The big over easy

“It’s not a practical joke, sir.”

Briggs looked nonplussed for a moment, then said, “Does Friedland know?”

“What’s it got to do with him?”

“Everything. He’s on the Guild of Detectives’ selection committee for Southern England and probably won’t take very well to someone else at Reading attempting to steal his headlines. Still, he’s a fine and upstanding man. I expect he’ll view your application with all due impartiality.”

“I’m sure he will, sir.”

Briggs missed the sarcasm, stared at Baker and his pills, shook his head and then left, dictating a note to himself about using the offices vacated by the NCD as a possible trophy room for Chymes.

“What was that all about?” asked Mary as she walked up.

Jack shrugged and pointed at the newspaper.

“‘Mad Scientists Distill Pure Wag from Dog’?” she read.

“Above that.”

“Ah! ‘Nursery Favorite Dies in Wall-Death Drama.’”

“Read on.”

She cleared her throat and began: “‘Humpty Dumpty, well-known nursery character and large egg, was found shattered to death beneath his favorite wall in the east of town. His generous donations to charity had made him a much-loved figure in Reading, and his death will be greatly mourned. Four-time giant killer Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, former assistant to the great Friedland Chymes until demoted for incompetence and more recently noted for his misguided attempt to convict the three pigs of murder, is in charge — ”

“I get the picture,” interrupted Jack. “Sounds like Chymes is trying to make life difficult for me already.”

Mary was silent. Jack was doubtless correct. Chymes would have every reason to keep the story current and trash him if he was planning on wrestling the case from him. She swallowed hard and wondered if Jack was at all suspicious that she was, for all intents and purposes, working for Friedland. She looked across at him, but he was occupying himself by trimming all the fat from his bacon.

“Don’t like fat?”

“Hate it. My first wife loved it. It made us the perfect couple. All that was left of the joint was a bone.”

“Loved fat?” she asked incredulously.

“Yes. Never ate anything else.”

“Isn’t that very unhealthy?”

“Very. She died.”

Mary covered her mouth in embarrassment and went a deep shade of crimson.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay. It was ten years, seven months and three days ago. I’m completely over it — ” He stopped talking as his mobile rang. It was Mrs. Singh. He listened intently for a moment and glanced at Mary and Baker in turn, then told her they’d be over straightaway.

Mary looked uneasy.

“Got a problem with morgues, Mary?”

“No, sir,” she answered truthfully. “I have no problems with morgues. It’s the dead people in them that I’m not too keen on.”

“Good,” said Jack cheerfully. “Finish up your deviled kidneys and we’ll go and view some corpses.”

The smell of formaldehyde reached them long before they had moved past the security desk of the small Victorian building two streets away, and the odor rose to a pungent crescendo as they pushed open the glass- paneled swinging doors. The pathology lab was set out open plan and was lit by a multitude of strip lights that filled the room with a harsh, unnatural glare. In the center of the lab were four large, white-glazed dissecting tables with a stainless-steel trolley next to each laden with saws, scalpels and other instruments the use of which Mary didn’t really want to try to guess. A microphone dangled from the ceiling above each table, along with an angled theater lamp. It had been a quiet week; none of the tables had anyone on them — except Humpty. As they drew closer, they could see that Mrs. Singh and her assistant had both been busy reassembling Humpty’s shattered shell with surgical tape, the way one might hold a broken vase together while glue was drying.

Mrs. Singh looked up and smiled.

“So you’ve managed to do what all the king’s men couldn’t,” observed Jack in admiration.

An ordinary pathologist would have given Humpty the most cursory of glances, but Mrs. Singh was different. Nursery Crime Division work was all hers, and she wasn’t going to let any possibility of criminal activity slip through her fingers.

“Quite a puzzle,” breathed Mary.

“With one hundred and twenty-six pieces,” replied Mrs. Singh proudly. “They say dead men can’t talk, but this one has spoken volumes. Take a look.”

Humpty was lying on his side with his face away from them. She pointed with a forefinger at the area of his lower back, just next to a little lion tattoo. There was a patchwork of much smaller fragments with the cracks radiating out in different directions.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “This is where he landed?”

She said nothing but beckoned him around to the front and pointed to a more random pattern of breakage just above Humpty’s left eye, this time with no defined center. A myriad of small pieces made up what seemed to be a second small impact area.

“So he bounced, right?”

“No. Your turn, Mary.”

Mrs. Singh looked at Mary, who was taken aback; she wasn’t expecting this to be a quiz.

“A blunt instrument?” ventured Mary.

“Wrong. Look closely at the damage on the lower back again.”

They dutifully walked back around and peered closer. There was a definite point of impact, very small and discolored at the edges.

“Holy shit,” whispered Jack. “He was… shot.”

“Top of the class,” replied Mrs. Singh. “The discoloration is definitely gunshot residue. Someone came up from the other side of the wall and shot him. I’ve requested pathological information about the effect of bullets traveling through very large eggs, but the Home Office hasn’t really got much on the subject — for obvious reasons. I’m hazarding a guess, but as the bullet moved through his liquid center, it set up a hydrostatic shock wave. By the time the bullet exited, the cracks had already encircled his body and… pow. He exploded into fragments. He was dead before he hit the dustbins.”

“Oh, crap,” said Jack.

“What?”

“I just told Briggs that Humpty had committed suicide because of depression brought on by Easter. You’re sure, right?”

“Of course. People who are depressed can get murdered, you know.”

Jack sighed and walked to the front of Humpty’s patchworked corpse to look at the exit wound again. “Caliber?”

Mrs. Singh thought for a moment. “Difficult to say. Skinner will confirm this, but it would have to be a powerful handgun. The distance between entrance and exit is about four feet. Albumen has a high viscosity, so you’d need a powerful slug to get all the way through. If I was forced to an opinion, I’d say something like a.357 or a.44. The slug must have come to earth not more than fifty feet away; I think there will be barely a scratch on it. Find a weapon and ballistics will have a nice easy one for a change.”

“Anything else?”

“Not a lot. We can say for certain that he died between midnight and two in the morning, and you already have my report about the high alcohol levels. There was one other thing that puzzled me, though.” She pointed to his body. “It was this section of shell, here on his waistline — or neckline, if you prefer.”

They peered closer at what would appear to be a small hole.

“Any ideas?” asked Jack.

“It is exactly one-quarter of an inch in width, so I am thinking it was drilled in him