The Fourth Bear

25. Back to the Forest

Within minutes the silver Allegro was bowling down the road, heading for Andersen’s Wood as quickly as Mary could drive. Jack was worried. Ed had sounded scared, and when a five-hundred-fifty-pound male bear with nothing above it in the food chain is frightened, then you are sure to take notice. The sun went behind a cloud as they entered the forest, and the whole world seemed to darken. Mary slowed down instinctively but hit a speed bump anyway. Everything loose in the car was tossed in the air as they landed.

“Er, right here isn’t it?” said Mary as they counted the turnings off the tarmac road.

“Next one, I thought.”

“Are you sure? I recognize that broken branch.”

“Did you? What about the fertilizer bag?”

“Probably blew away.”

Mary stopped and backed up, ignored Jack’s advice and bumped down a forestry track. They found the three bears’ turning after about half a mile and drove up the grassy track. The cottage was exactly as they had last seen it, except for the absence of any smoke from the chimney. They stopped the car and got out.

“Wait!” said Jack in a soft voice.

Mary paused. “What?”

“Hear that?”

Mary strained, but no sound could be heard.

“No.”

“Exactly,” murmured Jack, and moved on. The forest was deathly quiet. Mr. Bruin had told Jack that the forest could speak, and Jack realized now what he meant. A drum beating is ominous, but ominous changes to threatening when it stops. A sense of foreboding closed over both of them, a feeling of danger that seemed to roll in from the forest like a wave.

“Shall I call for backup?” whispered Mary.

“Not yet. They might just be out.”

Jack knocked at the front door as Mary went around the back. There was no answer, so he lifted the wrought-iron latch and pushed on the door. The sun came out as the door swung open, and a shaft of light illuminated the large room through the front windows. Amid the mess of what looked like a flagrant act of vandalism—smashed chairs and emptied drawers—Ed was lying in a heap beside the fireplace, a mountain of brown fur. A lake of dark blood had formed next to him and was still moving slowly outward. By the piano was another mound of fur, this one dressed in a pretty floral dress. It was Ursula. Jack quickly unlocked the back door and let Mary in.

“Oh, my God!” she murmured. Jack ran back to Ed’s bulk and pressed his hand into the thick fur at his neck. He’d never felt a bear’s fur before; it would have been unthinkably rude to do so uninvited. It felt warm, but coarser than he had imagined.

“I can feel a faint pulse. Call the Bob Southey Medical Center and get a trauma team out here immediately.”

Mary flipped open her cell phone and dialed a number as Jack looked at Ursula. Her eyes were open, and she was breathing in short gasps. He patted her paw and told her it would be okay, but she made no sign that she’d heard.

“Who’d want to kill the Bruins?” asked Mary, waiting for the phone to connect.

“Look over there,” said Jack grimly.

He pointed to the wall above the fireplace. In red aerosol someone had written:

“Ursists!” said Mary angrily.

“Get onto control and have roadblocks set up on all roads leading out of the forest. We didn’t pass a car on the way in, and this crime is less than ten minutes old.”

Jack found the entrance wound on Ed’s lower back. It was large-caliber—a hunting rifle. He was still alive, but Jack didn’t rate his chances. Illegal hunters and bile tappers: the scum of the earth.

“This is DS Mary of the NCD,” said Mary into the phone.

“We’ve got two bears shot and wounded in Andersen’s Wood….”

Jack was about to feel for Ed’s pulse again when he noticed something. Ed hadn’t lost consciousness immediately, and Jack peered closer. Next to his right claw were some letters traced with his own blood on the scrubbed flagstone floor. It didn’t read very well, but the meaning was clear:

“Backup will be here in twenty, always supposing they can find the place,” said Mary as she flipped her phone shut, “and the Bob Southey is dispatching a trauma team. What have you found?”

Jack pointed.

“‘SOB don’t trust’?” Who’s SOB?”

“‘Son of a bitch’ to our friends across the Atlantic. Ed’s a grizzly. They’re North American, aren’t they?”

“I’m not really an expert on—” Mary stopped midspeech as Jack raised a finger to his lips.

She mouthed What? to him, and he pointed at the ceiling. A thin trail of dust was falling from between the floorboards of the room upstairs. The wood creaked as something upstairs shifted its weight.

“Baby bear?” whispered Mary.

It seemed likely, and Jack was about to call out to him when there was the delicate metallic ring of a spent cartridge falling on the floor upstairs. If it was the baby bear, he was armed—and dangerous.

“What weren’t you an expert on?” asked Jack, trying to pretend all was normal but still staring at the ceiling.

“Bears,” she replied, pointing at the door to the upstairs.

