Mary jotted it down in her notebook. Jack was sure there must be relatives, and they would almost certainly ask him one important question.

  “Was it quick?”

  Mrs. Singh surveyed the wreckage. “I think so. When he hit the ground his lights, quite simply, went out.”

  Jack thanked her as she spoke a few words in Hindi to her assistant, who very gently — as befits the deceased — began to lift the larger pieces of shell into a PVC body bag.

  Jack carefully climbed up the ladder and looked at the top of the wall. It was barely a foot wide, and he could see an oval dip that had been worn by Humpty’s prolonged use. He climbed back down again, and both he and Mary went into the yard next door to look at the wall from the other side.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Mary.

  “Anything that might have been used to push him off.”

  “Pushed? You suspect foul play?”

  “I just like to keep an open mind, Mary, despite what Briggs said.”

  But if Jack expected to find anything incriminating, he was to be disappointed. The yard was deserted, and a precarious heap of rubbish and full garbage bags was stacked against the wall underneath where Humpty had sat. An assailant would have had to clamber over the heap but the rubbish was undisturbed. Jack was just looking in the outhouse for a rake or something when he noticed a small boy staring at him from the kitchen window. Jack waved cheerfully, but the little boy just stuck his middle finger up. He was grasped by the ear and pulled away, only to be replaced by a very small man in a nightgown and nightcap. He looked a bit bleary-eyed and fumbled with the latch before opening the kitchen window. Jack showed him his ID card.

  “Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, Nursery Crime. You are…?”

  The small man rubbed his eyes and squinted at the card.

  “Winkie,” he replied, blinking with tiredness. “William Winkie.”

  “Mr. Winkie, there was an accident last night. Mr. Dumpty fell off the wall.”

  “I heard.”

  “Him falling off?”

  “No, the news I mean. He was a nice fella. He used to play ball and that with the kids in the alleyway. My kids are well choked by his death.”

  One of the “well-choked” kids continued to pull faces at Jack through the window. Mr. Winkie gave him a clip round the ear, and he ran off bawling.

  “Did you hear anything out of the ordinary last night?”

  Willie Winkie yawned. “Pardon me. I got in from my shift at Winsum’s at about two and went straight to sleep. I have a sleeping disorder, so I’m on medication.”

  “Anyone else in the house?”

  Willie turned and shouted. “Pet! Did you hear anything strange last night? It’s about Mr. Dumpty.”

  A large, florid woman came to the window. She wore a purple nylon dress and had her hair done up in rollers. A small unlit rolled cigarette was stuck to her lower lip and bobbled as she spoke.

  “There was a truck reversing sometime in the small hours — but that’s not unusual around here. I sleep in a separate room to Willie so he doesn’t wake me. Sorry, love, I’d like to be able to help, but I can’t.”

  Jack nodded and started on another tack. “When did you last see him?”

  “Last night at about seven-thirty. He asked me to iron his cravat.”

  “Cravat?”

  “Or cummerbund. It’s difficult to say with him.”

  “How did he appear to you?”

  “Fine. We chatted about this and that, and he borrowed some sugar. Insisted on paying for it. He was like that. I often ironed his shirts — on a wok to get the right shape, of course, and he always paid over the odds. He helped us out with a bit of cash sometimes and sent the kids on a school trip to Llandudno last summer. Very generous. He was a true gent.”

  “Did you ever see him with anyone?”

  “He kept himself to himself. Liked to dress well, quite a dandy, y’know. One for the ladies, I heard. Come to think of it, there was a woman recently. Tall girl, quite young — brunette.”

  Jack thanked them and gave Willie his card in case he thought of anything else, then returned to the yard, where Mrs. Singh was still searching for clues as to what had happened.

  “Where was his room?” asked Jack.

  Mary pointed to the window overlooking the backyard.

