The Big Over Easy

6. Mrs. Laura dumpty

“He had it coming. Who was it, a jealous husband?”

“We never said he was murdered, Mrs. Dumpty.”

The ex-Dumpty residence was a large mock Tudor dwelling. It was cheaply elegant, the furniture and pictures all reproductions, and they trod on marble-effect linoleum in the entrance hall. Mrs. Dumpty spoke to them sitting at a faux-wood Formica table in the large kitchen, wearing a mock-leopardskin jacket and smoking a Sobranie through a silver gilt cigarette holder with affected grace. Her hair was dyed jet black, and her last face lift had pulled her features into a grimace. She spoke in elocuted upper-class tones and looked as though her tan had been applied with a roller. Everything in the house was false, and that included Mrs. Dumpty. She fixed Jack with a stern eye.

“What difference does it make? He’s dead isn’t he?”

“So you weren’t close, then?”

She laughed again. “Once upon a time, Inspector. ‘Fidelity’ was not a word in Humpty’s word stock as much as — ” She paused, trying to think up a suitable word.

“Vocabulary?” suggested Mary.

“Right. Fidelity was not a word in Humpty’s word stock as much as ‘vocabulary’ isn’t in mine. I knew he was sleeping around. He had great charm, and any moppet that came his way he used to regard as fair game.”

She paused for a moment, thinking. Neither Jack nor Mary said anything, so she continued:

“He married me for my money. My family name is Garibaldi. I suppose that means something to you?”

“Indeed it does,” said Jack. He knew as well as anyone that the Garibaldi family was big in biscuits. Yummy-Time Cakes and Snacks (Reading) was valued at over £130 million, and its Reading manufacturing facility churned out five thousand packets of chocolate digestives a day — and that was just the milk chocolate variety.

“When my father died, he left the biscuit concern entirely to me. It was my money that attracted Hump.”

“For high living?” asked Jack, wondering why Humpty had been working from a dive in Grimm’s Road.

“Speculation,” replied Mrs. Dumpty, taking the spent cigarette from the holder and stubbing it out in a mock-tortoiseshell ashtray.

“What did he speculate in?”

“Mostly bankrupt stock, that sort of thing. He bought shares when they went low before a possible merger and then sold when the shares rose — if they did. It was a very high-risk venture. He spent over eight million pounds of my money on his harebrained schemes. South American zinc, North American zinc, Canadian zinc…. In fact” — she paused for a moment — “I don’t think there was much zinc he didn’t speculate in. Some he made a killing on; most of them failed. We lived together for eighteen years, and in that time he made and lost five fortunes. His philandering always got worse when he was worth a lot of money. I thought it would blow over, small indiscretions that only served to prove he could still charm the ladies. It carried on, Mr. Spratt, grew more and more blatant, until I told him it had to stop. He refused, so I told him he couldn’t have any more of my money.”

“What did he do?” asked Jack.

Mrs. Dumpty paused for a moment. “He did what any other man would do in the same situation. He walked out. He went that same morning.”

She lit another cigarette. “I changed the locks. I got a divorce. An ironclad prenuptial against adultery denied him any of my Yummy-Time fortune. I know nothing about his tawdry affairs because I chose not to be interested. I’m afraid to say I cannot tell you anything more.” She paused and stared at the end of her cigarette.

Mary consulted her notebook.

“Do you know where he stayed after he left you?

“I have no idea. With one of his conquests, I imagine.”

“Do you have any idea what he was up to?”

“None. He was out of my life.”

“Did he ever get depressed?” asked Jack.

She visibly started at the question and said with some surprise, “Depressed? Are you considering this might be suicide?”

“I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions, ma’am.”

She pulled herself together and assumed an air of haughty indifference. “Why should I care, Inspector? He is no longer part of my life. Yes, he often got depressed. He was an outpatient at St. Cerebellum’s for longer than I had known him. Easter was always bad for him, as you can imagine, and whenever he saw a cooking program featuring omelettes or eggs Benedict, he would fly off the handle. Whenever the salmonella recurred, I know he found life very painful. Sometimes he would wake up at night in a sweat, screaming, ‘Help, help, take me off, I’m boiling.’ I’m sorry, Officer, do you find something funny?”

She directed this last comment at Mary, who had let out a misplaced guffaw and then tried to disguise it as a sneeze.

“No, ma’am, hay fever.”

“Mrs. Dumpty,” continued Jack, unwilling to lose the momentum of the interview, “do you recognize this woman?” He placed the Viennese photo in front of her.

“No.”

“It would help if you looked at the picture before answering.”

Her eyes flicked over to it, and she inhaled deeply on the Sobranie, blowing the smoke up in the air. “One of his tramps, I daresay.”

She looked at Jack, her eyes narrowing. “I haven’t seen him for two years, Mr. Spratt. We were divorced.”

She got up and walked to the window and paused for a moment with her back to them before asking in a quiet voice, “Do you think he was in any pain?”

“We don’t believe so, Mrs. Dumpty.”

She seemed relieved.

“Thank you, Inspector. It is good to know that, despite everything.”

She gazed out the window. In the middle of the lawn was a large brick wall. It was six feet high, three feet wide and two feet thick; the bricks were covered in moss, and the mortar was beginning to crumble.

