The Big Over Easy

“It all ended badly, of course. On the eighth lap of the race, Count Igor Debrovnik spun his seven-liter Fiat off the corner of the upstairs landing and out through the stained-glass windows to crash through the roof of the chapel below. A few minutes later, a marshaling mistake in the library caused the Earl of Sudbury to crash his Railton at seventy miles an hour into the antiquarian-book section, causing irreparable damage to some early works by Bacon. By the end of the race, a dozen other mishaps had reduced the inside of the house to a ruin, so in 1926 my grandfather decided to rebuild it with the help of the brilliant yet insane Wolfgang Caligari.”

He pushed open a panel, and they found themselves in a large room full of ancient Khmer stone architecture with large strangler fig trees growing across and through it. It was hot, and tropical plants grew in lush abundance. As they watched, a parrot flew across the room and perched on the mantelpiece.

“We call this the Angkor Wat Room,” said Spongg. “The roof is medieval spider-vaulted, and those windows are a faithful reproduction of the west window at Chartres—but with a few more feet.”

He bade them sit on a sofa that had been incongruously placed on a Persian rug in the center of the room. The tea things were already waiting for them.

“It’s remarkable!” said Mary.

“They didn’t say that when it was built,” replied Spongg, pouring the tea. “It was roundly lambasted, as all great buildings are. From the simple ‘ugly’ through the more forthright ‘wholly lacking in taste or style’ to the plainly overstated ‘work of Mephistopheles.’ It’s all of these and none of these and a lot more besides. Sugar?”

“Thank you.”

“So,” he said as soon as they had their tea, “you still have some questions, Inspector?”

“A few. Have you any idea at all how Humpty might have been planning to raise the value of Spongg shares?”

“I’ve thought about it a great deal since I saw you last,” said Spongg, “but I still can’t figure it out.”

Jack started on a new tack.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Grundy. He said that Humpty did offer to sell him his share portfolio that night at the Spongg benefit.”

“Did Grundy take up the offer?”

“No.”

“Then why would I want to kill him? If that was Humpty’s plan, then he misjudged his timing badly.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t planning to sell them to Grundy at all. Perhaps he was going to sell them back to… you.”

Spongg frowned and stared at them both. “For what purpose?”

“To allow you to reclaim the factory for the family.”

Spongg laughed. “If that is so, I must have been planning this for twenty years—that’s how long we’ve been in trouble. Besides, Humpty bought those shares, not me. I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“Mr. Dumpty could have been your front. If you had been buying your own shares back, I daresay City analysts would be asking why—and the price would have increased dramatically.”

Spongg laughed again, but anger was rising beneath his genial exterior.

“If I were a criminal, Inspector, I could have plundered my employees’ pension fund. I and my aged relatives are the sole trustees, so it wouldn’t have been difficult. There is over a hundred million in there, more than enough to put this company back on its feet. But it isn’t mine. It belongs to the workers. I’ve been battling Winsum and Loosum’s for years, not out of my responsibility as an employer or to maintain the Spongg name but because we have a moral imperative to maintain the supply of foot-care products.”

He said it very grandly and without any humor intended.

“The supply of foot-care products has a moral imperative?”

“You may laugh, Inspector, but then you don’t understand chiropody as I do. The Spongg empire is built on four major foot treatments. Without them we are nothing. Anyone can make special scissors, insoles and corn plasters—our selling point is our successful foot preparations. Winsum and Loosum aren’t interested in my factory or distribution. They want my patents. With their sales network and my cures for verrucas, corns, athlete’s foot and bunions, they could wipe the world’s feet free of ailments forever—or not.”

“Not?” inquired Mary.

“Precisely. They may retain our patents but decide to withhold them from the world market. Ointments that soothe but don’t cure is where the real money lies. In contrast, Spongg’s has always been committed to a public service in the foot-care market. If I wanted to play it like Winsum’s, I could be a multibillionaire by now.”

Spongg’s voice had been getting higher and higher as he explained all this. He was obviously quite impassioned by the magnitude of the situation.

“Without competition from us, they could charge what they want. Chiropody would become a gold mine, and that greedy bastard Solomon Grundy wants the lot!”