  They entered the house and climbed the creaking staircase. There was damp and mildew everywhere, and the skirting had come away from the wall. The door to Humpty’s room was ajar, and Jack carefully pushed it open. The room was sparsely furnished and in about as bad a state of repair as the rest of the house. Hung on the wall was a framed print of a Fabergé egg next to a copy of Tenniel’s illustration of Humpty from Through the Looking Glass. There was a shabby carpet that looked as though it hadn’t been hoovered since the turn of the last century and a wardrobe against one wall next to a sink unit and a cooker. A large mahogany desk sat in the center of the room with a small pile of neatly stacked bricks behind it which Humpty had used as a seat. On the desk was a typewriter, some papers, a fax and two telephones. The previous week’s edition of What Share? was open at the rare-metals page, and an undrunk cup of coffee had formed a skin next to Humpty’s spectacles. There was a photo in a gilt frame of Humpty with his hand on the leg of a pretty brunette in the back of a horse-drawn carriage in Vienna. Jack knew because he’d been there once himself and recognized the Prater wheel in the background. They were both well dressed and looked as though they had just come from the opera.

  “Any name?”

  Mary checked the back of the picture. There was none.

  Even from a cursory glance, it was obvious that not only had Humpty been working the stock market — he had been working it hard. Most of the paperwork was for a bewildering array of transactions, with nothing logged in any particular order. The previous Thursday’s Toad had been left open at the business news, and Jack noticed that two companies listed on the stock exchange had been underlined in red pencil. The first was Winsum & Loosum Pharmaceuticals, and the second was Spongg Footcare. Both public limited companies, both dealing in foot-care products. Winsum & Loosum, however, was blue chip; Spongg’s was almost bust. Mary had chanced across a file of press clippings that charted the downfall of Spongg’s over the past ten years, from the public flotation to the fall of the share price the previous month to under twenty pence. Jack opened another file. It was full of sales invoices confirming the purchase of shares in Spongg’s for differing amounts and at varying prices.

  “Buying shares in Spongg’s?” murmured Jack. “Where did he get the money?”

  Mary passed him a wad of bank statements. Personally, Humpty was nearly broke, but Dumpty Holdings Ltd. was good to the tune of ninety-eight thousand pounds.

  “Comfortable,” commented Mary.

  “Comfortable and working from a dump.”

  Jack found Humpty’s will and opened it. It was dated 1963 and had this simple instruction: “All to wife.”

  “What do you make of these?”

  Mary handed Jack an envelope full of photos. They were of the Sacred Gonga Visitors’ Center in various states of construction, taken over the space of a year or more. But the last snap was the most interesting. It was of a young man smiling rather stupidly, sitting in the passenger seat of a car. The picture had been taken by the driver — presumably Humpty — and had a date etched in the bottom right-hand corner. It had been taken a little over a year ago.

  “The Sacred Gonga,” said Mary, thinking about the dedication ceremony on Saturday. “Why is Humpty interested in that?”

  “You won’t find anyone in Reading who isn’t,” replied Jack.

  “There was quite an uproar when it was nearly sold to a collector in Las Vegas.”

  They turned their attention to the wardrobe that held several Armani suits, all of them individually tailored to fit Humpty’s unique stature and held up on hangers shaped like hula hoops. Jack checked the pockets, but they were all empty. Under some dirty shirts they found a well-thumbed copy of World Egg Review and Parabolic and Ovoid Geometric Constructions.

  “Typical bottom-drawer stuff,” said Jack, rummaging past a signed first edition of Horton Hatches the Egg to find a green canvas tool bag. He opened it to reveal the blue barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. Jack and Mary exchanged glances. This raised questions over and above a standard inquiry already.

  “It might be nothing,” observed Mary, not keen for anything to extend the investigation a minute longer than necessary. “He might be looking after it for a friend.”

  “A friend? How many sawed-off shotguns do you look after for friends?”

  She shrugged.

  “Exactly. Never mind about Briggs. Better get a Scene of Crime Officer out here to dust the gun and give the room the once-over. Ask for Shenstone; he’s a friendly. What else do you notice?”

  “No bed?”

  “Right. He didn’t live here. I’ll have a quick word with Mrs. Hubbard.”

