The Fourth Bear

by Jasper Fforde

  “Briggs just called to change his mind about the Gingerbread inquiry?”

  “No—much better. I’ve finally managed to complete my beer-mat collection. I’ve got them all. Every single one.”

  “That’s…wonderful news,” said Jack in an absent sort of way. Ashley was best humored, and since he didn’t really get sarcasm, he never took offense. “Any messages?”

  “Of course. You’ve got one from the Force Medical Officer requesting that you attend a hearing with an independent psychiatric evaluator tomorrow, then another, also from the FMO, informing you that you shouldn’t be at work to receive these messages and suggesting you go home and watch a few reruns of Kojak.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No,” replied Ashley, “but I think the FMO is wrong.”

  “That’s very good of you to say so, Ash.”

  “Not at all. Kojak is entirely the wrong show to be watching for relaxation. We watched your TV a lot back home on Rambosia, and Kojak was never our thing.”

  “No?” replied Jack without humor.

  “No. All that lollipop and ‘Who loves ya, baby?’ stuff—and the singing career? What was that all about? No, we always preferred Jim Rockford—especially Noah Beery, who played his father. I suggest you watch The Rockford Files.”

  “You and Briggs should have a chat,” said Jack, glaring at the small alien. “He thought I should be watching Columbo.”

  “That’s good, too,” mused Ashley. “A bit unusual for a whodunit, since we always knew in the first five minutes who had done it. Perhaps it should be called a ‘howcolumbofindsoutwhodunit’—”

  “What about my other messages?” interrupted Jack before Ashley gave him a rundown of every single U.S. cop drama of the seventies, a subject on which he was something of an expert.

  “Nothing else. These are all for Mary.” He passed a large stack of yellow message slips to her and added, “They’re from Arnold.”

  “Blast,” murmured Mary. She had been trying to dump Arnold for several years now, but without success, despite trying almost everything from feigned death to pretending she had the bubonic plague, for which she was grateful to Baker for being able to furnish a complete list of symptoms. “I thought I had it once,” Baker had said, mildly disappointed.

  “Do you want me to speak to him again?” asked Jack.

  “No thanks,” replied Mary, recalling the mess he had made of it the last time.

  “Are we on the Gingerbreadman hunt?” asked Ashley.

  “No.”

  “Are we going to do a plot device number 11010?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to see my beer-mat collection?” asked Ashley, in a state of some excitement. “It might cheer you up.”

  “You wouldn’t get them all in here, would you?” asked Jack, looking around at the diminutive offices.

  “On the contrary,” replied Ashley, blinking laterally and producing a shoe box from under the table. “They’re in here.”

  “How many do you have?” asked Jack, suddenly suspicious.

  “100100001.”

  “One hundred and forty-five?”

  “Yes. Every single one different—except an Arkley’s Bitter 2003 Drunk-Driving Warning Special, of which I have two.”

  “You tell him, Mary,” said Jack wearily. The phone rang, and he picked it up. “Spratt, NCD.”

  He listened for a moment and then sat back and twiddled absently with his tie.

  “Yes, there is some good news, Mrs. Dish. Your daughter has turned up in Gretna Green…. Gretna, yes, as in Green. Are you sitting down?…Good. Well, she’s married to Wallace Spoon.” Jack winced and held the receiver a little farther from his ear before continuing. “No, there are no grounds for criminal proceedings unless you can prove to us that she was forced into marriage, which she personally told me she wasn’t…. No, Mrs. Dish, I’m afraid not. The police have stopped ‘teaching people a lesson’ for quite some time now…. This isn’t a police matter, Mrs. Dish…. Yes, I’m sure the cow will be over the moon. Good day, Mrs. Dish.”

  He put the phone down and shook his head sadly.

  “How many different ones?” asked Ashley in a shocked tone.

  “Perhaps more,” explained Mary apologetically, “probably tens of thousands.”

  Ashley opened his eyes so wide you could see the greens.

  “But that could take years!”

  Jack passed Mary the address that Tarquin had scribbled out for him. “Check this out. See if it’s for real and who might be leasing the unit if it is.”

