THE BIG OVER EASY

Jasper Fforde

An investigation with the

Nursery Crime Division

HODDER & STOUGHTON

Copyright ©2005 by Jasper Fforde

The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A Hodder and Stoughton Book

1

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 923 6
Book ISBN 0 340 835672

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For my brother Mathew,

whose love of the absurd

– and the profound –

enlightened my childhood.

Also by Jasper Fforde

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men,

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

– Traditional

Author’s Notes

The Nursery Crime Division, the Reading Police Department and the Oxford & Berkshire Constabulary in this book are entirely fictitious, and any similarity to authentic police procedures, protocol or forensic techniques is entirely coincidental.

All the Jack Spratt books have been designated as Character Exchange Programme Safe Havens and all characters are protected by the Council of Genres Directive GBSD/211950.

The Big Over Easy has been bundled with Special Features

including:

‘The Making of’ documentary, deleted scenes from all five

books, out-takes and much more. To access all these free bonus

features, log on to: www.nurserycrime.co.uk/special/js1.html

and enter the code word as directed.

Contents

1. Mary Mary

2. Jack Spratt

3. The Fall Guy

4. Mrs Hubbard, dogs & bones

5. Prometheus

6. Mrs Laura Dumpty

7. The Nursery Crime Division

8. The armoury

9. Back at the office

10. Charles Pewter

11. The Sacred Gonga

12. St Cerebellum’s

13. First on the right

14. Meeting the detective

15. Granny Spratt’s displeasure

16. Mrs Singh turns the story

17. The enquiry begins

18. Lord Randolph Spongg IV

19. Solomon Grundy

20. Press conference

21. RIP Mrs Dumpty and ‘the case . . .is closed!’

22. Titans and beanstalks

23. Mary’s doubts

24. Briggs v. Spratt

25. Goodnight, Wee Willie Winkie

26. Meet the Grundys

27. Perplexity, complexity

28. Castle Spongg

29. Lola Vavoom

30. Another press conference

31. Home sweet home

32. Giorgio Porgia

33. What Bessie Brooks had to say for herself

34. Investigated

35. Summing up

36. Refilling the jar

37. The man from the Guild

38. Lola Vavoom returns

39. The red Ford Zephyr

40. The Goring Foot Museum

41. Dr Horatio Carbuncle

42. Return to Castle Spongg

43. Loose ends

44. The end of the story

1

Mary Mary

If Queen Anne hadn’t suffered so badly from Gout and Dropsy, Reading might never have developed at all. In 1702 the unhealthy Queen Anne, looking for a place to ease her Royal infirmities, chanced upon Bath; and where Royalty goes, so too does society. In consequence, Reading, up until that time a small town on a smaller tributary of the Thames, became a busy staging post on the Bath road, later to become the A4, and ultimately the M4. The town was enriched by the wool trade and later played host to several large firms that were to become household names. By the time Huntley & Palmers biscuits began here in 1822, Simonds brewery was already well established; and when Suttons Seeds began in 1835 and Spongg’s footcare in 1853, the town’s prosperity was assured.

– excerpt from A History of Reading

It was the week following Easter in Reading and no one could remember the last sunny day. Grey clouds swept across the sky borne on a chill wind that cut like a knife. It seemed that spring had forsaken the town. The drab winter weather had clung on like a heavy smog, refusing to relinquish its grip. Even the early bloomers were in denial. Only the bravest crocuses had graced the municipal park and the daffodils, usually a welcome splash of colour after a winter of greyness, had taken one sniff at the cold damp air and postponed blooming for another year.

A police officer was gazing with mixed emotions at the dreary cityscape from the seventh floor of Reading Central Police Station. She was thirty and attractive, dressed up and dated down, worked hard and felt awkward near anyone she didn’t know. Her name was Mary. Mary Mary. And she was from Basingstoke, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

‘Mary?’ said an officer who was carrying a large potted plant in the manner of someone who thinks it is well outside their job description. ‘Superintendent Briggs will see you now. How often do you water these things?’

‘That one?’ replied Mary without emotion. ‘Never. It’s plastic.’

‘I’m a policeman,’ he said unhappily, ‘not a sodding gardener.’

And he walked off, mumbling darkly to himself.

She turned from the window, approached Briggs’s closed door and paused. She gathered her thoughts, took a deep breath and stood up straight. Reading wouldn’t have been everyone’s choice for a transfer but for Mary Reading had one thing that no other city possessed: DCI Friedland Chymes, a veritable powerhouse of a sleuth whose career was a catalogue of inspired police work – his unparalleled detection skills had filled the newspaper columns for over two decades. Chymes was the reason Mary had joined the police force in the first place. Ever since her father had bought her a subscription to Amazing Crime Stories when she was nine, she’d been hooked. She had thrilled at ‘The Mystery of the Wrong Nose’, been galvanised by ‘The Poisoned Shoe’ and inspired by ‘The Sign of Three-and-a-half’. Twenty-one years farther on Friedland was still a serious international player in the world of competitive detecting, and Mary had never missed an issue. Chymes was currently ranked by Amazing Crime second in their annual league rating, just behind Oxford’s ever popular Inspector Moose.

‘Hmm,’ murmured Superintendent Briggs, eyeing Mary’s job application carefully as she sat uncomfortably on a plastic chair in an office that was empty apart from a desk, two chairs, them – and a trombone lying on a tattered chaise longue.

