The Big Over Easy

3. The Fall Guy

“The Japanese film crew is waiting to interview you again,” said Madeleine, interspersing stuffing spoonfuls of mashed banana into Stevie with taking surreptitious glances outside. “What do they want anyway?”

“To talk to me about Friedland Chymes and the Gingerbreadman,” replied Jack, sorting through his post and finding a notice from the Allegro Owners’ Club about checking wheel-bearing torque settings.

“Why don’t you speak to them?”

“Darling, they don’t want the truth. They want me to back up Chymes’s version of events where he ‘saved the day’ and single-handedly caught the deranged psychopath.”

Jack finished his toast and looked at Madeleine’s picture on the cover of The Toad, which had the headline WASHED-UP HAS-BEEN WITH WEIGHT PROBLEM VICIOUSLY ATTACKS JOURNALIST. The Mole, whose journalist didn’t get a broken jaw that night led with SOCK IT TO HIM, LOLA!

“Whatever happened to him?” asked Madeleine.

“Friedland Chymes? No idea.”

“No, silly. The Gingerbreadman.”

“Last I heard, he was still in St. Cerebellum’s Secure Wing for the Incurably Unhinged. Four-hundred-year sentence. It should have been five hundred, but we never proved his one hundred and fourth victim.”

“He couldn’t escape, could he?” asked Madeleine. “After all, he did promise to do unspeakable things to you and Friedland.”

“If he did, I’d be the first to know.” He sighed. “No, I guess I’d be the second.”

Jack’s mobile vibrated across the worktop and fell into the compost bin with a plop.

He picked it up, wiped off the spaghetti hoops and frowned at the text message.

“‘Gngbdmn out 2 get U,’” he murmured. “Now, that’s a coincidence.”

Madeleine dropped a spoon, and Jack chuckled.

“Just kidding. It actually says, ‘Big egg down — Wyatt.’ What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” replied Madeleine, “but if the husband with the dopey line in practical jokes wants to still be breathing in ten minutes, he better be out of the house.”

Wyatt was Briggs’s deputy and not the most polite of men.

“Are you coming in today?” he asked as soon as Jack called.

Jack glanced at his watch. It was barely nine.

“Of course. What’s the problem?”

“Wall fall over at Grimm’s Road. Looks like one of yours. Briggs is on his way and wants to see you there pronto.”

Jack replied that he’d be over as soon as possible, scribbled down the address and hung up.

“What was it?”

“One for the NCD, apparently.”

“Another Bluebeard copycat?”

“I hope not. Are you interviewing any more potential lodgers today?”

“Two.”

“Good. No one weird, remember. I’ll call you.”

He kissed her, then looked over Stevie to find the area of least sticky. He eventually found a small patch on the top of his head and kissed that and was out of the door.

Jack’s car was an Austin Allegro estate Mark 3 painted in a gruesome shade of lime green that had been designated as “Applejack” by an unnamed marketing executive with an odd sense of humor. Detectives driving vintage or classic cars was a Guild-inspired affectation that Jack thought ludicrous. Friedland Chymes’s 1932 Delage D8 was a not-untypical choice. As a small, pointless and totally unnoticed act of rebellion, Jack drove the dullest car he could find. His father had bought it new in 1982 and looked after it assiduously. When it passed to Jack, he continued to care for it. It was just coming up to its twenty-second birthday and had covered almost 350,000 miles, wearing out two engines and four clutches on the way.

He didn’t drive straight to Grimm’s Road. He had an errand to run first — for his mother.

She opened the door within two seconds of his pressing the doorbell, letting out a stream of cats that ran around with such rapidity and randomness of motion that they assumed a liquid state of furry purringness. The exact quantity could have been as low as three or as high as one hundred eight; no one could ever tell, as they were all so dangerously hyperactive. The years had been charitable to Mrs. Spratt, and despite her age she was as bright as a button and had certainly not lost any of her youthful zest. Jack put it down to quantity of children. It had either made her tough in old age or worn her out — if the latter, then without Jack and his nine elder siblings, she might have lived to one hundred ninety-six. She painted people’s pets in oils because “someone has to,” collected small pottery animals, Blue Baboon LPs and Jellyman commemorative plates. She had been widowed seventeen years.

