The big over easy

when his eye fell upon a servant’s call button next to the marble fire-place. It was worth a try. After all, Ffinkworth was a gentleman’s gentleman, and he did say to call him if he needed anything. Jack ran to the wall and pressed it. Deep in the bowels of the house, a bell sounded, and less than thirty seconds later, Ffinkworth appeared through a trapdoor in the floor, which would not have seemed out of place on a stage. His reflection, Jack noted, did the same.

Ffinkworth brushed himself down and straightened his jacket. “Can I be of any assistance, sir?”

“I need to get out of this room.”

“Quite impossible, sir. The door is firmly locked — I made sure of it myself.”

“What about your trapdoor?”

“I’m afraid to say, sir, the mechanism for its operation is down below.”

Jack looked over at the sandwich. It was now almost completely curled up, only half an inch separating the two corners. He pointed at the mirror.

“Do you see that, Ffinkworth? On the table. It’s a bomb. If you don’t help me, we’ll all be blown to kingdom come. NOW, HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS ROOM?”

Ffinkworth maintained perfect calm. “Prison is a depressing place, I am told, and certainly not the place for a man such as his lordship. He explained it to us both. We think that this is for the best.”

Jack was amazed at the man’s coolness. He was just about to die, yet he was being loyal to his master to the end.

“Ffinkworth, I — ”

Jack stopped and stared at the gaunt butler, who looked ahead of him dispassionately.

“‘Us both’?” said Jack, the light beginning to dawn. “Who’s ‘us both’?”

Ffinkworth looked unnerved for the first time, and his eyes flicked across to his reflection. In that instant Jack knew.

“Tell your brother to duck,” said Jack, picking up a large marble ashtray and hurling it for all his might at the mirror. Ffinkworth’s brother dived for cover, while the Ffinkworth next to Jack raised a hand to his worried face.

Jack ran up to where the glass had been and jumped through into the identical room behind what he had thought had been a mirror. The illusion had been perfectly realized. Even the painting of the Relief of Mafeking had been copied in reverse to create the perfect waking hallucination. Jack didn’t stop, his feet crunching and squeaking on the shards of broken glass as he ran up to the table and placed his Allegro Owners’ Club card carefully in between the jaws of the sandwich as they clicked shut. He breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the detonator from the dynamite. The second Ffinkworth picked himself up and gingerly brushed himself down. He had been slightly cut by flying glass but was otherwise unhurt. The first Ffinkworth peered through from the room Jack had just come from.

“Will that be all, sir?” the identical Ffinkworth twins asked in unison.

“Yes,” replied Jack as he breathed a deep sigh of relief, “except that you’re both under arrest.”

The Ffinkworths bowed again and also looked relieved.

“As you wish, sir.”

Jack brought Baker out of Castle Spongg, and Gretel and Mary and two paramedics ran up to help him.

“If I don’t pull through,” said Baker in a whisper, “tell Susie that I love her.”

“Baker,” said Mary, “it’s barely a scratch. Don’t be such a fusspot.”

“You mean I’m not going to die?” he asked the paramedics.

“Not today,” remarked the first medic, looking at Baker’s inconsequential wound.

“Did you see or hear a light aircraft recently?” asked Jack.

“Circled the building and then headed south about five minutes ago,” said Mary. “Was that Spongg?”

“And Lola, on their way to Geneva.”

“Lola?”

“It’s complicated. I need to speak to Briggs. Anyone got a phone?”

“Well,” said Brown-Horrocks a few minutes later, after Jack had reported Spongg’s escape and explained everything to him and Mary, “I suppose that wraps up the investigation. Spongg murders Humpty, Carbuncle and then the witness Winkie, attempts to raise the share price of his failing foot-care company by infecting everyone with verrucas. It’s not exactly standard Amazing Crime material, but I daresay it might be a welcome change for the readership. We may have to play down the identical-twin aspect, but it’s not all bad.”

“Yes,” said Jack thoughtfully, “I suppose you’re right.”

He got up and walked towards Gretel’s car as the two Ffinkworths gave themselves up. They had even changed out of their frock coats and packed two identical suitcases. Brown-Horrocks looked at them disapprovingly as Jack checked his watch. It was almost midday.

“What happened at the visitors’ center?”

“Cordoned off to a two-hundred-yard radius,” said Mary. “You wouldn’t believe the complexity of a biohazard response — everyone turned up, from DEFRA to the Met Office to the Environment Agency. Briggs gave a press conference on your behalf explaining the reason. There isn’t going to be a riot or anything; everyone’s just hoping there won’t be any lasting damage to the Sacred Gonga.”

“But the Jellyman will still dedicate it?”

“They’ve switched locations to the Civic Center.”

Jack suddenly felt tired and wanted to speak to Madeleine and the kids more than anything else. He called home, but they were out — probably to go see the Jellyman.

At that moment a van screeched to a halt in front of them. It belonged to the Reading Biohazard Fast Response Team, and two officials dressed in yellow rubberized suits jumped out.

“Who’s Jack Spratt?” asked the one with the clipboard.

Jack identified himself.

“Move away from those people and stand on your own, please, sir. Mary Mary?”

“Yes?”

“You’re to join him. Mr. Brown-Horrocks, too. Has anyone else come into contact with any of these three people?”

Baker, Gretel and the two paramedics all meekly put up their hands.

“What’s going on?” demanded Jack.

“You’ve been declared a category-A contamination risk. You’re going to have to be showered, scrubbed, examined and inoculated. All your clothes will have to burned, and any personal effects auto-claved for thirty minutes at one hundred and twenty-one degrees centigrade.”

“Even my clipboard?” asked Brown-Horrocks in dismay.

“Everything,” said the biohazard agent, with the buoyant tone of someone who has just been given a lot of power and is keen to try it out. “By rights you should never have left the Andersen’s Farm hot zone — you might have spread verrucas all over Berkshire. Haven’t you read the seven-hundred-and-twenty- page procedure manual for communicable-disease outbreaks?”

“Have you?” asked Jack sarcastically.

“Most of it,” replied the biohazard agent with surprising honesty.

They all grumbled but sat obediently in a small group on the grass while the decontamination unit cordoned them off and fetched some supplies from the ambulance for Baker, who seemed to be improving.

The fire brigade, ambulance and medical teams arrived within an hour, and the whole process began in earnest. It was a miserable end to an otherwise good day. As Jack waited his turn to be scrubbed down in the portable showers, he suddenly had a disturbing thought about something Lola had said. By the time he was dry, issued a set of blue overalls and finally allowed to go, the disturbing thought had transformed into doubt. A doubt that said everything was still not quite as it seemed.