“That doesn’t explain how you’d get hold of Dumpty’s shares.”

  As if on cue, the door opened behind Spongg. Lola Vavoom entered dressed in a sixties style catsuit. Jack looked around him, but he was still alone in the room; Randolph and Lola existed only in the reflection.

  “Hello, Inspector dahling,” she cooed, threading an arm round Spongg’s waist. “I never liked the idea of a comeback, but for you I’d be willing to make an exception.”

  She laughed as Jack looked at her in disbelief.

  “You two…?”

  “Yes, Inspector,” replied Lola. “Humpty and I were married; it wasn’t hard to persuade him — he adored me. I was to own thirty-eight percent of Spongg’s following my husband’s untimely death in the Zephyr, everyone catches verrucas with help from the Sacred Gonga, and before you can say Hallux valgus, Spongg’s is back on top!”

  “Just through verrucas?”

  “At first,” said Spongg. “Dr. Carbuncle was working on a corn serum to contaminate Britain’s water supply. Athlete’s-foot spore was to be introduced into the initial stages of sock manufacture. In under a year, Mr. Spratt, I could have bought out those sniveling dogs at Winsum and Loosum. Sold their company piecemeal as they were going to do to us and then fired all the executives after promising to take them on at increased salary — and then Lola and I could be married again!”

  “Again?”

  “Indeed,” Lola replied slowly, “it will be for the fifth time. Randolph was my third, seventh, tenth, fifteenth and soon my eighteenth husband. It’s an on-off sort of romance.”

  They kissed aggressively on the lips.

  “What about Willie Winkie? He saw you at Grimm’s Road?”

  “I think we’ve talked enough,” said Randolph. “So it’s time for you and me to bid each other good-bye.”

  “Why don’t we just call it au revoir?”

  Randolph thought for a moment.

  “No, let’s call it good-bye. My grandfather built a pneumatic railway that leads off beyond the perimeter of the grounds. There I have a Hornet Moth aircraft that will take Lola and myself to Europe. I have friends in Switzerland, and we will be in Geneva in time to hear of my own — and yours, of course — demise on the ten o’clock news. You, the house, that officer upstairs and unfortunately the Ffinkworths will be consumed by the detonation of this device.”

  He opened a Tupperware container that had been lying on the table and took out a small triangular sandwich on a cardboard plate. It had a piece of foil on its two furthermost corners. Spongg connected each one by way of a crocodile clip to a battery and then in turn to a detonator stuck into six sticks of dynamite bundled together. He then laid a hair dryer on the table, pointed it towards the sandwich and set it to “hot.” The sandwich immediately started to curl, and Jack could understand the fiendish simplicity of the device. In a few minutes, the sandwich would curl up completely, the two corners would touch, set off the dynamite and — He shuddered.

  “It’s a London and North East Railway garlic and lettuce special. They curl more than any others. We were approached in the sixties by the railways to find an anticurling agent. We developed one from our trench-foot remedies. It affected the taste, but that was not a primary consideration. This sandwich, Mr. Spratt, has not been treated. If you think this amount of dynamite won’t be enough, I have another ton of the stuff under the table. All that will be left of Castle Spongg will be a smoking hole in the ground.”

  Spongg opened the door on his side of the reflection.

  “Adieu!” he said with a cheery wave. “If it’s any consolation, I seriously underestimated you. I wouldn’t have dared try this with Friedland as head of the NCD. I thought you were just another plod. Oh, well, pip-pip!”

  He and Lola walked out and closed the door quietly behind them.

  “I’ve been underestimated before,” growled Jack under his breath.

  He ran to the door and tried the handle, but it was no use — it had been firmly locked. He checked the chimney, but that was too small. Then he walked back to the mirror and stared as the reflection of sandwich curled some more. At the rate it was going, he had possibly five minutes — maybe less. He thought of yelling, but that might bring Mary and the others into the house, and that would be disastrous. He sighed, drew out a chair and sat down. He pulled off the vest, which had grown uncomfortable and was now redundant, and let it fall to the floor. He thought about Madeleine and the kids and regretted that he hadn’t been able to say good-bye. He’d miss Stevie’s birthday. All of them. He was just thinking of some way to leave a message for them that wouldn’t be destroyed 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.

  43. Loose Ends

  PUMPKIN TRANSMUTATION DEVICE TESTED

  Scientists at QuangTech were said to be “overjoyed” at the latest testing of their new pumpkin transmutation device, it was reported in the Berkshire Radio News this month. The Reading-based technology company had been experimenting on pumpkins for some years, but until now with little success. The highly technical article outlines for the first time the extraordinary advances made in the world of pumpkin transmogrification. “It is possible,” said a QuangTech spokesman yesterday, “to change pumpkins into almost anything one wishes by bombarding them with twin beams of particle-shifting gamma radiation, then moving the charged particles to within a magnetic-contained matrix of the new shape. The successful transmutation of a pumpkin into a coach was undertaken last week and was entirely successful — for a while. At present we have no way of permanently fixing the new shape, and the coach reverted to a pumpkin around about midnight.”

