The Big Over Easy

28. Castle Spongg

Randolph wasn’t at the factory that day, he was at home. And “at home” for the Sponggs meant only Castle Spongg, the extraordinary neosurrealist building constructed in the thirties by the brilliant yet certifiable Dr. Caligari. Many people argued over the artistic merits of Castle Spongg, but there was one descriptive word that everyone agreed upon: “bizarre.”

Jack and Mary slowed to a stop outside the ornate wrought-iron gates of the main entrance. The gatehouse looked ordinary enough, but it was designed to give the illusion that it had sunk into the earth. The lodge was tilted at thirty degrees and was submerged to the top of the front door; the upstairs window served as the entrance and exit. They pulled through the open gates onto the drive, which was straight and flat but seemed to be a crudely mended patchwork of concrete and asphalt.

“You’d have thought he’d maintain it a bit better,” said Mary as the tires rumbled and squeaked on the different road surfaces.

“It’s not in poor repair,” said Jack, who had been to visit the Castle Spongg grounds on a few occasions. “If you drive at precisely twenty-nine miles per hour, the rumble strips play ‘Jerusalem’ on the car tires. Listen.”

Mary slowed to the correct speed and listened as they drove along. It did sound like “Jerusalem.” A low, rumbling tune, heavy and brooding, like distant thunder.

“…in ancient times!” sang Jack.

They drove on through the immaculately kept gardens with not a blade of grass looking out of place. “They call Castle Spongg the ‘jewel of the Thames Valley,’” said Jack. “The landscaped park was designed by the less-well-known ‘Incomprehensible’ Greene. See that reservoir?”

Mary looked to her left, where a footprint-shaped lake stretched away from them. Groves of silver birches grew where the soft, undulating parkland met the water. “Yes?”

“Greene installed large hydraulic rams in the lake bed that move up and down to give the effect of an Atlantic storm in winter. There is a sailing ship complete with torn sails and broken rigging down there — also on hydraulic rams — that can be made to founder and sink at the flick of a switch.”

“For what purpose?” asked Mary.

“To entertain Lord Spongg and his guests. In the twenties and thirties, Spongg’s was the wealthiest company in Reading — bigger even than Suttons Seeds or Huntley and Palmers — and consequently had the most lavish parties.”

“I think I’d be bored looking at a sailing ship sink all the time.”

“So was Lord Spongg. The ship can be retracted and replaced by a seventeen-ton Carrera marble fountain depicting Poseidon doing battle with a sea monster. Just over there was the pitch where they played aerial polo with Gypsy Moths. It was quite a lark, apparently.”

They drove on in silence for some minutes, staring at the strange wonders that met them at every turn. As the road smoothed and the last strains of “Jerusalem” faded on the car tires, they rounded a corner and came within sight of the bizarre and incongruous Castle Spongg.

The word “surreal” might have been invented for the Spongg residence. Everything about it flew in the face of aesthetic convention. It was impossible to say how many stories Castle Spongg had, for the windows were of varying sizes and shapes and placed randomly in the walls. The five towers all leaned precariously — some in, some out, three of them spiraling as they reached skywards, two of them even entwining at the top. The roof was decorated in seven different shades of slate, and the zinc guttering channeled water through gargoyles modeled on all the British prime ministers since 1726. Part of the roof was supported by flying buttresses, some Gothic, others smooth and looking like living branches of a tree. One buttress stretched seventy feet down, only to stop less than a yard from the ground.

They slowly motored up to the front door and parked where a silver-haired servant in a frock coat and white gloves was waiting to greet them.

“Good afternoon,” said the butler, bowing stiffly from the waist, “my name is Ffinkworth. I am the Spongg retainer. If you would follow me?”

They all walked towards the main door, which was the shape of a collapsed trapezoid. Strangely, there seemed to be a gap between the two circular brass strips that ran round the perimeter of the house. Stranger still, the house appeared to be rotating.

“Castle Spongg is built on a turntable,” explained Ffinkworth with a hint of pride. “Powerful electric motors in the basement rotate the house to any point of the compass so his lordship might look out of his study and view the rose garden, or the lake, or whatever he wishes. Given less inclement weather,” added Ffinkworth, “we could even track the sun and ensure that the morning room was naturally illuminated all day long.”

