THE FOURTH BEAR

An investigation with the

Nursery Crime Division

Jasper Fforde

HODDER & STOUGHTON

‘DCI Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division,’ announced Jack, holding up his ID. ‘Put down the scissors and STEP AWAY FROM THE THUMB.’

Copyright © 2006 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 & Stoughton Book

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 1 844 56924 3
Book ISBN 978 0 340 83571 5

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

www.hodder.co.uk

For my Mother

Also by Jasper Fforde

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

The Big Over Easy

Because the forest will always be there
and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it.

– A.A. Milne

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, and quite unintentional.

The Fourth Bear has been bundled with Special Features including:

‘The Making of’ documentary, deleted scenes,
and much more. To access all these free bonus features,
log on to: www.nurserycrime.co.uk/special/js2.html
and enter the code word as directed.

Contents

1 A death in Obscurity

2 A cautionary tale

3 St Cerebellum’s

4 The Robert Southey

5 The Austin Allegro Equipe

6 The Gingerbreadman is out

7 Nursery Crime Division

8 Noisy neighbours

9 The Deja-Vu

10 Porridge problems

11 Goldilocks (absent)

12 Gingery aftertaste

13 111110000

14 Virginia Kreeper

15 Three bears

16 SommeWorld

17 Home again

18 Early morning

19 The Rt Honourable Sherman Bartholomew, MP

20 Taking stock

21 Driven to Obscurity

22 QuangTech

23 Extreme cucumbers

24 Over-quotering

25 Back to the forest

26 Jack’s explanation

27 What Mary did that night

28 What Jack did that night

29 What Ashley did that night

30 The Punches make peace

31 The Truth is out there

32 Parks again

33 Hardy Fuchsia and Bisky-Batt

34 Return to the Bob Southey

35 Ursula

36 Totally over the top at SommeWorld

1

A death in Obscurity

‘Last Known Regional Postcode Allocation. Obscurity, Berkshire. Pop. 35. Spotted by an eagle-eyed official and allocated its postcode (RD73 93ZZ) in April 1987, a matter of such import among the residents of this small village that a modest ceremony and street party were arranged. A bronze plaque was inscribed and affixed below another plaque that commemorated the only other event of note in living memory – the momentous occasion when Douglas Fairbanks (Senior) became hopelessly lost in 1928 and had to stop at the village shop to ask for directions.’

– The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

The little village of Obscurity is remarkable only for its unremarkableness. Passed over for inclusion in almost every publication from the Domesday Book to Thirty Places Not Worth Visiting in Berkshire, the small hamlet is also a cartographic omission, an honour it shares with the neighbouring villages of Hiding and Cognito. Indeed, the status of Obscurity was once thought so tenuous that some of the more philosophically inclined residents considered the possibility that since the village didn’t exist then they might not exist either, and hurriedly placed ‘existential question of being’ on the parish council agenda, where it still resides, after much unresolved discussion, between ‘church roof fund’ and ‘any other business’.

It was late summer. A period of good weather had followed on from rain and the countryside was now enjoying a reinvigoration of colour, and scent. The fields and trees were a vibrant green and the spinneys rich with the sweet bouquet of honeysuckle and dog rose, the hedgerows creamy with cow parsley and alive with cyclamen. In the isolated splendour of Obscurity the residents enjoyed the season more as they had fewer people to share it with. Not many people came this way, and if they did they were invariably lost.

The Austin Somerset that pulled up outside a pretty brick-and-thatch cottage on the edge of the village was not lost. A dapper septuagenarian bounded from the front garden to greet the only occupant, an attractive woman of slender build in her late twenties.

‘Welcome to Obscurity, Miss Hatchett,’ he intoned politely. ‘Were you lost for long?’

‘Barely an hour,’ she replied, shaking his outstretched hand. ‘It’s very good of you to talk to me, Mr Cripps.’

‘The gravity of the situation is too serious to remain unremarked for ever,’ he replied sombrely.

She nodded, and the sprightly pensioner invited her into the garden and guided her to a shady spot under an apple tree. She settled herself on the bench and tied up her long blonde curly tresses. It was her single most identifiable feature and one that in the past had made her the subject of a certain amount of teasing. But these days, she didn’t much care.

‘Call me Goldilocks,’ she said with a smile as she caught Cripps staring at her remarkably luxuriant hair, ‘everyone else does.’