  Extract from The Mole, April 19, 1988

  Aside from the absence of the Sacred Gonga and the fact that it wasn’t held in the visitors’ center, the Jellyman’s Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center dedication went extremely well. Everyone present commented on how it was conducted with the utmost tact, solemnity and reverence. After the dedication ceremony, the Jellyman went on a procession route through the town, stopping off at various places of interest on the way.

  The police estimate for the turnout was nearly three hundred thousand, despite the poor weather and the faint possibility of contracting verrucas. Of that it was estimated that 10 percent actually got a good look, 30 percent saw a man in a white suit waving, a further 30 percent saw only a distant white blob, 10 percent thought they saw something but actually didn’t, and the remainder saw nothing at all.

  Madeleine, Stevie, Ben, Pandora, Megan and Jerome had been in the unlucky last category. They had left too late and got stuck in the throng, battling with the crowds and dodging street traders who were selling everything from Jellyman key rings to bedside lamps to DVDs of his speeches to dolls that made suitably sagacious pronouncements when you pulled a string at the back of their neck. Pandora and Ben gripped Jerome and Megan’s hands lest they get swept away in the crowd. They got to the Civic Center just as the Jellyman had gone in. When he came out two hours later, a police van pulled up and blocked their view, so all they saw was the back of his white Daimler limousine as he drove off to visit St. Septyck’s new ward for terminal sarcastics. Madeleine thought of waiting for his return in three hours’ time, but the children were tired and it had begun to drizzle. They made their way back home in a subdued mood. It was a bit like visiting the beach one day in the year to find it shut.

  “Congratulations, Jack!”

  Briggs shook him warmly by the hand, but Jack didn’t smile. The decontamination process has that effect on people.

  “They got away, sir. It’s not much of a result.”

  “You’re wrong,” Briggs said, handing Jack and Mary champagne glasses. “It’s a very good result. Without you more than ten thousand people would be infected with Dr. Carbuncle’s unbelievably infectious superverruca by now — with potentially millions in the coming months. Swimming pools, beaches and sports halls would have become no-go zones and shoe shops places of dread and suspicion. Spongg’s would be charging what they want, and we’d all be none the wiser. No, it’s a very good result indeed.”

  Jack took a sip of the champagne to find that it was, in fact, fizzy apple juice.

  “We’re still on duty,” said Briggs in response to Jack’s quizzical look. “Cheers!”

  “Cheers, sir.”

  Briggs sat at his desk. It was early evening, and the day’s security precautions were being slowly wound down. The Jellyman was at his last official engagement, a banquet over at the sprawling QuangTech facility to celebrate the technological, industrial and artistic achievements of Reading. Jack and Mary had been called up to Briggs’s office quite unexpectedly and were surprised to find Brown-Horrocks there, still dressed in the blue overalls, which were too short and showed at least seven inches of white ankle.

  “The Biohazard Response Team went to Dr. Carbuncle’s house and are going to encase it in concrete rather than risk even moving the verruca,” said Briggs. “The Foot Museum is being soaked in disinfectant and won’t be reopened for six months. I’ve had a word with the head of the Center of Communicable Diseases. They’d like to shake your hand without latex gloves on — that’s quite an honor from those chaps.”

  “Yes, but what about Lola and Spongg, sir?”

  Briggs shook his head. “They won’t find anywhere they can hide in Europe. The deliberate spreading of infectious diseases is serious stuff; the police forces of the Continent will definitely be on the lookout.”

  Jack was less than happy. Spongg and Lola’s progress had been charted by a series of sightings in the South of England. It seemed they had commenced their Channel crossing at Lulworth, and the French had sent two reconnaissance aircraft to patrol the coast. They were recalled three hours later when the Hornet Moth didn’t show.

  “Have you seen the late editions?” asked Briggs. He showed Jack a copy of The Toad. It carried glowing reports of the extraordinary drama played out in Reading that day and heaped almost as much praise on Jack today as the bile they had dumped on him yesterday. “It’s all going frightfully well. The press want you to issue a statement. Perhaps you could make up a catchphrase for yourself — something like… ‘This inquiry is shut’ — or something.”

  “I’d be lying, sir.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Brown-Horrocks looked up from where he was transcribing his notes, which had faded badly in the autoclave.

  “Something’s not right,” said Jack despondently. “Spongg planned to kill Humpty but didn’t. Someone beat him to it.”