The Big Over Easy

44. The End of the story

It was a cloud, clearless night and the stars brinkled twightly in the heavens. As Jack and Mary motored closer to his hother’s mouse, they could see that the mull foon had risen behind the beanstalk and now presented the leaves and pipening rods in sharp silhouette. Attached to the top of the stalk was a steady red light, a safety precaution fitted by the Civil Aviation Authority that afternoon. The crowds had departed from the streets nearby, and litter and soft-drink cans lay scattered about the road. After the busy day, everyone was at home relaxing.

Everyone, that is, except Dr. Quatt, who had not been at St. Cerebellum’s or her home when Ashley and Gretel called. Jack had issued a warrant for her arrest and posted uniformed officers at both places. No one had reported a chicken loose in Reading either — of any size.

“Thanks for dropping me off,” said Jack as they drove slowly up the road towards his mother’s. “Madeleine said she’d be up at Mum’s and I should meet her there. Hello, what’s this?”

Ahead of them two police cars blocked the street, and two officers in vests held automatic weapons.

“Yes, sir?” inquired one of the policemen in a businesslike tone when Jack got out and walked towards them.

“Detective Inspector Spratt, NCD.”

He held up his ID card, and the officer stood to attention respectfully.

“Thank you, sir. And may I say on a personal note how impressed I was by the way you cracked the Humpty case. Once had a verruca myself. Nasty little blighters. Do you always wear blue overalls, sir?”

“It was a decontamination sort of thing. What’s going on?”

The officer leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Jellyman on a personal social call, sir. Private viewing of the beanstalk and an audience with the owner.”

This was surprising and also a great honor — owing to his tight schedule, the Jellyman rarely did “drop-ins” these days.

“She’s my mother, and my family is up there. Can I go in?”

“One moment,” said the officer, and he relayed the request through his walkie-talkie.

“Good evening,” said Jack to the second officer. “Tell me, how long has that white van been there?”

The officer looked at where it was parked less than fifty yards away.

“Don’t know, sir. Why?”

“No reason.”

Mary switched off the BMW’s engine, and the city was suddenly still and quiet. Not a dog barked, not a car horn sounded. Everyone was indoors. Jack looked at his watch. Five past ten. People would be settling down to catch the edited highlights of the visit on the news. He looked about. At the various parts of the street, other armed police stood on duty, and outside his mother’s garden gate was a white Daimler limousine. Mary joined Jack and handed her own ID to the officer. He looked at Jack for his approval, and he nodded.

They waited for a couple of minutes until the walkie-talkie crackled into life.

“Tell them to come on over.”

The officer escorted them towards the garden gate, where Friedland Chymes was waiting to meet them. Since he was heading up Jellyman security, it was understandable. Unwelcome, but understandable. He was stony-faced but remained professional.

“Good result, Jack,” he managed to growl, the feeling that he should have been the one to figure it out all too obvious. “Sergeant, you’ll have to wait here. Family only. Baines will take you to the front door.”

Jack was handed over to a man wearing an earpiece and a bulge where a gun would be in a shoulder holster. The man asked to see his card.

“Why has your ID card shrunk?”

“Thirty minutes in an autoclave.”

“I see,” he replied, as though that sort of thing happened every day. “Thank you, Inspector. Follow me.”

Jack accompanied him up the path as the officer named Baines with the gun and the earpiece reeled off instructions parrot fashion.

“Only speak when you are spoken to. Do not attempt to shake hands. Bow your head when you are presented. Do not interrupt when he is talking. Do not touch him. Do not sneeze in his presence. Do not discuss politics, and always refer to him as ‘Your Eminence.’”

He rapped on the front door, and it opened a crack to reveal another officer with a large mustache who looked at Jack and then ushered him in. As soon as he stepped into the front hall, Jack noticed that the grandfather clock had stopped. He glanced across and was puzzled to see that the pendulum had halted midswing. Stranger still, his mother’s hyperactive cats were all sitting quietly in a row by the door, like skittles. He didn’t have time to think about it any further, as he was ushered into the familiar surroundings of his mother’s front room.

His whole family was there. Madeleine was standing at the back holding Stevie, and the rest of the children were either sitting or standing next to their grandmother. Incredibly, Pandora was wearing a dress, and more incredibly, Ben had combed his hair. Megan was standing in front of them all, facing the large leather armchair that used to be Jack’s father’s. Sitting in that chair, suffused by a soft glow that seemed to emanate not from his white suit but through it, was the Jellyman.