Cripps returned her smile and offered her a glass of lemonade.

‘Then you must call me Stanley – I say, you’re not the Goldilocks, are you? We have so few celebrities down this way.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ she replied good-naturedly, having been asked this question many times before. ‘I think that Goldilocks was a lot younger.’

‘Of course,’ said Stanley, who was still staring at her hair, which seemed to glisten like gold when the dappled light caught it.

Goldilocks smiled again and opened her notepad.

‘Firstly,’ she said, taking a sip of lemonade, ‘I must remind you that I am an investigative reporter for The Toad, and anything you say may well be reported in the newspapers, and you must be aware of that.’

‘I understand,’ replied Stanley, staring at the ground for a moment, ‘I fully appreciate what you are saying. But this is serious stuff. Despite continued pleas to the police and evidence of numerous thefts, attempted murder and acts of wanton vandalism, we are just dismissed as lunatics on the fringes of society.’

‘I agree it’s wrong,’ murmured Goldilocks, ‘but until recently I never thought that . . . cucumber growing might be considered a dangerous pastime.’

‘Few indeed think so,’ replied Cripps soberly, ‘but cucumbering at the international level is seriously competitive and requires a huge commitment in cash and time. It’s a tough and highly rarefied activity in the horticultural community, and not for the faint-hearted. The judges are merciless. Two years ago I thought I was in with a chance, but once again my arch-rival Hardy Fuchsia pipped me to the post with a graceful giant that tipped the scales at forty-six kilos – a full two hundred grams under my best offering. But, you know, in top-class cucumbering size isn’t everything. Fuchsia’s specimen won because of its curve. A delicately curved parabola of mathematical perfection that brought forth tears of admiration from even the harshest judge.’

‘Tell me all about your cucumbers but from the very beginning,’ said Goldilocks enthusiastically.

‘Really?’ replied Cripps, whose favourite subject usually generated large yawns from even the most polite and committed listener.

‘Yes,’ replied Goldilocks without hesitation, ‘in as much detail as you can.’

Cripps spoke for almost two hours, and only twice strayed from his favourite topic. He showed Goldilocks his alarmed and climate-controlled greenhouse, and pointed out the contenders for that year’s prize.

‘They’re remarkable,’ said Goldilocks, and so they were. A deep shade of bottle green with a smooth, blemish-free skin and a gentle curve without any kinks. If cucumbers had gods, these would be them. One cucumber in particular was so magnificent, so flawless, so perfect in every detail that Stanley confided to Goldilocks he was finally in with a chance to snatch the crown from the indisputable emperor of Cucumber Extreme, Mr Hardy Fuchsia. Unabashed rivals, they would doubtless lock antlers in the field of cucumbering at Vexpo2004, this year to be held in Düsseldorf.

‘A shade under fifty kilos,’ remarked Cripps, pointing at one specimen.

‘Impressive,’ replied Goldilocks, scribbling another note.

They spoke for another hour and she left just after eight, a notepad full of observations that confirmed what she already suspected. But of one thing she was certain: Mr Cripps was almost certainly unaware of the more sinister aspects of his hobby.

By 10.30 that night Stanley Cripps was tucked up in bed, musing upon the good fortune that would undoubtedly see his champion cucumber take all the prizes at everything he entered it for. He could almost hear the roar of the crowd, smell the trophy and visualise the cover story in Cucumber Monthly that would surely be his. As he sat in bed chuckling to himself with a cup of hot chocolate and a Garibaldi biscuit, the silent alarm was triggered and a cucumber-shaped light blinked at him from the control panel near his bed. There had been a couple of false alarms over the past few days, but his long-time experience of thieves had taught him to always be vigilant as wily cucumber pilferers often set alarms off deliberately so you would ignore them when they struck with real intent. He slipped on his dressing gown, donned his slippers and, after thinking for a moment, dialled Goldilocks’ number on the cordless phone while he padded noiselessly down the stairs to the back door.

Even before he reached the greenhouse he could see that this was no false alarm – the door had been forced and the lights were on. Goldilocks’ phone rang and rang at the other end, and he was just about to give up when her answerphone clicked in.

‘Hi!’ she said in a bright and breezy voice. ‘This is Henny Hatchett of The Toad. If you’ve got a good story . . .’

Stanley was by now only semi-listening. He mumbled a greeting and his name at the beep then ventured forth into his inner cucumber-cultivating sanctum, stick in hand and apprehensive of heart. He stopped short and looked around with growing incredulity.