  The phone rang again.

  “Spratt, NCD.”

  “It’s for you, Mary.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I think it’s Arnold.”

  “Do you want me to speak to him?” asked Ashley.

  “Would you? Tell him anything.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  Ash took the phone from Jack and said, “Hello, Arnold, PC Ashley here. Mary can’t have a date with you because she’s going out with me. Yes, with me. No, we’re going dancing that evening. She didn’t want to tell you because she thought it might hurt your feelings. Yes, I am the weird alien chappie and no, this isn’t some kind of sick joke—she’ll confirm it herself. Mary?”

  He held the receiver up, and Mary yelled, “Yes, it’s true!”

  “Sorry about that, Arnold,” continued Ashley. “No, that’s not true at all. It must have been someone else doing the abductions. And while we’re on the subject, a saucer is entirely the wrong shape for interstellar travel—they were probably hubcaps or something. Good day.”

  And he put the phone down.

  “How was that?”

  “Very…straightforward.”

  “Best like that. I was kidding about the dancing, by the way—I dance very badly, on account of my liquid-filled physiology. Shake me up and I tend to hallucinate. Driving over a cattle grid at speed has the same effect. But dinner would be pleasant. We’ll arrange something, right?”

  “R-r-r-ight,” replied Mary, unsure of whether he was kidding or not, but she had never really known Ash to make a joke, so she suspected not.

  The phone rang again. It was Briggs, wanting to know what Jack was doing answering the phones at the NCD when he was on sick leave. Jack replied that he’d popped in to collect his things and promised to be out of the station in ten minutes.

  “Knowing Briggs, he might come down here to check,” observed Mary.

  “Right,” said Jack reluctantly, fidgeting and hunting for some papers to shuffle or something.

  “Ash and I can look after the office. If Copperfield calls with any questions over the psychocake, I’ll get him to call your cell phone.”

  “O-o-okay,” said Jack. “We’ll check out Tarquin’s porridge contact first thing tomorrow morning—and just so there’s no confusion, the Gingerbreadman’s a cookie.”

  “Cake.”

  “Cookie.”

  “A cake goes hard when it goes stale,” explained Jack as he got up, “and a cookie goes soft. That’s the difference. He’s pliable, so he’s a cookie—and I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

  There was a pause as Ashley and Mary considered the feasibility of Jack’s cake/cookie definition.

  “But it’s not all bad,” Jack added from the door. “At least the Gingerbreadman gives the papers something to write about other than the Riding-Hood debacle. Good bye.”

  And he left the two of them staring at each other. Mary was thinking about how she’d never even considered going on a date with Ashley, and Ashley was thinking about how he’d been trying to pluck up enough courage for weeks.

  8. Noisy Neighbors

  Most noise-abatement orders served: Heavy-metal-loving Mr. and Mrs. Scroggins and their seventeen hyper-actively argumentative children have often been referred to as “the noisiest group of sentient beings yet discovered by man” and were moved to a special pro-noise council estate on the Heathrow fli
ght path, until neighbors complained that they couldn’t hear the jetliners anymore. Their collective 179 noise-abatement orders pale into insignificance, however, when compared to Mr. and Mrs. Punch of Berkshire, who have notched up 326 orders in the past forty-five years and also hold the record for “loudest argument in a restaurant” and the “longest nonstop bicker,” which lasted for three hours and twenty-eight minutes at a sustained level of 43.2 decibels.

  —The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

  Jack was right: The evening editions of The Mole, The Toad and The Owl covered little else but the Gingerbreadman’s dramatic escape, along with lurid accounts of what he had got up to the last time he was free. The scaremongering that had begun on the radio was thus reinforced, and by nightfall panic buying had occasioned the systematic emptying of every food store and gas station in town, causing several shopkeepers to comment in private that they wished a dangerous homicidal maniac would escape every week.

  Jack pulled up outside his house in the north of the town and locked the Allegro. His neighbor Mrs. Sittkomm was staring inquisitively over the fence as she pretended to take in the washing. But she wasn’t looking at Jack—she was looking beyond him to the house attached to Jack’s on the other side.

