Mary’s voice came out with a twinge of apprehension in it that triggered the hairs on the back of her neck to prickle, and she shivered. The hot, sweet smell was stronger, and she took a deep breath and slowly climbed the stairs. When she reached the tenth step, it creaked ominously, and she stopped to listen. There was silence for a moment and then a strange sound of destructive tearing, as though someone were undertaking some form of localized demolition. Then silence—followed by the noise of water escaping under pressure. She frowned. This definitely wasn’t right. While she stood on the stairs undecided whether to return to Jack or continue forward, the door upstairs exploded off its hinges as a cast-iron bathtub full of water was thrown through it. It was hurled with such force that the tub, taps, soap and several loofahs all sailed clean over her head and landed in the hall below with a teeth-jarring crash as the iron bathtub shattered, unleashing a flood of water across the parquet flooring. She was not so lucky with the bidet that quickly followed. It caught her on the shoulder and pitched her on a painful and untidy tumble down the stairs, where she ended up, bruised, winded and mildly concussed in a pool of cold, soapy bathwater. She looked up, but her vision was blurred and all she could see was a large brown object at the top of the stairs. Her assailant bounded down the stairs four at a time, landing with one large foot on Mary’s hand. She winced, expecting pain, but none came. The foot that had landed on her hand was soft and spongy. And the smell. Hot and sweet, but not honey—ginger.
Jack was sitting in the Allegro, speaking on his cell phone.
“How many?”
There was a pause.
“100010 °Currys in Reading,” repeated Ashley. “Now what?”
“That’s sixty-eight,” Jack muttered to himself. “Okay, we need to eliminate a few. Find out their ages and take out anyone under sixteen and over sixty-five. Sorry, that’s—let me think—anyone under 10000 and—Whoa!”
A movement in the house caught his eye, and a second later the Gingerbreadman came bounding out and with a single stride from the middle of the front garden cleared both the garden gate and the Allegro. He landed in the street in front of a car that swerved violently and hit a mailbox. He then ran off down the road in a series of large, powerful strides.
Jack started the car and tore off in pursuit, shouting into the phone to Ashley, “Tell Copperfield I’m following the Gingerbreadman west down Radnor Road!”
Jack accelerated rapidly, the Allegro’s more-powerful-than-usual-but-still-a-bit-crappy engine howling enthusiastically. The Gingerbreadman was running up the middle of the road at an incredible rate; Jack was hitting forty and still wasn’t catching up. The Gingerbreadman didn’t stop at the next road junction, and Jack chanced it likewise. The Gingerbreadman was lucky, Jack less so. A car was approaching the junction at speed and clipped Jack’s Allegro in the rear, causing him to careen sideways; he overcorrected and slewed the other way, bounced along a row of parked cars with the sound of tearing metal and the clatter of broken sideview mirrors. He yanked the wheel hard over and recovered, dropped down a gear and floored the accelerator as the Gingerbreadman ran off around the corner.
“Turning left into Silverdale Road!” shouted Jack as he cornered hard, the tires screeching in protest as they desperately tried to cling to the asphalt. The Gingerbreadman ducked down an alley, and Jack followed, oblivious to any damage that he might possibly inflict on the car. He caught a post on the way in and bent a suspension arm; the car vibrated violently as he turned left toward a block of garages and drove over a low brick wall that tore the front wheel off, shattered the windshield and pushed the engine back into the scuttle with a metallic crunch. The car came to a halt over the rubble of the demolished wall, one rear wheel in the air. The engine died with a shudder. Ahead of him the Gingerbreadman had stopped running and just stood with his hands on his hips, with a detached curiosity regarding the wreck of the car teetering on the broken masonry. There was an unnatural silence after the sudden excitement; the only sound to be heard was the hiss of the radiator and the tick-tick-tick of the engine as it cooled.
Jack fumbled with his phone and yelped into it, “Garages behind Crawford Close, and get a car to 7 Radnor Road for—Ahhh!”