‘Good heavens!’ he said in breathless astonishment. ‘It’s . . . full of holes!’

An instant later Stanley’s property exploded in a flaming ball of white-hot heat that turned the moonless night into day. The shock wave rolled out at the speed of sound in every direction and carried in front of it the shattered remains of Stanley’s house and gardens, while the fireball arced and flamed up into the night sky. The property next door collapsed like a card house, and the old oak had the side facing the blast reduced to a foot of charcoal. Windows were broken up to five miles away and the blast was heard as a dull rumble in Reading, some forty miles distant. As for Stanley, he and almost everything he possessed were atomised in a fraction of a second. His false teeth were found embedded in a beech tree a quarter of a mile away, his final comment recorded on Goldilocks’ answerphone. She would hear it with a sense of rising foreboding upon her return – and in just under a week, she too would be dead.

2

A cautionary tale

‘Most Under-funded Police Division. For the twentieth year running, the Nursery Crime Division in the Reading Police Department. Formed in 1958 by DCI Jack Horner, who felt that the regular force was ill equipped to deal with the often unique problems thrown up by nursery-related inquiries. After a particularly bizarre investigation that involved a tinder box, a soldier and a series of talking cats with varying degrees of ocular deformity, he managed to persuade his confused superiors that he should oversee all inquiries involving “any nursery characters or plots from poems and/or stories”. His legacy of fairness, probity and impartiality remains unaltered to this day, as do the budget, the size of the offices, the wallpaper and the carpets.’

– The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

The neighbourhood in West Reading that centres on Compton Avenue is similar to much of Reading’s pre-war urban housing. Bay windows, red brick, attached garage, sunrise doors. The people who live here are predominantly white-collar: managers, stock controllers, IT consultants. They work, raise children, watch TV, fret over promotion, socialise. Commonplace for Reading or anywhere else, one would think, aside from one fact. For two decades this small neighbourhood has harboured a worrying and unnatural secret: the occupants’ children, quite against the norms of acceptable levels of conduct . . . behave themselves and respect their parents. Meals are always finished, shoes neatly double-bowed and cries of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ring clearly and frequently throughout the households. Boys’ hair is always combed and cut above the collar, bedrooms are scrupulously clean, baths are taken at first request and household chores are enthusiastically performed. Shocking, weird, unnatural – even creepy. But by far and away the most strenuously obeyed rule is this: thumbs are never, repeat never, sucked.

‘We used to call this neighbourhood Cautionary Valley in the old days,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt to Constable Ashley, ‘where vague threats of physical retribution for childhood misdemeanours came to violent fruition. Get out of bed, play with matches, refuse your soup or suck your thumb and there was something under the bed to grab your ankles, spontaneous human combustion, accelerated starving or a double thumbectomy.’ He sighed. ‘Of course, that was all a long time ago.’

It had been twenty-five years ago, to be exact. Jack had been a mere subordinate in the Nursery Crime Division which he now ran. Technically speaking, cautionary crime was ‘juvenilia’ rather than ‘nursery’ but jurisdiction boundaries had blurred since the NCD’s inception in 1958 and their remit now included anything unexplainable. Sometimes Jack thought the NCD was just a mop that sponged up weird.

‘Did you get any prosecutions back then?’ asked Ashley, whose faint blue luminosity cast an eerie glow inside the parked car.

‘We nicked a couple of ankle-grabbers and took a chimney-troll in for questioning but the ringleader was always one giant stride ahead of us.’

‘The Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man?’

‘Right. We could never prove he snipped off the thumbs of errant suck-a-thumbs, but every lead we had pointed towards him. We never got to even interview him – the attacks suddenly stopped and he just vanished into the night.’

‘Moved on?’

‘I wish. Ever met a Cautionary Valley child?’

‘No.’

Jack shook his head sadly.

‘Sickeningly polite. A credit to their parents. Well mannered, helpful, courteous. We wanted to battle the Scissor-man and his cronies with everything the NCD could muster but were overruled by the local residents’ committee. They decided not to battle the cautionaries lurking in the woodwork, but use them. They pursued a policy of “cautionary acquiescence” by promulgating the stories and thus ensured that their children never had cause to invoke the cautionaries.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Of course. Believe me, once the hands really do grab your ankles when you get out of bed or the troll up the chimney does try to get you for not eating your greens, you make damn sure to do everything your parents tell you. But they’re still here,’ added Jack as he looked around, ‘waiting in the fabric of the neighbourhood. The stone, earth and wood. Under beds and in closets. They’ll reappear when someone is leaning back on their chair, being slovenly, not eating their soup, or – worst of all – sucking their thumb.’