‘Your application is mostly very good, Mary,’ he said approvingly. ‘I see you were with Detective Inspector Hebden Flowwe. How did that go?’

It hadn’t gone very well at all, but she didn’t think she’d say so.

‘We had a fairly good clear-up rate, sir.’

‘I’ve no doubt you did. But more importantly, anything published?’

It was a question that was asked more and more in promotion boards and transfer interviews, as well as being listed in performance reports. It wasn’t enough to be a conscientious and invaluable assistant to one’s allotted inspector – you had to be able to write up a readable account for the magazines that the public loved to read. Preferably Amazing Crime Stories but, failing that, Sleuth Illustrated.

‘Only one story in print, sir. But I was the youngest officer at Basingstoke to make detective sergeant and have two commendations for brav—’

‘The thing is,’ interrupted Briggs, ‘that the Oxford & Berkshire Constabulary prides itself on producing some of the most readable detectives in the country.’ He walked over to the window and looked out at the rain striking the glass. ‘Modern policing isn’t just about catching criminals, Mary. It’s about good copy and ensuring that cases can be made into top-notch documentaries on the telly. Public approval is the all-important currency these days, and police budgets ebb and flow on the back of circulation and viewing figures.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘DS Flotsam’s work penning Friedland Chymes’s adventures is the benchmark to which you should aspire, Mary. Selling the movie rights to Friedland Chymes – the Smell of Fear was a glory moment for everyone at Reading Central, and rightly so. Just one published work, you say? With Flowwe?’

‘Yes, sir. A two-parter in Amazing Crime. Jan–Feb 1999 and adapted for TV.’

He nodded his approval.

‘Well, that’s impressive. Prime-time dramatisation?’

‘No, sir. Documentary on MoleCable-62.’

His face fell. Clearly, at Reading they expected better things. Briggs sat down and looked at her record again.

‘Now, it says here one reprimand: you struck Detective Inspector Flowwe with an onyx ashtray. Why was that?’

‘The table lamp was too heavy,’ she replied, truthfully enough, ‘and if I’d used a chair it might have killed him.’

‘Which is illegal, of course,’ added Briggs, glad for an opportunity to show off his legal knowledge. ‘What happened? Personal entanglements?’

‘Equal blame on both sides, sir,’ she replied, thinking it would be better to be impartial over the whole affair. ‘I was foolish. He was emotionally . . . dishonest.’

Briggs closed the file.

‘Well, I don’t blame you. Hebden was always a bit of a bounder. He pinged my partner’s bra strap at an office party once, you know. She wasn’t wearing it at the time,’ he added after a moment’s reflection, ‘but the intention was clear.’

‘That sounds like DI Flowwe,’ replied Mary.

Briggs drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment.

‘Do you want to hear me play the trombone?’

‘Might it be prejudicial to my career if I were to refuse?’

‘It’s a distinct possibility.’

‘Then I’d be delighted.’

So Briggs walked over to the chaise longue, picked up the trombone, worked the slide a couple of times and blew a few notes, much to the annoyance of whoever had the office next door, who started to thump angrily on the wall.

‘Drug squad,’ explained Briggs unhappily, putting the instrument down. ‘Complete heathens. Never appreciate a good tune.’

‘I was wondering,’ said Mary before he had a chance to start playing again, ‘this detective sergeant’s job I’m applying for. Who is it with?’

Briggs looked at his watch.

‘An excellent question. In ten minutes we’re holding a press conference. I’ve a detective in urgent need of a new sergeant and I think you’ll fit the bill perfectly. Shall we?’

The press room was five floors below and an expectant journalistic hubbub greeted their ears while they were still walking down the corridor. They stepped inside and stood as unobtrusively as possible at the back of the large and airy room. Mary could see from the ‘Oxford & Berkshire Constabulary’-bedecked podium and high turnout that press conferences here were taken with a great deal more seriousness than she had known hitherto, which probably reflected this city’s pre-eminence over Basingstoke when it came to serious crime. It wasn’t that Reading had any more murders than Basingstoke – it just had better ones. Reading and the Thames Valley area were more of a ‘fairy cakes laced with strychnine’ or ‘strangulation with a silk handkerchief’ sort of place where there were always bags of interesting suspects, convoluted motives and seemingly insignificant clues hidden in an enquiry of incalculable complexity which was nevertheless solved within a week or two. By contrast, murders in Basingstoke were strictly blunt instruments, drunkenly wielded, solved within the hour – or not at all. Mary had worked on six murder investigations and to her great disappointment hadn’t once discovered one of those wonderful clues that seem to have little significance but later, in an epiphanic moment, turn the case on its head and throw the guilty light on someone previously eliminated from enquiries.

She didn’t have time to muse upon the imaginative shortcomings of Basingstoke’s criminal fraternity any longer as there was a sudden hushing of the pressmen, a burst of spontaneous applause and a handsome man in his mid-fifties strode dramatically from a side door.

‘Goodness!’ said Mary. ‘That’s—’

‘Yup,’ said Briggs, with the pride of a father who has just seen his son win everything at sports day. ‘Detective Inspector Friedland Chymes.’

