The Fourth Bear

14. Virginia Kreeper

“Of course, I was only kidding about that voodoo comment,” said Jack as soon as he was sitting in the Police Medical Officer’s room. It was cold and sterile and cheerless and not somewhere you’d really want to be. It was here that officers were frequently told bad news about their failing health. Or, in the hypochondriac Baker’s case, bad news about his excessive good health. Kreeper was behind the desk looking through Jack’s medical records and making annoying aha and hmm noises.

“And the leech stuff was admittedly a bit infantile.”

“Your comments just now, although insulting and uttered with intent to demean my profession,” muttered Virginia without looking up, “have no relevance to your mental health, and neither did our conversation yesterday at the Déjà Vu. I get that sort of treatment a lot, so it is hardly indicative of your psychiatric state.”

“Ah!” said Jack, highly relieved.

“My evaluation will be based on objective and unbiased observation.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“But,” she said, staring at him over her spectacles, “give me any more of your sarcastic backchat and I’ll recommend enforced retirement. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“Good,” she said, putting aside his file and picking up a pencil. “I’ve been asked to conduct this appraisal, as your commanding officer is concerned that too much exposure to unusual policing situations in a department requiring an open mind and imaginative thought processes might be aggravating a long-held psychosis, which may render you incapable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy and thus seriously compromise your abilities to conduct meaningful investigations.”

Jack frowned and said nothing for a few moments. “Run that by me again?” he asked at last.

“Briggs thinks you might be bananas.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and put his hands in his pockets.

“Now, that I understand. Listen, Kreeper, I’m as sane as the next man.”

“Then I fear for the next man,” she said, tapping his record with an index finger. “I am here to report on whether you are mentally fit enough to continue to work as an effective officer of the law.”

“Great!” said Jack, looking at his watch. “Let’s get to it.”

Kreeper stared at him again. “Okay. I understand you are head of what you call the ‘Nursery Crime Division.’ Is this true?”

“Spot on.”

“And you were swallowed, alive, by a wolf a week ago?”

“Right again.”

“And this doesn’t strike you as unusual?”

“Not at all. It’s all pretty much standard operating procedure within the division. I’ve been in tighter spots than the swallowing, I can tell you.”

“Such as?”

“Probably the incident with the troll—or the attack by Dr. Quatt’s genetic experiment. Or the Gingerbreadman. Or arresting King Midas—and Rumpelstiltskin didn’t take my closing down of his straw-into-gold dens too well.”

“And did any of these make you feel anxious or worried?”

“Of course.”

“Feelings of delayed shock?”

“Nope.”

“Guilt?”

“Only on a failed conviction—guilty that I didn’t present a robust enough case.”

Kreeper looked mildly disappointed and tried another tack. “Your marriage is good?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“How do you feel when you think of beautiful Pippa in the control room?”

“That she’s very pretty and young enough to be my daughter.”

“And who do you think she’s going out with?”

“Is this part of the test?”

“No, I was just interested like everyone else.”

“She showed an interest in Sergeant Pickle, but I’m not sure how far it’s gone.”

Virginia held up a picture of an inkblot.

“What does this look like to you?”

“It looks like a vagina. No, just kidding—it looks like a Rorschach inkblot test.”

“And what about this?” she asked, showing him another.

“It looks like the one you just showed me.”

“And this?”

“Ditto.”

“O-kay. Word association. I want you to tell me the first word that comes into your head. Ready?”

“Steady.”

“We haven’t started yet. Okay, here we go: Jack?”

“Yes?”

“No, we’ve started now. Jack?”

“Jill.”

“Dish?”

“Spoon.”

“Boy?”

“Blue.”

“Baa, baa?”

“Black sheep.”

“Ring around the rosies?”

“All fall down.”

“Porridge?”

“Bear.”

“Nursery?”

“Crime.”

“Bluebeard?”

“Crime.”

“Humpty?”

“Crime.”

“Crime?”

“Nursery.”

Kreeper wrote another note, leaned back in her chair and then asked, “Being swallowed. What did it feel like?”

“Constricting to begin with, then quite warm and womblike.”

“Aha!” muttered Virginia triumphantly, leaning forward again.