The Gingerbreadman had lunged forward, plucked the handset from Jack and crushed it between a massive thumb and forefinger. Jack looked up as the Gingerbreadman loomed over him. He was seven feet tall, broad at the shoulder and massively powerful, despite being less than four inches thick. His glacé cherry eyes burned with unhinged intellect, and his licorice mouth curled into a cruel smile. He was enjoying himself for the first time in a quarter of a century and had no intention of returning to St. Cerebellum’s.
“Hello, Inspector,” said the Gingerbreadman, his voice a low, cakey rumble. “How are things with you?”
“At this precise moment? Not terrific,” replied Jack, his hand feeling for the nightstick he always kept hidden between the seats. “What about you?”
“Prison? Oh, I can take it or leave it.”
“So I see.”
“Aren’t you going to arrest me?” asked the Gingerbreadman with a chuckle.
“Would there be any point?”
“Not really. You—”
Jack pulled out the nightstick and made a wild, desperate swipe in the direction of the psychopath’s head. The blow stopped short as the Gingerbreadman caught it in midair, wrenched it from Jack’s grasp and snapped it like a breadstick. He was fast—astonishingly so.
“Any other bright ideas?” inquired the Gingerbreadman, raising his licorice eyebrows questioningly and giving out a whiff of ginger.
Jack scrabbled across the passenger seat, kicked the door open, rolled out and made a run for it. He wasn’t quick enough. The Gingerbreadman bounded across the car, grabbed Jack’s arm and twisted it around into a half nelson.
“Although I swore to do unsfzpxkable things to you twenty years ago when you caught me,” he whispered in Jack’s ear, the pungent smell of his gingery breath almost overpowering, “I’m not going to.”
“Why not?” grunted Jack.
“Only the Sicilians know how to do vengeance properly,” he said. “The rest of us are really just groping in the dark, to be honest. Random homicide, on the other hand, has a wonderful arbitrary feel to it, don’t you think? The choice between giving or taking life is the ultimate exercise of power, and for you, today, here and now, I choose… life. Cross my path again and you won’t find me so charitable.”
He then picked Jack up as though he weighed nothing at all and threw him bodily through the wooden doors of a nearby garage. He smiled again, gave a cheery wave and with a short run and a single leap cleared a nearby wall, then ran through the next five gardens as though they were a series of hurdles, vanishing over the last with a stylish Fosbury flop.
“Are you all right?” asked a kindly lady who had come out to see what the commotion was all about. Jack sat up among the remains of the garage door and blinked. He rubbed his neck and winced as his fingers discovered a painful cut at the back of his head.
“I’ll be all right—thank you.”
The kindly lady smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”
The first of the squad cars arrived two minutes later as Jack emerged from the garage. It had been empty, which was perhaps just as well.
“Where did he go, sir?” asked Sergeant Fox.
“He’s long gone,” murmured Jack, leaning on a corner of his Allegro. “There’s nothing here but a bruised DCI.”
He carefully unclipped his tie and threw it onto the backseat of the Allegro, then executed a neat double take. The car didn’t have a single scratch on it. The front wheel was back on, the windshield mended, and the side that had scraped down the line of parked cars had miraculously mended itself. The car was perfect in every detail, with no evidence at all of the grueling punishment it had received not more than five minutes before. It seemed that Dorian Gray’s “guarantee” hadn’t
been an idle boast. Jack was looking at the oil painting in the trunk—that of the even more wrecked Allegro—when Copperfield drove up with two other squad cars that disgorged police marksmen in a seemingly never-ending stream.
“You look as though someone insane just threw you through a door,” said Copperfield without any sense of irony.
“Funnily enough,” said Jack, shutting the trunk and sitting on the broken wall, “that’s exactly what he did.”
Copperfield whistled. He had read the reports about the Gingerbreadman’s phenomenal strength, but it had to be seen to be believed. He started to arrange a search pattern in nearby streets, but Jack wasn’t confident of any success. He had seen the Gingerbreadman run at speeds of up to forty miles an hour and not even be out of breath.