They stepped onto the turntable, which had been so precisely engineered it was impossible to be sure you were moving at all. The butler stood back so they might enter first, and they walked past a pair of giant bronze anteaters that guarded the lopsided front door.

Inside, the hall’s high ceiling was supported by a varied muddle of columns. Some were Ionic, some Corinthian, some Doric and some Egyptian. Others were a mixture of all four. The floor was checkered with white and black marble, but each piece was differently shaped. They swirled around the floor with no discernible pattern, and if you looked at it too long, you could become disorientated.

“I wonder — ” said Jack, turning to speak to Ffinkworth, but the butler had vanished.

“It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?” said Mary, listening to the house utter gentle creaks and groans to itself as it flexed slightly on the turntable. Jack was just tilting his head to one side to try to view the paintings, which were hung upside down, when a familiar voice made them turn.

“Inspector!” said Randolph with a smile. “How nice to see you again! And Sergeant Mary. I trust the corn on the second toe of your left foot is not hurting you too much?”

“How did you know about that?”

He smiled modestly. “I am a fully trained and highly experienced chiropodist, Sergeant. I can tell by the way you walk. Is this your first time inside Castle Spongg?”

They both nodded.

“It’s officially one of the seven wonders of Reading,” said Spongg proudly. “Will you take tea?”

“Thank you.”

“The first Castle Spongg was built in 1892,” he explained as he led the way down a mirrored corridor. “It was a Gothic Revival edifice of humongous proportions. The main hall, corridor and doorways were so large that my grandfather took to driving everywhere in a Model T Ford.”

“Didn’t it damage the place?” asked Mary.

“The odd scuff here and there, but nothing serious. No, the real damage was done by the 1924 Spongg indoor car-racing championships. A three-car pileup in the main hall destroyed all the oak paneling between the library and the smoking room.”

He laughed at the thought of it.

“There was a high-banked corner built next to the staircase. The main hall became the home straight; they tell me the chicane in the orangerie was tricky but that you could really open it up down the picture gallery. My grandfather set a lap record of 86.42 miles per hour in a blown Delage-Talbot S-27. He destroyed the car and his left leg in the attempt.”

He stopped next to a glass case containing a piece of twisted metal.

“This was part of the Delage’s supercharger. We found it embedded in a tree half a mile from here two summers ago. Glory, glory days. This way.”

He took a left turn, opened a riveted steel hatch and led them down a corridor that looked like the interior of a submarine, complete with water dribbling out of the valves and the distant concussion of depth charges.

“It all ended badly, of course. On the eighth lap of the race, Count Igor Debrovnik spun his seven-liter Fiat off the corner of the upstairs landing and out through the stained-glass windows to crash through the roof of the chapel below. A few minutes later, a marshaling mistake in the library caused the Earl of Sudbury to crash his Railton at seventy miles an hour into the antiquarian-book section, causing irreparable damage to some early works by Bacon. By the end of the race, a dozen other mishaps had reduced the inside of the house to a ruin, so in 1926 my grandfather decided to rebuild it with the help of the brilliant yet insane Wolfgang Caligari.”

He pushed open a panel, and they found themselves in a large room full of ancient Khmer stone architecture with large strangler fig trees growing across and through it. It was hot, and tropical plants grew in lush abundance. As they watched, a parrot flew across the room and perched on the mantelpiece.

“We call this the Angkor Wat Room,” said Spongg. “The roof is medieval spider-vaulted, and those windows are a faithful reproduction of the west window at Chartres — but with a few more feet.”

He bade them sit on a sofa that had been incongruously placed on a Persian rug in the center of the room. The tea things were already waiting for them.

“It’s remarkable!” said Mary.

“They didn’t say that when it was built,” replied Spongg, pouring the tea. “It was roundly lambasted, as all great buildings are. From the simple ‘ugly’ through the more forthright ‘wholly lacking in taste or style’ to the plainly overstated ‘work of Mephistopheles.’ It’s all of these and none of these and a lot more besides. Sugar?”