“Hello, baby!” she enthused merrily. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Mother — and I’m not a baby anymore. I’m forty-four.”

“You’ll always be my baby. Did the pigs dangle?”

Jack shook his head. “We did our best. The jury just wasn’t convinced we had a case.”

“It’s hardly surprising,” she snorted, “considering the jury was completely biased.”

“The defendants might be pigs, Mother, but they do have the right to be tried by their peers. In this instance twelve other pigs. It’s a Magna Carta 1215 thing — nothing to do with me or the Prosecution Service.”

She shrugged and then looked furtively around. “Best come inside. I think the aliens are trying to control my thoughts using the mobile network.”

Jack sighed. “Mother, if you met an alien, you’d quickly change your mind; they’re really just like you and me — only blue.”

She ushered him in and shut the door. The house smelled of lavender water, acrylic paint and fresh baking, and it echoed with the stately tock of the grandfather clock in the hall. A quantum of cats shot out of the living room and tore upstairs.

“It’s the diet I have them on, I think,” she murmured, passing Jack a canvas wrapped in brown paper. She didn’t really want to sell her Stubbs painting of a cow, but since she had discovered all the must-have goodies on eBay, there was really no choice.

“Remember,” she said firmly, “take it to Mr. Foozle and get him to value it. I’ll make a decision after he’s done that.”

“Right.”

She thought for a moment.

“By the way, when are you going to remove those three bags of wool from the potting shed so I can have it demolished?”

“Soon, Mother, I promise.”

The rain had eased up after the previous night’s deluge, and puddles the size of small inland seas gathered on the roads where the beleaguered storm drains had failed to carry it all away. Grimm’s Road was in an area that had yet to fully benefit from the town’s prosperity. There were terraced houses on either side of the potholed road, and two large gas holders dominated the far end of the street, casting a shadow over the houses every month of the year except July. The houses had been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century and were typical of the period: two up, two down with kitchen behind, an outdoor loo, a yard at the rear and a coal house beyond this. A door at the back of the yard led out into an alley, a cobbled track scattered with rubbish and abandoned cars, a favorite playing ground for kids.

The traffic had slowed Jack down badly in the latter part of the journey, and it was about twenty minutes later when he drove slowly down Grimm’s Road trying to read the door numbers. He had received two other calls asking where he was, and it was fairly obvious that Briggs would not be in a sympathetic mood. Jack parked the car and pulled on an overcoat, keeping a wary eye on the darkening sky.

“Nice car, mister,” said a cheeky lad with a grubby face, trying to bounce a football that had a puncture. His friend, whose face his mother had cruelly forgotten to smear with grime that morning, joined in.

“Zowie!” he exclaimed excitedly. “An Austin Allegro estate Mark 3 deluxe 1.3-liter 1982 model. Applejack with factory-fitted optional head restraints, dog cage and Motorola single-band radio.” He paused for breath. “You don’t see many of those around these days. It’s not surprising,” he added, “they’re total shit.”

“Listen,” said the first one in a very businesslike tone, “give us fifty quid and we’ll set it on fire so you can cop the insurance.”

“Better make it a tenner,” said the second lad with a grin. “Fifty is all he’d get.”

“Police,” said Jack. “Now, piss off.”

The boys were unrepentant. “Plod pay double. If you want us to torch your motor, it’s going to cost you twenty.”

They both sniggered and ran off to break something.

Jack walked up to the house in question and looked at the shabby exterior. The guttering was adrift, the brickwork sprouted moss, and the rotten window frames held several sheets of cardboard that had been stuck there to replace broken panes. In the window the landlady had already put up a sign saying “Room to Let. Strictly no pets, accordion players, statisticians, smokers, sarcastics, spongers or aliens.”

Waiting for Jack was a young constable who looked barely out of puberty, let alone probation, which was pretty near the truth on both counts. He had made full constable and was sent to the NCD for three months to ease him into policing. But someone had mislaid the paperwork, and he was still there six months later, which suited him just fine.

“Good morning, Tibbit.”

“Good morning, sir,” replied the eager young man, his blue serge pressed into a fine crease — by his mother, Jack guessed.

“Where’s the Super?”

Tibbit nodded in the direction of the house. “Backyard, sir. Watch the landlady. She’s a dragon. Jabbed me with an umbrella for not wiping my feet.”