The Jellyman’s physical presence was something that could only be felt, never described. He exuded strong feelings of hope, and his calming personality seemed to envelop all who met him. They said of the Jellyman that a smile from him could brighten the darkest moment and a word could still the most passionate rage. Jack, like many, had remained skeptical about the great man’s powers, but in those few seconds he knew that everything they said was true.

The Jellyman was leaning forward in the chair, his fingertips pressed against his chin, and even though he whispered to Megan and the words were indistinct, they seemed to fill the room like chamber music in a hall of mirrors. Megan was nodding eagerly as he spoke to her, and when he finished, he laid his hand on her head and smiled. Megan nearly melted, and Madeleine wiped a tear from her cheek.

The Jellyman’s aide rapped a staff on the floor and said, in a loud, clear, voice, “Your Eminence, may I present Detective Inspector Jack Spratt!”

Jack took a step forwards and tried to remember all he had been told on the short walk up the garden path. He’d forgotten everything except the bit about sneezing, but it didn’t matter. The Jellyman swung round in his seat and stared at Jack with his piercing blue eyes.

“Mr. Spratt,” he said with an enigmatic smile, “you have a most charming family.”

“Th-thank you, Your Eminence.”

He stood up and approached Jack. He was a large man, but perhaps this impression was due to his overwhelming personality rather than his stature. He spoke plainly and without ambiguity. You could never remember the precise words he spoke, but the meaning of them stayed with you forever.

“I want to thank you on behalf of the nation for saving us from a plague of verrucas.”

“My duty, sir.”

“Even so, you have our thanks. I knew Humpty well, you know — we were at Oxford together. I heard he had slipped into the darker side of existence, but he was a good egg at heart. Was it Randolph Spongg who murdered him?”

“No, Your Eminence, we suspect a mad doctor named Quatt.”

The Jellyman shook his head sadly. “A perverter of the natural order,” he said disdainfully. “I had her banned from research, but I see I should have taken more extreme measures. Why did she murder him?”

“She didn’t — but death was inevitable once she had decided to use Humpty as a living incubation device. As soon as Humpty Dumpty hatched, it was murder.”

“How fascinating! What came out?”

“A chicken. Quatt must have been — ”

Jack stopped as nasty thoughts coalesced in his mind. Why had he supposed it was a chicken? Images of Winkie’s tattered body hove into view. A slash so violent it had split his sternum. Winkie must have heard the shot, come out and seen — not the hit man who was already gone, but Dr. Quatt, who had been waiting for several days with her white St. Cerebellum’s van. Winkie returned home, read the newspapers, assumed Quatt had killed Humpty and then — poor fool — tried to blackmail her. She had turned up to pay him off with whatever came out of Humpty’s shell — something so terrifying that, urine-soaked with fear, Winkie couldn’t even defend himself. A haddock with a kitten’s head was child’s play: Dr. Quatt had created something unspeakably nasty and then grown it in Humpty’s denucleated yolk. And for what? To use against the one man who had ruined her!

“Inspector?” asked the Jellyman. “Something perturbs you.”

“You’re in danger. We’re all in danger. Madeleine, Mum, get the children into the cellar right now and lock the door. You with the mustache, get the officers outside to check the white van parked down the street — and get the Jellyman to safety!”

He used the sort of voice where no one argued, and as Madeleine swiftly guided the family downstairs to cries of “yes, but why?” the guard with the mustache spoke into his radio. The front door opened a crack. It was Chymes.

“What the hell’s going on, Spratt?”

“Quatt has bred some sort of weird Humpty-beast to try to kill the Jellyman. It will be immensely strong and have claws capable of splitting a man open.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

As if in answer, there was a burst of gunfire and a cry. Chymes rapidly opened the door and came in, while the officer with the mustache drew his pistol and spoke on his walkie-talkie. There was a garbled message in return and another five shots, then silence. After a moment there was a knock at the door, and Baines came inside, sweating.

“Did you see it?” asked Chymes.

The officer with the mustache went to the kitchen door as the Jellyman and his aide-de-camp waited patiently.

Chymes opened the front door a crack and looked out. At the garden gate, he could see an armed officer at the rear door of the limo. He beckoned urgently. Chymes shut the door and turned to Baines and Jack.

“His limo is only twenty meters away. If we bunch ourselves around him, we can probably make it.”

“It’s your show, Friedland.”