“How do you get on with your mother?”

“She’s a monumental pain in the ass, but I love her—I suppose.”

“When you were a little boy, did you ever walk into your parents’ bedroom when they were making love?”

“No!”

“Beaten as a child?”

“No.”

“Humiliated? Other siblings favored over you?”

“No.”

“Potty trained too late?”

“No.”

“Potty trained too early?”

“No!”

“Shame,” she said a little sadly. “That would have made it all a lot easier. This car of yours. You say it mended itself?”

“No, I don’t think I ever said that.”

“I distinctly heard you tell Sergeant Mary.”

“I meant it in… in… an ironic manner.”

“What sort of ironic manner?”

“I’m not sure,” said Jack, beginning to get a trifle annoyed and wanting to skip to the “clean bill of health” part. “Listen: I sleep well, eat well, have no problems with anyone except for people who… want to stop me from doing my job.”

“Eat well?” asked Virginia, consulting Jack’s medical records.

“That’s what you said? ‘Eat well’?”

“Ye-e-es,” replied Jack, trying to figure where this was going.

“And your name is Jack Spratt?”

“You know it is.”

“Who eats no fat?”

“A lot of people don’t eat fat,” replied Jack defensively, suddenly realizing what Kreeper was up to. The interview had started out quite innocently, but now she was probing right under the skin, and he didn’t like it—not one little bit.

“And your wife—your first one—she ate no lean, is that correct?”

“Do you have to bring my first wife into this?” said Jack, rubbing his hands together because they had begun to itch. “You know she died?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, but it might be important.”

“Yes, she only ate the fat. Only ever ate fat. What of it?”

“So together,” said Kreeper in a meaningful tone, “you licked the platter clean?”

“Metaphorically speaking—you could say that,” snapped Jack, rubbing his brow. The room had suddenly grown hot, and he pulled at his collar to try to stop his shirt from sticking to him.

“Are you feeling okay, Inspector?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t want to stop and carry on another time?”

“No.”

“And none of that ‘eat no fat / eat no lean / platter clean’ stuff strikes you as unusual?”

“Not at all.” replied Jack. He looked down at his hands and noticed a slight tremor. He tried to smile and clasped his fingers together, then felt an itch on his neck that he had to scratch but didn’t in case Kreeper thought he was acting strangely. If this was a test to see if he would crack and admit his PDRness, it was a good one.

“Have you heard of the Jack Sprat nursery rhyme?”

“Never,” he replied angrily. “Is there one?”

“Yes. Do you want to hear it?”

Jack felt his heart thump heavily in his chest, and his scalp prickled. “No, I don’t.”

“I see,” replied Virginia with infuriating calm. “So, Jack, what is the meaning of all this… GIANT KILLING?”

Jack jumped to his feet. “Station tittle-tattle!” he exclaimed, more forcefully than he had intended. “Yes, yes, there were three of them, but only one was technically a giant; the rest were just tall. I was cleared of wrongdoing on every occasion.”

He found himself pacing the room, stopped, gave a wan smile, then seated himself with his hands under his thighs to keep them from fidgeting.

“Is that all you need to know?”

“I’m only just beginning,” replied Kreeper with a unpleasant smile. “Tell me about the beanstalk.”

“What beanstalk?”

“The one that grew in your mother’s garden. The one that grew after you swapped the Stubbs cow for the ‘magic’ beans. The one you chopped down to destroy that giant… thing.”

“Oh, that beanstalk.”

“Yes, that one. Doesn’t the whole scenario ring with even the slightest familiarity to you?”

“What do you want from me, Kreeper?”

“Nothing,” she replied evenly. “I’ve just been asked to do a psychiatric evaluation to see if you are mentally fit enough to continue your duties, and I think it’s important to understand why it is that you are so suited to nursery crime work.”

He stared at her, and she stared back. He took a deep breath and calmed himself. Something about her manner wasn’t right. She had brought her own selfish agenda to the meeting. This wasn’t an evaluation; it was simply a hurdle in the narrative. And as soon as he realized that, he knew he could go on the attack. He remembered some advice that DCI Horner had given him when he had passed the NCD reins across to him. “Remember, m’boy,” his old boss had said, eyes twinkling, “that if anyone tries to get the better of you, stand up straight and say to yourself in an imperious air, ‘I am the new Mrs. de Winter now!’ You’ll find it works wonders.” Jack stared at Kreeper and narrowed his eyes.

