The Fourth Bear

19. The Right Honorable Sherman Bartholomew, MP

“I’m sorry we always have to meet under such disagreeable circumstances,” said Jack to a well-dressed, handsome man in his late fifties. “This is Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, also of the NCD.”

“I was the defense attorney for the Gingerbreadman,” explained Bartholomew for Mary’s benefit. “No one else would handle it.”

“You put up a robust defense,” replied Jack with a smile.

“I’m always relieved it wasn’t robust enough, Inspector. He got better than he deserved—have you caught him yet?”

“We’re not on the chase. I shouldn’t worry—you’re the last person he’d want to attack.”

“I’m very relieved to hear it.” Sherman Bartholomew shook their hands with a firm grip and offered them a seat in his office. He was that rare thing in politics, a freethinking and radical MP who wasn’t sidelined by his party to the anonymity of the back benches. He was an asset to the city and took his job seriously. The constituency hours took place once a week in the council offices, and Jack and Mary had managed to jump the line of disgruntled bears and other assorted citizens who sat grumbling in the waiting room. Bartholomew, in keeping with the strongest parliamentary tradition, shunned the possibility of any kind of scandal and agreed to see them straightaway. “Perhaps you might tell us what you know about Goldilocks, Mr. Bartholomew?”

He didn’t answer and instead drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment. “It’s a situation of the utmost delicacy,” he said without making eye contact.

“Was she investigating you about something?”

“No.”

“Extortion?”

“No!”

“Blackmail?”

“No, no—it was nothing like that.” He stood up and paced nervously back and forth behind his chair.

“Sir,” said Jack, this time more forcefully, “I have to tell you that this morning we positively identified the remains of a woman we found up at SommeWorld.”

Bartholomew looked at Jack with a pained expression. “Goldilocks?”

“Yes.”

“I need to sit down, if you don’t mind,” he mumbled, and sat heavily in his chair.

“We know,” continued Jack, “that you dined with her the evening before she vanished. If you have been involved in any sort of parliamentary impropriety that Goldilocks was investigating, it will almost certainly come out in the fullness of time.”

He looked at them both and rubbed his forehead. “We were lovers,” he said in a quiet voice.

“What?” exclaimed Jack with undisguised astonishment. He was expecting any explanation but this one.

“Lovers,” repeated Bartholomew. “Goldilocks and I. For more than a year now.”

“Wait, wait,” said Jack in a state of some confusion. “You were, to great fanfare, Westminster’s first openly gay MP and have remained a vociferous mouthpiece for all kinds of minority-rights issues for the past twenty-five years, and now you’re telling me… you’re straight?”

Bartholomew covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook with a silent sob.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he said miserably, “living a lie. I’ll be ruined and disgraced if this gets into the papers. My parliamentary career will be finished and my hard-fought pink credentials in tatters.”

“What about Douglas?” asked Mary, equally shocked by Bartholomew’s confession. “Your long-term relationship and much-publicized adoption of two children has always seemed so… perfect.”

“I did it for appearance’s sake,” he mumbled sadly. “Doug knows what I am and will stand by me if any of this gets out.”

Jack and Mary looked at each other as Bartholomew massaged his temples and stared at the blotter on his desk, as though the dark smudges might reveal some sort of answer to his dilemma. He blew his nose and tried to compose himself.

“Mr. Bartholomew,” said Jack after a pause, “it won’t be the first time I’ve had to investigate a potential crime that has involved sensitive issues of a strictly personal nature. But you must understand that our prime consideration at this point is to find out what happened to Goldilocks.”

“Potential crime?” he said, looking up at him. “What do you mean?”

“We don’t know precisely how she died.”

“Are you saying she might have been… murdered?”

“No, I’m saying we don’t know precisely how she died. I need to know more about the circumstances surrounding Miss Hatchett’s death before we can decide one way or another. I’m not here to ruin anyone’s career.”

Jack meant it. Bartholomew was a good MP, and Jack didn’t want to see him ousted over something as meaningless as his utterly orthodox sexual orientation. Bartholomew served Reading well and represented quite a few of the nursery figures that Jack worked with. In many ways, the concerns of Jack’s were Bartholomew’s, too.

“I think I knew deep down something terrible had happened to her,” said Bartholomew unhappily. “It was unlike her not to be on the end of the phone. The police’s involvement was predictable, too—but I must confess I was expecting a more—how shall I put it? — conventional branch of the service. No offense meant.”

“None taken. There appears to be a Nursery Crime angle to this.”

“Ah,” said Bartholomew, “bears. I knew my support of them might be my undoing.”

“Bears?” echoed Jack. “I never mentioned anything about bears.”

“I think you’ll find that Goldilocks and bears are inextricably linked, Inspector. It was bears that brought us together, in July of last year. Since all the anthropomorphized animals in Reading are my constituents, I have a duty to promote their interests in Parliament—I met Goldilocks when she came to my office to press for a law to allow lethal ursine self-defense.”

“The ‘right to arm bears’ controversy?”

“Yes. It seemed pointless to have given bears equal rights, only for them to be unable to defend themselves against illegal hunting and the bile tappers who still stalk their community. If a hunter takes a rifle to kill a bear, it seems entirely just and proper to me that a bear should be able to obtain an identical rifle in order to defend itself.”

“The hunters claim that it’s not antibear or ursism but tradition.”

“Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition, Inspector. We got to talking, and before I knew it, I had asked her out to dinner. We worked closely to draft the Ursine Self-Defense Bill. It was my fifth private member’s bill and met with general approval, although the final vote was disappointing—six hundred and eight against and one for.” He sighed. “A lone voice in the wilderness.”

“When did you last see her?” asked Mary.

“We had dinner at the Green Parrot last Friday. Do you know it?”

“I’ve heard of it,” returned Mary, knowing full well that it was one of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants on the Thames. It was so exclusive, in fact, that most nights the guests never attained the necessary high criteria, and it remained empty.

“What time did you part company?”

“About eleven. We spoke again a little after midnight. I wished her good luck, and… that was the last time we spoke. I called her at about ten on Saturday morning, but she didn’t answer.”

“At ten on Saturday morning?” queried Jack. “You’re sure it wasn’t before?”

“Definitely.”

“And you block your number on your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, please continue.”

“I tried the rest of the day to call both her cell phone and her home but only got her answering machine. When I hadn’t heard anything by Sunday evening, I went around to her flat. It was locked and dark, so on Monday morning I called her brother to see if he knew where she was. He didn’t.”

“And he speaks to me four days later at the Déjà Vu,” observed Jack. “You’re the last human we know to have seen her alive. Did she seem normal Friday night?”

“Excitable, I would say. She said she was close to an important breakthrough in a story.”

“About unexplained explosions?”

“No,” replied Bartholomew, somewhat surprised, “it was about cucumbers.”

“Cucumbers?”

“Yes. Something big going down in the world of extreme cucumber growing, and that her story would have major consequences.”

“And she didn’t mention explosions?”

“Only in relation to that Stanley Cripps fellow’s death. Other than that it was cucumbers, cucumbers, cucumbers. She spoke about record-breaking examples, the international cucumber-fancying fraternity, the fact that a cucumber is a fruit and not a vegetable, a member of the pumpkin family—that sort of thing. Bit boring, really—but it makes a change from parliamentary procedure, and… I just like listening to her talk.” He paused for thought, and his eyes glistened.

“Did she mention anyone else in connection with this story?”

“Yes,” said Bartholomew, snapping his fingers. “She was going to have lunch with a contact on Saturday who she said would ‘reveal all.’ McGuffin was his name. Angus McGuffin. She said he was the key to the whole business.”

“Did she say why?”

Bartholomew shook his head. Jack and Mary looked at one another. Perhaps Goldilocks had been working on two stories.

“Can you tell us where you were on Saturday morning?” asked Mary.

“At my house here in Reading. Doug had taken the kids up to his mum’s for the weekend—I didn’t expect them back until Sunday. I was alone until Agent Danvers picked me up at eleven to take me to the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center for a lunch with the Mayor and the Splotvian Ambassador.”

“Did you call anyone, or did anyone call you?”

“Doug called me at about nine-thirty, and I must have fielded a dozen or so calls until Agent Danvers arrived.”

“So you can’t account for your whereabouts until nine-thirty in the morning?”

“No.”

They questioned him further but gained little else that was useful. He knew of no one who would want to hurt Goldilocks except a few disgruntled hunters and bear farmers. He regarded the notion that she might have committed suicide or ignored warning notices to wander over SommeWorld as “laughable” and described her as “fussy” and methodical but quite obsessive and single-minded.

“You’ve been very helpful,” said Jack finally. “I may ask you some more questions when we know more. I’ll let you get back to your constituents.”

Bartholomew rolled his eyes skyward. “More complaints about the roads and hospital waiting lists, I shouldn’t wonder. If you ever think you might want a career in politics, Inspector, think again. It’s merely a continuous and mostly vain attempt to keep several groups of people with opposing needs and agendas happy, and knowing in your heart of hearts that you cannot, and being lambasted for your hard work in the bargain.”

He paused for a moment before continuing.

“Please keep me informed, Inspector—she meant a great deal to me.”

Jack drove a circuitous route back to the office. He still wanted to get Dorian Gray to explain to Kreeper the nature of the Allegro’s guarantee. On the way there, Mary said, “Bartholomew genuinely seemed to have cared about Goldilocks.”

“I agree. It also explains NS-4’s interest. They must realize that his days as an MP are numbered if even a whiff of his straightness gets out, and are trying to protect him.”

“I’d like to know the story she was working on,” mused Mary.

“So would I.”

“Sorry to trouble you,” said a young officer who had just waved them down at another police checkpoint, “but I wonder if you have seen this person anytime recently?” He showed them a picture of the Gingerbreadman.

“We’re NCD, Officer,” said Mary, holding up her ID.

“Beg pardon, ma’am,” said the officer, who saluted and waved them on. As they drove off, they could see that the armored car parked next to the road was full of heavily armed troops. Copperfield was clearly trusting in superior firepower to bring the Gingerbreadman down.

They fell silent until they reached Dorian Gray’s used-car lot, or to be more precise, Dorian Gray’s ex—car lot. He had done a runner. There was a mini-Dumpster full of old brochures and letterhead notepaper, cheap furniture and a few old Leyland posters. The lockup where Gray had kept the Allegro was open—and empty. On the forecourt, where the cars had stood less than two days before, a smattering of oil stains was the only evidence that there had even been a used-car lot there at all. Of the cars, Dorian Gray himself and even the bunting, there was no sign.

“Blast,” said Jack, “another missing person.”