Jack thanked him, wiped his feet with great care on the faded and clearly ironic “Welcome” doormat and stepped inside. The house smelled musty and had large areas of damp on the walls. He walked past the peeling wallpaper and exposed lath and plaster to the grimy kitchen, then opened the door and stepped out into the backyard.

The yard was shaped as an oblong, fifteen feet wide and about thirty feet long, surrounded by a high brick wall with crumbling mortar. Most of the yard was filled with junk — broken bicycles, old furniture, a mattress or two. But at one end, where the dustbins were spilling their rubbish onto the ground, large pieces of eggshell told of a recent and violent death. Jack knew who the victim was immediately and had suspected for a number of years that something like this might happen. Humpty Dumpty. The fall guy. If this wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the Nursery Crime Division, Jack didn’t know what was. Mrs. Singh, the pathologist, was kneeling next to the shattered remains dictating notes into a tape recorder. She waved a greeting at him as he walked in but did not stop what she was doing. She indicated to a photographer areas of particular interest to her, the flash going off occasionally and looking inordinately bright in the dull closeness of the yard.

Briggs had been sitting on a low wall talking to a plainclothes policewoman, but as Jack entered, he rose and waved a hand in the direction of the corpse.

“It looks like he died from injuries sustained falling from a wall,” Briggs said. “Could be accident, suicide, who knows? He was discovered dead at 0722 this morning.”

Jack looked up at the wall. It was a good eight feet high. A sturdy ladder stood propped up against it.

“Our ladder?”

“His.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“A couple of points. Firstly, you’re not exactly ‘Mr. Popular’ with the seventh floor at present. There are people up there who think that spending a quarter of a million pounds on a failed murder conviction for three pigs is not value for money — especially when there is zero chance of getting it into Amazing Crime Stories.”

“I didn’t think justice was meant to have a price tag, sir.”

“Clearly. But it’s a public-perception thing, Spratt. Piglets are cute; wolves aren’t. You might as well try and charge the farmer’s wife with cruelty when she cut off the mice’s tails with a carving knife.”

“I did.”

“And?”

“Insufficient evidence.”

“A good thing I never heard of it. So what you’re going to do here is clean up Humpty’s tumble with the minimum of fuss and bother. I want it neat, quick and cheap — and without hassling any more anthropomorphized animals.”

“Including pigs?”

“Especially pigs. You so much as look at a bacon roll and I’ll have you suspended.”

“Is there a third point?”

“The annual budgetary review is next week, and because of that pig fiasco, the NCD’s future is on the agenda. Stir up any more trouble and you could find yourself managing traffic volume on the M4.”

“I preferred it when there were only two points.”

“Listen, Jack,” went on Briggs, “you’re a good officer, if a little overenthusiastic at times, and the Nursery Crime Division is necessary, despite everyone’s apparent indifference. The bottom line is that I want this ex-egg mopped up neat and clean and a report on my desk Wednesday morning. The Sacred Gonga’s new visitors’ center is being dedicated by the Jellyman on Saturday, and I need all the hands I can get for security — and that includes your little mob hiding down there at the NCD.”

“You want me to head up Jellyman security, sir?” asked Jack with a gleam in his eye. He liked the idea of being near the great man; guaranteeing his safety was even better.

“No, we need someone of unimpeachable character, skill and initiative for that; Chymes is already drawing up security plans. I want you to ensure the safety of the Sacred Gonga itself. Anti-Splotvian protesters might try to disrupt the dedication ceremony. Protect it with your life and the lives of your department. Solomon Grundy paid forty million to keep it in the country, and we wouldn’t want to upset him. You should go and look over the visitors’ center; there’ll be a Jellyman security briefing on Thursday at 1500 hours.”

“Sir, I — ”

“I would consider taking the assignment with all enthusiasm, Jack,” observed Briggs. “After that three-pigs debacle, you’ll need as many friends as you can get.”

“Is this where I say thank you?”

“You do.” Briggs beckoned the policewoman over. “Jack, I want you to meet Detective Sergeant Mary.”

“Hello,” said Jack.

“Mary Mary,” said Mary Mary.

“Hello, hello?”

“Don’t play the fool, Spratt,” cut in Briggs.

