“Tragic,” was all he could say when they mentioned Stanley Cripps. “Tragic, tragic, tragic.”
“Had you spoken to him recently?”
“The evening… um, before he died,” said Fuchsia. “He was wildly excited over this year’s possible champion. We might be competitors, but we still talk a great deal. Premier-league cucumbering is a lonely pursuit, Inspector, brightened only by the arrival of another with a similar high level of skill. I hope… ah, you appreciate that?”
“Of course. What did you talk about?”
“His challenger for the nationals. He and I were the only competitors in the cucumber extreme class—for anything weighing over twenty-five kilos. If he beat me, he’d automatically win the world championship. His champ was about to pass the magic fifty-kilo mark; not even I’ve managed that, although size isn’t everything. A fine curve can speak volumes—and a smooth, unblemished skin is worth thirty percent of the judge’s… ah, marks alone. Would you care to have a seat?”
He indicated an upturned water barrel for Mary and a garden roller for Jack.
“How long have you known Mr. Cripps?” asked Mary.
“Well, that is to say, I… oh, over thirty years. We both worked in the same department, although he is my senior by… er… well… um, more years than he would have cared to remember. Would you like to see Cuthbert and the family?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Oh! An… um, petty foible of mine. Quite… er, childish. Cuthbert… well, and the family — my cucumbers, you see.”
He led them into his ancient wooden greenhouse, the wood almost black with layers of creosote and the roof curved downward in the center with age. The reward in cucumbers, Jack noted, was not of the monetary sort. Mr. Fuchsia led them past radishes the size of basketballs, then some tomatoes and a few parsnips growing in a length of downpipe. His champion cucumbers were green monsters about six feet long and the thickness of a small barrel. The plant that had spawned the beasts was seemingly quite small and forlorn next to them. Even though there were seven of similar size, it wasn’t hard to figure out which one was Cuthbert. The others were excellent, but this one was perfect. The skin was smooth and shiny and blemish-free. It was quite a vegetable—or fruit, if you want to be pedantic.
“Very nice,” murmured Jack. “What do they taste like at this size?”
Mr. Fuchsia looked shocked. “Taste like? You don’t eat them, Inspector. These are for… um, showing.”
Mary pointed to a passive infrared alarm in one corner. “You take this seriously?” she asked.
“I certainly do,” replied Fuchsia. “Many cucumberistas have suffered loss and damage at the hands of”—he looked around and lowered his voice—“the Men in Green.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said Mary, somewhat rudely.
“Well, I’ve never seen them myself,” conceded Fuchsia,
“but the cucumber world is awash in stories of mysterious men turning up at night to steal prize cucumbers and to conduct… experiments.”
“What sort of experiments?”
“Bizarre and unseemly experiments of a horticultural nature. Core samples and cuttings taken, probes inserted, skin removed—that sort of thing. Have you ever seen a flayed cucumber, Inspector? It’s not a pretty sight. The Men in Green are rarely seen, but when they are, they seem to wear nothing… but green.”
“That’s quite far-fetched, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said Mary.
“I don’t mind at all,” replied Fuchsia evenly, “and you’re probably right. But true cucumberistas are a superstitious and somewhat obsessed group of people—many consider us insane, and rightly so.”
“So what do you think happened to Mr. Cripps?” asked Mary.
“Cucumber nobblers, without the shadow of a doubt,” said Mr. Fuchsia without even drawing breath. “The Men in Green. Probably French. They’ve been jealous of le concombre anglais ever since the Hundred Years’ War, which was mostly about the right to buy and sell cucumbers in Europe.”
“Of course it was,” said Jack, humoring him, “but isn’t blowing Cripps and his house to kingdom come a little over the top?”
“It’s in their blood,” replied Fuchsia with a hefty whiff of xenophobia, “from the days of the Resistance. Why use a pound of Semtex when a ton will do the job with a much more impressive bang? Besides, no one would suspect it was a cucumber crime with such a blast—it’s a smoke screen, Inspector, mark my words.”
