The Fourth Bear nc-2

by Jasper Fforde

  “One every three years, regular as clockwork,” she murmured.

  “And,” said Ashley, who was more adept at spotting patterns,

  “every single one was scrapped between two to nine weeks after purchase. How does all this fit into the Goldilocks inquiry?”

  “It doesn’t. I’ve just had a hunch.” She tapped the most recent name on the list. “We can interview this Mr. Aldiss fellow right now. No time to lose.”

  “No time to lose,” repeated Ashley, reading the address.

  “Good—it’s on the way to my parents’ place.”

  “Oh, rats,” said Mary with a sigh, finally resigning herself to the inevitable. “Okay, okay, you’re on—listen, you don’t eat bugs or anything, do you?”

  “Bugs? Why ever would we do that?”

  “Well, I thought your antennae made you kind of… I don’t know… insectoid.”

  Ashley gave out a high-pitched squeak of a laugh and said, “Insectoid? The very idea!” He squinted up at his stubby antennae before continuing. “These don’t do anything at all, really—as much use and purpose as your eyebrows. No, of all the many strange and barely related phyla you have on your planet, you know which body type most closely resembles ours?”

  “I don’t know.” Mary shrugged as she looked at Ashley’s curious semitransparent, liquid-filled appearance. “A cross between an amoeba and a crème brûlée?”

  “Not even close. I’ll tell you: None of them. The closest thing to our physiology is seven live jellyfish stuffed inside a balloon designed to fit only two.”

  He pinged his cheek with a digit, and the shock waves in his elastic skin rippled out around his head and back again before he added, “Intelligent jellyfish, mind you. We’ll take my car. Shall we go?”

  “These old things are a rarity these days,” explained Ashley, driving through the darkened streets at exactly twenty-two miles per hour in his meticulously restored 1975 Datsun 120A Coupe. “My brother rebuilt it for me.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “And a sister, although the concept of gender is a tricky one to understand, even for us. That reproduction stuff of yours sounds pretty messy. Does the man really—”

  “Yes, yes, he does,” said Mary quickly. “It’s all true.”

  “And is that really a satisfactory method? I’ve got a couple of ideas for improvements, if you want to hear them.”

  “No, no, please keep them to yourself. It seems to have worked very well for quite a few years now.”

  They drove slowly on in silence for a few minutes, while drivers behind them attempted to pass where they could and honked their horns in annoyance. Mary consulted the list of ex—Dorian Gray car owners and guided Ashley to a very ordinary-looking street in Tidmarsh.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Mary, fully aware that some people still couldn’t get their heads around the fact that there really were aliens and on occasion would start screaming uncontrollably—sometimes for hours.

  “Righto,” said Ashley, who generally didn’t like people screaming, especially at him. “I’ll sit here and listen to the Delfonics on my eight-track.”

  Mary climbed out of the car and walked up the garden path of number sixty-two. Even though Dorian’s car had been consigned to the wrecker’s yard almost exactly three years previously, the owners, she reasoned, might still be living in the same house. They were. Or at least, Mrs. Aldiss was.

  “Oh!” she said when Mary explained the reason for her visit.

  “I’m sorry, but I thought I’d answered all the questions back then—do I have to go over the whole thing again?”

  “What questions were those?” asked Mary. “After all, it was only about a car your husband once owned.”

  “It was more than that, Officer,” she replied softly. “It was the one he… died in.”

  Mary apologized, and Mrs. Aldiss invited her in for a cup of tea. Her husband had been something of a seventies-car nut, too, and the pristine 1976 Austin Maxi had been too good to resist.

  “He was initially very happy with it,” said Mrs. Aldiss, staring at the carpet, “but after a few weeks I think he began to grow suspicious of it.”

  “In what way?”

  “It’s difficult to say precisely. I used to see him stand outside the house staring at it. He tried to take it back, but Dorian Gray had vanished.”