“It’s Mary Mary,” explained Mary. “That’s my name.”

“Mary Mary? Where are you from? Baden-Baden?”

“First time I heard that one, sir — today.”

Jack sighed. He smiled mechanically, she smiled mechanically, and they shook hands.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” she said.

“And you,” replied Jack. “Who are you working with?”

She looked across at Briggs rather pointedly.

“Mary is your new detective sergeant,” said Briggs. “Transferred with an A-one record from Basingstoke. She’ll be with you on this case and any others that spring up.”

Jack sighed. “No offense to DS Mary, sir, but I was hoping you could promote Ashley, Baker, or — ”

“Not possible, Jack,” said Briggs in the tone of voice that made arguing useless. He looked up at the ominous sky. “Well, I’m off. I’ll leave you here with Mary so you can get acquainted. Remember: I need that report as soon as possible. Got it?”

Jack did indeed get it, and Briggs departed.

Jack shivered in the cold and looked at her again. “Mary Mary, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kind of an odd name.”

Mary bit her lip. It was a contentious point with her, and the years had not diminished the hot indignation of playground taunts regarding contrariness. It was an odd name, but she tried not to let her feelings show.

“It’s just my name, sir. I come from a long line of Mary Marys — sort of like a family tradition. Why,” she added, more defensively.

“is there a problem?”

“Not at all,” replied Jack, “as long as it’s not an affectation for the Guild’s benefit — Briggs was threatening to change his to Föngotskilérnie.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Friedland Chymes’s investigations usually end up in print, as you know,” explained Jack, “and Briggs is habitually not referred to. He thought a strange name and a few odd habits might make him more … mentionworthy.”

“Hence the trombone?”

“Right.”

There was a short silence, during which Jack thought about who he would have preferred to have as his DS and Mary thought about her career.

“So the NCD disbanded?” she said, using her best woeful voice to make it sound like terribly bad news. “That would mean all the staff would have to be reassigned to other duties, right?”

“Along with the chairs and table lamps, yes, I suppose so.”

“When is this budgetary meeting?”

“The Thursday following next.”

Mary made a mental note. The sooner she could get away from this loser department, the better.

Jack turned his attention to the shattered remains of Humpty’s corpse.

Mary took her cue and flicked open her notepad. “Corpse’s name is — ”

“Humpty Dumpty.”

“You knew him?”

“Once,” Jack sighed, shaking his head sadly. “A very long time ago.”

Humpty’s ovoid body had fragmented almost completely and was scattered among the dustbins and rubbish at the far end of the yard. The previous night’s heavy rain had washed away his liquid center, but even so there was still enough to give off an unmistakably eggy smell. Jack noted a thin and hairless leg — still with a shoe and sock — attached to a small area of eggshell draped with tattered sheets of translucent membrane. The biggest piece of shell contained Humpty’s large features and was jammed between two dustbins. His face was a pale white except for the nose, which was covered in unsightly red gin blossoms. One of the eyes was open, revealing a milky-white unseeing eye, and a crack ran across his face. He had been wearing a tuxedo with a cravat or cummerbund — it was impossible to say which. The trauma was quite severe, and to an untrained eye his body might have been dismissed as a heap of broken eggshell and a bundle of damp clothing.

Jack knelt down to get a closer look. “Do we know why he’s all dressed up?”

Mary consulted her notebook. “He was at something called the Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit — ”

“What?” interrupted Jack. “The Spongg bash? Are you sure?”

“The invite was in his shirt pocket.”

“Hmm,” mused Jack. He would have to talk to Madeleine — she might even have a few pictures of him. “It was an expensive do. We’d better speak to someone who was there. We should also talk to his doctor and find out what we can about his health. Depression, phobias, illness, dizzy spells, vertigo — anything that might throw some light on his death.”

Jack peered more closely at Humpty’s features. He looked old, the ravages of time and excessive drinking having taken their toll. The face of the cadaver was a pale reflection of the last time they had met. Humpty had been a jolly chap then, full of life and jokes. Jack paused for a moment and stared silently at the corpse.

Mary, to whom every passing second was a second not spent furthering her career, had made a choice: She would keep her head down and then try to get a good posting when the division was disbanded. If she did really well with Jack, perhaps Chymes would take notice. Perhaps.