“He loved his walls,” she said absently, looking away from the structure in the garden and staring at the floor. “He had an extraordinary sense of balance. I had seen him blind drunk and asleep, yet still balanced perfectly. I had that one built for him on his fiftieth birthday. He used to tell me that when he had to go, he would die atop one of his favorite walls, that he would remain there, stone-cold dead, until they came to take him away.”

She cast another look at the brick monolith in the back garden.

“It’s his tombstone now,” she said, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

Jack peered beyond Humpty’s wall at a large wooden construction with a glass roof. Mrs. Dumpty guessed what he was looking at.

“That was his swimming pool. He had it built when we came here. Keen swimmer. It was about the only physical activity he excelled in. Good buoyancy and natural streamlining, you see — especially backward, with his pointy end first, if you get what I mean. If you have no other questions…?”

“Not for now, Mrs. Dumpty. Thank you.”

“Mrs. Dumpty?” said a voice from the door. “It’s time you did your thirty lengths.”

They turned to see an athletic-looking blond man aged about thirty dressed in a bathrobe. He had curly hair and large brown eyes like a Jersey cow.

“This is Mr. Spatchcock,” explained Mrs. Dumpty quickly, “my personal fitness instructor.”

Spatchcock nodded a greeting. They left her to his attentions and walked back to the car.

“Think she’s over Dumpty?” asked Mary.

“Not really. She didn’t believe he was likely to fall by accident. What did she say: ‘blind drunk and still perfectly balanced’? I think she had more to say, too. Secrets. Perhaps not to do with his death, but secrets nonetheless.”

“Most people do,” observed Mary. “Where are we going now?”

“To the Paint Box to see Mr. Foozle.”

“How is he to do with Humpty?”

“He isn’t.”

Mr. Foozle was a large man with a ruddy complexion whom Jack knew quite well, as their sons played football together. The shop was also a gallery; on the walls at present was a collection of abstract paintings.

“Mr. Spratt!” said Foozle genially. “I didn’t expect to see you in here.”

“Me neither, Mr. Foozle. Do you sell any of these things?” he asked, waving a hand at the canvases splashed with paint.

“Indeed. Two hundred eighty pounds a throw.”

“Two hundred eighty pounds? It looks like a chimp did them.”

Foozle gasped audibly and looked to either side in a very surreptitious manner. “Extraordinary! You detective johnnies have an uncanny sixth sense! You see, a chimp did do them — but that’s our secret, right?”

Jack laid the painting on the counter. “It’s my mother’s,” he explained. “It’s of a cow. She says it’s a Stubbs.”

Foozle unwrapped the canvas. “How is Mrs. Spratt? More cats?”

“Don’t ask.”

“And your delightful wife? Her cover this morning was a real corker — Oh!”

It was said with a surprised tone that made Jack wonder whether it was an “Oh!” good or an “Oh!” bad. Foozle took a magnifying glass from his coat and examined the painting minutely, hunching over it like a surgeon. He grunted several times and finally stood up straight again, taking off his spectacles and tapping them against his teeth.

“Well, you’re right about one thing.”

“It’s a Stubbs?”

“No, it’s a cow.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a fake?”

Mr. Foozle nodded. “I’m afraid so. It’s painted in his style and dates probably from the early years of the nineteenth century. It’s interesting for the fact that it’s a prize cow. Stubbs usually painted horses, so it’s unusual that a forger would copy work in his style yet not his favorite subject.”

Jack ventured a theory. “Is it possible that it was painted in his style quite innocently, and then someone else added the signature, intending to pass it off as a Stubbs?”

Foozle smiled. “You should be a detective in our business, Mr. Spratt. I think you’re probably right. In any event I don’t suppose it’s worth much more than a hundred pounds, perhaps more if an auction house would take it.”

Jack sighed. His mother would be mortified when she heard. He pulled the picture back across the counter and looked at it. It was a good painting and the only one of his mother’s that he would have had on his own wall.

“Do the best you can, Mr. Foozle.”

Foozle smiled and placed the picture behind the counter, then had an idea and pulled out a small cardboard box. “I wonder whether your mother would be interested in… these?”

He opened the box. Inside were six brightly colored broad beans about the size of walnuts. They flashed and glowed as the light caught them. They were exceptionally beautiful, even to Jack’s jaundiced eye.

“What are they?”

A smile crossed Mr. Foozle’s face. “I got them from a dealer the other day. He said they were magical and very valuable. If you planted them, something wonderful would be sure to happen.”

Jack looked at him dubiously. “He said that, did he?”

Mr. Foozle shrugged. “Take them to your mother and if she likes them, we’ll call it a straight swap. If she doesn’t, I’ll give you a hundred pounds for the painting. Fair?”

“Fair.” They shook hands, and Mr. Foozle replaced the lid of the box, then wrapped a rubber band around it for safekeeping.

It was the sort of thing Jack’s mother liked. Her house was almost full to capacity with knickknacks of every size and description; something this unusual might take the disappointment out of the Stubbs-that-wasn’t.

Jack walked out of the shop and paused on the pavement as a curious feeling welled up inside him. “Magic beans for a Stubbs cow,” he murmured to himself. There was something undeniably familiar about what he had just done, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what. He shrugged and joined Mary in the car.