The Fourth Bear

23. Extreme Cucumbers

Mr. Hardy Fuchsia was editor, publisher, proprietor and founder of Cucumber World, all rolled into one. They found him in the greenhouse of his modest semidetached house in Sonning. The day was hot, and the greenhouse’s vents were all open to keep down the heat inside. Hardy Fuchsia was a cheery man with a limp; he was about eighty, retired, and he obviously thought cucumbers were the be-all and end-all. He came out of the greenhouse, mopped his brow with a handkerchief and shook them warmly by the hand.

“Tragic,” was all he could say when they mentioned Stanley Cripps. “Tragic, tragic, tragic.”

“Had you spoken to him recently?”

“The evening… um, before he died,” said Fuchsia. “He was wildly excited over this year’s possible champion. We might be competitors, but we still talk a great deal. Premier-league cucumbering is a lonely pursuit, Inspector, brightened only by the arrival of another with a similar high level of skill. I hope… ah, you appreciate that?”

“Of course. What did you talk about?”

“His challenger for the nationals. He and I were the only competitors in the cucumber extreme class—for anything weighing over twenty-five kilos. If he beat me, he’d automatically win the world championship. His champ was about to pass the magic fifty-kilo mark; not even I’ve managed that, although size isn’t everything. A fine curve can speak volumes—and a smooth, unblemished skin is worth thirty percent of the judge’s… ah, marks alone. Would you care to have a seat?”

He indicated an upturned water barrel for Mary and a garden roller for Jack.

“How long have you known Mr. Cripps?” asked Mary.

“Well, that is to say, I… oh, over thirty years. We both worked in the same department, although he is my senior by… er… well… um, more years than he would have cared to remember. Would you like to see Cuthbert and the family?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh! An… um, petty foible of mine. Quite… er, childish. Cuthbert… well, and the family — my cucumbers, you see.”

He led them into his ancient wooden greenhouse, the wood almost black with layers of creosote and the roof curved downward in the center with age. The reward in cucumbers, Jack noted, was not of the monetary sort. Mr. Fuchsia led them past radishes the size of basketballs, then some tomatoes and a few parsnips growing in a length of downpipe. His champion cucumbers were green monsters about six feet long and the thickness of a small barrel. The plant that had spawned the beasts was seemingly quite small and forlorn next to them. Even though there were seven of similar size, it wasn’t hard to figure out which one was Cuthbert. The others were excellent, but this one was perfect. The skin was smooth and shiny and blemish-free. It was quite a vegetable—or fruit, if you want to be pedantic.

“Very nice,” murmured Jack. “What do they taste like at this size?”

Mr. Fuchsia looked shocked. “Taste like? You don’t eat them, Inspector. These are for… um, showing.”

Mary pointed to a passive infrared alarm in one corner. “You take this seriously?” she asked.

“I certainly do,” replied Fuchsia. “Many cucumberistas have suffered loss and damage at the hands of”—he looked around and lowered his voice—“the Men in Green.”

“You’re kidding, right?” said Mary, somewhat rudely.

“Well, I’ve never seen them myself,” conceded Fuchsia,

“but the cucumber world is awash in stories of mysterious men turning up at night to steal prize cucumbers and to conduct… experiments.”

“What sort of experiments?”

“Bizarre and unseemly experiments of a horticultural nature. Core samples and cuttings taken, probes inserted, skin removed—that sort of thing. Have you ever seen a flayed cucumber, Inspector? It’s not a pretty sight. The Men in Green are rarely seen, but when they are, they seem to wear nothing… but green.”

“That’s quite far-fetched, if you don’t mind me saying so,” said Mary.

“I don’t mind at all,” replied Fuchsia evenly, “and you’re probably right. But true cucumberistas are a superstitious and somewhat obsessed group of people—many consider us insane, and rightly so.”

“So what do you think happened to Mr. Cripps?” asked Mary.

“Cucumber nobblers, without the shadow of a doubt,” said Mr. Fuchsia without even drawing breath. “The Men in Green. Probably French. They’ve been jealous of le concombre anglais ever since the Hundred Years’ War, which was mostly about the right to buy and sell cucumbers in Europe.”

“Of course it was,” said Jack, humoring him, “but isn’t blowing Cripps and his house to kingdom come a little over the top?”

“It’s in their blood,” replied Fuchsia with a hefty whiff of xenophobia, “from the days of the Resistance. Why use a pound of Semtex when a ton will do the job with a much more impressive bang? Besides, no one would suspect it was a cucumber crime with such a blast—it’s a smoke screen, Inspector, mark my words.”