She said, “How did you know him?”

“He used to lecture on children’s literature and business studies at Reading University. Good company and very funny, but a bit of a crook. He was being investigated by the university in 1981 when Chymes and I questioned him — ”

“Whoa!” said Mary suddenly. “You worked for Friedland Chymes?”

“No,” replied Jack with a sigh, “Friedland and I worked together. You didn’t know he started at the NCD, did you?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t spread it around. I’ve had some good officers through here, but they don’t stay for long.”

“Really?” said Mary, as innocently as she could.

“Yes. It’s a springboard to better things — if you consider that anything is better than this. Unless you run it, in which case — ”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but Mary knew what he meant.

“So … how long have you been here?”

“Since 1978,” mused Jack, still staring at Humpty’s unseeing eye.

“Twenty-six years,” said Mary, perhaps with a little too much incredulity in her voice than she would have liked. Jack looked at her sharply, so she changed the subject.

“I heard Friedland Chymes was a joy to work with.”

“He’s an ambitious career officer who will lie, cheat and steal as he clambers over the rubble of used and discarded officers on his way to the top.”

“Boy, did I read that wrong,” she replied, not believing a word — she knew how the brightest stars always invoked jealousy from those left behind.

“Yes, you did. You’ve heard, I suppose, about the murder of Cock Robin?”

“No.”

Jack sighed. No one ever did these days. Chymes made certain of it. It had been two decades ago anyway.

“Well, it doesn’t matter — it’s ancient history. To get back to Humpty, Friedland and I questioned him about a racket in which he imported eight containerloads of spinning wheels the week before the government ban. The compensation deal netted him almost half a million, but he’d done nothing illegal. He was like that. Always up to something. Ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving. He was fired from the university when they suspected him of having his hands in the till.”

“They couldn’t fire him over suspicion, surely?”

“No, but he’d made the mistake of having an affair with the dean’s wife, and it didn’t go down too well. Last I heard of him, he had hit the sauce pretty badly and was into commodity speculation.”

Jack looked at Humpty’s features again. “How old was he?”

Mary consulted his driving license. “He was… er, sixty-five.”

Jack looked up at the wall again. Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way. He’d even had one built in the lecture room where he taught, a plaster and wooden mockup that could be wheeled in when required.

“Have uniform been round to break the news to Mrs. Dumpty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We should have a word with her. Find out what state she’s in. Good morning, Gladys, what does this look like to you?”

Mrs. Singh stood up and stretched her back. She had just celebrated her fiftieth birthday and was the pathologist allocated by default to Jack and all his cases. In real life she was an assistant pathologist, but the chief pathologist wouldn’t do NCD work in case he got laughed at, so he sent along Mrs. Singh and rubber-stamped her reports without reading them. Like Jack, she was doing the best she could on limited resources. Unlike Jack, she loved cats and people who loved cats and had six grandchildren.

“They hung us out to dry over the pig thing, Jack,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Were you surprised?”

“To be honest, no. When was the last time we got a conviction?”

“Five years ago,” replied Jack without even having to think about it. “That guy who was running the illegal straw-into-gold dens. What was his name again?”

“Rumplestiltskin,” returned Mrs. Singh with a faint smile at the memory. “Twenty years, no remission. Those were the days. Who’s the new blood?”

“DS Mary Mary,” said Jack. “Mary, this is Mrs. Singh.”

“Welcome to the house of fun,” said Mrs. Singh. “Tell me, did you actually request to work here?”

“Not… as such.”

Mrs. Singh flashed an impish smile at Jack. “No,” she said, “they never do.”

She waved a rubber-gloved hand at Humpty’s remains. “That’s a lot of shell. I never saw him alive — how big was he?”

Jack thought for a moment. “About four-foot-six high — three foot wide.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. He would have been quite heavy, and it’s a fall of over twelve feet. I’ll know a bit more when I get him back to the lab, but I can’t see anything that would preclude a verdict of either accidental death or suicide.”

“Any idea on the time of death?”

“Difficult to say. The rainstorm last night pretty much washed everything away. There are scraps of inner and outer membrane — and this.” She held up a gelatinous object.

“A jellyfish? This far inland?”