“I thought you were on sick leave?” said Copperfield. “And undergoing psychological assessment?”
“No secrets in the station, are there? It’s called counseling. And I just happened to be in the area with Mary.” He suddenly remembered and sat bolt upright. “Mary…?”
Jack jumped into the Allegro and made his way back to Radnor Road, where he found her sitting in the back of an ambulance with a red blanket draped across her shoulders.
“You all right?”
She nodded. “Bruised. He chucked a bathtub full of water at me.”
“How can he chuck a tubful of water?”
“With the bath still surrounding the water on most sides, quite easily. You?”
“He threw me into a lockup garage.”
“Lucky the doors were open.”
“They weren’t. I lost him a mile away.”
He sat down next to her as she related what had happened.
“The owner of the flat?”
“She’s dead—wallpapered over in the spare room. Good job, too. Despite the lumpiness, all the pattern matched up, and he’d bothered to line it first. No one does that anymore—not even the really class decorators.”
“Another one for the Gingerbreadman,” sighed Jack. “That makes one hundred and eight victims.” He thought for a moment.
“Any bears living here?”
“None—not even a small one. If Goldilocks was the Goldilocks, she kept herself to a conventional neighborhood.”
“Listen,” said Jack, “where NS-4 is involved, we can’t trust anyone. We keep the Goldilocks thing to ourselves. I was cadging a ride, and you were here checking on a potential ursine residential license infringement. You didn’t find anything.”
“Got it.”
She shook her head sadly. “Not really fair, is it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Getting the stuffing kicked out of us when it’s not even our investigation.”
12. Gingery Aftertaste
The only known human able to speak binary: Owing to the complexity of binary, the speed at which it is spoken and the way in which the rules of grammar and pronunciation change almost daily and for no apparent reason, few humans have ever progressed beyond simple phrases such as “hello,” “good-bye,” “Can you direct me toward galaxy C-672?” and “My aunt is comprised chiefly of stardust.” But utilizing a “total immersion” system of learning, Dr. Colin Parrot of Warwick University successfully mastered basic binary and can converse, but with a limited vocabulary and at only one-thousandth the speed. “Colin did jolly well,” said his teacher, friend and mentor, Adrian 1001010111111101010. “His language skills are about on a par with those of a programmable toaster. Given a couple of years more, he’ll be able to have an intelligent one-on-one with a dishwasher.”
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition
Jack and Mary were driven to the emergency room, where Jack had three stitches in his head. Copperfield and Briggs were waiting to question them when they got back to the station, the military and tactical firearms squads now very much in evidence.
The first thing Briggs said was, “I thought you were at home watching reruns of Columbo, Jack.”
“Mary was driving me to my counseling session and stopped off on the way—an NCD matter.”
Briggs turned to Mary. “Is this true?”
“Yes, sir. A possible ursine residential license infringement.”
“The Gingerbreadman is not an NCD investigation, Sergeant. You know that.”
“It was a coincidence, sir,” she responded confidently.
“Do you think I would be crazy enough to tackle him on my own?”
“Perhaps not you,” said Briggs, glancing at Jack. Briggs thought for a moment and narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t plot device number twenty-seven, is it?” he asked suspiciously.
“The one where my partner gets killed in a drug bust gone wrong and I throw in my badge and go rogue?” replied Jack innocently. “I don’t think so, sir.”
“No, not that one,” countered Briggs in a state of some confusion. “The one where you try and find the Gingerbreadman on the sly and make Copperfield and me look like idiots.”
“That would be a twenty-nine, wouldn’t it?” put in Mary, who wasn’t going to miss out on the fun.
“No, no,” said Jack, “Briggs means a twenty-six. A twenty-nine is where the bad guy turns out quite inexplicably to be the immediate superior.”
“A twenty-six,” said Briggs, “yes, that’s the one.”
“What about it?”
