The Big Over Easy

17. The Inquiry Begins

As they walked back into the office, they found Tibbit standing guiltily by Jack’s chair, which was still moving. He looked like a puppy that had been caught sleeping on the sofa. Jack hid a smile.

“Red rum, Tibbit,” he said.

“Murder?”

“So it appears. Humpty didn’t fall, and he didn’t jump. Mary, we should speak to his ex-wife again.”

Mary picked up the phone, and Jack looked at the photograph of Humpty talking to Charles Pewter, the stockbroker. Humpty’s illogical purchase of Spongg shares seemed as good as anyplace to start an inquiry. He looked at the snap of Humpty with Solomon Grundy. Jack had dismissed him earlier, but now anyone who had a vested interest in the financial health of Spongg Footcare PLC had to be a suspect. He pinned the picture of Humpty and Solomon on the board and stared at it.

Tibbit held up a small evidence bag with two spent twelve-bore cartridges in it.

“These came down from Chymes’s office, sir. DS Flotsam himself brought them in. And do you know what? He’s not really chirpy or cockney at all!”

“It’s an act for Amazing Crime, Otto. Run them across to Skinner, would you? He knows what they’re for.”

Mary opened her notebook and selected a blank page for Chymes’s benefit, then wrote “Grundy,” “.44 caliber,” “28-foot auburn hair” and “Mrs. Dumpty.” She then snapped it shut guiltily and looked up. But no one was watching her.

At that moment two officers walked into the room. One was short and the other long.

The shorter of the two was pale blue in color and had the body layout of a human except with elbows and knees that bent both ways and three fingers and two opposable thumbs on each hand. His police uniform was tailored to fit, but even so he still looked uncomfortable in it. Although Mary had seen pictures of aliens, she’d never actually witnessed one up close before and found herself staring.

“What are you looking at?” asked Ashley innocently, blinking laterally at her, which is unnerving the first time you see it done.

“Nothing,” mumbled Mary, trying hard not to stare, and she looked away, which felt awkward and more rude, so she looked back and then felt she was staring — and the whole cycle went around again.

She felt herself begin to flush, but Jack, whether sensing her discomfort or not, rescued her by saying, “PC 100111 is a Rambosian. His full name is 1001111001000100111011100100, but that’s a bit of a mouthful, so we just call him Ashley. Ashley, this is DS Mary Mary.”

“Hullo!” said Ashley, putting out a hand for Mary to shake. His hand was unusually warm and adhered to her palm with a dry stickiness that was odd but not unpleasant. As soon as she touched him, however, she had a fleeting and extremely vivid glimpse of herself and this strange creature rolling naked in a slimy and passionate embrace in a shallow marsh under twin setting suns. Ashley quickly pulled his hand away, went bright blue and blinked nervously.

“Is that the time?” he said quickly. “I’ve just remembered there’s something I need to do. Good-bye.”

And he darted out the door.

“Rambosians sometimes project their inner thoughts with touch,” explained Jack. “Did you see anything?”

“Nothing,” replied Mary, a little too firmly for anyone to believe her.

“A good lad,” continued Jack, peering out the door to see if Ashley was out of earshot and lowering his voice. “He’s here as part of the alien equal-opportunities program. No one else would work with him, so he came down to us.”

“Can he do that thought thing in reverse?” asked Mary. “It might be useful.”

“I never asked,” replied Jack. “Why don’t you bring it up with him? But be careful. The first thing you learn about aliens is that they don’t quite… get it.”

“Get what?”

“It. Us. The whole bit. You’ll see. The second thing you learn is that they’re really not that interesting, so don’t strike up a conversation without a good reason to excuse yourself. Despite that, Ashley excels with records, filing, indexing and general data crunching.”

“It’s not as though I actually wanted to be a policeman,” said Ashley, who had returned as quickly as he left, “but the filing here is to die for.”

“Here as in earth?” asked Mary, without meaning to be patronizing.

“No,” replied Ashley without even the smallest trace of taking offense, “here as in Reading.”

The other officer was a woman. She was very tall and willowy and had long straight hair made up into a single plait. She looked as though she had been heated up at birth and then drawn out like a soft candle. She was over six foot two, and when she ran, it looked as if she were in slow motion, like a giraffe. In the park where she jogged every morning, there were at least a half dozen men and two women there for no other reason than to watch her.

“Mary, this is Constable the Baroness Gretel Leibnitz von Kandlestyk-Maeker, all the way from Cologne. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here, and we don’t know what she’s doing here, but we’re glad she is, because she’s a damn fine officer. She used to work with Chymes.”

“Really?” asked Mary, interested all of a sudden. “What happened?”

“I was — how can I say it? — less respectful than I should have been. If Chymes asks you to do something, refuse it at your peril. I could have been DS by now — just look at me.”

“Thank you, Gretel,” said Jack, none too happy at the inference. “Gretel’s area of expertise is forensic accounting.”

“Forensic accounting?” asked Mary. “What’s that?”

“It is paper chasing mostly,” replied Gretel. “If you want to find where money came from or where it went, you come to me.”

“Best in the land,” added Jack, “which is why Chymes will still use you even after your — how shall we put it? — vigorous exchange of discourtesies.”

Gretel leaned closer to Mary and whispered, “I called him an arsehole.”

“Daring.”

“No, just stupid,” replied Gretel with a sigh.

“Okay,” continued Jack, “grab a seat, everyone. I want to tell you what has happened so far.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Ashley?”

“Do we get any more officers this time?”

Jack looked at all of them in turn. “I’ll ask, but you know how Briggs feels about the NCD. Short-staffed is kind of standard operating procedure with the division, so we’ll have to make our arm-work and legwork count. Let’s get straight to it, then.”