“And you?” asked Jack. “Might you want to nobble Mr. Cripps’s cucumber?”

“Good Lord no!” said Fuchsia in a shocked tone. “What a suggestion! Cucumber growing is the best fun a man can have, I grant you, but the really exciting bit is the competition. And now that Stanley has joined Simon Prong and Howard Katzenberg in the great greenhouse in the sky, I am on my own in the cucumber extreme class—and there is no fun to be had in a one-cucumber race.”

“Wait, wait,” said Jack. “Katzenberg and Prong were both cucumber growers?”

“Of course!”

Jack and Mary exchanged glances. There had been a link after all—but cucumbers?

“Katzenberg was one of our colleagues who had emigrated across the… ah, water,” explained Fuchsia, “a loss to the European cucumber fraternity, but we always kept in touch.”

“And Prong?”

“Again, a good friend and colleague. Like Cripps and Katz, his greenhouse, garden and cucumber strain were all destroyed. When he died, he’d just reported a one-hundred-and-ten-pound corker. Mind you,” he added, “I’ve always gone for curve and color rather than out-and-out weight. That’ll all change,” he said, patting the smooth hide of his cucumber affectionately, “once Cuthbert here gets into his stride. Three more ounces and he’ll have equaled Stanley’s record.”

Fuchsia seemed entirely unconcerned by the risk that he seemed to be facing. The fact hadn’t been lost on Mary either.

“Has it struck you,” she said slowly, “that all your fellow cucumberistas have died in blazing fireballs?”

“Goodness,” said Fuchsia thoughtfully, “I’d never even considered it before. Do you suppose the Men in Green are after me, too?”

Mary looked at Jack. “Protective custody?” she queried. “Or just section him?”

Jack shook his head. “Can you imagine trying to run this request past Briggs? We’ll try, but I think I know what he’ll say.”

They turned back to Fuchsia.

“It’s likely you’re in very grave danger,” said Mary. “Is there anyone you can stay with for a few weeks?”

“Impossible!” spluttered Fuchsia, waving a hand in the direction of Cuthbert and his family. “A gap in the continuity of care right now could set me back decades. Four people may have died in explosions, but this is something well worth the risk!”

“Four?”

“What?”

“You said four had died. Who was the fourth?”

“Cripps, Katzenberg, Prong and… McGuffin.”

“You knew McGuffin?” asked Mary.

“Indeed!” he said jovially, “Myself, Howard, Prong, McGuffin and Cripps began this whole cucumber thing together in the sixties. It was Simon’s idea, I suppose, the growing of heavy cucumbers. A distraction from the… ah, rigors of work.” He thought for a moment and added, “To be honest, I don’t think McGuffin loved cucumbers half as much as he loved blowing things up. He left us in the early eighties to conduct his own experiments over at QuangTech.”

“What sort of a man was he?”

“Mad as a barrel of skunks. Brilliant, but impetuous. He wanted to grow heavy cucumbers like us, but he was always too impatient. He said he was going to fast-forward the years of crossbreeding and grow a champion to beat all champions in his retirement.”

Jack thought about this. If McGuffin were alive, perhaps he was planning on doing precisely that.

“Has… anything been stolen from you recently?” asked Mary.

“Indeed it has!” exclaimed Fuchsia indignantly. “Someone broke in here two nights ago and stole my fledgling Alpha-Pickle.”

“Your… what?”

“My Alpha-Pickle. It’s the progeny of Cuthbert here and will develop into an even finer specimen. Mind you, the Alpha-Pickle is worthless without the skills to make it develop. In untrained hands it will be good only for… salad.”

After that they showed him Goldilocks’s photo to see if he had seen her, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t throw any light on the blast on the Nullarbor Plain either. Deserts, he told them, were not great places in which to grow cucumbers. They asked him again if he would move somewhere else, but once again he refused, stoically declaring that he would, as an Englishman, defend his cucumbers to the death. Quite how much fight they thought an octogenarian would put up was questionable, but McGuffin, if alive, would be sixty-eight, so perhaps he had a chance after all.

“What do you think?” asked Jack as they took the road back to Reading.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“No idea. Winning a cucumber championship where the first prize is twenty quid and a trophy seems the slenderest of motives for a triple murder. And if Goldilocks’s “scoop” was about deceit, skulduggery, murder, faked death and high drama in the world of competitive cucumber growing, would it really be necessary to kill her, too? I must say, I’m pretty flummoxed by it all.”

“I’m the same,” retorted Mary, “but more so. No matter. I’ll use my feminine wiles on Briggs to see if we can’t get some sort of protection for Fuchsia. I’m sure he’ll agree to it.”