Friedland Chymes! In person. There was a hush as the famous detective stepped up to the podium. The assembled two dozen newspapermen readied themselves, pens poised, for his statement.

‘Thank you for attending,’ he began, sweeping back his blond hair and gazing around the room with his lively blue eyes, causing flutters when they lingered ever so slightly on the women present in the room, Mary included. She found herself almost automatically attracted to him. He was strong, handsome, intelligent, fearless – the most alpha of alpha males. Working with him would be an honour.

‘It was the small traces of pastry around the gunshot wound on Colonel Peabody’s corpse that turned the case for me,’ began the great detective, his sonorous tones filling the air like music, ‘minute quantities of shortcrust whose butter/flour ratio I found to be identical to a medium-sized Bowyer’s pork pie. The assailant had fired his weapon through the tasty snack to muffle the sound of the shot. The report heard later was a firecracker set off by a time fuse, thus giving an alibi to the assailant, whom I can reveal to you now was . . .’

The whole room leaned forward in expectation. Chymes, his only apparent vanity a certain showmanship, paused for dramatic effect before announcing the killer.

‘. . . Miss Celia Mangersen, the victim’s niece and, unbeknown to us all, the sole beneficiary of the missing will, which I found hidden – as expected – within a hollowed-out statuette of Sir Walter Scott. Yes, Mr Hatchett, you have a question?’

Josh Hatchett of The Toad newspaper had raised his hand in the front row.

‘What was the significance of the traces of custard found on the colonel’s sock suspender?’

Friedland raised a finger in the air.

‘An excellent question, Mr Hatchett, and one which pushed my powers of deduction to the limit. Bear with me if you will while we go through the final moments of Colonel Peabody’s life. Mortally wounded and with only seconds to live, he had somehow to leave a clue to his assailant’s identity. A note? Of course not – the killer would find and destroy it. Guessing correctly that a murder of this magnitude would be placed in my hands, he decided to leave behind a clue that only I could solve. Knowing the colonel’s penchant for anagrams, it was but a swift move to deduce his reasoning. The sock suspender was made in France. “Custard” in French is “crème anglaise” – and an anagram of this is “Celia Mangerse—”, which not only correctly identified the killer, but also told me the colonel died before he was able to finish the anagram.’

There was more applause and he quietened everyone down before continuing.

‘But since anagram-related clues are now inadmissible as evidence, we sent the pork pie off for DNA analysis and managed to pinpoint the pie shop where it was purchased. Guessing that Miss Mangersen might have an affinity for the pies, we staked out the shop in question, and yesterday evening Miss Mangersen was taken into custody whereupon she confessed to me in a tearful scene that served as a dramatic closure to the case. My loyal and annoyingly chirpy cockney assistant and biographer DS Flotsam will, of course, be writing a full report for Amazing Crime Stories in due course, after the formality of a trial. Ladies and gentlemen: the case . . . is closed!’

The assembled journalists rose as one and burst into spontaneous applause. Chymes dismissed the adulation with a modest wave of the hand and excused himself, muttering something about needing to open a hospital for orphaned sick children.

‘He’s amazing!’ breathed Mary, somehow convincing herself – as had all the other women present – that Chymes had winked at her across the crowded room.

‘I agree,’ replied Briggs, standing aside as the newsmen filed out, eager to get the stories into the late editions. ‘Don’t you love that “the case is closed!” stuff ? I wish I had a catchphrase. He’s an asset not only to us here at Reading but also to the nation – there aren’t many countries that haven’t requested his thoughts on some intractable and ludicrously complex enquiry.’

‘He’s remarkable,’ agreed Mary.

‘Indeed,’ went on Briggs, seemingly swept up in a paroxysm of hagiographic hero-worship. ‘He’s also a hilarious raconteur, has a golf handicap of two, was twice world aerobatic champion and plays the clarinet as well as Artie Shaw. Speaks eight languages, too, and is often consulted by the Jellyman himself on important matters of state.’

‘I’m going to enjoy working with him, I can see,’ replied Mary happily. ‘When do I start?’

‘Chymes?’ echoed Briggs with a faint yet unmistakably patronising laugh. ‘Goodness gracious, no! You’re not working with Chymes!’

‘Who, then?’ asked Mary, attempting to hide her disappointment, and failing.

‘Him.’

Mary followed Briggs’s outstretched finger to an untidy figure who had taken his turn at the podium. He was in his mid-forties, had greying hair and one eye marginally higher than the other, giving him the lopsided look of someone deep in thought. If he was deep in thought, considered Mary, it was clearly something more important than his personal appearance. His suit could have done with a good pressing, his hair needed to be any way but the way he had it. He might have shaved a little less hurriedly, and made more of an attempt to exude some – any – confidence. He fumbled with his papers as he stared resignedly after the rapidly vanishing press corps.

‘I see,’ said Mary, a great deal more coldly than she had intended, ‘and who’s he?’

Briggs patted her arm in a fatherly manner. He could sense her disappointment but it wasn’t up to him. Chymes picked his own people.

‘That’s DI Jack Spratt, of the Nursery Crime Division. The NCD. You’ll be on his team. Or at least, you and a few others will be the team. It’s one of our smallest departments.’ He thought for a moment and then added: ‘Actually, it is our smallest department – if you don’t count the night shift in the canteen.’

