The Fourth Bear

He looked at them both and rubbed his forehead. “We were lovers,” he said in a quiet voice.

“What?” exclaimed Jack with undisguised astonishment. He was expecting any explanation but this one.

“Lovers,” repeated Bartholomew. “Goldilocks and I. For more than a year now.”

“Wait, wait,” said Jack in a state of some confusion. “You were, to great fanfare, Westminster’s first openly gay MP and have remained a vociferous mouthpiece for all kinds of minority-rights issues for the past twenty-five years, and now you’re telling me… you’re straight?”

Bartholomew covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook with a silent sob.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he said miserably, “living a lie. I’ll be ruined and disgraced if this gets into the papers. My parliamentary career will be finished and my hard-fought pink credentials in tatters.”

“What about Douglas?” asked Mary, equally shocked by Bartholomew’s confession. “Your long-term relationship and much-publicized adoption of two children has always seemed so… perfect.”

“I did it for appearance’s sake,” he mumbled sadly. “Doug knows what I am and will stand by me if any of this gets out.”

Jack and Mary looked at each other as Bartholomew massaged his temples and stared at the blotter on his desk, as though the dark smudges might reveal some sort of answer to his dilemma. He blew his nose and tried to compose himself.

“Mr. Bartholomew,” said Jack after a pause, “it won’t be the first time I’ve had to investigate a potential crime that has involved sensitive issues of a strictly personal nature. But you must understand that our prime consideration at this point is to find out what happened to Goldilocks.”

“Potential crime?” he said, looking up at him. “What do you mean?”

“We don’t know precisely how she died.”

“Are you saying she might have been… murdered?”

“No, I’m saying we don’t know precisely how she died. I need to know more about the circumstances surrounding Miss Hatchett’s death before we can decide one way or another. I’m not here to ruin anyone’s career.”

Jack meant it. Bartholomew was a good MP, and Jack didn’t want to see him ousted over something as meaningless as his utterly orthodox sexual orientation. Bartholomew served Reading well and represented quite a few of the nursery figures that Jack worked with. In many ways, the concerns of Jack’s were Bartholomew’s, too.

“I think I knew deep down something terrible had happened to her,” said Bartholomew unhappily. “It was unlike her not to be on the end of the phone. The police’s involvement was predictable, too—but I must confess I was expecting a more—how shall I put it? — conventional branch of the service. No offense meant.”

“None taken. There appears to be a Nursery Crime angle to this.”

“Ah,” said Bartholomew, “bears. I knew my support of them might be my undoing.”

“Bears?” echoed Jack. “I never mentioned anything about bears.”

“I think you’ll find that Goldilocks and bears are inextricably linked, Inspector. It was bears that brought us together, in July of last year. Since all the anthropomorphized animals in Reading are my constituents, I have a duty to promote their interests in Parliament—I met Goldilocks when she came to my office to press for a law to allow lethal ursine self-defense.”

“The ‘right to arm bears’ controversy?”

“Yes. It seemed pointless to have given bears equal rights, only for them to be unable to defend themselves against illegal hunting and the bile tappers who still stalk their community. If a hunter takes a rifle to kill a bear, it seems entirely just and proper to me that a bear should be able to obtain an identical rifle in order to defend itself.”

“The hunters claim that it’s not antibear or ursism but tradition.”

“Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition, Inspector. We got to talking, and before I knew it, I had asked her out to dinner. We worked closely to draft the Ursine Self-Defense Bill. It was my fifth private member’s bill and met with general approval, although the final vote was disappointing—six hundred and eight against and one for.” He sighed. “A lone voice in the wilderness.”

“When did you last see her?” asked Mary.

“We had dinner at the Green Parrot last Friday. Do you know it?”

“I’ve heard of it,” returned Mary, knowing full well that it was one of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants on the Thames. It was so exclusive, in fact, that most nights the guests never attained the necessary high criteria, and it remained empty.

“What time did you part company?”

“About eleven. We spoke again a little after midnight. I wished her good luck, and… that was the last time we spoke. I called her at about ten on Saturday morning, but she didn’t answer.”

“At ten on Saturday morning?” queried Jack. “You’re sure it wasn’t before?”

“Definitely.”

“And you block your number on your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, please continue.”

“I tried the rest of the day to call both her cell phone and her home but only got her answering machine. When I hadn’t heard anything by Sunday evening, I went around to her flat. It was locked and dark, so on Monday morning I called her brother to see if he knew where she was. He didn’t.”

“And he speaks to me four days later at the Deja Vu,” observed Jack. “You’re the last human we know to have seen her alive. Did she seem normal Friday night?”

“Excitable, I would say. She said she was close to an important breakthrough in a story.”

“About unexplained explosions?”

“No,” replied Bartholomew, somewhat surprised, “it was about cucumbers.”

“Cucumbers?”

“Yes. Something big going down in the world of extreme cucumber growing, and that her story would have major consequences.”

“And she didn’t mention explosions?”

“Only in relation to that Stanley Cripps fellow’s death. Other than that it was cucumbers, cucumbers, cucumbers. She spoke about record-breaking examples, the international cucumber-fancying fraternity, the fact that a cucumber is a fruit and not a vegetable, a member of the pumpkin family—that sort of thing. Bit boring, really— but it makes a change from parliamentary procedure, and… I just like listening to her talk.” He paused for thought, and his eyes glistened.

“Did she mention anyone else in connection with this story?”

“Yes,” said Bartholomew, snapping his fingers. “She was going to have lunch with a contact on Saturday who she said would ‘reveal all.’ McGuffin was his name. Angus McGuffin. She said he was the key to the whole business.”

“Did she say why?”

Bartholomew shook his head. Jack and Mary looked at one another. Perhaps Goldilocks had been working on two stories.

“Can you tell us where you were on Saturday morning?” asked Mary.

“At my house here in Reading. Doug had taken the kids up to his mum’s for the weekend—I didn’t expect them back until Sunday. I was alone until Agent Danvers picked me up at eleven to take me to the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center for a lunch with the Mayor and the Splotvian Ambassador.”

“Did you call anyone, or did anyone call you?”

“Doug called me at about nine-thirty, and I must have fielded a dozen or so calls until Agent Danvers arrived.”

“So you can’t account for your whereabouts until nine-thirty in the morning?”

“No.”

They questioned him further but gained little else that was useful. He knew of no one who would want to hurt