“Mrs. de Winter,” he murmured.

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing. In answer to your question as to why I’m so suited to NCD work: After many years working among the nursery characters living in Reading, I have grown to have an affinity with their way of thinking. Call it intuition if you like, but there it is, and I can’t explain it.”

Kreeper’s face fell at Jack’s recovery. She thought she’d gotten him. “Nothing else?”

Jack felt his heart stop thumping and was suddenly calmer.

“Nothing at all. Tell me, what kind of parents named Kreeper give their daughter a name like Virginia?”

She scratched her chin and looked away.

“Virginia Kreeper is a plant, isn’t it?”

“Possibly. But this interview isn’t about me, Inspector.”

“You’re wrong. It’s about us, And since you have to stand in judgment of me, I think I’m entitled to know just what sort of a person I’m dealing with and where you fit into the grand scheme of things. A tall, thin, beaky appearance with colored-frame spectacles. Pointlessly aggressive, doubtlessly single and seemingly without a clue as to the proper procedure for a psychiatric evaluation. From where I’m sitting, you look like a poorly realized stereotype, a one-dimensional character without backstory or future—and a name to match your bearing and position within the bigger picture.”

It was Kreeper’s turn to be flustered. She ran a hand through her lank hair, trembled for a moment and then said, “I… I… don’t know what you mean, I’m sure. A stereotype? Bigger picture? What are you suggesting?”

“Let’s put it this way,” said Jack, suddenly feeling a lot more self-assured. “You and I have perhaps more in common than you think. And you sitting behind that desk questioning my motivations smacks of the very worst kind of hypocrisy. Essentially, you’re nothing but a vehicle for a series of bad psychiatric jokes and a plot device to stop me from getting to the truth. A threshold guardian, whose only purpose in existence is for me to circumvent—which I’m doing right now, if you haven’t noticed.”

Kreeper stared back at him, trying to adopt a bemused air of condescension to disguise her sudden nervousness.

“A one-dimensional threshold guardian? No, no, you’re quite wrong. Look, here!” She opened her purse and passed him a picture of a teenager in pigtails and wearing glasses. “It’s my niece,” she explained. “I take her out on her birthday to all kinds of places. Last year we went to the Natural History Museum. So you see I’m not poorly realized at all—I’m flesh and blood and fully in command of my own destiny—and having a recollectable past proves I’m not one-dimensional.”

She glared at him hotly, but Jack had enough experience of PDRs and incidental characters to know one when he saw one.

“What’s her name?”

“Her… name?”

“Yes. Your niece has a name, I take it?”

Kreeper blinked at him, and tears started to well up in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said at last, breaking out in a series of sobs. “I just… don’t…know!”

Jack felt sorry for her. It can’t be easy to have your entire life summed up in a few perfunctory descriptive terms, the sole meaning of your existence just a few lines in the incalculable vastness of fiction. Still, this was his career in the balance. If he didn’t deal with her, the Jack Spratt series was likely to stop abruptly at the second volume. No third book and definitely no boxed set.

“The only question we have here,” said Jack without emotion,

“is this: ‘Am I sane enough to be back on active duty?’ Do we understand each other?”

But Kreeper was in no state to say or do anything. Her shoulders heaved with silent sobs, and tears rolled down her cheeks. She buried her face in her notes and mumbled, “Why?… Why?… Why? Oh, the echoing void, the meaninglessness of it all!”

Jack looked at his watch. This was becoming tiresome, and he had a journalist to find.

“Her name’s Penny,” he said in a quiet voice, “Penny Moffat. She’s your brother Dave’s second daughter. They have another daughter called Anne, who’s at Warwick. You and Dave were brought up in Hampshire, and once, when you were six and he was eight, you fell off your bike and cut your chin. That’s how you got that scar.”