‘And his Amazing Crime Stories rating? What about that?’

‘He’s not rated,’ replied Briggs, trying to make it sound all matter-of-fact and not the embarrassment that it was. ‘In fact, I don’t think he’s even in the Guild.’

Mary stared at the shabby figure and felt her heart fall. All of a sudden DI Flowwe didn’t seem quite so bad after all.

Jack Spratt looked around the room. Most of the newsmen had left by now and aside from Briggs and a woman Spratt didn’t recognise by the door there were only two people still in the room. The first was a large man named Archibald Fatquack, who was the editor of the Reading weekly gossip sheet The Gadfly. The second was a junior newshound from The Reading Daily Eyestrain, who appeared to be asleep, drunk, dead, or a mixture of all three.

‘Thank you all for attending this press conference,’ announced Jack in a sombre tone to the good-as-empty room. ‘I’ll try not to keep you any longer than is necessary. This afternoon, the Reading Central Criminal Court found the three pigs not guilty of all charges relating to the first-degree murder of Mr Wolff.’

He sighed. If he was intending it to be a dramatic statement it wasn’t, and it didn’t help that no one significant was there to witness it. He could still hear the excited yet increasingly distant chatter of the newsmen as they filed down the corridor, but it was soon drowned out by Friedland’s 1932 Delage D8 Super-Sport, which started up with a throaty roar in the car park. Jack waited until he had gone then continued gamely, the extreme lack of interest not outwardly affecting his demeanour. After nearly twenty years he was kind of used to it.

‘Since the death by scalding of Mr Wolff following his ill-fated climb down Little Pig “C”s chimney, we at the Nursery Crime Division have been following evidence that this was not an act of self-defence but a violent and premeditated murder by three individuals who, far from being the innocent victims of wolf/porcine crime, actually sought confrontation and then acted quite beyond what might be described as reasonable self-defence.’

Jack paused for breath. If he had hoped his misgivings over the outcome of the trial would be splashed all over the paper, he was mistaken. Page sixteen of The Gadfly was about the sum total for this particular story, sandwiched ignominiously between a three-for-two Haemorrelief advert and the Very Reverend Conrad Poo’s weekly dental hygiene column.

‘Mr Spratt,’ began Archibald, slowly bringing himself up to speed like a chilled gecko, ‘is it true that Mr Wolff once belonged to the Lupine Brotherhood, a secret society dedicated to traditional wolfish pursuits such as the outlawed Midnight Howling?’

‘Yes, I understand that to be the case,’ replied Jack, ‘but that was over fifteen years ago. We do not deny that he has been investigated over various charges of criminal damage arising from the destruction of two dwellings built by the younger Pigs, nor that Mr Wolff threatened “to eat them all up”. But we saw this as an empty threat – we found witnesses who swore that Mr Wolff was a vegetarian of many years’ standing.’

‘So what was your basis for a murder prosecution?’ asked Archie, scratching his head.

‘We believed,’ replied Jack in exasperation, as he had made the same point in the same room to the same two uninterested journalists many times before, ‘that boiling Mr Wolff alive was quite outside the realm of “reasonable force” and the fact that the large pan of water would have taken at least six hours to reach boiling point strongly indicated premeditation.’

Archibald said nothing and Jack, eager to go home, wrapped up his report.

‘Despite the not-guilty verdicts we at the NCD feel we have put up a robust case and were fully justified in our actions. To this end we will not be looking to re-examine the case or interview anyone else in connection with Mr Wolff’s death.’

Jack sighed and looked down. He appeared and felt drained.

‘Personally,’ said Briggs in an aside, ‘I didn’t think the jury would go for it. The problem is that small pigs elicit a strong sympathetic reaction and large wolves don’t. There was a good case for self-defence, too – Mr Wolff was trespassing when he climbed down the chimney. It really all hinged on whether you believed that the pigs were boiling up a huge tureen of water to do their washing. And the jury did. In only eight minutes. Do you want me to introduce you?’

‘I’d prefer tomorrow once I am officially on duty,’ said Mary quickly, thinking she might have to go outside and scream or something.

Briggs picked up on her reticence.

‘Don’t underestimate the Nursery Crime Division, Mary. Spratt does some good work. Not high-profile, you understand, but important. His work on the Bluebeard serial wife-killings case was . . . mostly good solid police work.’

‘That was Spratt?’ asked Mary, something vaguely stirring in her memory. It hadn’t been in Amazing Crime, of course; it was just one of those ‘also-ran’ stories you usually find dwelling in the skim-read part of the dailies, along with City prices, dog horoscopes and ‘true life’photo stories. It had been under the subheading ‘Colourfully hirsute gentleman kills nine wives; hidden room contained gruesome secret’.

‘That’s him. Jack was on to Bluebeard and was well ahead of events.’

‘If nine wives died he couldn’t have been that good.’

‘I said it was mostly good police work. More notably he arrested Rumpelstiltskin over that spinning-straw-into-gold scam and was part of the team that captured the violently dangerous psychopath, the Gingerbreadman. You might have heard about Jack in connection with some giant-killing, too.’

Something stirred in Mary’s memory again and she raised an eyebrow. Police officers weren’t meant to kill people if they could help it – and giants were no exception.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Briggs, ‘it was self-defence. Mostly.’