They fell into silence and looked around but all was normal. The summer’s night was cool and clear and the streets empty and quiet. They had been parked in Compton Avenue for twenty-five minutes and nothing had appeared remotely out of the ordinary.

Things at the Nursery Crime Division were looking better than they had for many years, Jack admitted to himself. The success of the Humpty Dumpty inquiry four months before had placed himself and the NCD firmly in people’s consciousness. While not perhaps up there among the cutting-edge aspects of police detection such as murder, serious robbery or the ever popular ‘cold cases’, they were certainly more important than traffic or the motorcycle display team. There were plans to increase the funding from its ridiculously low level and a permanent staff beyond himself, DS Mary Mary and Constable Ashley.

‘What’s the time?’

Ashley glanced at his watch.

‘10010 past 1011.’

Jack did a quick calculation. Eighteen minutes past eleven. It was binary, of course, Ashley’s mother tongue. He generously spoke it as ones and zeros for Jack’s benefit – full-speed binary sounds like torn linen and is totally unintelligible. Ashley had no problem with English or any of the other twenty-three principal languages on the planet; it was the decimal numbering system he couldn’t get his head around. He was a Rambosian, an alien visitor from a small planet eighteen light years away who arrived quite unexpectedly along with 127 others four years previously. Every single one of the seventy billion or so inhabitants of Rambosia was a huge fan of Earth’s prodigious output of television drama and comedy, and Ashley had been part of a mission to discover why there had never been a third series of Fawlty Towers and to interview Ronnie Barker. But when the mission got to see just how much filing and bureaucratic data management there was on the planet, all 128 elected to stay.

Ashley had been in uniform for two years as part of the alien equal opportunities programme and had found himself after much reshuffling at the Nursery Crime Division, where he could do no real harm. His real name was 10111001000100111011100100, but that was tricky to remember and even harder to pronounce. Get the emphasis wrong on the seventh digit and it could mean ‘my prawns have asthma’. He was about five foot tall with slender arms and legs that bent both ways at the elbow and knee. His head was twice the width of his shoulders with big eyes, a small mouth and no nose. The UFO fraternity had got an alien’s appearance pretty much right, which surprised them all no end. His police uniform had been especially tailored to fit his unique physique, with a special elasticised girth as Rambosians had a tendency to swell and contract depending on atmospheric pressure.

‘So,’ continued Jack, ‘ten minutes to go. What stories do Rambosians use to terrify their children into behaving themselves, Ash?’

‘Vertical stripes, mainly.’

‘Why?’

Jack watched Ashley think. Owing to the Rambosian physiology, which comprised a translucent outer membrane filled with a blend of gelatinous liquid, Jack really could see his mind working. ‘Amorous linguini’ was how one unkind observer put it – but they weren’t far wrong.

‘It’s the linear uniformity in the vertical plain,’ Ashley explained with a shiver, turning a darker shade of blue. ‘We don’t much fancy bar codes, railings or pinstripe suits, either. Mind you, horizontally we have no problem with any of them – which is why we like to wear our pinstripes perpendicular to the norm.’

‘I always wondered about that,’ replied Jack slowly. Conversation was never easy with Ashley. There really wasn’t much in common between humans and Rambosians – except for a passionate interest in order and bureaucracy. During his lunch hour Ashley could often be found indulging in his hobby of ‘carspotting’, which is like trainspotting, only with cars. At the weekends Rambosians would cluster around one of the town’s many vehicle number recognition cameras, where they all got a bit tipsy reading the binary data stream. Other than that, they lived their own lives and didn’t say very much. That’s the thing about aliens that no one had ever really expected. They’re a bit dull.

The walkie-talkie crackled into life.

‘Jack, are you there?’

It was Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, Jack’s number two at the Nursery Crime Division. They had been together since the Humpty affair, and although there had been a few hiccups in the early days, they now got on well. She didn’t know why she’d been allocated to the NCD but was glad that she had been. Despite it being a career black hole and the butt of many station jokes, she felt somehow that she belonged. She didn’t know why. Jack picked up the radio and keyed the mike.

