The big over easy

Jack sighed. His mother would be mortified when she heard. He pulled the picture back across the counter and looked at it. It was a good painting and the only one of his mother’s that he would have had on his own wall.

“Do the best you can, Mr. Foozle.”

Foozle smiled and placed the picture behind the counter, then had an idea and pulled out a small cardboard box. “I wonder whether your mother would be interested in… these?”

He opened the box. Inside were six brightly colored broad beans about the size of walnuts. They flashed and glowed as the light caught them. They were exceptionally beautiful, even to Jack’s jaundiced eye.

“What are they?”

A smile crossed Mr. Foozle’s face. “I got them from a dealer the other day. He said they were magical and very valuable. If you planted them, something wonderful would be sure to happen.”

Jack looked at him dubiously. “He said that, did he?”

Mr. Foozle shrugged. “Take them to your mother and if she likes them, we’ll call it a straight swap. If she doesn’t, I’ll give you a hundred pounds for the painting. Fair?”

“Fair.” They shook hands, and Mr. Foozle replaced the lid of the box, then wrapped a rubber band around it for safekeeping.

It was the sort of thing Jack’s mother liked. Her house was almost full to capacity with knickknacks of every size and description; something this unusual might take the disappointment out of the Stubbs-that-wasn’t.

Jack walked out of the shop and paused on the pavement as a curious feeling welled up inside him. “Magic beans for a Stubbs cow,” he murmured to himself. There was something undeniably familiar about what he had just done, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what. He shrugged and joined Mary in the car.

7. The Nursery Crime Division

The Nursery Crime Division was formed in 1958 by DCI Horner, who was concerned that the regular force was too ill-equipped to deal with the often unique problems thrown up by a standard NCD inquiry. After a particularly bizarre investigation that involved a tinderbox, a soldier and a series of talking cats with varying degrees of ocular deformity, he managed to prove to his confused superiors that he should oversee all inquiries involving “any nursery characters or plots from poems and/or stories.” He was given a budget, a small office and two officers that no one else wanted and ran the NCD until he retired in 1980. His legacy of fairness, probity and impartiality remain unaltered to this day, as do the budget, the size of the offices, the wallpaper and the carpets.

Excerpt from A Short History of the NCD

“Make yourself at home, Mary.”

She looked around at the close confines of the NCD offices. They were cramped and untidy. No. They were worse than that. They had gone through cramped and untidy, paused briefly at small and shabby before ending up at pokey and damp. Dented and chipped steel filing cabinets ringed the walls, making the room even smaller than it was. There was barely enough space for a desk, let alone three chairs.

“How long has the NCD been in these offices, sir?”

“Since they started the division. Why?”

“No reason. It just seems a bit… well, close.”

“I like it,” replied Jack mildly, taking a telephone from one of the filing cabinet drawers. “We have a room next door as well, but Gretel and the filing take up most of that. It’s generally okay, as long as we don’t all want to walk around at the same time.”

“Gretel?”

“She’s a specialist in forensic accountancy, but she helps us out when we’re short-staffed, so we consider her one of ours. You’ll like her. She’s good with numbers and speaks binary.”

“Is that important?”

“Actually, it is. Constable Ashley generally understands everything we say, but complex issues are best explained to him in his mother tongue.”

“Ashley’s a Rambosian?”

“Yes, first ever in uniform.”

There was a pause.

“Do you have any problems with aliens, Mary?”

“Never met one,” she replied simply. “I take people as I find them. What’s that smell?”

“Boiled cabbage. The canteen kitchens are next door. Don’t worry; by the third year, you’ll barely smell it.”

“Hmm,” murmured Mary, looking disdainfully around the small room and the piles of untidy case notes. “I might have an issue with the window.”

“What window?”

“That’s the issue.”

At that moment a cloud of cold germs loosely held together in the shape of a human being walked in through the door. This, guessed Mary, was another part of the NCD. She was right.

“Good morning, sir,” said the sickly-looking individual. He took a sniff from a Vick’s nasal spray and dabbed his red nose with a handkerchief.

“Good morning, Baker,” replied Jack. “Cold no better?”

Baker’s cold never got better. A semidripping nose seemed to be a permanent fixture since a bout of flu eight years earlier. He wore a scarf even when it was quite warm, and his skin seemed pale and waxy. Despite looking as if he had barely three weeks before a terminal illness mercifully carried him away, he was actually extremely fit — he passed his annual medical with flying colors and completed the Reading Marathon every June in a creditable time.

“This is Charlie Baker, the station hypochondriac. I call him the office terrier. I give him a problem to solve and he won’t let go until it’s done. He’s also convinced he has only a month to live, so he doesn’t mind going through the door first on a raid.”

“How do you do?” said Mary, shaking his hand.

“Not terribly well,” replied Baker. “The dizzy spells have got worse recently, I have a rash on my scrotum, and a twinge in the knee might be the onset of gout.” He showed her his forearm.

“Does this look swollen to you?”

“Have you seen Ashley or Gretel?” asked Jack, trying to change the subject before he really got started.

“Ashley’s burning some spinning wheels that were handed in as part of that amnesty thing,” said Baker as he squeezed a few drops of Visine into his eyes and blinked rapidly, “and Gretel is having the morning off — I think she’s being checked for Orzechowski’s syndrome, a curious disease that plays havoc with the central nervous system and causes rapid movements of hands, feet and eyes — incurable, you know.”

Jack and Mary stared at him, and he shrugged.

“Or maybe she’s just waiting in for a plumber.”

“Right. Mary, call St. Cerebellum’s and get the name of Humpty’s doctor, and, Baker, dig up some background info on Humpty — we should know what he’s been up to and if he has a record. I’ll be back in half an hour, and I take my coffee white with one sugar.”

Jack picked up the evidence bag that contained the shotgun and walked out the door.

The Nursery Crime Division, it seemed, didn’t generate many headlines — the framed news clippings that hung on the wall were just short, faded sections of newsprint culled from the few papers that carried the stories. There were clippings about Bluebeard’s arrest, Giorgio Porgia, the notorious crime boss, and several others, going back over four decades. Uniquely, there was one regarding the Gingerbreadman from the front page of