‘Mostly?’

‘The last one he ran over in a car.’

‘The last one?’ repeated Mary incredulously. ‘How many have there been?’

‘Four. But don’t mention it; he’s a bit sensitive over the issue.’

Mary’s heart, which had already fallen fairly far, fell farther.

‘Well, that’s all I have to say,’ said Jack to the sparsely populated room, ‘are there any more questions?’

Archibald Fatquack stirred, scribbled in his pad but said nothing. The reporter from The Reading Daily Eyestrain had moved slowly forward during Jack’s report until his head was resting on the seat-back in front. He began to snore.

‘Good. Well, thank you very much for your time. Don’t all rush to get out. You might wake Jim over there.’

‘I wasn’t asleep,’ said Jim, eyes tightly closed. ‘I heard every word.’

‘Even the bit about the bears escaping into the Oracle Centre and eating a balloon seller?’

‘Of course,’ he murmured, beginning to snore again.

Jack picked up his notes and disappeared through a side door.

‘Are there usually this few people for his press conferences?’ asked Mary, horrified at the prospect of the career black hole into which she was about to descend like a suicidal rabbit.

‘Good Lord, no,’ replied Briggs in a shocked tone. ‘Often he has no press at all.’

He looked at his watch. ‘Goodness, is that the time? Check in with me first thing tomorrow and I’ll introduce you to Jack. You’ll like him. Not exactly charismatic, but diligent and generally correct in most . . . some of his assumptions.’

‘Sir, I was wondering—’

Briggs stopped her mid-sentence, divining precisely what she was about to say. The reason was simple. All the detective sergeants he had ever allocated to Jack said the same thing.

‘Look upon it as a baptism of fire. The NCD is good training.’

‘For what?’

Briggs had to think for a moment.

‘Unconventional policing. Your time won’t be wasted. Oh, and one other thing.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Welcome to Reading.’

2

Jack Spratt

The Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives was founded by Holmes in 1896 to look after the best interests of Britain’s most influential and newsworthy detectives. Membership is strictly controlled but pays big dividends: the pick of the best enquiries in England and Wales, an opportunity to ‘brainstorm’ tricky cases with one’s peers, and an exclusive deal with the notoriously picky editors of Amazing Crime Stories. The Guild’s legal department frequently brokers TV, movie and merchandising deals and membership usually sways juries in tricky cases. It seems to work well. The only people who didn’t like the system are the officers who are non-Guild.

– excerpt from Inside the Guild of Detectives

Jack drove home that evening with a feeling of frustration that would have been considerably worse had it been unexpected. He and the prosecution had tried to present the pig case as well as they could but for some reason the jury didn’t buy it. Briggs hadn’t said anything to him yet but mounting prosecutions such as The Crown v. Three Pigs was undeniably expensive, and after the failed conviction of the conmen who perpetrated the celebrated ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ scam the year before, Jack knew that the Nursery Crime Division would be under closer scrutiny by the bean counters. Not that the NCD was consistently racked with failure – far from it – but the fact was that few of his cases attracted much publicity. And in the all-important climate of increased public confidence, budget accountability and Amazing Crime circulation figures, Friedland’s crowd-pleasing antics were strides ahead of Jack’s misadventures – and hugely profitable for the Reading police force, too. But all of this was scant comfort to Mr Wolff, who went to his casket unavenged, and parboiled.

He drove along Peppard and took the left fork into Kidmore End.

‘Shit,’ muttered Jack under his breath as the whole wasted six-month investigation sank in. He didn’t want murder cases, of course – he would be happier not to have any, ever – but there was a slight frisson that went with them that he welcomed. The NCD, after an early rush of celebrated cases, had settled down into something of a workaday existence. There is a limit to how many lost sheep you can track down, how many illegal straw-into-gold dens he could uncover, how many pied pipers arrived in town trying to extort money from the authorities over pest control and how often Mr Punch would beat his wife and throw the baby downstairs. He knew there was not much prestige, but there was an upside: he was left pretty much to his own devices.

He stopped the car outside his house and stared silently into his own kitchen, where he could see his wife, Madeleine, attempting to feed the youngest of their five children. They had brought two children each from previous marriages – the two eldest, Pandora and Ben, were Jack’s, and Megan and Jerome were Madeleine’s. As if to cement the union further they had had one that was entirely down to the pair of them – Stevie, who was a year old.

‘This is why I do this,’ he muttered under his breath, opening the car door. Pausing only to place a block of wood under one of the rear wheels to stop his Allegro from rolling down the slope, he picked up his case, bade ‘good evening’ to his neighbour, Mrs Sittkomm, who was glaring suspiciously at him from over the fence, and took the side entrance to the house.

‘Honey,’ he yelled without enthusiasm as he dumped his case on the hall table, ‘I’m home.’

She coo-ee’d from the kitchen, and the sound of her voice made all the stresses of the day that much more bearable. They had been married almost five years, and neither of them had any regrets over their choice. She bounded in from the kitchen, gave him a kiss and hugged him tenderly.

‘Otto called me about the Wolff thing,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Bum deal. The pigs deserved to fry. I’m sorry.’

And she hugged him again.

‘I’d say “some you win” but I don’t seem—’

She placed a finger on his lips and took him by the hand to walk him through to the kitchen, where Stevie was attempting to reduce his dinner to a thin film that might, through careful application of skill, be made to cover the entire room.