  Jack went downstairs, stopping on the way to straighten his tie in the peeling hall mirror.

  4. Mrs. Hubbard, Dogs and Bones

  The Austin Allegro was designed in the mid-seventies to be the successor to the hugely popular Austin 1100. Built around the proven “A” series engine, it turned out to be an ugly duckling at birth with the high transverse engine requiring a slab front that did nothing to enhance its looks. With a bizarre square steering wheel and numerous idiosyncratic features, including a better drag coefficient in reverse, porous alloy wheels on the “sport” model and a rear window that popped out if you jacked up the car too enthusiastically, the Allegro would — some say undeservedly — figurehead the British car-manufacturing industry’s darkest chapter.

  The Rise and Fall of British Leyland, A. Morris

  Jack knocked politely on the door. It opened a crack, and a pinched face glared suspiciously at him. He held up his ID card.

  “Have you come about the room?” Mrs. Hubbard asked in a croaky voice that reminded Jack of anyone you care to mention doing a bad impersonation of a witch. “If you play the accordion, you can forget about it right now.”

  “No, I’m Detective Inspector Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division. I wonder if I could have a word?”

  She squinted at the ID, pretended she could read without her glasses and then grimaced. “What’s it about?” she asked.

  “What’s it about?” repeated Jack. “Mr. Dumpty, of course!”

  “Oh, well,” she replied offhandedly, “I suppose you’d better come in.”

  She opened the door wider, and Jack was immediately assailed by a powerful odor that reminded him of a strong Limburger cheese he had once bought by accident and then had to bury in the garden when the dustbinmen refused to remove it. Mrs. Hubbard’s front room was small and dirty, and all the furniture was falling to pieces. A sink piled high with long-unwashed plates was situated beneath yellowed net curtains, and the draining board was home to a large collection of empty dog-food cans. A tomcat with one eye and half an ear glared at him from under an old wardrobe, and four bull terriers with identical markings stared up at him in surprise from a dog basket that was clearly designed to hold only two.

  Mrs. Hubbard herself was a wizened old lady of anything between seventy-five and a hundred five. She had wispy white hair in an untidy bun and walked with a stick that was six inches too short. Her face was grimy and had more wrinkles in it than the most wrinkled prune. She stared at him with dark, mean eyes.

  “If you want some tea, you’ll have to make it yourself, and if you’re going to, you can make one for me while you’re about it.”

  “Thank you, no,” replied Jack as politely as he could. Mrs. Hubbard grunted.

  “Is he dead?” she added, looking at him suspiciously.

  “I’m sorry to say that he is. Did you know him well?”

  She shuffled across the room, her short walking stick making her limp far more than was necessary.

  “Not really,” she replied, settling herself in an old leather armchair that had horsehair stuffing falling out of its seams. “He was only a lodger.” She said it in the sort of way that one might refer to vermin. Jack wondered just how fantastically unlucky you would have to be to have this old crone as a landlady.

  “How long had he a room here?”

  “About a year. He paid in advance. It’s nonreturnable, so I’m keeping it. It’s very hard getting lodgers these days. If I took in aliens, spongers or those damnable statisticians, I could fill the place twice over, but I have standards to maintain.”

  “Of course you do,” muttered Jack under his breath, attempting to breathe through his mouth to avoid the smell.

  At that moment one of the dogs got out of its basket, pushed forth its front legs and stretched. The hamstrings in its hind legs quivered with the effort, and at the climax of the stretch the dog lowered its head, raised its tail and farted so loudly that the other dogs glanced up with a look of astonishment and admiration. The dog then walked over to Mrs. Hubbard, laid its nose on her lap and whined piteously.

  “Duty calls,” said Mrs. Hubbard, placing a wrinkled hand on the dog’s head. She heaved herself to her feet and shuffled over to a small cupboard next to the fridge. Even Jack could see from where he was standing that it contained nothing except an old tin of custard powder and a canned steak-and-kidney pie. She searched the cupboard until satisfied that it was devoid of bones, then turned back to the dog, which had sat patiently behind her, thumping its tail on an area of floor that had been worn through the carpet and underlay to the shiny wood beneath.