‘NCD-1 in position front of house. All quiet.’

‘I thought I was NCD-1?’ replied Mary over the airwaves. ‘I’m in the front line today.’

‘No, you’re NCD-2. Ashley’s NCD-3 and Baker and Gretel are NCD-4 and 5.’

‘I should be NCD-3,’ cut in Baker. ‘I’ve been working part time at the division longer than anyone.’

‘Shall we stick to names?’ asked Mary. ‘It’s going to be a lot easier.’

‘Whatever. Spratt at front of house, nothing to report.’

‘Good,’ replied Mary. ‘We have thumb re-entry in T minus . . . five minutes.’

This time, there’d be no escape for the Scissor-man.

Inside the house, Mary was briefing Conrad’s parents for the last time. They stared at her anxiously, but with both Jack and Ashley at the front and Gretel and Baker at the back, it seemed as safe a sting operation as they could make it.

‘Your backs are to be turned for Conrad’s thumb to go in at 23.30,’ explained Mary as she checked her watch. ‘At the same time he should lean back on his chair, refuse to eat his soup and play with these matches. I’ll be in the cupboard and on the radio, so if we can’t catch the Scissor-man before he reaches the house I’ll give the “thumb out” order and Conrad aborts all actions. Do you understand?’

Mr and Mrs Hoffman looked at one another and then at Conrad, who at seventeen was old enough to understand the risks. Like many of the children in the area he had lived in a condition of understated terror for so long that he now barely noticed. He had never had a brush with the cautionaries himself; the presence of Roland Snork in the neighbourhood was enough for most children. Roland’s face was frozen in an ugly grimace because the wind had changed while he was pulling a face, and although the thirteen cosmetic surgeries had alleviated the problem somewhat, he was one of the more obvious warnings about uncautionary behaviour. But if all went well, children like Roland wouldn’t suffer a lifetime of humiliation for a few injudiciously pulled faces. The parents of Cautionary Valley had banded together and unanimously voted for normality. For surly, grunty teenagers who dropped their clothes on the floor and stared vacantly out from behind lanky unwashed hair. For untied shoelaces, messy rooms, homework left until the last moment, inappropriate boy/girlfriends, and unregulated nose-picking. For brooding silences, funny smells in the bathroom, hours spent on video games and ignored calls to the dinner table. It all seemed so normal, so blissful. They had contacted the police, who gladly batted it down the line to the Nursery Crime Division.

‘We’re happy to go ahead, Sergeant,’ said Mr Hoffman with a dryness in his throat. ‘There are methods other than terror to instil discipline. We want to be like normal families where threats of mutilation and a sorry end to achieve good behaviour are met with a sarcastic “Yeah, Dad, like, way to go – you’re such a zoid, like, y’know. Tight”.’

He sighed deeply and turned to his son.

‘Conrad? Are you happy to go ahead?’

The boy nodded his head enthusiastically.

‘Yes, Father,’ he replied good-naturedly, ‘if it is for the good of everyone. Would anyone like a sandwich or a cup of tea?’

‘No, Conrad. There’ll be no more tea-making for you after tonight.’

‘Are you sure? I could bake you all a cake, too – and then play the piano for your entertainment before taking the dog for a walk and repainting the spare room.’

Even Mary found him a bit creepy. She didn’t have any children of her own – unless you counted her collection of ex-boyfriends – but children to her were meant to be something a little more than mindless automatons.

The Hoffmans hugged each other nervously, but when Mr Hoffman shook Mary’s hand she noticed that his left thumb was missing.

‘I was one of the first,’ he muttered sadly, following her gaze. ‘A life lived in fear is a life half lived. A life half lived is fear lived in half. A life half feared is fear half lived.’

Some people have a way with words, but Hoffman wasn’t one of them.

‘What exactly is the Scissor-man?’ asked Mrs Hoffman, who found the idea of characters from cautionary tales made flesh and blood a little strange, as well she might.

‘We call them PDRs,’ explained Mary. ‘Persons of Dubious Reality. Refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence, and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from Cautionary Tales are particularly mindless. They do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done – and it’s up to us to stop them.’

‘Are you sure the Nursery Crime Division is up to it?’ Mrs Hoffman added, voicing a strongly felt suspicion within the community that the regular force weren’t taking their concerns seriously.

‘Of course,’ replied Mary confidently. ‘Only two months ago we successfully detained a ghoulie, a ghosty and a long-legged beastie.’