Kreeper stopped sobbing and looked up. “Penny?” she said, picking up the photograph of her niece, then gently touching the small raised scar that had suddenly appeared on her chin.

“Yes. Your brother’s wife is called Felicity, and… she’s the best friend you have.”

Kreeper’s eyes filled with tears again, but this time they were tears of joy. “She is, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Last year you all went to Cádiz on holiday. It was hot.”

“Very hot,” agreed Kreeper. “I got sunburned and had to spend the third day indoors.” She smiled to herself, then at him.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So… when do you put me back on the active list?”

She dabbed her eyes with Jack’s handkerchief and took a deep breath. “If it was in my power, I’d do it here and now, Jack.”

He raised an eyebrow. “But…?”

“But the whole self-repairing car issue is a continuing subplot and completely out of my hands. The best I can do is ask you for some sort of proof the car is doing what you say it is.”

“I give you my word, Kreeper.”

She looked around and lowered her voice. “Jack, you and I both know there are bigger forces at play here. If I don’t have proof about your car, I can’t give you a clean bill of health. You know how it works. Besides, cars don’t repair themselves.”

“This one does. I bought it with a guarantee from this guy named Dorian Gray over at Charvil. Ever heard of him?”

“No.”

Jack stared at her for a moment. She was right—this was the best she could do. He snapped his fingers as an idea came to him.

“Come with me.”

A few minutes later, they found themselves back in the underground garage, facing the shiny new Allegro Equipe. He showed her the oil painting of the busted-up Allegro, but she wasn’t impressed.

“So?” she said, hands on hips.

“I’ll break something on it, and you can see for yourself how it mends itself. Then you’ll understand and I’m sane, right?”

“No. I’d be as mad as you—which is the same thing, relatively speaking.”

Jack took the wheel brace from the trunk and with a single swipe took off the side mirror and put a dent in the door. The mirror fell to the ground with a tinkling of broken glass.

“Watch carefully,” he said. “The last time it happened, the whole car repaired itself from a total wreck in under a minute, so a side mirror should be a snap. Any moment now. Pretty soon. A few seconds.”

Kreeper folded her arms.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be watching it,” mused Jack after they had stared at it for more than a minute without the car’s giving even the slightest sign of repairing itself.

“Listen, I’ve been very patient over this—”

“Just turn around, Kreeper. We have to not be watching. That’s when it works.”

Jack turned around, and Virginia reluctantly joined him.

“I’m very busy,” said Kreeper, glancing at her watch, “and if you want, we can talk about this tomorrow.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Jack. “Just give it a moment.”

They waited a minute and turned around. The mirror was still broken, the dent still showing clean and crisp in the door. Jack rubbed his head. This wasn’t going so well.

“Listen,” said Virginia, resting a friendly hand on his shoulder, “being swallowed by a wolf has probably stressed you out more than you think. You work in an area of policing that requires giant leaps of imaginative comprehension, and perhaps… well, perhaps you’ve been at it too long.”

Jack sighed. “Then I’m not back on the active list?”

“No. Concede that this whole car-mending-itself nonsense was some sort of bizarre fiction-induced delusion, and I’ll suggest you return to work after a three-month rest.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“I’ll recommend retirement on grounds of mental ill-health, and they’ll put you in front of a board of medics—and they’ll be a whole lot less understanding than me. It’s a good deal, Jack—in effect a paid holiday.”

She was right. It was a good deal. But he hadn’t been seeing things.

“It happened, Kreeper.”

She sighed and stared at him. “I’ll leave you to think about it for a few days. My report doesn’t have to be with Briggs until Monday next. If you change your mind,” she announced with the closest thing she had to a kindly smile, “you know where to find me.”

And she walked off, leaving Jack staring stupidly at the door mirror he had just broken off. Perhaps Kreeper was partly right. Perhaps he had been overdoing it recently. But it didn’t matter. He’d get Dorian Gray to explain the nature of his “special” guarantee and be back on the active list. He was just annoyed that his reality had been questioned twice in twenty-four hours, when no one had even suggested he was anything but genuine flesh-and-blood for over a decade. He turned and headed back toward the NCD offices, deep in thought.

“How did you get along with Virginia Kreeper?” asked Mary a few minutes later.