  Mary felt herself shiver.

  “He used the car as normal after that, and then one night they found it crushed on the eastbound lane of the A329. It had been hit by a truck, apparently, although the other vehicle was never traced. Brian died instantly.” She fell silent and wiped a tear from her eyelash.

  “I’m sorry to ask you these things,” said Mary. “Did you ever drive it yourself?”

  “Once. I didn’t like it.”

  “I know the feeling. I have a colleague with an Allegro I have to drive.”

  “It wasn’t that. There was something else. Something malevolent about the car.”

  Mary knew what she meant. “The odometer went backward, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Aldiss quietly, “yes, it did.”

  “What news?” asked Ashley, turning down the volume on “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time).”

  Mary sat in the passenger seat and opened her phone. “The driver was killed and the car destroyed in an accident on the A329 three years ago. The odometer went backward on that car, too.”

  She texted Jack: CAUTION ALLEGRO MILEAGE APPROACHES ZERO MARY, then snapped her cell phone shut.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I’ve no idea. Have a look at the other owners first thing tomorrow,” said Mary. “I’d like to know how many of them are still with us.”

  “I’ll get onto it. So… back to my parents’ place?” he asked, positively — and literally — swelling with expectation.

  “Yes,” said Mary a bit absently, “drive on.”

  They drove the short distance to Pangbourne and pulled into a very ordinary-looking estate, the proliferation of seventies Japanese sedans giving it a very time-warped appearance.

  “Is the whole neighborhood alien?” asked Mary.

  “Pretty much,” he replied. “Very few people want to live next to us, although I’ve no idea why—we make good neighbors.”

  Ashley got out, ran across the roof and opened the door for Mary before she could do it herself.

  “Thank you,” she said graciously.

  “My pleasure,” said Ashley, “and please don’t make fun of my parents’ attempts to be human.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  28. What Jack Did That Night

  Seediest hotel in Reading: The thirty-eight-room Bastardos on Station Approach holds this dubious distinction, having been awarded the coveted Five-Bedbug Award by Clip Joint magazine every year since records began, except in 1975, when an accidental change of linen raised the hotel’s ranking from “nasty” to “shamefully grimy.” Currently under investigation by the area health authorities but kept open due to an obscure statute of 1845 relating to the conditions of workhouses, the Bastardos has recently added a restaurant, where food poisoning is almost a certainty and death a distinct possibility.

  The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

  Jack parked the Allegro in the street a few doors down from his house and tried to catch a glimpse of Madeleine through the kitchen window. He could see shadows moving around behind the curtains, but little else. He hadn’t spoken to her at all that day and wondered whether she would still be pissed at him for being a PDR or, worse, not telling her. It was the least of his worries. If Bartholomew really had murdered Goldilocks, Jack could be up for some very serious charges indeed. He frowned to himself. Up until the Red Riding-Hood debacle, everything seemed to be going so well. It had all just spiraled downhill from there, both professionally and personally. He fortified himself with the thought that it couldn’t possibly get mu
ch worse. He looked next door. Mr. and Mrs. Punch were having a fight as usual, and the muffled thumps and sounds of breaking crockery punctuated the peace of the night.

  His cell phone rang. “Yuh?”

  “I have information for you,” said a woman’s voice on the other end.

  “Really?” responded Jack, well used to crank calls.

  “Yes, really. About Goldilocks. Hotel Bastardos, room twenty-seven, half an hour, alone.” There was a click, and the line went dead.

  He frowned and looked at his watch. It was a little past nine, and he thought of calling Mary to back him up, but if she and Ash were on a date, he didn’t really want to disturb them. He thought of calling Madeleine, then decided not to. It was the wrong decision, of course, but he had made up some very compelling arguments in his own head, so thought he’d go and see what his mystery caller had to say for herself and put off the fight that Madeleine would surely give him for at least an hour.