‘And the bump in the night?’ asked Mr Hoffman anxiously. ‘What about that?’

‘Ah,’ returned Mary, scratching her chin thoughtfully. ‘No, the bump got away – but I’m sure you would agree a seventy-five per cent success rate in that particular operation was a very good result indeed.’

Constables Charlie Baker and Gretel Brown-Horrocks were waiting in the back garden, covering the house from the potting shed in case the Scissor-man came from that direction. Unlike Ashley, Mary and Jack, Baker and Gretel were occasional members of the NCD, brought in only when the need arose. Baker had been designated a D-minus in ‘public social skills’ owing to his acute hypochondria and was used only for internal duties within the Reading Central police station.

‘Want some Vicks?’ he said to Gretel, offering her the small bottle after trying in a most noisy and unpleasant fashion to clear his sinuses, which seemed to be incessantly blocked with possibly the finest cold viruses that natural selection had managed to create.

‘No thanks,’ replied Gretel in her soft German accent. Her skills in forensic accountancy kept her much in demand not only in Reading but throughout most of the Berks & Wilts Constabulary. NCD work was meant to ‘get her out more’. She was glad that it did. At the end of the Humpty affair she had met the man who was now her husband. He was seven foot three and she was six foot two and a quarter. It was a match made perhaps not in heaven, but certainly nearer the ceiling.

‘Do you have to sniff constantly?’ she asked him.

‘The sniffing’s nothing,’ replied Baker. ‘Do you want to see my rash?’

‘You showed it to me already.’

‘That was a tiddler. This new one covers two-thirds of my body and has raised pimples.’

‘It does not.’

‘It does so – or it will have soon, if my diagnosis is correct. What’s the time?’

‘One minute to go. We keep our eyes open – and for God’s sake: stop that sniffing.’

Baker made one great big huge super-sniff that drew everything swilling around his lower sinuses into the space between his eyes, where gravity, being the force it was, would ensure it would not stay for long.

Back inside the house, Mary counted off the seconds on her watch. At five seconds to go she keyed the mike on her walkie-talkie and said:

‘Thumb re-entry T minus five seconds.’

She climbed into the cupboard, shut the door to nothing more than a crack, and signalled to the Hoffmans. They nodded sagely and began the routine they had rehearsed down the road at Tesco’s, where the Scissor-man had no influence. Mr Hoffman, in an overly dramatic fashion, said:

‘We’re going to leave you here to finish your soup on your own, Conrad. Don’t play with those matches, don’t lean back on your chair and don’t you dare suck your thumb when our backs are turned!’

They sighed, walked out of the kitchen and closed the door behind them. Conrad was now alone in the kitchen with only Mary watching through a crack in the cupboard door. He stared at his thumb for a moment, having never even contemplated sucking it – not since he was first warned about the Scissor-man. His father had a missing thumb to prove the wisdom of this course, and Conrad was always careful to avoid getting his thumb anywhere near his mouth just in case the Scissor-man should make a mistake.

He paused for a moment, thumb outstretched, and looked at Mary again. She nodded to him and smiled. If they were to catch the Scissor-man, this was the only way. After wavering for a few more seconds, Conrad opened his mouth and in went the thumb. He paused for a few moments then obediently carried out the plan they had rehearsed. He leaned back on his chair, idly struck a match and said petulantly: ‘I don’t want my soup!’

Jack and Ashley were outside the car and looking about attentively at the time the thumb went in. There was a distant rumble of thunder and somewhere a dog barked. Other than that, nothing seemed unusual.

‘What does the Great Red-Legg’d Scissor-man look like?’ asked Ashley.

‘Tall, red-legged – carries a huge pair of scissors. Believe me, you’ll know him when you see him.’

Ashley looked down at his own hands. He had three fingers and two opposable thumbs on each hand, and any of them would grow back if lost. The idea of a thumb not growing back hadn’t occurred to him until that morning.

Gretel and Baker were alert but like Jack and Ashley they found that this was to no avail. No Scissor-man – nothing. The night was clear and crisp and the moon had risen, so it was easy to see. There was nothing to be discerned in either the Hoffmans’ garden or in any of the next-door gardens. There shouldn’t have been, anyway. The entire neighbourhood had been evacuated for the operation. Only personnel involved in the sting were in residence.