“And you?” asked Jack. “Might you want to nobble Mr. Cripps’s cucumber?”
“Good Lord no!” said Fuchsia in a shocked tone. “What a suggestion! Cucumber growing is the best fun a man can have, I grant you, but the really exciting bit is the competition. And now that Stanley has joined Simon Prong and Howard Katzenberg in the great greenhouse in the sky, I am on my own in the cucumber extreme class—and there is no fun to be had in a one-cucumber race.”
“Wait, wait,” said Jack. “Katzenberg and Prong were both cucumber growers?”
“Of course!”
Jack and Mary exchanged glances. There had been a link after all—but cucumbers?
“Katzenberg was one of our colleagues who had emigrated across the… ah, water,” explained Fuchsia, “a loss to the European cucumber fraternity, but we always kept in touch.”
“And Prong?”
“Again, a good friend and colleague. Like Cripps and Katz, his greenhouse, garden and cucumber strain were all destroyed. When he died, he’d just reported a one-hundred-and-ten-pound corker. Mind you,” he added, “I’ve always gone for curve and color rather than out-and-out weight. That’ll all change,” he said, patting the smooth hide of his cucumber affectionately, “once Cuthbert here gets into his stride. Three more ounces and he’ll have equaled Stanley’s record.”
Fuchsia seemed entirely unconcerned by the risk that he seemed to be facing. The fact hadn’t been lost on Mary either.
“Has it struck you,” she said slowly, “that all your fellow cucumberistas have died in blazing fireballs?”
“Goodness,” said Fuchsia thoughtfully, “I’d never even considered it before. Do you suppose the Men in Green are after me, too?”
Mary looked at Jack. “Protective custody?” she queried. “Or just section him?”
Jack shook his head. “Can you imagine trying to run this request past Briggs? We’ll try, but I think I know what he’ll say.”
They turned back to Fuchsia.
“It’s likely you’re in very grave danger,” said Mary. “Is there anyone you can stay with for a few weeks?”
“Impossible!” spluttered Fuchsia, waving a hand in the direction of Cuthbert and his family. “A gap in the continuity of care right now could set me back decades. Four people may have died in explosions, but this is something well worth the risk!”
“Four?”
“What?”
“You said four had died. Who was the fourth?”
“Cripps, Katzenberg, Prong and… McGuffin.”
“You knew McGuffin?” asked Mary.
“Indeed!” he said jovially, “Myself, Howard, Prong, McGuffin and Cripps began this whole cucumber thing together in the sixties. It was Simon’s idea, I suppose, the growing of heavy cucumbers. A distraction from the… ah, rigors of work.” He thought for a moment and added, “To be honest, I don’t think McGuffin loved cucumbers half as much as he loved blowing things up. He left us in the early eighties to conduct his own experiments over at QuangTech.”
“What sort of a man was he?”
“Mad as a barrel of skunks. Brilliant, but impetuous. He wanted to grow heavy cucumbers like us, but he was always too impatient. He said he was going to fast-forward the years of crossbreeding and grow a champion to beat all champions in his retirement.”
Jack thought about this. If McGuffin were alive, perhaps he was planning on doing precisely that.
“Has… anything been stolen from you recently?” asked Mary.
“Indeed it has!” excla
imed Fuchsia indignantly. “Someone broke in here two nights ago and stole my fledgling Alpha-Pickle.”
“Your… what?”
“My Alpha-Pickle. It’s the progeny of Cuthbert here and will develop into an even finer specimen. Mind you, the Alpha-Pickle is worthless without the skills to make it develop. In untrained hands it will be good only for… salad.”
After that they showed him Goldilocks’s photo to see if he had seen her, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t throw any light on the blast on the Nullarbor Plain either. Deserts, he told them, were not great places in which to grow cucumbers. They asked him again if he would move somewhere else, but once again he refused, stoically declaring that he would, as an Englishman, defend his cucumbers to the death. Quite how much fight they thought an octogenarian would put up was questionable, but McGuffin, if alive, would be sixty-eight, so perhaps he had a chance after all.