Chymes opened the door again just in time to see something large and scaly run past the limo and dispatch the armed officer with a swiftness that was impressive, deadly — and gruesome.

“New plan,” said Chymes as he closed the door again. “The Jellyman goes in the cellar.”

“I refuse,” said the Jellyman with finality. “They want me. I won’t take danger to the innocents.”

He meant Jack’s children, of course. Since protocol dictated that the Jellyman could never be manhandled, there was little they could do but acquiesce.

There was another shot and a cry from outside.

“Now what?” asked Baines.

“Newer plan,” said Chymes. “You stay here and defend the Jellyman, and I’ll coordinate the backup response from… somewhere else.”

And without another word, he opened the door and was gone. Jack watched him as he ran across the street and jumped inelegantly through the privet hedge of the house opposite.

“Where’s the backup?” asked Jack as he closed and locked the door.

“On its way.”

“Then we wait.”

There were more shots, this time from the garden, and another cry.

“Whoa!” shouted the officer in the kitchen, “I just saw something dark and scaly go past the windows — and I think it got Simpson.”

“Controlled fire at anything that comes in!” yelled Baines.

“Make every shot count!”

Baines and Jack moved through to the living room and wedged the door to the hall shut with a chair under the handle. Baines then positioned himself between the Jellyman and the kitchen door.

“Officer Baines,” said the Jellyman, “you are excused. I have nothing to fear from death, and they want only me. You, too, Inspector, and you, Mr. Vaughn.”

Jack looked at Baines and Vaughn, the aide-de-camp. Neither of them moved.

“Is he always this pleasant?”

“Always,” replied Baines, adding over his shoulder, “I’m sorry, Your Eminence, my orders are quite clear on this matter.”

There was a crash as the kitchen door was smashed in and loud reports accompanied by muzzle flashes as the officer in the kitchen slowly emptied his weapon into something out of their line of vision. The gunshots stopped, and they heard a faint metallic clack as the empty magazine hit the tiled kitchen floor. The officer with the mustache never got a chance to reload. There was another crash of broken furniture, and the officer’s arm, still with the pistol held tightly in his hand, slid past the open door and hit the fridge. The Jellyman closed his eyes and spoke quietly to himself, doubtless preparing himself for his physical end.

There was a low hiss from the kitchen and the scrape of furniture as the creature made its way to the living room door. A scaly claw with an elongated central digit like a kitchen knife grasped the doorframe. This was followed by the head of something that looked like an illustration from Jerome’s Bumper Book of Carnivorous Dinosaurs. It stood upright on powerful rear legs, using a gently lashing tail as a counterbalance, but it was no taller than Jack — just a lot more powerful. The body was covered by a series of bony plates like a pangolin, and it had small dark eyes that darted around until they alighted on the Jellyman. Then it hissed again and trod purposefully into the room, the sharp claws on its feet gouging deep furrows in the highly polished parquet flooring.

Baines fired, but the shot merely ricocheted off the beast’s scaly hide and shattered a vase on the sideboard. Jack did the first thing he thought of — he grabbed the creature’s tail and attempted to pull it off balance. With a cry the beast snapped its muscular tail like a whip, and Jack was flicked backwards at high speed through the kitchen door and into the furniture, which broke under him like matchwood.

Baines stood his ground and fired at regular, controlled intervals. It didn’t help. The beast approached him and with one violent swipe sent him to either side of the room. There was nothing now between the Humpty-beast and the Jellyman, who stared back at it with an expression of detached serenity. Jack looked around desperately for a weapon that would make a dent on the creature’s hide, but without luck: His mum’s kitchen wasn’t generally the sort of place where you’d try to kill bioengineered hell-beasts sprung from the crazed mind of a revenge-fueled fanatic.

Blast. And he’d done so well up until now. If only he’d figured this out earlier, Humpty’s degenerate offspring wouldn’t be about to kill the only honest politician the planet possessed. He stopped. Offspring. Strictly speaking, the creature wasn’t anything of the sort, as Dr. Quatt had used Humpty only to incubate it, but then again…

Jack stood up and yelled: “HUMPTY!!”

The creature paused momentarily, thought for a moment and then took a step closer to the Jellyman, who forgave the beast and closed his eyes. The creature raised a powerful arm in readiness to complete Dr. Quatt’s revenge when… a size-B egg hit it on the back of the head.

