The Fourth Bear

As Jack told him, the few features Ashley did have scrunched into the vague semblance of a frown. When Jack had finished, Ashley gave out a laugh that was something very like the noise a squeaky toy makes when someone heavy sits on it, and he said, “Get out of here! What utter nonsense—you think I was hatched yesterday?”

“It’s true.”

“It is?” replied Ashley, his eyes opening wide in a mixture of wonderment and shock. “And the baby comes out where?”

Luckily, Mary had returned to the car.

“Rented to a company named Three Monkeys Trading. A ‘Mr. Guy Gorilla’ signed a three-year contract eighteen months ago.”

“Much traffic?”

“For all he’s seen of them, he said, it might as well be the Tooth Fairy who leased it.”

“It won’t be her,” said Jack after giving the matter some thought. “She’s doing four years in Holloway over that regrettable incident with the pliers.”

“What do you want to do?” asked Mary.

“We’ll take a look.”

They drove on into the industrial estate. Unit sixteen was sandwiched between a cut-price carpet showroom and a motorcycle-repair specialist. The windows were grimy and unwashed, and even up close it was difficult to see inside. Jack consulted the entry-code numbers Tarquin had jotted down and punched them into the keypad. There was a soft click and a buzz, and the door swung open.

They stepped into the gloom, and Jack hit the switch. The strip lights flickered on to reveal a lot of not very much at all. The unit was deserted apart from a Dumpster full of rubbish.

“If this is used as a distribution warehouse, they’re a bit low on stock,” murmured Jack.

“But they were here,” replied Mary, showing him a couple of rolled oats that had been trodden into the dust on the floor, “so Tarquin wasn’t lying.”

“Does this mean anything?” asked Ashley, who had been poking in the Dumpster.

“No, that’s just a bathtub—to wash in, you know?”

“I know what a bathtub is for,” said Ashley, “but why would anyone want to throw away a perfectly good one?”

“People do that sort of thing all the time.”

“Can we take it?”

“No.”

“Look at this, Jack,” said Mary, who had also been looking in the Dumpster.

“A sink?”

“No—empty porridge-oat bags.”

Mary handed Jack a Bart-Mart plastic bag with “1Kg Value Porridge Oats” printed on the side. Jack looked into the Dumpster, which held hundreds of similar bags. Either there had been a big shipment or someone had been doing this for a while. Next to the Dumpster was a trestle table laid out with empty plastic bags and rolls of tape, presumably for repacking the rolled oats to disguise provenance.

Suddenly a shadow fell across the open door, and a deep baritone boomed, “Everyone turn around really slowly.”

They all slowly turned to look at the newcomer. He was a fully grown brown bear dressed in a well-tailored three-piece tweed suit. He was wearing a trilby hat, had a shiny gold watch chain dangling from his waistcoat, and white spats covered the top of his shoeless feet. And he was holding a gun.

“Police,” said Jack. “DCI Spratt of the NCD.”

“ID?”

Jack very carefully retrieved it from his pocket and passed it across.

The bear looked at the card, raised an eyebrow and lowered his gun. His small brown eyes flicked among them. “Then you must be Officers Mary and Ashley. Which one of you is the alien?”

“That would be me,” replied Ashley, putting up his hand.

“Right,” said the bear, returning the weapon to an elegantly tooled shoulder holster.

“Who are you?” asked Jack.

“Sorry about the weaponry,” said the bear without answering or even appearing to hear him, “but I don’t know who to trust these days. Since the bile tappers got active in the area, we members of the phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Carnivora, family Ursidae are not going to take any chances.” He walked over to the Dumpster and looked in. “Hmm,” he said.

“It’s a bathtub,” remarked Ashley. “They’re used for washing in.”

The bear looked at Jack. “Is he for real?”

“I’m afraid so. Again: Who are you?”

The bear took a calling card from a large wallet and handed it to Jack. “The name’s Craps, Vincent Craps. Folks call me Vinnie.”

Jack read the card and pocketed it. “And the gun?”

“Licensed by NS-4,” replied Vinnie. “I’m an investigator for the League of Ursidae. We take attacks on bears and ursine substance abuse very seriously.”

Jack wasn’t convinced. “I’m NCD, Mr. Craps, and I’ve never heard of any League of Ursidae.”

“Then the NCD don’t know shit, do they?”

He walked up close to Jack and towered over him in a very obvious display of dominance. He had a just- washed-dog smell about him, laced with aftershave and just the vaguest hint of tomcat.

“Listen,” said Vinnie, tempering his overwhelming physical presence with a kindly fireside voice, “I’d be happier if you left porridge problems to those who really understand them. Your well- intended but undeniably clumsy attempt to contain the problem yesterday does no one any favors at all. Do you understand my meaning?”

Jack thought for a moment. Then the penny dropped. “Tarquin is one of yours?”

“We have operatives on the ground looking after things, Inspector. Bullying Tarq into selling the flake cheap to a bear named Algy was a classy move. But if you’d tried to shake him down, I’d have… Well, put it this way, the League of Ursidae doesn’t generally consider the courts either efficient or fair in matters regarding bears.”

“I’ll take that as a threat.”

“Come, come!” said Vinnie with a smile, taking a few paces back to make himself appear less threatening. “The NCD does an excellent job, but bears are better policed by bears. Take it as a request to let us keep our own house in order without outside interference.”

“I’ll leave you alone if you keep me in the loop, Craps. What’s going on here?”

Vinnie thought for a moment and looked around the empty factory unit.

“This little setup is nothing too special. Bears like porridge in the same way that humans like alcohol. Unhappily, the law regards porridge not as a harmless recreational pursuit but as a potentially dangerous habit and regulates it with ration books.”

“I know how the system works, Vinnie.”

“Bears tend to blow their quotas in the first few days of each month. What you see here is a porridge ‘taster’ undertaken by a couple of humans who see themselves as friendly to bears. They take forty kilos or so and dump it on the bear market midmonth through Tarquin. It’s well-meaning and pretty harmless, but we like to keep an eye on this stuff rather than shut it down, just in case.”

“Who’s doing it?”

“We cooperate closely with National Security and don’t wish to jeopardize a good working relationship. I can’t tell you.”

“Then why Bart-Mart and not, say, Waitrose or Somerfields?”

“I think we’re about done here,” said Vinnie after a pause. “I hope I can rely on your good sense to leave this up to us?”

“I won’t ignore any lawbreaking, Craps.”

“No one’s asking you to, Inspector. It’s a question of priorities. I’m just asking you to put porridge on a… low priority. Be seeing you.”