“What do you think?” asked Jack as they took the road back to Reading.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“No idea. Winning a cucumber championship where the first prize is twenty quid and a trophy seems the slenderest of motives for a triple murder. And if Goldilocks’s “scoop” was about deceit, skulduggery, murder, faked death and high drama in the world of competitive cucumber growing, would it really be necessary to kill her, too? I must say, I’m pretty flummoxed by it all.”
“I’m the same,” retorted Mary, “but more so. No matter. I’ll use my feminine wiles on Briggs to see if we can’t get some sort of protection for Fuchsia. I’m sure he’ll agree to it.”
24. Overquotaing
Most overdue manuscript: Although many writers have been known to be late with manuscripts, and the dialogue between editors and writers can at sometimes reach a fevered pitch of cordial dispute, the lateness of Gerald of Frome’s celebrated audit of the Reading Cathedral repairs of 1364 took 640 years to reach the publishers. Gerald’s successive ancestors cited many reasons for the delay, such as not having enough ink, the wrong sort of vellum, noisy peacocks and the dissolution of the monasteries. The descendants of the original publishers who commissioned the work were overjoyed to finally receive the beautifully illuminated manuscript handwritten in copperplate and bound in leather, and they returned it with a note saying that they “totally loved it” but suggested the emphasis of the work be moved away from a spider-vaulted North Arcade suffering from subsidence and more toward a single career woman obsessed with boyfriends and her weight.
The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition
“Let me get this straight,” said Briggs. “You want me to sanction the overtime for a twenty-four-hour surveillance operation on a cucumber?”
“Not just any cucumber,” said Mary, who was standing in front of Briggs’s desk an hour later. “This one is a world champion, and if you read the report on the blast at Obscurity—”
“It was an unexploded wartime bomb, Mary. Official. You don’t honestly expect me to believe that someone is going around bumping off the competition solely to win a cucumber championship?”
Mary bit her lip. It was almost exactly what Jack thought he’d say, but she had to try. “I’d like your refusal to be noted, sir.”
Briggs looked up at her. “That’s very impertinent, Sergeant.”
“It reflects my certainty that Fuchsia’s life is in danger, sir.”
“Your passion in this matter is certainly intriguing,” replied Briggs thoughtfully. “Tell me, is there a lot of money in cucumber championships? A six-figure payout or something?”
“A twenty-pound book coupon, sir—and a dented cup.”
He shook his head sadly. “You’re as mad as Spratt. Perhaps madder. Sonning isn’t far—if this Fuchsia fellow gets suspicious, he can call us. Just speak to beautiful Pippa and have him put on ‘expedite’ in the control room.”
“But, sir—”
“Before you go, Sergeant, one other thing. There seems to be a bizarre rumor making its way around the station that you’re going on a date with that alien. Is this true?”
Mary bit her lip. She still wanted to wriggle out of the date if she could, but she didn’t like Briggs’s attitude. Despite a few obvious failings, Ash was a good officer, and part of the team.
“Yes, sir,” she said defiantly, “it’s all true. And his name’s Ashley.”
“Well,” said Briggs with a patronizing air, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He returned to staring at several reports on his desk.
“Yes, sir.”
When Mary got back to the office she found Jack in conversation with Copperfield, who had aged five years since the Gingerbreadman inquiry had begun. His eyes were dark-rimmed and hollow, and he was chain-smoking again. There had been several near misses, but the Gingerbreadman had remained tantalizingly out of his reach, despite the buildup of almost three hundred troops and armed-response groups from as far away as Newcastle. You couldn’t walk anywhere in Reading without seeing somebody in uniform carrying a weapon standing at a street corner.
“Any leads on the crazy cookie?” asked Jack.
“No… and he’s a cake.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Jack firmly. “A cookie goes soft when—”
“And it’s not getting any better,” added Copperfield, who hadn’t the inclination to listen to Jack’s cookie/cake debate.
“We’ve got nothing, but nothing, to go on. We’re getting these twice a day, all mailed from the center of town—look.”