‘Gretel?’ came Mary’s voice over the radio. ‘Anything your end?’

‘Nothing,’ she replied.

‘Stay put,’ came in Jack’s voice, ‘we wait. Mary, is Conrad still sucking his thumb?’

Mary looked out of the cupboard and confirmed that, yes, he was still sucking his thumb, not eating his soup and leaning back on his chair while playing with matches, something that he was actually finding great fun. They waited five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Nothing. Mr Hoffman put his head around the door.

‘Is anything happening?’

‘No, sir. We must be patient.’

Mr Hoffman said: ‘Okay,’ and shut the door again. Every minute Mary would ask for a status report, and after twenty reports in as many minutes she keyed the mike and said in an exasperated tone:

‘Jack, when was the last cautionary-related crime?’

Jack turned to Ashley. The alien had many talents, but only a few that might have been considered useful. One that definitely had its uses was his total recall.

‘Five-day accelerated starvation due to soup refusal, 9 July 1978. Single thumbectomy on 23 December 1979. A fatal house fire on the night of 26 January 1985 may have been matchplay-related, but it was never proved.’

Jack relayed the information to Mary, who replied:

‘Twenty-five years since the last definite scissoring – what if he’s retired or inactive or something?’

‘You mean Cautionary Valley has been living in terror for over two decades when they needn’t have?’ said Gretel from her position in the back garden. ‘I’d be a bit pissed off if that was the case.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ replied Jack, ‘but only that. I say we give it another half-hour, then abort and go away for a rethink – Briggs will have something to say about the overtime as it is.’

Everyone radioed in their agreement and all was quiet again.

‘Gretel?’ said Baker in the potting shed.

‘What?’ replied Gretel, who was thinking about tall babies. ‘You’re a woman.’

‘I know this.’

‘Yes, well,’ he said a bit awkwardly, ‘I just wondered – do you think Pippa would go out on a date if I asked her?’

‘You mean beautiful Pippa in the control room? No.’

‘What do you mean, “No”?’

‘I mean “No” as in “No, I don’t think she’d go out with you”.’

‘You might have paused for thought or something,’ said Baker in an affronted tone, ‘or been ambiguous – to save my feelings, y’know.’

‘Sorry. You ask a question and I answer it,’ replied Gretel simply; she had a reputation for directness that sometimes didn’t sit well with higher authority. ‘I’ll tell you why. Remember that time you sneezed on her?’

‘It wasn’t just her.’

‘I know. It’s just that girls don’t really like that sort of thing.’

Baker nodded slowly. He’d suspected for a while that they might not. Still, he never thought it really fair to have a girlfriend, since he had only six months to live. The thing was, he’d had only six months to live for over thirteen years now.

‘Hmm,’ said Charlie, half to himself, ‘I think I need a doctor who’ll give me a year to live.’

‘Do you like it here?’ Jack asked Ashley. They were leaning on the car but still keeping a close lookout on the front of the house.

‘Here, in this street?’

‘No, Ashley, this planet.’

‘Most agreeable,’ replied Ashley happily. ‘The filing is excellent, the sitcoms top notch and bureaucracy to die for. But by far and away the best feature is your digital mobile phone networks. We can taste the binary data stream in the air. It gives your cities a favourably congenial atmosphere – to you, something like the bouquet of a fine wine.’

Mary was beginning to get a bit uncomfortable inside the cupboard, and she looked at her watch with increased frequency, willing the hands to move faster so they could all go home. She shifted to get more comfortable, the door swung shut and there was a soft click.

‘Blast!’ she muttered as she gently pushed the door. It was no good. It was shut fast.

‘Jack,’ came Mary’s embarrassed voice over the walkie-talkie, ‘I’ve just locked myself in the cupboard and I can’t see the kitchen any more. Can we abort?’

Jack looked around. The street was empty and quiet. He’d said they’d stay until midnight and he liked to be true to his word.

‘No,’ he said to Mary over the radio as he walked through the garden gate.

‘Sir,’ came Gretel’s voice over the airwaves, ‘it’s just a thought but my mother told me never to hide in cupboards in case . . . I was locked in.’

Jack looked around again. It had been quiet before but now it seemed somehow even quieter. There was no distant hum of traffic – nothing. It was as though Cautionary Valley was suddenly an island, cast adrift from the rest of Reading, and the world. He’d felt it before in the same place twenty-five years earlier. He shivered with the onset of a cold breeze and his breath showed in the night air. He brought the radio to his mouth and whispered:

‘He’s here.’