“Who do you think did this?”

“I don’t know,” returned Jack as he moved across to the sturdy wooden door, which he discovered, to his relief, could be secured by a peg.

“We had better leave the crime scene,” said Mary as she noticed that the thin trail of dust was now falling from an area closer to the door. There was also the sound of a footfall and the unmistakable clack of a breech being surreptitiously locked. They couldn’t do any more for the bears, so a retreat to safety seemed the best and only course of action. Jack ran the last two strides to the door, slammed it shut and dropped the peg into the hasp. There was an enraged cry from upstairs, and they both headed for the car—and escape. They heard two muffled gunshots in quick succession as the door exploded into splinters. They reached the car, threw themselves in and started it up. There wasn’t time to turn around, so Jack slammed the Allegro into reverse and backed down the lane as fast he could.

A tall, mahogany-toned figure stepped nonchalantly from the door of the cottage, then jumped from the veranda to the cabbage patch with a single leap. He watched as they backed hurriedly out of the clearing, and Mary shuddered. He looked dangerous enough on his own, with the cruel licorice mouth and his piercing cherry eyes, but what made him look even more dangerous was the massive Holland & Holland heavy-game sporting rifle he was cradling in his arms. He had sawn the barrels short and wielded it as though it were a handgun. Mary knew from experience that it weighed at least thirty pounds, could stop a rhinoceros and had a kick like a cart horse.

The Gingerbreadman, laconic as usual, was in no hurry. He eyed the car reversing down the grassy track away from him, smiled to himself and broke the gun, which ejected two steaming brass cartridges that landed in the asparagus bed behind him. With slow deliberation he withdrew two more shiny rounds from a belt slung over his shoulder and closed the gun with a deft flick of his wrist. He raised the weapon as though it weighed almost nothing, then aimed and fired in one smooth movement. The Allegro swerved as it hit a dip in the road, and the shot went wide, shattering the trunk of a silver birch next to them as they sped past, the felled tree dropping into the road behind the rapidly receding car.

“Blast!” said the Gingerbreadman. Surprised by his own poor marksmanship, he took aim again.

“What was that?” asked Jack above the scream of the engine, the tachometer needle edging into the red but the car not wanting to go much faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. He hadn’t seen the figure; his attention was dominated by keeping the car on a straight course down the track.

“Gingerbreadman!” shouted Mary. “Keep going!”

The Gingerbreadman decided that they were too far away and started to run toward them in long, measured strides. He held the Holland & Holland with one hand as he strode after them, the Allegro bouncing in and out of the bumpy track as Jack floored the accelerator.

“Faster!” cried Mary as the Gingerbreadman started to gain, his long strides swiftly eating up the distance between them. He fired at them as he ran, a slug the size of a king-size marble passing through the windshield between them and vanishing through the rear seats with a scattering of velour and kapok stuffing.

The Gingerbreadman cursed again and reloaded as he ran, the Allegro’s overrevving engine howling in protest. As he took aim for the third time, they hit the logging track, and before Jack could even think about braking, they had crossed the road and slammed straight into a large beech tree, the sudden stop knocking the wind out of them both and entirely demolishing the rear of the car. The trunk was pushed into the area where the rear seats had been, and the two swing axles were twisted outward, causing the two rear wheels to bend to an impossible angle. The rear window burst, and a steel ripple rode through the roof, ultimately relieving the stress by popping out the front windshield and deforming the two front fenders. But both the seats held in the reverse impact, and neither of them was hurt.

Jack and Mary were not the only ones to be caught unawares. The Gingerbreadman, unused to running fast during his twenty-year incarceration, had forgotten the rules governing the inertia of moving bodies. He attempted to stop but skittered on the gravel track and ran straight into the car, tripped on the front bumper, bounced off the roof and hit the tree with sufficient impact to knock the heavy game rifle out of his hand and send it tumbling end over end into the undergrowth.

The Gingerbreadman was only slightly stunned. He sat up on the forest floor and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Wow!” he murmured to himself, then chuckled, shook his head and looked around to see what had become of the sporting rifle. At the same time, not more than ten feet away on the other side of the tree, Jack and Mary cautiously pushed open the twisted doors of the Allegro and looked around warily to see what had become of the Gingerbreadman. They all quickly noticed one another.

“Inspector Spratt!” said the Gingerbreadman cordially. “We meet again! And you still not even attached to this inquiry. Briggs and Copperfield will have something to say!”

He got to his feet and started to look around for the Holland & Holland more seriously, talking as he did so. “I do so wish you were on the hunt for me,” he said with a grin. “I really don’t think that Copperfield chap is up to it.”