  “There goes the neighborhood,” she muttered with barely concealed venom.

  Jack followed her look to where a moving van was disgorging a procession of carefully taped cardboard boxes. “Ah!” said Jack. “Our new neighbors. Any idea who they are?”

  Mrs. Sittkomm stared at him and then ran through the gamut of severe English disapproval. She started with a slow shake of the head, went on to raised eyebrows and a glare, then ended with an audible tut. She beckoned him closer and hissed under her breath, “Nurseries!”

  “Which ones?” asked Jack, more through professional interest than anything else.

  “You’ll see,” said Mrs. Sittkomm scornfully. “They’ve no right to be living with decent real people. They’ll bring house prices down, you see if they don’t.”

  “Bears?” asked Jack curiously.

  “Mercifully not,” replied Mrs. Sittkomm with a snort. “I had a bear as a lodger once; took six months to get the smell of porridge out of the spare room—and the honey in the carpet…”

  She didn’t finish her sentence and just signaled that her contempt was total by rolling her eyes, shrugging and looking to heaven all at once, a curious maneuver that reminded Jack of a stage contortionist he had once seen.

  Jack left Mrs. Sittkomm to her twisted moral dilemma, walked along the street to his new neighbors’ house and rang the doorbell.

  A florid-looking woman in a flower-patterned dress answered the door. She had large, exaggerated features, unblinking eyes and a shiny, almost varnished complexion. She also had several bruises on her face and one arm in a sling.

  “Mrs. Punch…?” said Jack, recognizing her immediately. She and her husband were well known to him and the NCD. Although their constant fights were no one’s business but their own, Jack was always concerned that they might throw the baby downstairs, something they had been threatening for over thirty years but fortunately had not yet done.

  “Inspector!” screeched Judy, staring at Jack as though he were something you might tread on in the local park. “What the bloody hell do you want?”

  “I’m not here on business, Mrs. Punch. I live next door—and keep your voice down. I’m only a yard away.”

  “Nuts to that!” she screamed, so loudly that several pieces of saliva exploded from her mouth with such force that Jack had to step aside to let them pass. “Lazy bastard of a husband!” she shouted over her shoulder into the house. She waited with extreme patience for perhaps a half second for him to appear, and when he didn’t, she screamed “HUS-BAAAAND!” so loudly that Jack felt his ears pop, and one of the flowerpots in the garden shattered. Presently, and with the slow, almost reptilian movement of the worst kind of loafer, Mr. Punch appeared, dressed in his traditional red tunic and hat. His features were more exaggerated than his wife’s, his complexion more florid, shinier and uglier. He had a large hooked nose that curved down to almost touch his upwardly hooked chin, and his long, thin mouth was curled into a permanent leer. He wore a small pointed hat and had heaped upon his back a hump that was as pointed as his chin, nose or hat. He also had several bruises on his face, and one eye was puffy and black. He had an infant clasped to his chest in a typical crossed-arms Punch pose and was rocking the baby back and forth in an aggressive manner. Jack stood and stared at Punch and Judy, trying to figure out which one he disliked least—it was a tricky contest.

  “Bloody hell!” said Punch in an annoying, high-pitched voice. He opened his glassy eyes wide in shock and grinned even more broadly to reveal two long rows of perfectly varnished teeth. “The pig-bastard baby snatcher! What the ****ing hell do you want?”

  “I live next door,” said Jack, “and keep your voice down. If I ever hear you swear without asterisk substitution, I’ll arrest you for offensive and threatening language.”

  “Like I g*ve a shit!” screamed Mr. Punch, tossing the sleeping baby into a pram and picking up a handy baseball bat.

  Jack stood his ground. “Drop the bat or you’re under arrest.”

  “It’s not for you!” screeched Mr. Punch. “It’s for my lazy scumbag of a wife. Where’s my dinner, trout-lips?”