“I’m no expert when it comes to eggs,” confessed Mrs. Singh, “but I’ll try to identify it.”

“What about time of death?”

She dropped the section of Humpty’s innards into a plastic Ziploc bag with a plop and thought for a moment. “Well, the remaining viscera are still moist and pliable, so sometime within the last twenty-four hours. Mind you, the birds would have had most of it if he’d fallen off the wall yesterday, so if you want me to make a guess, sometime between 1800 hours yesterday evening and 0300 this morning. Any later than that and the rain wouldn’t have had time to wash away all that albumen.”

Mary jotted it down in her notebook. Jack was sure there must be relatives, and they would almost certainly ask him one important question.

“Was it quick?”

Mrs. Singh surveyed the wreckage. “I think so. When he hit the ground his lights, quite simply, went out.”

Jack thanked her as she spoke a few words in Hindi to her assistant, who very gently — as befits the deceased — began to lift the larger pieces of shell into a PVC body bag.

Jack carefully climbed up the ladder and looked at the top of the wall. It was barely a foot wide, and he could see an oval dip that had been worn by Humpty’s prolonged use. He climbed back down again, and both he and Mary went into the yard next door to look at the wall from the other side.

“What are you looking for?” asked Mary.

“Anything that might have been used to push him off.”

“Pushed? You suspect foul play?”

“I just like to keep an open mind, Mary, despite what Briggs said.”

But if Jack expected to find anything incriminating, he was to be disappointed. The yard was deserted, and a precarious heap of rubbish and full garbage bags was stacked against the wall underneath where Humpty had sat. An assailant would have had to clamber over the heap but the rubbish was undisturbed. Jack was just looking in the outhouse for a rake or something when he noticed a small boy staring at him from the kitchen window. Jack waved cheerfully, but the little boy just stuck his middle finger up. He was grasped by the ear and pulled away, only to be replaced by a very small man in a nightgown and nightcap. He looked a bit bleary-eyed and fumbled with the latch before opening the kitchen window. Jack showed him his ID card.

“Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, Nursery Crime. You are…?”

The small man rubbed his eyes and squinted at the card.

“Winkie,” he replied, blinking with tiredness. “William Winkie.”

“Mr. Winkie, there was an accident last night. Mr. Dumpty fell off the wall.”

“I heard.”

“Him falling off?”

“No, the news I mean. He was a nice fella. He used to play ball and that with the kids in the alleyway. My kids are well choked by his death.”

One of the “well-choked” kids continued to pull faces at Jack through the window. Mr. Winkie gave him a clip round the ear, and he ran off bawling.

“Did you hear anything out of the ordinary last night?”

Willie Winkie yawned. “Pardon me. I got in from my shift at Winsum’s at about two and went straight to sleep. I have a sleeping disorder, so I’m on medication.”

“Anyone else in the house?”

Willie turned and shouted. “Pet! Did you hear anything strange last night? It’s about Mr. Dumpty.”

A large, florid woman came to the window. She wore a purple nylon dress and had her hair done up in rollers. A small unlit rolled cigarette was stuck to her lower lip and bobbled as she spoke.

“There was a truck reversing sometime in the small hours — but that’s not unusual around here. I sleep in a separate room to Willie so he doesn’t wake me. Sorry, love, I’d like to be able to help, but I can’t.”

Jack nodded and started on another tack. “When did you last see him?”

“Last night at about seven-thirty. He asked me to iron his cravat.”

“Cravat?”

“Or cummerbund. It’s difficult to say with him.”

“How did he appear to you?”

“Fine. We chatted about this and that, and he borrowed some sugar. Insisted on paying for it. He was like that. I often ironed his shirts — on a wok to get the right shape, of course, and he always paid over the odds. He helped us out with a bit of cash sometimes and sent the kids on a school trip to Llandudno last summer. Very generous. He was a true gent.”

“Did you ever see him with anyone?”

“He kept himself to himself. Liked to dress well, quite a dandy, y’know. One for the ladies, I heard. Come to think of it, there was a woman recently. Tall girl, quite young — brunette.”

Jack thanked them and gave Willie his card in case he thought of anything else, then returned to the yard, where Mrs. Singh was still searching for clues as to what had happened.

“Where was his room?” asked Jack.