‘Hi, kids!’ he shouted, summoning a small amount of enthusiasm.

‘Hullo!’ said Jerome, who was just eight, was enthusiastic about everything and smelt strongly of fish fingers. ‘I can wiggle my ears!’

He then attempted to demonstrate his new-found skill, and after about a minute of grunting and going bright red and with his ears not wiggling even the tiniest bit, said:

‘How was that!?’

‘Awesome,’ replied Jack, rolling his eyes dramatically. ‘Wiggle them any more and you’ll be able to fly.’

‘Jack—!’ began Megan, her mouth full. ‘My teacher Miss Klaar eats . . . puppies!’

‘And how do you know that?’

‘Johnny said so,’ she replied intensely, all curls and big questioning blue eyes the colour of a Caribbean lagoon.

‘I see. And does Johnny have any corroborative evidence?’

‘Of course,’ said the ten-year-old, knowing a few technical police terms herself. ‘Johnny said that Roger told him that a friend of his who lives next door to someone who knows Miss Klaar said it’s a fact in her street. Do we have a case?’

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Jack, ‘I often go to court with far less.’

‘Da-woo!’ screamed Stevie, waving a spoon as he scattered food around the room, much to the pleasure of the cat, with whom, it was generally agreed, Stevie had an understanding. Ripvan – as in ‘Winkle’, naturally – was the laziest cat that had ever lived, ever. She would sleep in corridors, roads, paths, puddles, gutters – anywhere where it suddenly felt tired. She would rather sit in the cold and have to be revived from near hypothermia with a hairdryer than trouble herself to use the cat flap. If she hadn’t had the sense to lie on her back under Stevie’s high chair with her mouth open, she would probably have starved.

Madeleine sidled up to where Jack was absently staring at the children gorging themselves and wrapped an arm around his waist.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘Deflated,’ he replied, ‘and Friedland got another standing ovation at the press conference.’

‘Don’t worry about Friedland,’ said Madeleine soothingly, ‘he only gets the good cases because he’s in the Guild of Detectives.’

‘Don’t talk to me about the Guild. Heard the saying: “If you’re in, you’re made. If you’re out, you’re Traffic”?’

‘Many times. But you’re not Traffic.’

‘Check in again a week from now.’

‘Did you apply as we discussed, darling?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘No. Listen, I’m not really Guild material. How many people want to read about three disreputable pigs and a dopey wolf with a disposition towards house demolition?’

‘If you were in the Guild, maybe lots.’

‘Well, I’m not so sure. The Guild won’t want someone like me. The NCD conviction record is . . . well, shite.’

‘That’s because the force doesn’t appreciate what you’re doing. If you were Guild, Briggs and the Crown Prosecution Service would soon change their tune. Aside from that, Ben and Pandora will both be at university in two years, so we could do with the extra cash.’

‘That’s true. The cost of Pot Noodle, subsidised beer and cannabis these days is simply scandalous – think I can get a cheap deal from the drugs squad?’

‘I’m serious, Jack.’

‘Okay, okay, I’ll apply tomorrow, I promise.’

‘You won’t need to. I took the liberty of doing it for you. Here.’

She handed him a sheet of paper.

Jack accepted it with misgivings, unsure of whether to be angry at Madeleine’s intervention or glad that she had taken the burden of responsibility from him.

‘It’s a conditional acceptance,’ he said, reading the short letter twice to make sure he understood what was going on. ‘They need a day’s observation in order to calculate my sleuthing quotient – if it’s higher than a 6.3 they’ll put my name up to the board.’

He turned the sheet over.

‘It doesn’t say when this observation day will be.’

‘I think it’s done on a random basis in case detectives try to “spice things up a bit” with a head in a bag or something,’ observed Madeleine. She was quite correct. Desperate wannabe Guild detectives had been known to borrow cadavers from medical schools and then dump them in a chest freezer for later ‘discovery’ to impress Guild observers.

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I’m just amazed that I got even as far as a conditional acceptance.’

‘That’s easily explained,’ she replied. ‘I told them you were a chain-smoking vintage-Rolls-Royce-driving divorced alcoholic with an inability to form lasting relationships. And with a love of Puccini, Henry Moore and Magritte. And a big pipe.’

‘What about a deerstalker hat?’

‘No – do you think I should have?’

‘Absolutely not. Why did you tell them all that?’

‘I had to write something interesting about you. If your investigations are going to be written up in Amazing Crime Stories you’re going to have to have a few interesting foibles. I don’t think “happily married father of five” quite cuts the mustard these days.’

He sighed. She was right.

‘Well,’ he said, giving her an affectionate hug, ‘if I’m going to be a womanising pipe-smoking opera fanatic with a vintage car and a drink problem, I’d better practise getting into character. I could make a start chatting up that new assistant of yours – what was her name again?’

‘Diane? Sure, you could try that. She said yesterday she thought you were really nice.’

‘She did?’

‘Reminded her of her dad, she said.’

‘Hmm. What sort of pipe did you have in mind for me?’

They laughed. The Guild. What the hell. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

‘Bums—!’ said Madeleine, glancing at the wall clock. ‘I’m late.’

‘Late for what?’

‘The Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit. It’s on the calendar.’