The effect was electric. The creature roared so loudly that some of Jack’s mother’s pottery animals vibrated off the display cabinet. The Jellyman thus momentarily forgotten, the beast swung around to face its new aggressor, its eyes fixing Jack’s in the sort of way a cat might fixate on a mouse. Jack had changed from being an annoyance — to being prey.

Jack purposefully dropped an egg on the kitchen floor. It made that distinctive cracking ploppy noise, and the beast bellowed angrily and pawed the ground, its sharp talons cutting through the parquet flooring like margarine.

“Oh, dear!” said Jack. “What a butterfingers I am.” He pointed to his right and shouted, “Watch out! A GIANT MONGOOSE!”

The creature flinched and looked to where he had pointed, which gave Jack a chance to take the remainder of the eggs and run to the other end of the kitchen. The beast growled menacingly and took a step closer. Deep within its tiny one-track, kill-Jellyman mind, something vaguely familiar stirred. Small vestigial feelings that had been passed unseen from the egg who had died to give it life. Humpty’s worries — and his fears.

“Oh, dearie me again,” said Jack as he dropped another egg on the floor and backed towards the shattered kitchen door. The creature gave a snort and a growl, took three quick steps closer and raised its arm to attack. But Jack was prepared. He pulled his mother’s egg poacher from the cupboard and brandished it the way you would a crucifix to a vampire. The creature backed off for a moment, then snapped and lunged, caught the poacher and sent it flying across the room.

“Then what about this?” asked Jack, grabbing the egg timer from beside the oven. “Three minutes for the perfect egg? Egg dippy fingers, anyone? With hollandaise?”

He backed out through the door and dropped another egg. The creature, enraged and confused, followed him into the back garden and snapped, growled and lunged while Jack taunted it with an egg whisk.

“Scrambled eggs on toast!” Jack yelled. “Fried, poached, boiled… SOUFFLÉ!”

He backed across the garden and yelled eggy insults until he walked into something hard and unyielding. It was the beanstalk. Shiny dark green, with a beautifully smooth trunk, it seemed almost impossible to resist.

“Tortilla!” he yelled as he threw the egg whisk at the beast with all his strength. The creature caught it in its teeth and then crushed it angrily.

Jack stuffed the three eggs that remained in his overall pocket and started to climb. It was easier than he had thought, and the leaves offered good handholds. But if he had hoped this would offer some sort of escape, he was wrong. The creature snapped the air once or twice when Jack shouted “Eggs en cocotte!” — and then followed him.

Jack clambered up, past the ripening beans and high enough to see the road — and the Jellyman’s Daimler being driven off at high speed. He breathed a sigh of relief, something that didn’t last long, as he suddenly realized that although His Eminence was safe, Jack personally still had to deal with five hundred pounds of dangerously pissed-off Humpty-beast.

“Actually,” said Jack, “I hate eggs.”

The beast snapped angrily at him again.

“No, no,” he added hurriedly, cursing his own stupidity, “I meant that by hating eggs, I don’t eat them. Meringues — yuck.”

It had no effect whatsoever. The creature leaped nimbly to the branch below Jack and swiped angrily at his foot. Jack grabbed the branch above him and pulled himself away — just too late. He felt a stab of pain course through his foot. He looked down. The creature had taken away not only the branch he’d been standing on but also his shoe, sock and, although he didn’t yet know it, his little toe. He winced with the pain and resumed the climb, favoring the arch of his damaged foot rather than the ball. He could hear the wail of sirens as the backup units approached, but they didn’t offer him much comfort. Within a few minutes, he had reached the red aviation warning light, and he stole a quick look below. He was about a hundred feet from the ground, and his mother’s house looked very small. There was a growl from below as the creature continued its pursuit, and Jack hurriedly climbed beyond the red light only to discover a new and dramatically unforeseen problem to contend with: The creature was no less angry, and Jack had just run out of beanstalk.

He hooked a leg around one of the leaves and took the eggs from his pocket. But his hands were shaking, and he fumbled; the three remaining size-B free-range eggs fell from his grasp and dropped away into the darkness. And with them his last possible bargaining chip.

“Bollocks!” he muttered to himself. “What a day.”

The creature slavered, hissed and snapped and made another swipe. Jack tried to avoid the lunge and succeeded, but it was a short-lived escape. The beanstalk was smaller and weaker at this height, and the leaf Jack was holding came away from the main stalk. He made a wild grab for another, but this, too, came away in his hands. He overbalanced, lost his footing, and fell backwards into space.