He signalled to Ashley to stay put, ran a circuitous route to the front door and entered the house. When he opened the kitchen door he stopped short as there was a small conflagration on the kitchen table. The matches Conrad had been playing with had caught fire with an impossibly bright flame and were now rapidly burning a path up the table to where the boy sat, rooted to the spot with fear. They’d thought of this. Jack killed the fire with a handy extinguisher, opened the cupboard door to let Mary out, then barked to Conrad:

‘The thumb – back in!’

In his panic the boy had stopped sucking his thumb, but obediently did as he was told. No sooner was the thumb back in when the back door was flung violently open, and before Jack and Mary could even blink a wild-eyed figure in crimson trousers leapt in brandishing a giant pair of gold scissors. With expert precision the tips of the scissors closed around Conrad’s thumb and the Scissor-man would doubtless have snipped it off and been gone again in a flash if Jack hadn’t shouted:

‘HOLD IT!’

The Scissor-man froze. His bloodshot eyes darted towards Jack with a mixture of fear and insanity. He looked gaunt and pale with an untidy shock of nicotine-stained hair; a tailor’s tape measure hung from the pocket of his bottle-green jacket.

‘DCI Spratt,’ continued Jack as he held up his ID. ‘Nursery Crime Division. You’re under arrest. STEP AWAY FROM THE THUMB.’

The Scissor-man glared at Jack, then at the thumb, then at Mary. His eyes twitched and his long bony fingers clasped the outsize scissors even more firmly. Jack could see that the tips of the scissors were clasped around Conrad’s thumb; the flesh was white where the blades held it tight. Even the slightest pressure would take it off.

‘I’m not kidding,’ said Jack slowly in his best authoritarian voice. ‘Drop the scissors. We can plea-bargain this down to possession of an offensive weapon.’

‘Snip!’ snarled the Scissor-man, a wild grin on his lips revealing several rotten teeth, ‘snip-snap! The thumbs are off – alas, alack!’

He tensed, ready to cut.

‘Cut that thumb off and you’re doing serious time,’ said Jack, hoping against hope that the others would initiate phase two without him. They should know what was going on; his finger had been pressed tightly on the ‘transmit’ button since the Scissor-man had so dramatically entered the kitchen. ‘Put down the scissors and we can talk.’

In reply the Scissor-man made a wild snip in Jack’s direction, then returned the scissors to Conrad’s thumb. The whole movement took less than a second, and Jack didn’t know what the madman had done until he saw that his tie had been neatly severed and was lying on the floor at his feet. If it came to a fight, they were in trouble. But at that moment, as Conrad’s continued relationship with his thumb was looking at its most precarious, the floodlights came on in the front garden and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. The Scissor-man screamed in rage and shock. On the lawn outside were six more children, all waving at him with their thumbs in their mouths.

Jack and Mary didn’t waste a moment. With the Scissor-man momentarily distracted Mary jammed her walkie-talkie in the jaws of the scissors as Jack pushed Conrad out into the hallway. The Scissor-man glared at Mary, gave an unintelligible cry and severed the radio in two with a metallic snick before bounding out of the front door – and straight into a pit covered with a sheet of painted brown paper in the front garden. In a vain attempt to save himself he had let go of his precious scissors, which flew through the air in a graceful arc before embedding themselves in a tree.

As the Scissor-man snarled and snapped and whined in the pit, jumping up and trying to scrabble out, Mary and Jack ran into the front garden at the same time as the neighbours appeared to take their children home. It had been an excellent plan, and unlike many other excellent NCD plans, it had worked.

‘Have we missed something?’ asked Baker as he and Gretel appeared from the back garden, where they had seen the grand sum of precisely nothing. Jack nodded towards the pit where the Great Red-Legg’d Scissor-man cursed at them in the most loathsome language imaginable.

‘He looks kind of puny without the scissors, doesn’t he?’ said Jack as they all stared down at him. ‘I’ll toss you for who gets to put the cuffs on.’

The Scissor-man stopped yelling and screaming as he had suddenly noticed a small, accidentally self-inflicted cut on his hand.

‘Snip!’ he said to himself in dismay. ‘Cut myself – bad – wrong!’

‘How apt,’ murmured Jack, ‘Mr Red-Legg’d Scissor-man . . . you’re nicked.’