a bear icon.”
“I see. Have you got Bartholomew with you?”
“Yes.”
“Put him on.”
“What’s going on, Jack?” asked Sherman in a worried tone.
“You said twelve hours and you’d have found out who killed Goldy—I trusted you about my life being in danger, and now I’ve made things ten times worse for myself!”
“It’s taking longer than I thought,” replied Jack. “Trust me. What’s the deal over this surrender?”
Jack heard an audible sigh at the other end of the phone.
“I don’t know anything about it. If there was an offer of surrender it didn’t come from anyone in here. Bears are trustworthy and honest, and I have Friend to Bears status. They’d all fight to the death to protect me. But that won’t happen. I’ll give myself up before a single bear is harmed.”
“Keep that to yourself for the moment, sir. Are you sure there’s no one there who would give you up?”
“Positive.”
“You could be mistaken. There was a fourth bear at the Bruins’ house that morning. A bear not like other bears. A bear who is willing to kill—his own kind, if necessary. Keep your eyes and ears open. I’ll call you as soon as I have any information.”
He put the phone back in his pocket and threaded his way toward where Mary was waiting for him. She had been joined by Ashley, who was showing her some photographs of hideously crushed vehicles.
“Jack, we’ve traced all the previous owners of Dorian Gray’s car sales—”
“Mary, I hardly think that’s important right now.”
“No, but I really think you should listen—every single one of them has died in a horrific traffic accident.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
She showed him the pictures. Every car was a crumpled heap of scrap on the road.
“All of these were sold by Gray, and each was totaled shortly after the sale—and there was never any other vehicle involved.”
“What are you saying?”
“I did some research on Dorian Gray,” said Ashley, “and I could only find one person with this name, born in 1878.”
“You told me this already. It can’t be the same person—it would make him one hundred and twenty-six. The Dorian I met was barely thirty.”
“I thought it couldn’t be the same person either,” replied Ashley. “There wasn’t a death certificate. I did some more research and found a photograph from 1911. It’s… well, see for yourself.”
He handed over the picture, and Jack felt the hairs rise on his neck. The reason was clear: The Gray in the picture was the same one who had sold him the car. The smile was the same, even the mole on his left cheek.
“And from 1935,” said Ashley, passing him another, “and here, in 1953.”
They were all of the same man. Jack handed back the pictures and stared at the Allegro suspiciously. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem quite so pristine. The rubber windshield surround looked a bit faded, and there was a small discoloration on the front bumper.
“Every recipient of a Gray-‘guaranteed’ car died in it, you say?”
Ash nodded, and Jack looked between the two of them. If what Ashley was saying was true, this was bad—worse, it was evil.
“Forget face creams and all that ‘laboratoire’ crap you see on the telly,” he said slowly. “There’s only one tried and tested way to stay young, and that’s a pact with the Dark One. Damn. I knew there was a reason he had me sign the buyer’s agreement with red ink.” He shook his head sadly. “He must have been using some kind of suspended automotive decrepitude to channel a few luckless souls to Mephistopheles—and all for a few more years of his own miserable youth. What a louse.”
“It explains the reverse-running odometer,” said Mary.
“Just goes to show that if a deal looks too good to be true, it generally is. Thanks, Ash. I think this car is going to stay right where it is….”
His voice trailed off as he caught sight of someone familiar in the sea of heads.
“Isn’t that Dr. Parks?”
He called Parks over, and the lecturer moved through the crowd that was rapidly forming for no other reason than that there was a crowd forming.
“Hullo, Inspector,” said Parks, panting slightly. “I got here like you asked.”
“I didn’t ask you,” replied Jack with a frown, “but no matter—got something for us?”
“And how!” He looked around curiously at the milling crowd.
“What’s the ruckus?”
“Bartholomew’s holed up in there with a sloth of bears.”
“Ah! Well, check this out,” Parks said excitedly, handing them several photomicrographs from the scanning electron microscope.
“We had to search around, but we finally got there,” he said triumphantly, tapping the image. “How did you know?”
“Call it a hunch. I’d like you to get this on the Conspiracy Theorist Web site as soon as you can; spread it around so everyone knows. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“I see it,” said Mary, still staring at the pictures, “but what does it mean?”
“It means Bisky-Batt lied to us—I thought all that smarmy ‘In what way can I assist you, Officer?’ rubbish was too good to be true.”
There was a loud siren from close by, and an armored car drove up, parked and disgorged a dozen more troops, all heavily armed. It was turning into an all-out siege.
“There’s something else,” said Parks.
“Yes?”
“I was thinking again about the Nullarbor blast, and something stirred in my memory. I had a look through some back issues of Conspiracy Theorist and discovered that there is a theory that might explain the sort of damage we saw at Obscurity and on the Nullarbor. It was first postulated in the 1950s but was so far-fetched that even the hard-core pseudoscience elite dismissed it as nonsense. It was called Cold Ignition Fusion and was a way of building a small thermonuclear device using a deuterium/tritium fuel that could be self-extracting from the heavy hydrogen found in groundwater, and then a mass-induced organic trigger to set it off. It’s on a par with the moon being made of green cheese and the existence of a Mayan temple under Cleethorpes, but the result would be pretty much what we saw at Obscurity and all the others. A small thermonuclear blast in the region of a half to one kiloton.”