Ordinarily they would all have sat, but there wasn’t room, so they leaned against the door and the filing cabinets, except Ashley, who nimbly stuck himself to the wall.

“Welcome to the hunt, all of you. Mary is my number two on this, and even though she is new to Reading, I want you to give her all the help you can. Ashley will be based here to look after the incident room and keep him near his beloved Internet… and, Ashley?”

“Yes, sir?”

“No checking eBay for unusual beer mats.”

Jack pointed to Madeleine’s photo of Humpty with Charles Pewter.

“Victim’s name is Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant van Dumpty, more commonly known as Humpty Dumpty. He was sixty-five years old and died at approximately one o’clock yesterday morning, killed by a single gunshot wound to the back. He died instantly. He had a bitter ex-wife and a girlfriend we haven’t found; no witnesses, no suspects, no weapon and no motive.”

He wrote “MOTIVE — WEAPON — SUSPECTS” on the board with a felt pen and underlined each word.

“For the past year, Dumpty has been operating a business from Grimm’s Road, changing a carefully earned two-and-half-million-pound profit into a one-and-a-half-million-pound loss. Yes, Baker?”

“Was he living at Grimm’s Road?”

“Good point. It seems not, so we need to find out where he was. He had this photo on his desk.”

Jack showed them the photo of Humpty with the woman in the back of the horse-drawn carriage in Vienna.

“We need to find this woman. Dumpty and she were together in Vienna — and that’s all we know about her.”

He held up the auburn hair.

“SOCO found this in Humpty’s office. It’s a single human hair, auburn colored and twenty-eight feet long. Shouldn’t be difficult to trace. Tibbit, what have we got on your initial door-to-door?”

Tibbit was delighted. To him, this was real police work. He flipped open his notebook and summarized his notes. Eager to make an impression, he had copied them up neatly the evening before.

“Some people heard dustbins being knocked over sometime after midnight.”

“And?”

“A box van was seen on several nights prior to the night he died.”

Tibbit flipped over some more pages.

“There was a silver VW Polo, too — with a woman in it.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nope. Everyone I met liked him, though.”

“Okay, we’ve established that he was popular, and not just with the ladies. We should cross-check any VW Polos with the names ‘Bessie’ or ‘Elizabeth.’ Otto and Baker, I want you to go back to Grimm’s Road and try to find the slug that killed him; you should liaise with Mrs. Singh and Skinner to estimate where it fell. I want drains lifted and bins searched, along with any other place where we might conceivably find a gun. Ashley, start the usual trace proceedings on Miss Vienna and ring around to hair salons to see if you can match the auburn hair.”

He held up a photograph of the Marchetti shotgun.

“And there’s this. It was found in Dumpty’s office and links to one of Chymes’s cases, a double murder eighteen months ago, about the same time that Dumpty starts to buy shares in the rapidly failing Spongg foot-care empire, apparently against all better judgment. The dates might be a coincidence, but equally, there might be a link between the two.”

“The shotgun proves that, doesn’t it, sir?” ventured Baker.

“Not at all. It could have changed hands a dozen times. Skinner is matching the shell cases as we speak to see if it was the murder weapon. Gretel?”

“Where did he get the money to buy all those shares?”

“Another good question. We don’t know. He traded in bonds, commodities, currency, scrap, béarnaise sauce, strawberries — anything he could lay his hands on. I’d like you to unravel just exactly where all his capital came from. He made two and a half million from scratch in eighteen months and spent the lot on shares in a failing chiropody empire. I think we should know the reason why.”

“I’ll get onto it straightaway,” said Gretel, rubbing her hands in happy anticipation of all the forensic accounting to come.

Baker had been studying the photo of Humpty. “I think he owned a car, sir.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s those short legs. I don’t suppose he could go far on them without getting a bit pooped.”

“I’ll have a look,” said Ashley, twisting the computer terminal towards him and tapping in to the Police National Computer.

“At the same time,” continued Jack, “I want you to run the usual checks on his background. I want every single scrap of information on him you can find.”

Ashley turned from his terminal. He had found Humpty’s car.

“Registered to Mr. H. A. Dumpty, a red 1963 modified Ford Zephyr, registration number Echo Golf Golf three one four. One owner since new, tax disc renewed a month ago. Grimm’s Road address.”

“I want this car found. Mary, speak to uniform and put out a bulletin. Baker, I want you to put your ear to the ground in town. He’s been lying low this past year, so see if you can find out why and where.”

Mary thought of something and rummaged in a box of filed evidence. She located what she was looking for — the pictures that they had found in Humpty’s desk of the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center. They were all pictures taken from the window of a car. A red car.

“You’re boys,” she said, showing the pictures to Ashley and Baker. “Tell me, does that look like a Ford Zephyr?”

“Definitely,” replied Baker. “My uncle used to own one.”

Jack took the picture that had the young man in it and handed it to Tibbit.

“Then we need to find this chap, too. He’s a known associate of Humpty’s, and they were together, as this date in the photo would attest, almost exactly a year ago. Tibbit, get copies made and circulate them around the station — if he’s a local lad with a record, someone might recognize him.”

Tibbit took the picture and hurried off.

“Mrs. Dumpty is his ex-wife, still bitter and still in love with him. Mary, have you spoken to her?”

“Not yet, sir. She’s not at home or work. I’ve left messages.”

Jack looked at his watch. “That’s all for now. We’ll reconvene after lunch.”

He picked up his coat and headed for the door.

“Ashley, keep on trying Mrs. Dumpty and let Randolph Spongg and Solomon Grundy know we’re on our way. Mary — with me.”

He was feeling good again, for the first time in as long as he could remember.

“Where are we going, sir?”

“To learn a bit more about Reading’s foot-care empire.”