  Judy expertly ducked the baseball bat that quickly followed. Mr. Punch, thrown off balance by her quick maneuver, left his flank unguarded, an opportunity quickly grasped by Judy, who thumped him painfully in his already badly bruised eye. Mr. Punch gave a scream of pain, but Judy hadn’t finished. She grabbed his arm, twisted it around so hard he had to drop the bat, which fell with a clatter to the floor, then stamped on his knee from the side. He collapsed in a groaning heap near the still-sleeping baby.

  “I’ll get your bloody dinner when I bloody feel like it!” she screamed, and trod on his hand as she stepped over him.

  “Are you okay?” asked Jack.

  “Never better!” he gasped, his painted grin not for one second leaving his face. “Terrific lass, Judy. Very…spirited.”

  “Very,” said Jack, thinking that if Judy hadn’t ducked the baseball bat, she would be unconscious, or worse. Still, this was what they did. What they had always done. For over three hundred years, they had beaten the living blue blazes out of each other for the joyous edification of the masses. Of course, what with the changing attitudes to marriage, women and respect for the law, Punch couldn’t actually kill anyone anymore, but the violent slapstick remained. He had for centuries been a source of lighthearted entertainment, but his star was now low on the horizon, and he was seen more as a misogynistic social pariah than an icon of antiestablishment dissent—especially in any neighborhood in which he lived. It wasn’t his fault the world had moved on; today’s Punch was a fly in amber, a fossilized pop-culture relic from a bygone era.

  “I’m too old for this endless fighting crap,” he said mournfully, wincing as he struggled to his feet. “Want to come in for a beer? We could chat about the good old days—do you still do your ‘Jack Sprat / eat no fat’ routine?”

  Jack’s heart nearly bounced out of his chest. He’d hidden it for so long that he’d almost forgotten that he was himself a PDR—a Person of Dubious Reality.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said defensively. “I’m as real as the next man. Besides, that Jack Sprat is spelled with one t—I have two.”

  “Oh, right,” said Mr. Punch with a smirk. “In denial, are we? Got anything against PDRs?”

  “No,” said Jack hurriedly. “Some of my best friends are PDRs. But I’m not and never have been—okay?”

  “Okay, okay,” said Punch, winking. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “There’s no secret. I don’t know what you mean, really I don’t,” responded Jack, complaining perhaps a little too forcefully. “Maybe another time for the beer—and keep the fighting down, yes?”

/>   “I’ll try,” said Mr. Punch, with all the conviction of a weak-willed recovering alcoholic being offered a shot of Jack Daniel’s, “but you know how it is.”

  “Look what I’ve just found,” said Judy, returning to the door as though nothing had happened and holding a broken dinner plate. “It’s the first piece of crockery I ever threw at you. See, I wrote the date on the back.”

  They smiled and then hugged, gingerly trying to avoid the bruised areas on each other’s bodies.

  “Fish pie, sweetheart?” said Judy.

  “Sounds perfect, my cherub.”

  And she picked up the baby and walked back inside the house.

  “Well then,” said Jack, still firmly rattled by Punch’s comments over his PDRness. If Punch knew, how many others? His first wife knew because she’d been one, too—the “wife who could eat no lean”—but his second wife, Madeleine, had no idea, which on reflection was a big mistake. You can’t and shouldn’t keep those sorts of secrets from loved ones.

  “So,” he added, swallowing a rising feeling of panic, “enjoy your…um…evening.”

  “Th-thank you,” said Punch, gently closing the front door behind him. Jack walked back down the garden path to the sound of breaking crockery and a scream from Judy that transformed mid-wail into a lascivious giggle.

  Jack took a deep breath to calm himself, opened his own kitchen door and walked in. “Honey,” he said, “I’m home!”

  “Wotcha, Dad,” said Ben, his nose firmly wedged into a copy of Conspiracy Theorist magazine, something in which he had a particular interest. He had been overwhelmed when he learned that his dad had an alien working for him, but underwhelmed when he actually met him. Instead of talking about faster-than-light travel and wormholes, Ash had droned on at length about seventies Datsun motorcars, collectible plates and who he thought was the best Cartwright on Bonanza.

  “Hi, Ben,” replied Jack. “Yeti populations holding steady?”

  “Pretty much. Hear about the explosion up at Obscurity?”