Jack rolled out of the car and grabbed a stout branch, swung it above his head and swiped the Gingerbreadman on the back of the head. The blow bounced off his cakey body without effect. The Gingerbreadman turned to him, oblivious to the impact.

“If he thinks a massive display of firepower will bring me down, he’s badly mistaken. This is the second time you’ve found me, Jack. People will think you have a hidden agenda.”

“Why shoot the Bruins?” demanded Jack, giving up on the branch and joining in the hunt for the Holland & Holland. Mary was putting out a call to the station to upgrade her backup to armed backup.

“I needed a place to hole up, Jack,” replied the Gingerbreadman in a deep, doughlike voice, his cherry eyes flicking this way and that as he searched the undergrowth for the gun. “You may not have noticed, but I’m public enemy number one at the moment.”

“It hadn’t escaped my attention,” replied Jack, “but why here and now? And blaming the attack on hunters. Since when were you ever ashamed of taking the credit for some utterly mindless display of violence?”

“You ask a lot of questions for a very puny and insignificant human, don’t you?” said the Gingerbreadman as he stopped the search for the gun and stared at Jack with just the kind of look you wouldn’t want from a psychopath.

“It’s my job,” replied Jack, sensing that if he didn’t find the gun and gain the high ground, he might be pushing up daisies quite soon.

“Who needs a gun anyway?” asked the Gingerbreadman, catching Jack by the wrist. He tried to pull away but was held fast in the big cookie’s iron grip. The Gingerbreadman smiled cruelly as he placed his other hand on Jack’s body, meaning to pull his arm off, just as you might twist the leg off a roast chicken on the dinner table.

“I like this bit,” he announced, his cherry eyes flashing cruelly. His grip tightened around Jack’s wrist, and he started to pull. He smiled. He was having fun. Jack’s face contorted with the pain, and he gave a cry of agony as he felt the tendons stretch tight in his arm.

But the Gingerbreadman didn’t pull his arm off. Abruptly, he relaxed his hold. Jack looked up at him, but the Gingerbreadman was looking past Jack, his licorice eyebrows raised in exclamation.

“Careful,” he said to Mary, who had found the Holland & Holland and was now pointing it at him. “You might hurt someone.”

Mary slid off the safety with a loud click. “That’s the idea.”

The Gingerbreadman’s licorice mouth drooped at the corners. “Be careful, miss,” he repeated as he let Jack fall into a heap at his feet. “That’s a.600-caliber elephant gun loaded with Nitro Express cartridges. It has a muzzle energy of over eight thousand foot-pounds—the recoil can dislocate a shoulder!”

“I’ll be careful,” replied Mary evenly. “Just step away from Jack and lie facedown on the ground with your arms outstretched.”

They were less than ten feet apart, and Mary couldn’t have missed. The Gingerbreadman took a step back but didn’t lie facedown. He stared at Mary and narrowed his eyes, wondering what course of action to take.

“Have you ever killed anyone, miss?”

“JUST LIE FACEDOWN ON THE GROUND!”

“No,” said the Gingerbreadman simply. “I’ve been locked in St. Cerebellum’s for twenty years, and I’m not going back. If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to fire.”

Mary’s finger tightened on the trigger. She was in no doubt that the Gingerbreadman would have killed her after he had dealt with Jack and would kill again, given the chance. There was no decision to make. She would shoot him. In the back, if necessary—and to hell with procedure.

The Gingerbreadman, despite his resigned attitude, was not out of tricks. He turned and jumped to one side, leaped back again and then ran away, zigzagging crazily. He knew, as Mary soon found out, that a heavy elephant gun wasn’t designed to follow a fast-moving object, and by the time Mary had him in her sights, he jinked out again. Mary gave up following him and held the gun still, waited for him to leap back into her sights, and then she squeezed on the trigger.

There was a concussion like a thunderclap, and for a moment Mary thought the gun had exploded. She was pushed violently backward, caught her foot on a tree root and fell over in an untidy pile. When the smoke had cleared, the forest was empty. She had missed; the Gingerbreadman had escaped.

“You all right, sir?”

“Fine,” said Jack, rubbing his shoulder and standing up as the distant wail of sirens brought the outside world once more into the forest. “What about you?”

“Pissed off I didn’t kill him, sir.”

“I can understand that.”

Mary reloaded the rifle from the cartridge belt the Gingerbreadman had discarded and walked slowly up the road to make sure that he wasn’t wounded and lying out of sight. She looked around carefully, satisfied herself that he was long gone and then picked something up from the ground before she returned to Jack.

“I didn’t miss after all,” she announced, showing Jack what she’d found. In her hand was a single gingerbread thumb.