The Fourth Bear

who might be leasing the unit if it is.”

The phone rang again.

“Spratt, NCD.”

“It’s for you, Mary.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I think it’s Arnold.”

“Do you want me to speak to him?” asked Ashley.

“Would you? Tell him anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

Ash took the phone from Jack and said, “Hello, Arnold, PC Ashley here. Mary can’t have a date with you because she’s going out with me. Yes, with me. No, we’re going dancing that evening. She didn’t want to tell you because she thought it might hurt your feelings. Yes, I am the weird alien chappie and no, this isn’t some kind of sick joke—she’ll confirm it herself. Mary?”

He held the receiver up, and Mary yelled, “Yes, it’s true!”

“Sorry about that, Arnold,” continued Ashley. “No, that’s not true at all. It must have been someone else doing the abductions. And while we’re on the subject, a saucer is entirely the wrong shape for interstellar travel—they were probably hubcaps or something. Good day.”

And he put the phone down.

“How was that?”

“Very… straightforward.”

“Best like that. I was kidding about the dancing, by the way—I dance very badly, on account of my liquid-filled physiology. Shake me up and I tend to hallucinate. Driving over a cattle grid at speed has the same effect. But dinner would be pleasant. We’ll arrange something, right?”

“R-r-r-ight,” replied Mary, unsure of whether he was kidding or not, but she had never really known Ash to make a joke, so she suspected not.

The phone rang again. It was Briggs, wanting to know what Jack was doing answering the phones at the NCD when he was on sick leave. Jack replied that he’d popped in to collect his things and promised to be out of the station in ten minutes.

“Knowing Briggs, he might come down here to check,” observed Mary.

“Right,” said Jack reluctantly, fidgeting and hunting for some papers to shuffle or something.

“Ash and I can look after the office. If Copperfield calls with any questions over the psychocake, I’ll get him to call your cell phone.”

“O-o-okay,” said Jack. “We’ll check out Tarquin’s porridge contact first thing tomorrow morning—and just so there’s no confusion, the Gingerbreadman’s a cookie.”

“Cake.”

“Cookie.”

“A cake goes hard when it goes stale,” explained Jack as he got up, “and a cookie goes soft. That’s the difference. He’s pliable, so he’s a cookie—and I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

There was a pause as Ashley and Mary considered the feasibility of Jack’s cake/cookie definition.

“But it’s not all bad,” Jack added from the door. “At least the Gingerbreadman gives the papers something to write about other than the Riding-Hood debacle. Good bye.”

And he left the two of them staring at each other. Mary was thinking about how she’d never even considered going on a date with Ashley, and Ashley was thinking about how he’d been trying to pluck up enough courage for weeks.

8. Noisy Neighbors

Most noise-abatement orders served: Heavy-metal-loving Mr. and Mrs. Scroggins and their seventeen hyperactively argumentative children have often been referred to as “the noisiest group of sentient beings yet discovered by man” and were moved to a special pro-noise council estate on the Heathrow flight path, until neighbors complained that they couldn’t hear the jetliners anymore. Their collective 179 noise-abatement orders pale into insignificance, however, when compared to Mr. and Mrs. Punch of Berkshire, who have notched up 326 orders in the past forty-five years and also hold the record for “loudest argument in a restaurant” and the “longest nonstop bicker,” which lasted for three hours and twenty-eight minutes at a sustained level of 43.2 decibels.

The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

Jack was right: The evening editions of The Mole, The Toad and The Owl covered little else but the Gingerbreadman’s dramatic escape, along with lurid accounts of what he had got up to the last time he was free. The scaremongering that had begun on the radio was thus reinforced, and by nightfall panic buying had occasioned the systematic emptying of every food store and gas station in town, causing several shopkeepers to comment in private that they wished a dangerous homicidal maniac would escape every week.

Jack pulled up outside his house in the north of the town and locked the Allegro. His neighbor Mrs. Sittkomm was staring inquisitively over the fence as she pretended to take in the washing. But she wasn’t looking at Jack— she was looking beyond him to the house attached to Jack’s on the other side.

“There goes the neighborhood,” she muttered with barely concealed venom.

Jack followed her look to where a moving van was disgorging a procession of carefully taped cardboard boxes. “Ah!” said Jack. “Our new neighbors. Any idea who they are?”

Mrs. Sittkomm stared at him and then ran through the gamut of severe English disapproval. She started with a slow shake of the head, went on to raised eyebrows and a glare, then ended with an audible tut. She beckoned him closer and hissed under her breath, “Nurseries!”

“Which ones?” asked Jack, more through professional interest than anything else.

“You’ll see,” said Mrs. Sittkomm scornfully. “They’ve no right to be living with decent real people. They’ll bring house prices down, you see if they don’t.”

“Bears?” asked Jack curiously.

“Mercifully not,” replied Mrs. Sittkomm with a snort. “I had a bear as a lodger once; took six months to get the smell of porridge out of the spare room—and the honey in the carpet…”

She didn’t finish her sentence and just signaled that her contempt was total by rolling her eyes, shrugging and looking to heaven all at once, a curious maneuver that reminded Jack of a stage contortionist he had once seen.

Jack left Mrs. Sittkomm to her twisted moral dilemma, walked along the street to his new neighbors’ house and rang the doorbell.

A florid-looking woman in a flower-patterned dress answered the door. She had large, exaggerated features, unblinking eyes and a shiny, almost varnished complexion. She also had several bruises on her face and one arm in a sling.

“Mrs. Punch…?” said Jack, recognizing her immediately. She and her husband were well known to him and the NCD. Although their constant fights were no one’s business but their own, Jack was always concerned that they might throw the baby downstairs, something they had been threatening for over thirty years but fortunately had not yet done.

“Inspector!” screeched Judy, staring at Jack as though he were something you might tread on in the local park. “What the bloody hell do you want?”

“I’m not here on business, Mrs. Punch. I live next door—and keep your voice down. I’m only a yard away.”

“Nuts to that!” she screamed, so loudly that several pieces of saliva exploded from her mouth with such force that Jack had to step aside to let them pass. “Lazy bastard of a husband!” she shouted over her shoulder into the house. She waited with extreme patience for