“You’re not doing one, are you?”
“No, sir,” replied Jack. “I’m suspended awaiting a psychological appraisal, and I don’t know what plot device that is.”
“Got to be well over a hundred,” suggested Mary helpfully.
Briggs looked at them both for a moment. He shrugged, seemingly satisfied. “Okay. Copperfield has some questions.”
He left them to the Inspector, who took infinitely detailed statements. The Gingerbreadman had been at liberty for less than twenty-four hours and had already killed once.
“Do you have any idea where he is now?” asked Jack, who wanted to keep abreast of what was going on.
“We’re searching the local area,” replied Copperfield in a businesslike tone. “He won’t get far.”
“He’s long gone,” said Jack with a sigh. “He’ll run and run and you won’t catch him. No one will ever catch him. He has to make a mistake—or be tricked.”
“How would you know that?” asked Copperfield.
“I’m NCD. I know these things. It will take more than a platoon of highly trained killing machines to bring him down.”
Copperfield leaned closer. “What then?”
“Get inside his head. Think what he thinks. Figure out what you might do if you were a gingerbreadman.”
Copperfield stared at Jack, then burst out laughing. “You’re kidding, right? Thanks for nothing. You can go.”
Ashley was waiting for them when they got back to the NCD office, and when he saw them, he went even bluer that he usually was.
“I’m glad to see you’re not mutilated in any way,” he said. “A missing arm might ruin your symmetry. Personal asymmetry where I come from is a big taboo and brings great shame on the family and sometimes even the whole village.”
“Do you then have to kill yourself over it or something?”
“Goodness me, no! The family and village just have to learn to be ashamed—and nuts to them for being so oversensitive.”
“I see. Well, thanks for relaying the messages.”
Jack sat down and looked at the eighty or so pointless e-mails that were in his in-box while Ashley scuttled up to Mary.
“And you are well, too, Mary?”
“I’m fine, Ash. A bit bruised, but I’ll live. Um… were you serious about that date?”
He blinked again. “Yes—weren’t you?”
“Of course,” replied Mary, her nerve failing her.
Jack deleted the e-mails en masse and said, “Ash, did you find out anything about Goldilocks’s friend Mr. Curry?”
The alien produced a sheet of paper covered with ones and zeros. Of
course, he could write in English and readily agreed it was more efficient and helpful to do so, but he found binary more relaxing, despite the fact that it can take over two sides of closely written ones and zeros to ask for two extra pints from the milkman—and a single zero in the wrong place made it unintelligible, even to Ashley.
“1000100 Mr. Currys,” read Ash, “100000 of which were either under 1000 or over 111100. 10 were in prison, which leaves 100010. I copied those addresses down in English—here.”
Jack examined the thirty-four names closely. Sadly, none of them were bears—which would have been a long shot, but worth a look nonetheless. He dialed Josh Hatchett’s number, but it was busy.
“I called the Bart-Mart superstore about the security tapes,” said Ashley, “and they told me they’d be happy to release them as long as we sent them a letter of request—it’s for the QuangTech lawyers, apparently.”
“QuangTech? What have they got to do with Bart-Mart?”
“They own them,” remarked Ashley. “Everyone knows that.”
“It’s not common knowledge, Ash.”
“I think it is. Mary?”
“Yes?”
“Who owns Bart-Mart?”
“QuangTech,” she replied without thinking. “Everyone knows that.”
“They do not,” replied Jack, reflecting upon the Quangle-Wangle’s heavy financial cloak that seemed to have fallen over most of Berkshire. “It was a fluke, you both knowing.”
Ashley handed him a sheet of paper.
“This was the request I was going to send. As you can see, not one pirate. What do you think?”
Jack quickly read it. “Fine,” he said handing it back, “just leave out the bit about the elephants. And I need some info on Goldilocks’s car. An Austin Somerset, registration 226 DPX. And we should consider tracing her cell phone—and look through these explosions and see if you can find a link.”
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