“Thank you.”

“So,” he said as soon as they had their tea, “you still have some questions, Inspector?”

“A few. Have you any idea at all how Humpty might have been planning to raise the value of Spongg shares?”

“I’ve thought about it a great deal since I saw you last,” said Spongg, “but I still can’t figure it out.”

Jack started on a new tack.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Grundy. He said that Humpty did offer to sell him his share portfolio that night at the Spongg benefit.”

“Did Grundy take up the offer?”

“No.”

“Then why would I want to kill him? If that was Humpty’s plan, then he misjudged his timing badly.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t planning to sell them to Grundy at all. Perhaps he was going to sell them back to… you.”

Spongg frowned and stared at them both. “For what purpose?”

“To allow you to reclaim the factory for the family.”

Spongg laughed. “If that is so, I must have been planning this for twenty years — that’s how long we’ve been in trouble. Besides, Humpty bought those shares, not me. I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“Mr. Dumpty could have been your front. If you had been buying your own shares back, I daresay City analysts would be asking why — and the price would have increased dramatically.”

Spongg laughed again, but anger was rising beneath his genial exterior.

“If I were a criminal, Inspector, I could have plundered my employees’ pension fund. I and my aged relatives are the sole trustees, so it wouldn’t have been difficult. There is over a hundred million in there, more than enough to put this company back on its feet. But it isn’t mine. It belongs to the workers. I’ve been battling Winsum and Loosum’s for years, not out of my responsibility as an employer or to maintain the Spongg name but because we have a moral imperative to maintain the supply of foot-care products.”

He said it very grandly and without any humor intended.

“The supply of foot-care products has a moral imperative?”

“You may laugh, Inspector, but then you don’t understand chiropody as I do. The Spongg empire is built on four major foot treatments. Without them we are nothing. Anyone can make special scissors, insoles and corn plasters — our selling point is our successful foot preparations. Winsum and Loosum aren’t interested in my factory or distribution. They want my patents. With their sales network and my cures for verrucas, corns, athlete’s foot and bunions, they could wipe the world’s feet free of ailments forever — or not.”

“Not?” inquired Mary.

“Precisely. They may retain our patents but decide to withhold them from the world market. Ointments that soothe but don’t cure is where the real money lies. In contrast, Spongg’s has always been committed to a public service in the foot-care market. If I wanted to play it like Winsum’s, I could be a multibillionaire by now.”

Spongg’s voice had been getting higher and higher as he explained all this. He was obviously quite impassioned by the magnitude of the situation.

“Without competition from us, they could charge what they want. Chiropody would become a gold mine, and that greedy bastard Solomon Grundy wants the lot!”

He had gone a bright shade of red but soon calmed himself, took a sip of tea, apologized to Mary for swearing in her presence and then said, “To think the Jellyman will be shaking hands and honoring Solomon on Saturday is obscene to my mind, Inspector. If the Jellyman understood anything about feet at all, he would not be honoring Grundy but enacting legislation against him.”

“Do you know where Mr. Dumpty had been living this past year?”

“I’m afraid not. Aside from at the charity benefit, I’ve not seen him.”

Jack put down his tea and took the picture of Tom Thomm from his pocket.

“Have you ever seen this man?”

Spongg put on his glasses and stared at the picture.

“Yes, I think with Humpty a couple of times — but not for a while.”

“What about him?” asked Jack, passing him a photo of Winkie.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“What about Laura Garibaldi?”

“That was tragic, Inspector. Truly tragic. I introduced them, for my sins. Laura and I were on the Reading clay-pigeon shooting team. She was a fine shot and a good woman. I don’t think Humpty really deserved her.”

“You’ve been very kind,” said Jack, “and I’m sorry that my questioning seemed harsh at times.”

“Please think nothing of it,” said Spongg. “Come, I’ll see you out.”

They rose and walked between the faux-ancient-stone ruins as the parrot took flight and flashed its exotic blue tail feathers.

“That’s quite a bird,” murmured Mary.

“Norwegian blue,” said Spongg admiringly. “Beautiful plumage.”