Jack walked over to look. It was there in black Biro. He didn’t look closely enough at these things and was always being caught out.

‘Schmoozing or snapping?’

She slapped him playfully on the shoulder.

‘Snapping, you dope. Someone has to take pictures of all the dazzling Reading socialities shaking hands with whatever D-class celebrity Lord Spongg has managed to dredge up.’

‘Is that an improvement on the Thames Valley Fruit-Growers Ball, where you were merely photographing “low-grade celebrity wannabes”?’

‘Of course, dear – it’s called upward mobility. By the summer I could be doing portraits of chinless twerps at the Henley Regatta.’

‘Well, you’d better dress up a bit, then.’

‘All in good time, husband, dearest. Can you take Megan to Scouts?’

‘Sure. When is it again?’

‘Seven,’ said Megan, and excused herself from the table.

‘What did you do at school, Jerome?’ asked Jack when Madeleine had gone upstairs to change into something a little smarter. It didn’t do well to turn up at a charity bash dressed scruffily, even if you were only the photographer.

‘Nothing much.’

‘Then it’s a bit pointless sending you, isn’t it? Why don’t we just cancel school and you can stay at home and – I don’t know – just eat chocolate and watch TV all day?’

Jerome perked up at this gold-edged scenario.

‘Really?’

‘No, not really.’

His shoulders slumped.

‘But school’s sooooooo boring.’

‘Agreed. But it’s almost perfect training for a career at Smileyburgers.’

‘But I’m not going to work at Smileyburgers.’

‘You will if you do nothing much at school.’

‘Da-woo!!’ yelled Stevie, jumping up and down. In the absence of anything more productive to do, he grasped large handfuls of scrambled egg and squeezed until it oozed between his fingers like yellow toothpaste.

‘Yag,’ said Jerome, ‘and you tell me off for picking my nose!’

‘It’s not the picking,’ explained Jack, who secretly liked a good dig himself and didn’t want to be a hypocrite, ‘it’s the eating.’

Talk abruptly halted as Ben walked into the kitchen looking very self-conscious in his college orchestra uniform. He was sixteen, gangly, and awash in a toxic sea of hormones. He had joined the orchestra less through love of music than love of Penelope Liddell, who played the harp.

‘It’s those slender fingers plucking on the strings,’ he had explained while confessing the object of his adoration to Jack a few days before, ‘and that concentration! Hell’s teeth! If she looked at me like that I think I’d explode.’

‘Well, mind you don’t,’ Jack had replied, ‘it could be very messy.’

Ben was actually a very competent tuba player, but since the tuba section is about as far away as you can get from the harp and the tuba doesn’t exactly ooze macho sexuality – except, perhaps, to another tuba – he had joined the percussion section to bring him closer to the object of his affections. He dragged two heavy cases out from the cupboard under the stairs and put on a parka.

‘Do you need a hand with those?’ asked Jack.

‘Thanks, Dad. My ride will be here soon.’

A car horn sounded outside.

Jack tried to pick up one of the cases but it was so heavy it felt as though it had taken root.

‘What the hell have you got in here?’

‘We’re doing Il Trovatore,’ Ben explained. ‘Mr Moore said we should experiment – so I’m using real anvils and real hammers.’

Between the two of them they managed to drag the cases across the floor, heave them over the door step and down the path to the boot of the waiting car, which sank alarmingly.

Half an hour later Madeleine came back down dressed in a strapless red ball gown kept up by nothing but faith. All eyes were on her as she did a twirl for them in the kitchen.

‘How do I look?’

‘Whoa!’ said Pandora, who had just walked in. ‘Maddy’s in girl-clothes!’

‘Beautiful,’ said Megan wistfully, clasping her hands together and holding them up to her chin, dreaming of a time when she could dress up in ball gowns, go to parties and be kissed by a handsome prince – although she would accept a knight, if there were problems regarding availability.

‘It’s very bright,’ was Jerome’s only comment.

‘Da-woo,’ said Stevie.

‘I thought you were the one doing the photographing,’ said Jack. ‘I mean, how do you actually get in your own photographs? Press the shutter and then run round really fast?’

‘It is the Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit, darling. While I’ve still the tattered remnants of youth and good looks I might as well use them to drum up some work. Debs’ parents pay good money for portraits.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘just don’t allow yourself to be chatted up by Lord Spongg – you know what a reputation he has.’

‘I have every intention of being chatted up by Lord Spongg,’ she responded with a smile. ‘I need all the work he can give me.’ She curled a hand around Jack’s chin and neck, brought her lips to his ear and whispered:

‘These dresses are notoriously tight and the zips are always faulty. You may have to tear it from my body.’

She kissed him, smiled, and withdrew.

‘I’ll wait up.’

‘Oh, no need for that, is there?’ she returned playfully.

‘Yes.’

She laughed and was suddenly a burst of energy.

‘Megan, get your shoes on – NOW! If you can’t find a woggle use an elastic band. The rest of you behave yourselves with Jack. I’ll be back after your bedtime.’

She kissed them all, grabbed her camera bag, which spoiled the illusion of sophisticated socialising, and was out of the door in a flash.

‘Da-woo,’ murmured Stevie, clearly impressed.