He saw a glimpse of the Humpty-beast bathed in a red glow as he fell past, then a blur of beanstalk leaves and pods accompanied by a loud rushing noise. He just had time to experience a curious mixture of relief and renewed peril when he landed on the potting shed in an explosion of rotting wood, earwigs and perished roofing felt. He was momentarily stunned, and all he could see when he opened his eyes was a gaping hole in the collapsed shed and the beanstalk stretching away into the night sky. He picked himself up from where the remains of the roof had collapsed onto the three bags of wool, groaned and stumbled outside. He had a bad cut above his eye, and his foot and ankle were starting to throb badly. He had to think for a moment as his dazed mind tried to focus on what had just happened. It didn’t take long. He looked up and realized that it wasn’t a bad dream: The creature was beginning its descent.

Jack shook his head and staggered backwards, his hand falling onto the shaft of an ax that was resting in a block of wood. He knew what had to be done. He hobbled into the shed, rummaged under the broken wood and found his father’s old chain saw. He flicked the switch and pulled on the cord. It didn’t even fire. He pulled again and again as he walked around to the side of the beanstalk facing the road. If he felled it onto his mother’s house, he’d never hear the end of it. On the fourth pull, the chain saw burst into life, and the harsh staccato roar filled the quiet night. The chain saw bit easily into the hard stalk, and he had soon cut out a wedge and then swapped sides to make the final cut. He was halfway through and had already felt a few promising cracks and groans when there was a loud concussion, some sparks, and the chain saw stopped dead. Jack didn’t realize what had happened until a voice made him turn.

“I underestimated you,” snarled Dr. Quatt.

She stood facing Jack with a smoking automatic and looked as though she would be only too happy to use it again.

“I get underestimated a lot,” replied Jack with a wince, as the pain from the thousand and one cuts and bruises he had sustained began to kick in, “and by better people than you.”

“Interfering fool!” she spat. “The bastard Jellyman has escaped. Ten long years of planning for nothing. Do you know how long it took me to engineer my little friend up there?”

“You just said. Ten years — ”

“Don’t patronize me!” she screeched, her eyes flashing dangerously. “My research was only to save lives!”

“And Humpty? Who saved his life?”

“Humpty was an egg,” she retorted. “What is an egg for — if not to create life?”

“How about an omelette?” suggested Jack with a grimace as a muscle twinged uncomfortably in his back.

“Come here, my child,” called Dr. Quatt to the Humpty-beast, still halfway down the beanstalk, which creaked and groaned under its weight. “One more for you.”

“But Humpty was your patient!”

“And the worthy recipient of my greatest research project,” said Quatt with pride. “I was initially worried that night when the gunman shot him, but he was fine. I just had to help the little darling to hatch.”

Jack shivered. She was nastier and more inhuman than he had thought.

“He survived the fall, didn’t he?”

“Oh, yes. He recognized me, you know, and asked for help, so I picked up a chair leg — ”

There was a loud, dull metallic clunk, and Dr. Quatt abruptly stopped talking and pitched heavily forwards onto her face. Mary had struck her a glancing blow on the back of the head with a shovel.

Jack’s legs collapsed from under him, and he sat on the ground against the garden swing. The stalk creaked ominously. Mary kicked away Quatt’s pistol before running up to him.

“Sorry, sir, but I thought we’d heard quite enough. Are you all right?”

“No, Mary, I feel like shit. I’ve just fallen a hundred feet and gone through a potting shed — and you need to get out of here.”

“Not without you.”

She tried to lift him, but he was surprisingly heavy, and weakened. He couldn’t stand.

“Go, Mary, before the — ”

It was too late. The creature jumped the remaining fifteen feet and landed on Stevie’s tortoise-shaped sandbox with a crunch. It lashed its tail angrily and hissed menacingly at them both before looking down at the unconscious body of Quatt. It nudged her gently with its nose, made a quiet whining noise and then very tenderly picked her up. The beanstalk creaked and trembled as the stresses of the huge weight bore down on the badly weakened structure.

Mary grabbed the ax to use as a weapon, but Jack stopped her.

“Leave it,” he said shakily. “I think I know how this will all turn out. It’s an NCD thing.”

The beast hissed at them once more and then bounded clear over the garden fence with Quatt in its arms, snapping angrily at the officers who had just arrived. They weren’t armed, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they were.

“Tell them to leave it alone,” said Jack in a quiet voice.

