The Big Over Easy

THE BIG OVER EASY Jasper Fforde

Briggs waved a hand in the direction of the corpse. “It looks like he died from injuries sustained falling from a wall.”

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses

And all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

—Traditional

For my brother Mathew, whose love of the absurd — and the profound — enlightened my childhood

1.Mary Mary

If Queen Anne hadn’t suffered so badly from gout and dropsy, Reading might never have developed at all. In 1702 the unhealthy Queen Anne, looking for a place to ease her royal infirmities, chanced upon Bath; and where royalty goes, so too does society. In consequence, Reading, up until that time a small town on a smaller tributary of the Thames, became a busy staging post on the Bath road, later to become the A4, and ultimately the M4. The town was enriched by the wool trade and later played host to several large firms that were to become household names. By the time Huntley & Palmers biscuits began here in 1822, Simonds brewery was already well established; and when Suttons Seeds began in 1835 and Spongg’s footcare in 1853, the town’s prosperity was assured.

—Excerpt from A History of Reading

It was the week following Easter in Reading, and no one could remember the last sunny day. Gray clouds swept across the sky, borne on a chill wind that cut like a knife. It seemed that spring had forsaken the town. The drab winter weather had clung to the town like a heavy smog, refusing to relinquish the season. Even the early bloomers were in denial. Only the bravest crocuses had graced the municipal park, and the daffodils, usually a welcome splash of color after a winter of grayness, had taken one sniff at the cold, damp air and postponed blooming for another year.

A police officer was gazing with mixed emotions at the dreary cityscape from the seventh floor of Reading Central Police Station. She was thirty and attractive, dressed up and dated down, worked hard and felt awkward near anyone she didn’t know. Her name was Mary. Mary Mary. And she was from Basingstoke, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

“Mary?” said an officer who was carrying a large potted plant in the manner of someone who thinks it is well outside his job description. “Superintendent Briggs will see you now. How often do you water these things?”

“That one?” replied Mary without emotion. “Never. It’s plastic.”

“I’m a policeman,” he said unhappily, “not a sodding gardener.”

And he walked off, mumbling darkly to himself.

She turned from the window, approached Briggs’s closed door and paused. She gathered her thoughts, took a deep breath and stood up straight. Reading wouldn’t have been everyone’s choice for a transfer, but for Mary, Reading had one thing that no other city possessed: DCI Friedland Chymes. He was a veritable powerhouse of a sleuth whose career was a catalog of inspired police work, and his unparalleled detection skills had filled the newspaper columns for over two decades. Chymes was the reason Mary had joined the police force in the first place. Ever since her father had bought her a subscription to Amazing Crime Stories when she was nine, she’d been hooked. She had thrilled at “The Mystery of the Wrong Nose,” been galvanized by “The Poisoned Shoe” and inspired by “The Sign of Three and a Half.” Twenty-one years further on, Chymes was still a serious international player in the world of competitive detecting, and Mary had never missed an issue. Chymes was currently ranked by Amazing Crime second in their annual league rating, just behind Oxford’s ever-popular Inspector Moose.