The Fourth Bear

28. What Jack Did That Night

Jack parked the Allegro in the street a few doors down from his house and tried to catch a glimpse of Madeleine through the kitchen window. He could see shadows moving around behind the curtains, but little else. He hadn’t spoken to her at all that day and wondered whether she would still be pissed at him for being a PDR or, worse, not telling her. It was the least of his worries. If Bartholomew really had murdered Goldilocks, Jack could be up for some very serious charges indeed. He frowned to himself. Up until the Red Riding-Hood debacle, everything seemed to be going so well. It had all just spiraled downhill from there, both professionally and personally. He fortified himself with the thought that it couldn’t possibly get much worse. He looked next door. Mr. and Mrs. Punch were having a fight as usual, and the muffled thumps and sounds of breaking crockery punctuated the peace of the night.

His cell phone rang. “Yuh?”

“I have information for you,” said a woman’s voice on the other end.

“Really?” responded Jack, well used to crank calls.

“Yes, really. About Goldilocks. Hotel Bastardos, room twenty-seven, half an hour, alone.” There was a click, and the line went dead.

He frowned and looked at his watch. It was a little past nine, and he thought of calling Mary to back him up, but if she and Ash were on a date, he didn’t really want to disturb them. He thought of calling Madeleine, then decided not to. It was the wrong decision, of course, but he had made up some very compelling arguments in his own head, so thought he’d go and see what his mystery caller had to say for herself and put off the fight that Madeleine would surely give him for at least an hour.

The Hotel Bastardos was the grottiest hotel in a series of grotty hotels located near the railway station. It was in a shabby state of disrepair. The interior was grimy and smelly, cheap and nasty, decorated badly or not at all. The rooms were small and cheerless, the windows cracked and grimy, the curtains stained and torn. The hot water was patchy, the electricity unreliable and the food lamentable. Rooms could be hired for the month, week, day or hour, and the only room service anyone got was the sort that usually follows a call to one of those brightly colored cards you find in telephone booths. This was exactly how the clientele liked it, and the proprietors expended a lot of time, energy and money maintaining just the right level of sleazy decrepitude.

Jack trotted up the stairs, past the landing where the Easter Bunny had once held him at bay with a stream of hot lead from her M-16. It was over a decade ago, and she’d done her time. People were often fooled, he mused, by the one day in the year on which she did charitable work—the rest of the time she was the rabbit from hell. He topped the stairs and turned left down the hallway, along the threadbare carpet and to room twenty-seven. He stood to one side and rapped on the door. There was a muffled “Enter!” from within, and he pushed open the door.

The room was poorly furnished and dimly lit; a forty-watt bulb was burning in a lamp on the sideboard, a scarf lying across the shade to diffuse the light. A neon sign flashed outside the window, and the hum of the air-conditioning units on the roof next door gave the room a certain degree of noir charm. Jack had arrested a murder suspect in this same room seven years previously, but it might have been yesterday; the room hadn’t changed a jot. The same old wallpaper, the same badly painted woodwork.

There was a figure on the bed.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Good-bye, Agatha.”

Jack turned on his heel and walked back out the door and down the staircase, seriously pissed off. Why couldn’t she leave him alone? He’d heard that Briggs and Agatha had marital difficulties, but he didn’t see why he had to be dragged into them. He’d have to make some sort of official complaint, but he didn’t know how Briggs would take it. Not well, he presumed. He stepped out the front door of the Bastardos and walked back toward his car, reading Mary’s text. He wondered what she’d found out but wasn’t worried—the odometer on the Allegro still had twenty-eight miles to go before it hit zero.

A familiar voice said, “Where have you just been?”

Jack stopped. There was a figure in the shadows of the bus stop outside the hotel entrance. His heart froze. It was Briggs, and he looked a bit drunk—and not at all happy.

“Good evening, sir. A contact called me with information, but it was nothing.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Sir, I just want to go home.”

Briggs looked up at the hotel and gave a mournful sigh.

“Agatha is in there, and I think she’s waiting for someone. Who do you think it is?”

“I’ve no idea, sir. Why don’t you go home?”

Briggs nodded agreement, and the whole sorry chapter might have ended right there and then had not Agatha, in a masterful display of bad timing, appeared from the entrance of the Bastardos yelling, “Jack, come back!”

Briggs scowled angrily and, before Jack could even try to explain, punched him painfully on the chin, then strode off. Jack staggered backward with the blow and momentarily saw stars. He’d been avoiding Agatha for years but had never reported her continual pestering in order not to cause trouble and to help her help herself. If there was a situation that had “unfair” stamped all over it, this was it.

“Are you okay?” said a passerby, helping him to his feet. “I can call the police.”

“I am the police,” said Jack, who’d always wanted to say that, but preferably in a better set of circumstances, “and so is he. Thanks, I’ll be fine. I’m going home.”

When he got to the house, it was locked and bolted. He was about to knock when a small voice said, “I shouldn’t bother if I were you.”

It was Caliban. He was sitting on a garbage can reading a copy of The Beano by the outside light.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” repeated the small, misshapen ape, “I shouldn’t bother if I were you.”

“Oh? And what makes you say that?”

“I heard what she said she’d do if you dared to show your face.”

“And what was that?”

The door was suddenly flung open. Madeleine marched out, struck Jack a glancing blow on the head with a rolling pin and went back inside in one swift movement. Jack fell over, more from surprise than the blow itself.

“She said she’d do that.”

“Why?”

“She got a call from Briggs about something.”

“Shit,” he murmured. Implausibly, things had gotten worse. Much worse.