  The Hotel Bastardos was the grottiest hotel in a series of grotty hotels located near the railway station. It was in a shabby state of disrepair. The interior was grimy and smelly, cheap and nasty, decorated badly or not at all. The rooms were small and cheerless, the windows cracked and grimy, the curtains stained and torn. The hot water was patchy, the electricity unreliable and the food lamentable. Rooms could be hired for the month, week, day or hour, and the only room service anyone got was the sort that usually follows a call to one of those brightly colored cards you find in telephone booths. This was exactly how the clientele liked it, and the proprietors expended a lot of time, energy and money maintaining just the right level of sleazy decrepitude.

  Jack trotted up the stairs, past the landing where the Easter Bunny had once held him at bay with a stream of hot lead from her M-16. It was over a decade ago, and she’d done her time. People were often fooled, he mused, by the one day in the year on which she did charitable work—the rest of the time she was the rabbit from hell. He topped the stairs and turned left down the hallway, along the threadbare carpet and to room twenty-seven. He stood to one side and rapped on the door. There was a muffled “Enter!” from within, and he pushed open the door.

  The room was poorly furnished and dimly lit; a forty-watt bulb was burning in a lamp on the sideboard, a scarf lying across the shade to diffuse the light. A neon sign flashed outside the window, and the hum of the air-conditioning units on the roof next door gave the room a certain degree of noir charm. Jack had arrested a murder suspect in this same room seven years previously, but it might have been yesterday; the room hadn’t changed a jot. The same old wallpaper, the same badly painted woodwork.

  There was a figure on the bed.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  “Good-bye, Agatha.”

  Jack turned on his heel and walked back out the door and down the staircase, seriously pissed off. Why couldn’t she leave him alone? He’d heard that Briggs and Agatha had marital difficulties, but he didn’t see why he had to be dragged into them. He’d have to make some sort of official complaint, but he didn’t know how Briggs would take it. Not well, he presumed. He stepped out the front door of the Bastardos and walked back toward his car, reading Mary’s text. He wondered what she’d found out but wasn’t worried—the odometer on the Allegro still had twenty-eight miles to go before it hit zero.

  A familiar voice said, “Where have you just been?”

  Jack stopped. There was a figure in the shadows of the bus stop outside the hotel entrance. His heart froze. It was Briggs, and he looked a bit drunk—and not at all happy.

  “Good evening, sir. A contact called me with information, but it was nothing.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Sir, I just want to go home.”

  Briggs looked up at the hotel and gave a mournful sigh.

  “Agatha is in there, and I think she’s waiting for someone. Who do you think it is?”

  “I’ve no idea, sir. Why don’t you go home?”

  Briggs nodded agreement, and the whole sorry chapter might have ended right there and then had not Agatha, in a masterful display of bad timing, appeared from the entrance of the Bastardos yelling, “Jack, come back!”

  Briggs scowled angrily and, before Jack could even try to explain, punched him painfully on the chin, then strode off. Jack staggered backward with the blow and momentarily saw stars. He’d been avoiding Agatha for years but had never reported her continual pestering in order not to cause trouble and to help her help herself. If there was a situation that had “unfair” stamped all over it, this was it.

  “Are you okay?” said a passerby, helping him to his feet. “I can call the police.”

  “I am the police,” said Jack, who’d always wanted to say that, but preferably in a better set of circumstances, “and so is he. Thanks, I’ll be fine. I’m going home.”

  When he got to the house, it was locked and bolted. He was about to knock when a small voice said, “I shouldn’t bother if I were you.”

  It was Caliban. He was sitting on a garbage can reading a copy of The Beano by the outside light.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said,” repeated the small, misshapen ape, “I shouldn’t bother if I were you.”

  “Oh? And what makes you say that?”

  “I heard what she said she’d do if you dared to show your face.”

  “And what was that?”

  The door was suddenly flung open. Madeleine marched out, struck Jack a glancing blow on the head with a rolling pin and went back inside in one swift movement. Jack fell over, more from surprise than the blow itself.