  “Sorry, pooch. No bones for you today.”

  The dog strode off and sat among its brethren, apparently comprehending every word. Mrs. Hubbard resumed her seat.

  “Now, young man, where were we?”

  “What sort of person was he?”

  “Nice enough, I suppose,” she said grudgingly, the same way a Luddite on dialysis might react to a kidney machine. “Never any trouble, although I had little to do with him.”

  “And did he often sit on the wall in the yard?”

  “When he wasn’t working. He used to sit up there to — I don’t know — to think or something.”

  “Did you ever see him with anyone?”

  “No. I don’t permit callers. But there was a woman last night. Howling and screaming fit to bring the house down, she was. Really upset and unhappy — I had to threaten to set the dogs on her before she would leave.”

  He showed her the photo of the woman in Vienna. “This woman?”

  Mrs. Hubbard squinted at it for a few moments. “Possibly.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No.”

  Another dog had risen from the basket and was now whimpering in front of her like the first. She got up and went to the same cupboard and opened it as before, the dog sitting at the same place as the first, its tail thumping the area of shiny wood. Jack sighed.

  “Sorry, dog,” she said, “nothing for you either.”

  The bull terrier returned to its place in front of the fire, and Mrs. Hubbard sat back in her chair, shooing off the tomcat, which had tried to gain ascendancy in her absence. She looked up at Jack with a puzzled air.

  “Had we finished?”

  “No. What happened last night after the woman left?”

  “Mr. Dumpty went to a party.”

  She got up again as another dog had started to whimper, and she looked in the cupboard once more. Considering the hole in the carpet and the area of shiny wood that the dogs’ tails had worn smooth, Jack supposed this little charade happened a lot.

  “When did he get back?” asked Jack when she had returned.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Dumpty.”

  “At about eleven-thirty, when he arrived in the biggest, blackest car I’ve ever seen. I always stay up to make sure none of my lodgers bring home any guests. I won’t have any sin under this roof, Inspector.”

  “How did he look?”

  “Horribly drunk,” she said with disgust, “but he bade me good evening — he was always polite, despite his dissolute lifestyle — and went upstairs to his room.”

  “Did he always spend the night here?”

  “Sometimes. When he did, he slept on the wall outside. The next time I saw him, he was at peace — or in pieces, to be more precise — in the backyard when I went to dump the rubbish.”

  She had expected Jack to laugh at her little joke, but he didn’t. Instead he sucked the end of his pencil thoughtfully.

  “Do you have any other lodgers?”

  “Only Prometheus upstairs in the front room.”

  “Prometheus?” asked Jack with some surprise. “The Titan Prometheus? The one who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind?”

  “I’ve no concern with what he does in his private life. He pays the rent on time, so he’s okay with me.”

  Jack made several notes, thanked Mrs. Hubbard and beat a grateful retreat as she went to the same cupboard for the fourth time.

  5. Prometheus

  TITAN ESCAPES ROCK, ZEUS, CAUCASUS, EAGLE

  A controversial punishment came to an end yesterday when Prometheus, immortal Titan, creator of mankind and fire-giver, escaped the shackles that bound him to his rock in the Caucasus. Details of the escape are uncertain, but Zeus’ press secretary, Ralph Mercury, was quick to issue a statement declaring that Prometheus’ confinement was purely an “internal god-Titan matter” and that having eagles pick out Prometheus’ liver every day, only to have it grow back at night, was “a reasonable response given the crime.” Joyous supporters of the “Free Prometheus” campaign crowded the dockside at Dover upon the Titan’s arrival, whereupon he was taken into custody pending applications for extradition.

  From The London Illustrated Mole, June 3, 1814

  Jack walked up the creaky steps to the upstairs landing. He had just raised his hand to knock on the door opposite Humpty’s when a deep male voice, preempting his knock, boomed, “One moment!”