He passed a photocopied note to Jack, who read it carefully: “‘I’ll run and run and jump with glee. I’m the Gingerbreadman—you can’t catch me.’"
Jack passed it back to Copperfield, who said, “He’s taunting us, Jack. Mailed in Friar Street at two-thirty yesterday afternoon. Broad daylight, center of town. We’ve been staking out mailboxes, but somehow he always finds a way around us.”
“He wants you to know he can do what he pleases, and that he’s still around. He’s also telling you that he’s smart. And he is. Smarter than you or I.”
“That’s comforting to know. Listen, I realize I’ve been a bit of an ass for not seeking your advice, but now I really need some help. You’ve been NCD for years—how would you go about this?”
“Well,” Jack said slowly, glad that Copperfield had finally seen sense, “we need to know more about him, so I’d start at the very beginning. First, I’d be looking for an oven big enough to have baked him. Secondly, there can’t be many rolling pins large enough to have rolled him out, and someone must remember building a cutter that size and shape. Perhaps a local steel fabricator might know something. And you’d need a bakery with an overhead crane to lower the cutt—”
David gave an indignant snort and stood up. “Thanks for nothing, Jack. I plead with you for help, and all you do is just muck about. Good day.”
And he left without another word.
“Some people just don’t want to be helped,” said Mary as she sat down in the chair vacated by Copperfield.
“He’ll come around to us eventually,” Jack said. “I just hope the gingery lunatic hasn’t killed too many people before he does. Let me guess: Briggs told you to stick the cucumber stakeout in your ear?”
“In one. You didn’t really think he’d go for a twenty-four-hour cucumber stakeout, did you?”
“To be honest, no. Have a look at these.” He pushed a couple of photos across to Mary. “This is a picture of Stanley Cripps, and this is McGuffin. I thought they might be the same person, but they’re not.”
“Do you think McGuffin’s alive?”
“If he is, he’s bloody well hidden.”
“Hellooo,” said Ash as he walked in carrying a manila envelope. “Want to see what I’ve found?”
He laid a photograph on the desk. It was from the security cameras at the Coley Park Bart-Mart, and the date in the bottom corner showed that it had been taken ten days earlier. The picture was slightly grainy and a bit blurred, but the figure pushing the shopping ca
rt piled high with bags of value-pack porridge oats was unmistakable.
“Bartholomew,” breathed Jack. “An MP involved in overquotaing to bears?”
“He gets it at discount, too,” said Ashley. “Bart-Mart is the family business. Although it’s controlled by QuangTech, the Bartholomew family still holds thirty-eight percent.”
Jack rubbed his head. “I suppose it makes some kind of sense,” he said finally. “Perhaps he felt he was somehow indebted to them for his not being able to pass the Ursine Self-Defense Bill.”
“There’s more,” said Ashley, laying down another picture.
The relevance of this one wasn’t so clear until he pointed it out.
“This was taken two minutes before the one with Bartholomew—that’s Goldilocks’s Austin Somerset parked in the background.”
They peered closer. It was. This complicated matters.
“Anything else?” asked Jack.
“Only this,” said Ashley, laying down a third picture on the desk and pointing at someone astride a motorcycle near the trolley park. The figure was so far in the background as to be barely a smudge. A blowup that Ashley had printed didn’t really help. “It’s possible that this motorcyclist is Vinnie Craps,” said Ashley, “but I couldn’t say for sure—it might just be someone very bulky.”
Jack leaned back in his chair and twiddled absently with a pencil while Ash and Mary stared at him.
“What does it mean?” asked Mary.
“I’m not sure,” said Jack. “Goldilocks and Craps in the parking lot while Bartholomew is on a porridge buy. It might mean a lot of things—or nothing.”
Jack put down the pencil, held his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Explosions, cucumbers, porridge, missing scientists, QuangTech. Nothing seemed to make any sense at all.
“Anything on Gray?” he asked, still hopeful.
“No,” replied Ashley. “He isn’t on the voting register. I went through the births, marriages and deaths record, and I’m not sure he really is Dorian Gray—the only person I could find of that name was born in 1878.”
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