It was after ten, the younger children were all tucked up and Jack and Pandora were sitting in the living room. The telly was on, although they weren’t paying it much attention, and Pandora was doing some revising – several textbooks on theoretical particle physics were strewn around the sofa. Pandora was almost twenty and still at the sort of age where she didn’t really care what her father thought of her life choices and wanted him to know it – which naturally meant she cared a great deal what he thought, but wasn’t going to let on. And Jack, for his part, couldn’t help giving her advice that he thought valuable and pertinent but was actually useless – mostly because it had been a long time since he was her age and he hadn’t been able to figure it out either. But there were small triumphs. For a start, Pandora didn’t have any piercings or tattoos. This was partly due to Jack’s relaxed attitude, something that took the wind out of her semi-rigged rebellious sails. Sometimes she thought Jack was using reverse psychology on her, which meant that she should double-bluff his double-bluff, and she might have done so except that the idea of a tattoo or a piercing made her feel queasy.

Jack stared blankly at his crossword. It was the three hundred and forty-fourth consecutive puzzle he had failed to complete. A new personal best.

‘Hey,’ said Pandora, ‘tough break on the three pigs case. I’m a committed holier-than-thou-meat-is-murder-bore-the-pants-off-all-and-sundry vegetarian and even I thought they should have been served up boiled with new potatoes, peas and parsley sauce.’

‘Well,’ replied Jack, taking a swig of beer, ‘we thought we might have got Gerald – that’s Little Pig “A” – to squeal on his elder brothers for a lesser sentence, but he wouldn’t play ball. How’s school?’

‘I’m nearly twenty, Dad. I don’t go to school any more. It’s called uni-ver-sity and it’s good. Can you help me with my quantum particle homework?’

‘Sure.’

‘Okay. Here’s the question: “Solve the Schrodinger equation explicitly in the case of a particle of mass m in a constant Newtonian gravitational field: V = mgz”.’

Jack thought for a moment.

‘Definitely “B”.’

‘Eh?’

‘Box “B” unless the previous answer was box “B” in which case it’ll be box “C”. This is multiple choice, yes?’

Pandora laughed.

‘No, Dad. Particle physics is a little more involved than that.’

‘Box “A”?’

She slapped him playfully on the arm.

‘Dad! You are so no help at all!’

The local news came on. There was a piece about Chymes and the Peabody case, of course, and more about the Jellyman’s visit on Saturday to dedicate the Sacred Gonga visitors’ centre. There was also a bit about the Spongg Footcare Charity Benefit, live from the Deja-Vu Ballrooms. They both craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Madeleine in her red dress and saw her lurking in the back of a shot where Lord Randolph Spongg, the CEO of Spongg Footcare PLC, was doing a piece for the live broadcast.

‘. . . as well as representatives from Winsum & Loosum’s and QuangTech we’ve seen a galaxy of Reading celebrities tonight,’ said the handsome peer cheerfully, ‘in order to help us raise funds to replace the outdated and woefully inadequate St Cerebellum’s mental hospital. We are very grateful indeed to Mr Grundy, Mr Attery Squash, the Blue Baboon, Mr Pobble, Lola Vavoom and of course the Dong, who so generously agreed to entertain us with his luminous nose.’

‘Ah yes, Miss Vavoom,’ said The Toad reporter as he crossed to the retired star of screen and stage, ‘so good to see you out in Reading society again – how do you react to the epithet “formerly gorgeous”?’

‘Like this,’ she said, downing the reporter with a straight right to the jaw. There was a cry, a flash going off, and they cut the live broadcast back to a bemused anchorman who hid a smile, told a heart-warming story about the efforts of the fire service to rescue a kitten stuck in a pipe, then introduced Reading’s favourite weather-girl, Bunty McTwinkle.

‘Reading will once again experience a cloudy day with little sign of sunshine,’ said Bunty without much emotion, ‘a bit like living inside Tupperware.’

Pandora keyed the remote and the TV went silent.

‘I was hoping I might make the local news this time,’ said Jack despondently, ‘even if it was to be trashed.’

Ben finally drifted in at eleven and made a little too much noise. A light came on in Mr and Mrs Sittkomm’s bedroom, which was always a bad sign. Jack beckoned him in as quickly as he could.

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘To excess. I had two shandies.’

‘Almost an alcoholic. How did it go with the harpist? Did she like your anvils?’

‘Oh, her,’ he sniffed, taking off his parka and chucking it in the cloakroom, ‘she’s going out with Brian Eves, who plays the tuba. She says it’s the sexiest instrument in the brass section.’

‘Oh, Ben,’ said Jack, ‘I’m so sorry!’

‘Shit happens,’ he replied, making his way towards the staircase, his room and the welcome oblivion of low-alcohol-induced lovelorn unconsciousness. ‘Yes indeed, shit happens.’

Jack went to bed at midnight and was awoken in the small hours by Madeleine, who came to bed smelling of champagne, canapés and hard work.

‘Guess what!’ she whispered, not at all quietly in his ear.

‘The house is on fire?’

‘No. I snapped Lola Vavoom slugging a journalist. It’ll be on the front page of The Mole and The Toad tomorrow. She packs quite a punch – they had to wire his jaw!’

Despite the feisty and provocative talk earlier about the red dress having to be torn from her body, they both fell fast asleep doing nothing about it. Besides, it was rented.