The Big Over Easy

“Can he do that thought thing in reverse?” asked Mary. “It might be useful.”

“I never asked,” replied Jack. “Why don’t you bring it up with him? But be careful. The first thing you learn about aliens is that they don’t quite… get it.”

“Get what?”

“It. Us. The whole bit. You’ll see. The second thing you learn is that they’re really not that interesting, so don’t strike up a conversation without a good reason to excuse yourself. Despite that, Ashley excels with records, filing, indexing and general data crunching.”

“It’s not as though I actually wanted to be a policeman,” said Ashley, who had returned as quickly as he left, “but the filing here is to die for.”

“Here as in earth?” asked Mary, without meaning to be patronizing.

“No,” replied Ashley without even the smallest trace of taking offense, “here as in Reading.”

The other officer was a woman. She was very tall and willowy and had long straight hair made up into a single plait. She looked as though she had been heated up at birth and then drawn out like a soft candle. She was over six foot two, and when she ran, it looked as if she were in slow motion, like a giraffe. In the park where she jogged every morning, there were at least a half dozen men and two women there for no other reason than to watch her.

“Mary, this is Constable the Baroness Gretel Leibnitz von Kandlestyk-Maeker, all the way from Cologne. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here, and we don’t know what she’s doing here, but we’re glad she is, because she’s a damn fine officer. She used to work with Chymes.”

“Really?” asked Mary, interested all of a sudden. “What happened?”

“I was—how can I say it?—less respectful than I should have been. If Chymes asks you to do something, refuse it at your peril. I could have been DS by now—just look at me.”

“Thank you, Gretel,” said Jack, none too happy at the inference. “Gretel’s area of expertise is forensic accounting.”

“Forensic accounting?” asked Mary. “What’s that?”

“It is paper chasing mostly,” replied Gretel. “If you want to find where money came from or where it went, you come to me.”

“Best in the land,” added Jack, “which is why Chymes will still use you even after your—how shall we put it?—vigorous exchange of discourtesies.”

Gretel leaned closer to Mary and whispered, “I called him an arsehole.”

“Daring.”

“No, just stupid,” replied Gretel with a sigh.

“Okay,” continued Jack, “grab a seat, everyone. I want to tell you what has happened so far.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, Ashley?”

“Do we get any more officers this time?”

Jack looked at all of them in turn. “I’ll ask, but you know how Briggs feels about the NCD. Short-staffed is kind of standard operating procedure with the division, so we’ll have to make our arm-work and legwork count. Let’s get straight to it, then.”

Ordinarily they would all have sat, but there wasn’t room, so they leaned against the door and the filing cabinets, except Ashley, who nimbly stuck himself to the wall.

“Welcome to the hunt, all of you. Mary is my number two on this, and even though she is new to Reading, I want you to give her all the help you can. Ashley will be based here to look after the incident room and keep him near his beloved Internet… and, Ashley?”

“Yes, sir?”

“No checking eBay for unusual beer mats.”

Jack pointed to Madeleine’s photo of Humpty with Charles Pewter.

“Victim’s name is Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant van Dumpty, more commonly known as Humpty Dumpty. He was sixty-five years old and died at approximately one o’clock yesterday morning, killed by a single gunshot wound to the back. He died instantly. He had a bitter ex-wife and a girlfriend we haven’t found; no witnesses, no suspects, no weapon and no motive.”

He wrote “MOTIVE—WEAPON—SUSPECTS” on the board with a felt pen and underlined each word.

“For the past year, Dumpty has been operating a business from Grimm’s Road, changing a carefully earned two-and-half-million-pound profit into a one-and-a-half-million-pound loss. Yes, Baker?”

“Was he living at Grimm’s Road?”

“Good point. It seems not, so we need to find out where he was. He had this photo on his desk.”

Jack showed them the photo of Humpty with the woman in the back of the horse-drawn carriage in Vienna.

“We need to find this woman. Dumpty and she were together in Vienna—and that’s all we know about her.”

He held up the auburn hair.

“SOCO found this in Humpty’s office. It’s a single human hair, auburn colored and twenty-eight feet long. Shouldn’t be difficult to trace. Tibbit, what have we got on your initial door-to-door?”

Tibbit was delighted. To him, this was real police work. He flipped open his notebook and summarized his notes. Eager to make an impression, he had copied them up neatly the evening before.

“Some people heard dustbins being knocked over sometime after midnight.”

“And?”

“A box van was seen on several nights prior to the night he died.”

Tibbit flipped over some more pages.

“There was a silver VW Polo, too—with a woman in it.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nope. Everyone I met liked him, though.”