Mary pointed to the window overlooking the backyard.

They entered the house and climbed the creaking staircase. There was damp and mildew everywhere, and the skirting had come away from the wall. The door to Humpty’s room was ajar, and Jack carefully pushed it open. The room was sparsely furnished and in about as bad a state of repair as the rest of the house. Hung on the wall was a framed print of a Fabergé egg next to a copy of Tenniel’s illustration of Humpty from Through the Looking Glass. There was a shabby carpet that looked as though it hadn’t been hoovered since the turn of the last century and a wardrobe against one wall next to a sink unit and a cooker. A large mahogany desk sat in the center of the room with a small pile of neatly stacked bricks behind it which Humpty had used as a seat. On the desk was a typewriter, some papers, a fax and two telephones. The previous week’s edition of What Share? was open at the rare-metals page, and an undrunk cup of coffee had formed a skin next to Humpty’s spectacles. There was a photo in a gilt frame of Humpty with his hand on the leg of a pretty brunette in the back of a horse-drawn carriage in Vienna. Jack knew because he’d been there once himself and recognized the Prater wheel in the background. They were both well dressed and looked as though they had just come from the opera.

“Any name?”

Mary checked the back of the picture. There was none.

Even from a cursory glance, it was obvious that not only had Humpty been working the stock market — he had been working it hard. Most of the paperwork was for a bewildering array of transactions, with nothing logged in any particular order. The previous Thursday’s Toad had been left open at the business news, and Jack noticed that two companies listed on the stock exchange had been underlined in red pencil. The first was Winsum & Loosum Pharmaceuticals, and the second was Spongg Footcare. Both public limited companies, both dealing in foot-care products. Winsum & Loosum, however, was blue chip; Spongg’s was almost bust. Mary had chanced across a file of press clippings that charted the downfall of Spongg’s over the past ten years, from the public flotation to the fall of the share price the previous month to under twenty pence. Jack opened another file. It was full of sales invoices confirming the purchase of shares in Spongg’s for differing amounts and at varying prices.

“Buying shares in Spongg’s?” murmured Jack. “Where did he get the money?”

Mary passed him a wad of bank statements. Personally, Humpty was nearly broke, but Dumpty Holdings Ltd. was good to the tune of ninety-eight thousand pounds.

“Comfortable,” commented Mary.

“Comfortable and working from a dump.”

Jack found Humpty’s will and opened it. It was dated 1963 and had this simple instruction: “All to wife.”

“What do you make of these?”

Mary handed Jack an envelope full of photos. They were of the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center in various states of construction, taken over the space of a year or more. But the last snap was the most interesting. It was of a young man smiling rather stupidly, sitting in the passenger seat of a car. The picture had been taken by the driver — presumably Humpty — and had a date etched in the bottom right-hand corner. It had been taken a little over a year ago.

“The Sacred Gonga,” said Mary, thinking about the dedication ceremony on Saturday. “Why is Humpty interested in that?”

“You won’t find anyone in Reading who isn’t,” replied Jack.

“There was quite an uproar when it was nearly sold to a collector in Las Vegas.”

They turned their attention to the wardrobe that held several Armani suits, all of them individually tailored to fit Humpty’s unique stature and held up on hangers shaped like hula hoops. Jack checked the pockets, but they were all empty. Under some dirty shirts they found a well-thumbed copy of World Egg Review and Parabolic and Ovoid Geometric Constructions.

“Typical bottom-drawer stuff,” said Jack, rummaging past a signed first edition of Horton Hatches the Egg to find a green canvas tool bag. He opened it to reveal the blue barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. Jack and Mary exchanged glances. This raised questions over and above a standard inquiry already.

“It might be nothing,” observed Mary, not keen for anything to extend the investigation a minute longer than necessary. “He might be looking after it for a friend.”

“A friend? How many sawed-off shotguns do you look after for friends?”

She shrugged.

“Exactly. Never mind about Briggs. Better get a Scene of Crime Officer out here to dust the gun and give the room the once-over. Ask for Shenstone; he’s a friendly. What else do you notice?”

“No bed?”

“Right. He didn’t live here. I’ll have a quick word with Mrs. Hubbard.”

Jack went downstairs, stopping on the way to straighten his tie in the peeling hall mirror.