“Like two peas in a pod,” replied Jack sullenly, sitting down heavily on his chair, unable to shift thoughts of clean platters, beanstalks and Madeleine from his head.

“So she’s going to give you a clean bill of health?”

“Not exactly. I’ve got to visit Dorian Gray again. Did you speak to the officer investigating Stanley Cripps’s death?”

“Yes,” she replied, “I told him about Goldilocks and the ‘It’s full of holes’ message, and he was very interested. Goldilocks hadn’t come forward after the blast, and he would be wanting to speak to her once we find her.”

“It won’t be the first time a reporter has committed the sin of omission,” mused Jack, dialing Dorian’s number only to receive the “disconnected” tone.

“I’ve found several links between these explosions,” said Ashley, waving the folder.

“You have?” said Jack excitedly. “What are they?”

“They all happened to humans—except the one in the Nullarbor Plain, which happened to sand.”

“Inspired. Anything else?”

“They all occurred on the planet Earth, the addresses all had an A in them, they all happened during the day except Obscurity, none of them occurred in Antarctica, each was within a thousand miles of human habitation, all of them—”

“Any useful links? Like something Katzenberg, Prong and Cripps had in common.”

“Aside from them all being killed in unexplained explosions?”

“Yes.”

Ashley consulted his list for a moment. “No. Not a single one. By the way,” he continued, “I’m still waiting for Bart-Mart to get back to me, and Goldy’s car hasn’t been reported abandoned or anything.”

“Thanks.”

“And Agatha Diesel dropped in to say hello while you were both out.”

“Did she?” said Jack, making a face. “What did she want?”

“It was most odd,” said Ashley thoughtfully. “She said she wanted to talk to you about a charity benefit in aid of distressed gentlefolk she was planning, but I think she just wants you to put your—” He stopped, looked at Mary, gave a shrug and then placed a single sucker digit on Jack’s forehead.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” agreed Jack after a moment, “and most graphically realized, too.” He pushed away Ashley’s digit, which detached with a faint pop. “And please, don’t do that mind-merging stuff on me, okay?”

“Sorry. Do you find it intrusive?”

“Not at all—it’s just that I can see what you’re thinking in the background.”

“Oops,” gulped Ashley, flicking a look toward Mary, who thankfully wasn’t paying much attention. “Right you are, then.”

The phone rang.

“Spratt, NCD…”

It was Briggs, so Jack just carried on talking.

“…isn’t in right now, but if you’d like to leave a message when you hear the tone, please do so…. Beeeeep.”

“That old pretending-to-be-an-answering-machine stuff doesn’t fool me, Spratt,” said Briggs angrily.

“Sorry, sir.”

“What are you doing in the office?”

“I was with the quack for my psychiatric evaluation, sir. I just popped in to brief Mary about the Rumpelstiltskin parole hearing.”

“Hmm. Well, put her on.”

He handed the phone to Mary, who listened for a moment and then said, “Yes, sir, I was very impressed you didn’t fall for the answering-machine gag.”

She looked up at Jack, who made a sign for her to call him and then crept out the door. Briggs had been known to walk around the building on a cell phone pretending he was in his office, and Jack had just about had his fill of threshold guardians for the day.

Jack walked down to his car and noticed that the door mirror had mended itself in his absence. He drove out of the garage, meaning to visit Dorian Gray and have a word with him in person. He’d called him several times, but had continued to get the “number disconnected” tone.

A few miles down the road, and after the brief annoyance of a military checkpoint looking for the Gingerbreadman, Jack’s cell phone rang.

“I’m going home to watch Columbo, sir,” he said without waiting to hear who it was. “Oh, sorry, Mary—what’s up?”

He slowed the car as he listened, then pulled into a lay-by.

“Excellent,” he said at last. “I’ll meet you at the northern entrance in twenty minutes.”

He tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, signaled and pulled out into the afternoon traffic, heading rapidly off in the direction of Andersen’s Wood. As he did so, he noticed for the first time that the odometer on the Allegro was going backward—and the fuel gauge was still on the three-quarters mark. He shrugged. Clearly a glitch of some sort.