The Fourth Bear

what she already suspected. But of one thing she was certain: Mr. Cripps was almost certainly unaware of the more sinister aspects of his hobby.

By ten-thirty that night, Stanley Cripps was tucked up in bed, musing upon the good fortune that would undoubtedly see his champion cucumber take all the prizes at everything he entered it for. He could almost hear the roar of the crowd, smell the trophy and visualize the cover story in Cucumber Monthly that would surely be his. As he sat in bed chuckling to himself with a cup of hot chocolate and a Garibaldi, the silent alarm was triggered and a cucumber-shaped light blinked at him from the control panel near his bed. There had been a couple of false alarms over the past few days, but his longtime experience of thieves told him to always be vigilant, as wily cucumber pilferers often set alarms off deliberately so you would ignore them when they struck with real intention. He pulled on his dressing gown, donned his slippers and, after thinking for a moment, dialed Goldilocks’s number on the cordless phone while he padded noiselessly down the stairs to the back door.

Even before he reached the greenhouse, he could see that this was no false alarm—its door had been forced, and the lights were on. Goldilocks’s phone rang and rang at the other end, and he was just about to give up when her answering machine clicked in.

“Hi!” she said in a bright and breezy voice. “This is Henny Hatchett of The Toad. If you’ve got a good story…”

Stanley was by now only semilistening. He mumbled a greeting and his name at the beep, then ventured forth into his inner cucumber-cultivating sanctum, stick in hand and apprehensive of heart. He stopped short and looked around with growing incredulity.

“Good heavens!” he said in breathless astonishment. “It’s… full of holes!”

An instant later Stanley’s property exploded in a flaming ball of white-hot heat that turned the moonless night into day. The shock wave rolled out at the speed of sound in every direction and carried in front of it the shattered remains of Stanley’s house and gardens, while the fireball arced and flamed up into the night sky. The property next door collapsed like a house of cards, and the old oak had its side facing the blast reduced to a foot of charcoal. Windows were broken up to five miles away, and the blast was heard as a dull rumble in Reading, some forty miles distant. As for Stanley, he and almost everything he possessed were atomized in a fraction of a second. His false teeth were found embedded in a beech tree a quarter of a mile away, and his final comment in this life recorded on Goldilocks’s answering machine. She would hear it with a sense of rising foreboding upon her return—and in just over a week she, too, would be dead.

2. A Cautionary Tale

Most underfunded police division: For the twentieth year running, the Nursery Crime Division in the Reading Police Department. Formed in 1958 by DCI Jack Horner, who felt the regular force was ill- equipped to deal with the often unique problems thrown up by a nursery-related 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.” His legacy of fairness, probity and impartiality remains unaltered to this day, as do the budget, the size of the offices, the wallpaper and the carpets.

The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

The neighborhood in West Reading that centers on Compton Avenue is similar to much of Reading’s prewar urban housing. Bay windows, red brick, attached garage, sunrise doors. The people who live here are predominantly white collar: managers, stock controllers, IT consultants. They work, raise children, watch TV, fret over promotions, socialize. Commonplace for Reading or anywhere else, one would think, aside from one fact. For two decades this small neighborhood has harbored a worrying and unnatural secret: Their children, quite against the norms of acceptable levels of conduct… behave themselves and respect their parents. Meals are always finished, shoes neatly double-bowed and cries of please and thank you ring clearly and frequently throughout the households. Boys’ hair is always combed and cut above the collar, bedrooms are scrupulously clean, baths are taken at first request, and household chores are enthusiastically performed. Shocking, weird, unnatural—even creepy. But by far the most strenuously obeyed rule was this: Thumbs are never, repeat never, sucked.

“We used to call this neighborhood ‘Cautionary Valley’ in the old days,” said Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt to Constable Ashley. “Where vague threats of physical retribution for childhood misdemeanors came to violent fruition. Get out of bed, play with matches, refuse your soup or suck your thumb, and there was something under the bed to grab your ankles, spontaneous human combustion, accelerated starving or a double thumbectomy.” He sighed. “Of course, that was all a long time ago.”

It had been twenty-five years ago, to be exact. Jack had been only a mere subordinate in the Nursery Crime Division, which he now ran. Technically speaking, cautionary crime was “juvenilia” rather than “nursery,” but jurisdictional boundaries had blurred since the NCD’s inception in 1958 and their remit now included anything vaguely unexplainable. Sometimes Jack thought the NCD was just a mop that sponged up weird.

“Did you get any prosecutions back then?” asked Ashley, whose faint blue luminosity cast an eerie glow inside the parked car.

“We nicked a couple of ankle grabbers and took a chimney troll in for questioning, but the ringleader was always one giant stride ahead of us.”

“The Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man?”

“Right. We could never prove he snipped off the thumbs of errant suck-a-thumbs, but every lead we had pointed toward him. We never got to even interview him—the attacks suddenly stopped, and he just vanished into the night.”

“Moved on?”

“I wish. Ever met a Cautionary Valley child?”

“No.”

Jack shook his head sadly. “Sickeningly polite. A credit to their parents. Well mannered, helpful, courteous. We wanted to battle the Scissor-man and his cronies with everything the NCD could muster but were overruled by the local residents’ committee. They decided not to battle the cautionaries lurking in the woodwork but instead use them. They pursued a policy of ‘cautionary acquiescence’ by promulgating the stories and thus ensured that their children never had cause to accidentally invoke the cautionaries.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course. Believe me, once the hands really do grab your ankles when you get out of bed or the troll up the chimney does try to get you for not eating your greens, you make damn sure to do everything your parents tell you. But they’re still here,” added Jack as he looked around, “waiting in the fabric of the neighborhood. In the stone, earth and wood. Under beds and in closets. They’ll reappear when someone is leaning back on their chair, being slovenly, not eating their soup or—worst of all— sucking their thumb.”

They fell into silence and looked around, but all was normal. The summer’s night was cool and clear and the streets empty and quiet. They had been parked on Compton Avenue for twenty-five minutes, and nothing had appeared remotely out of the ordinary.

Things at the Nursery Crime Division were looking better than they had for many years, Jack admitted to himself. The success of the Humpty Dumpty inquiry four months earlier had placed himself and the NCD firmly in people’s consciousness. While not perhaps up there among cutting-edge police detection such as murder, serious robbery or the ever-popular “cold cases,” they were certainly more important than traffic or the motorcycle-display team. There were plans to increase the funding from its ridiculously low level and add a permanent staff beyond himself, DS Mary Mary and Constable Ashley.