“Step away from the beast!” yelled Mary. “It won’t get far — it’s an NCD thing.”

Jack nodded gratefully as the beanstalk cracked again, shook and gently started to fall, while the beast gathered speed in large strides down the road. It had almost reached the first police car and was about to leap over it to freedom when the beanstalk came crashing down on top of it, crushing the hapless creature and Dr. Quatt and scattering sleeping-bag-size bean pods around the neighborhood. The almighty thump reverberated through the ground, split the asphalt and lifted two drain covers. Four cars were cut virtually in half, and there was a spontaneous cacophony of car alarms.

“What do you know?” said Mary with admiration. “It got them!”

“That’s the beauty of Nursery Crime work,” said Jack, closing his eyes and smiling. “Things generally turn out the way you expect them to, even if the manner in which they do is a bit unpredictable.”

“Like who killed Humpty Dumpty?”

“Of course. Mrs. Dumpty thought she had shot him; Bessie thought she’d poisoned him. Grundy thought his hit man had got him, and Spongg wired his car. But none of them killed him, not even that lunatic Quatt. The giant beast that Humpty had become was killed by a man named Jack… when he chopped down a beanstalk.”

An ambulance picked its way through the outsized beans lying on the road and pulled up alongside the garden.

“You’re going to be okay, sir,” said Mary, yelling over her shoulder for a medic and placing her hand against a bad wound in his side.

“Call me Jack,” he whispered. “We’ve been through enough.”

“You’re going to be okay, Jack.”

“I’ll be honest, Mary — ”

“You should call me by my first name too, Jack.”

“Sorry. I’ll be honest, Mary — ”

“That’s better.”

“I thought you weren’t going to last the course.”

“Closer than you think. Y’know, I don’t know why, but I just feel that I belong here. Does that sound weird to you?”

“Nah,” said Jack. “I think Briggs, for all his faults, knew that when he sent you to me.”

“How do you think he knew?”

“I don’t know,” he replied with an almost imperceptible shrug as grateful unconsciousness, heavy and black, swept towards him. “Sometimes the name just fits.”

Humpty Dumpty was buried that June. Thirty thousand people turned up to see his ovoid coffin being borne through the town. Hundreds of those whom he had helped in the past paid floral tributes, and noted among the guests were the Jellyman’s personal aide-de-camp, Mary Mary and Jack Spratt.

Jack Spratt made a full recovery and returned to work at Reading Central. He was promoted to detective chief inspector and presented with the Jellyman’s Award for Outstanding Courage in the Face of Something Nasty. Despite numerous pleas from the Guild of Detectives, he has yet to join.

Mary Mary still works with DCI Spratt. The investigation that became known as “The Big Over Easy” was serialized in Amazing Crime Stories and is soon to be made into a TV series. She has still not yet managed to dump Arnold.

Lola Vavoom and Randolph Spongg were listed as “missing, presumed drowned.” Reports of sightings from Alice Springs to Chicago have been dismissed as “unsubstantiated.”

Sophie Muffet-Dumpty was written out of an early draft of this novel and does not appear.

Friedland Chymes’s infamous “tactical withdrawal” from the attack on the Jellyman led to his retirement from the Oxford & Berkshire Constabulary. He is now president of the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives.

The Goose was spirited away to a top-secret government research station. It contained only what you’d usually expect to find inside a goose and died on the operating table.

The Stubbs was real after all. Mr. Foozle is helping the police with their inquiries.

Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now live in Eastern Splotvia, which conveniently — and coincidentally, claim the couple — has no extradition treaty with Britain. They are doing well, and Mrs. Grundy is expecting their first child.

Otto Tibbit never worked with Jack again. He left the force and became a goose breeder, gold dealer and president of a charitable trust. He is currently writing a palindromic book entitled, predictably enough, D’neeht.

The Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center was opened to the public after prolonged decontamination. It attracted half a million visitors in the first six months and remains Reading’s number-one tourist attraction.

Prometheus and Pandora were married six months later. Prometheus gained British citizenship and permanent political asylum. A bolt of lightning hit the church during the ceremony, setting fire to the congregation and badly burning eight people. The event was described as “an act of God,” although no specific gods were mentioned.

Castle Spongg was given to the National Trust. It is open six days a week, ten until four, excluding Tuesdays and Christmas Day. Wheelchairs welcome; visitors to the revolving room please bring soft shoes.

The Nursery Crime Division was not disbanded and is still active to this day.