  “She said she’d do that.”

  “Why?”

  “She got a call from Briggs about something.”

  “Shit,” he murmured. Implausibly, things had gotten worse. Much worse.

  29. What Ashley Did That Night

  Least likely alien abduction suspects: The Rambosians, who when asked if they’d been involved in reported medical experiments on “abductees,” replied, “You must be joking. If we wanted to know about your physiology—which we don’t—we’d just watch BBC2 or read Gray’s Anatomy.” When pressed, they had to admit they couldn’t think of any life-form bored enough to want to travel halfway across the galaxy to push a probe up an ape’s bottom, nor what it might accomplish—apart from confirming that in general apes don’t like that sort of thing.

  The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

  The front door to Ashley’s house opened, and two almost identical aliens stood in the hall and blinked rapidly at Mary. To the untrained human eye, every alien is identical to every other alien—much the same way as all humans seemed identical to aliens. Indeed, to the more unobservant alien, all mammals looked pretty much the same. “It’s the backbone that’s so confusing,” explained an alien spokesman when asked how a sheep might appear indistinguishable from a human in a woolly jumper. The reason Mary could tell Ashley’s parents apart at all was that one was wearing a large and very obvious brown wig, had a folded newspaper under its arm and was wearing slippers, and the other wore a blue gingham dress with an Alice band perched precariously on its shiny, high forehead.

  “Hello,” said Mary politely to the one in the slippers, “you must be Ashley’s father.”

  “No, that would be me,” said the one in the gingham. “Roger’s the name. This is Abigail, my wife.”

  “Hello,” said the one wearing the slippers, proffering a three-fingered, double-opposable-thumb hand for Mary to shake.

  Mary did so with some trepidation, as Rambosians tend to transmit their thoughts through touch. Still, she thought it would be rude not to, and her hand was enveloped in the warm, dry stickiness of Abigail’s grip. Almost instantly the image of a wedding popped into Mary’s head, complete with a large white Rolls-Royce, church, confetti and with Mary herself dressed in a quite stunning white wedding gown, with Ashley in morning suit.

  “Sorry about that,” said Abigail, hurriedly letting go of Ma
ry’s hand.

  “It’s quite all right,” she replied, her close contact with Ashley having prepared her for almost anything. “But just out of interest—where did you see that dress?”

  “At Veils R Us,” replied Abigail wistfully. “Wasn’t it just the most beautiful thing ever?”

  “Why did you assume I was the mother?” asked Roger, who had been thinking about this for several moments.

  “It’s the dress and Alice band,” explained Mary. “They’re usually considered female-gender apparel.”

  “I told you the sales assistant didn’t seem that bright,” he said to Abigail. “We better swap.”

  Mary half expected them to strip off in front of her, but they didn’t. They just placed a sticky digit on each other and trembled for a second or two.

  “Right,” said the one who used to be Abigail. “I’m now Roger. Why don’t you come in?”

  Roger led her into the living room, which was decorated as though from the seventies. Earth’s TV signals had taken eighteen years to reach distant Rambosia, so it was understandable that this was the era in which they felt the most comfortable. The furniture was dark-colored, the wallpaper and carpet patterned, the music center one of those combined radio-cassette-turntable things, and the obligatory plaster ducks flew across the wall next to a print of The Hay Wain.

  “How long have you had this bad knee?” asked Abigail, rubbing the offending joint of her body-swapped partner.

  “A few days,” replied Roger.

  “You should look after yourself better—and your arms feel a bit low. When did you last have a pressure test?”

  “This always happens when we swap bodies, doesn’t it?” replied Roger with a baleful glare. “Nag, nag, nag.”

  “If you looked after yourself, I wouldn’t have to.”

  “Maybe I like having a dodgy knee—ever thought of that?”

  “Sorry about this,” said Ashley.