The Fourth Bear (Nursery Crime, #2)

by Jasper Fforde

“A life lived in fear is a life half lived. A life half lived is fear lived in half. A life half feared is fear half lived.” Some people have a way with words, but Hoffman wasn’t one of them.

At the end of the Humpty affair, she had met the man who was now her husband. He was seven foot three, and she was six foot two and a quarter. It was a match made perhaps not in heaven but certainly nearer the ceiling.

“Professor Strait?” he asked as he took a step closer. “I read your book on obsessional neurosis with great interest.” “How…how did you know it was me?” stammered Strait, taken aback at the Gingerbreadman’s powers of observation. “That’s easily explained.” The Gingerbreadman smiled. “Your picture is on the book jacket.” “Ah. Well…what did you think?” asked Strait, his voice high and tremulous with suppressed fear. “I’ll be frank with you, Frank,” replied the Gingerbreadman, adding hastily, “May I call you Frank?” “I’d prefer Professor Strait.” “Very well. I’ll be straight with you, Strait. I wasn’t that impressed. The prose was dull, the research patchy.

“It’s for you, Mary.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I think it’s Arnold.” “Do you want me to speak to him?” asked Ashley. “Would you? Tell him anything.” “Anything?” “Anything.” Ash took the phone from Jack and said, “Hello, Arnold, PC Ashley here. Mary can’t have a date with you because she’s going out with me. Yes, with me. No, we’re going dancing that evening. She didn’t want to tell you because she thought it might hurt your feelings. Yes, I am the weird alien chappie and no, this isn’t some kind of sick joke—she’ll confirm it herself. Mary?” He held the receiver up, and Mary yelled, “Yes, it’s true!” “Sorry about that, Arnold,” continued Ashley. “No, that’s not true at all. It must have been someone else doing the abductions. And while we’re on the subject, a saucer is entirely the wrong shape for interstellar travel—they were probably hubcaps or something. Good day.”

Mary was thinking about how she’d never even considered going on a date with Ashley, and Ashley was thinking about how he’d been trying to pluck up enough courage for weeks.

Most noise-abatement orders served: Heavy-metal-loving Mr. and Mrs. Scroggins and their seventeen hyper-actively argumentative children have often been referred to as “the noisiest group of sentient beings yet discovered by man” and were moved to a special pro-noise council estate on the Heathrow flight path, until neighbors complained that they couldn’t hear the jetliners anymore. Their collective 179 noise-abatement orders pale into insignificance, however, when compared to Mr. and Mrs. Punch of Berkshire, who have notched up 326 orders in the past forty-five years and also hold the record for “loudest argument in a restaurant” and the “longest nonstop bicker,” which lasted for three hours and twenty-eight minutes at a sustained level of 43.2 decibels.

“Have you ever been to the Déjà Vu before?” asked Madeleine as they entered the main doors. Jack looked around the entrance lobby. “I don’t think so,” he answered, “but it does look sort of familiar.”

Neville was looking at Jack with obvious delight. He despised Jack with the lingering hatred of an idle underachiever who had lost everything by his own stupidity and was now looking for someone to blame.

“She’s a journalist. She wrote a long piece about whether bears should be allowed to carry weapons for self-defense.” “The ‘right to arm bears’ controversy?”

lol

“Hmm,” she said, looking at the “Important” written on the front, “this could be important.” “I did that joke already.” “Sorry.”

What’s your interest in Miss Hatchett?” “It’s a potential missing-persons inquiry.” “Do you know where she is?” “No, that’s what the ‘missing’ in ‘missing persons’ means.”

“We’ve had a pretty checkered history with humans, you know. But the way I figure it, you lot can’t seem to make up your minds about us at all. On the one hand, you name constellations after us, make us deities and use us as strong national symbols, and on the other hand you hunt us to near extinction.” “Bears are not exactly alone in that category.” “Agreed, but you also name athletic teams after us, create in our image tremendously popular characters like Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington and Yogi, and every child has a teddy bear of some sort, yet up until 1835 it was considered a fun day out to pay good money to see my kind either being torn apart by dogs or blinded and then beaten with a stick. Your first Queen Elizabeth liked nothing better than to watch us being tormented in some highly imaginative way.”

After twenty minutes Jack made the first discovery. It was a woman’s shoe, with the foot still inside it.

European nation with highest politician/lover ratio: Few European states can hope to compete with France and Italy in this department, and the two nations have been battling for European political lothario supremacy for over thirty years. The contest has been increasingly acrimonious since 1998, when France was initially the clear winner but somehow “lost” sixty-eight illicit lovers in the recount and had to concede defeat. The following year was no less rocked in scandal, when the Italians were disqualified for “stretching the boundaries” of their elected representatives to include senior civil servants—and the crown was tossed back to France. No one was quite prepared for the disgraceful scandal the following year when it was discovered that one French minister had no mistress at all and “loved his wife,” a shocking revelation that led to his resignation and ultimately to the fall of the government.

“Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition,

“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.

If you ever think you might want a career in politics, Inspector, think again. It’s merely a continuous and mostly vain attempt to keep several groups of people with opposing needs and agendas happy, and knowing in your heart of hearts that you cannot, and being lambasted for your hard work in the bargain.”

“Large graveyard,” observed Jack as he peered over the wall. “You’d be surprised by the number of people who die in Obscurity,” observed the Vicar.

“Mr. Cripps’s last words were ‘Good heavens! It’s full of holes!’” said Mary. “Do you have any idea to what he was referring? “Most puzzling,” confessed the Vicar. “He might have been referring to anything—the greenhouse, his cucumber, the plot—anything.” “The plot?” echoed Mary. “I mean the vegetable plot,” he said hurriedly. “A slip of the tongue.

“From my experience of government departments,” said Jack, “they couldn’t order the right size of staples, let alone succeed in anything as bizarrely complex as a murder and then subsequent cover-up.” “Yes,” agreed Parks sulkily, “it’s where that particular mainstay of conspiracy theory falls down. I hate to admit it, but governmental deviousness is usually better explained by incompetence, vanity and the need to protect one’s job at all costs.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” “I’ll be fine,” said Mary, fully aware that some people still couldn’t get their heads around the fact that there really were aliens and on occasion would start screaming uncontrollably—sometimes for hours. “Righto,” said Ashley, who generally didn’t like people screaming, especially at him.

Least likely alien abduction suspects: The Rambosians, who when asked if they’d been involved in reported medical experiments on “abductees,” replied, “You must be joking. If we wanted to know about your physiology—which we don’t—we’d just watch BBC2 or read Gray’s Anatomy.” When pressed, they had to admit they couldn’t think of any life-form bored enough to want to travel halfway across the galaxy to push a probe up an ape’s bottom, nor what it might accomplish—apart from confirming that in general apes don’t like that sort of thing.

The conversation moved around to Big Brother after that, and the news that Cousin Eric had applied to be on the show but had been turned down because he lacked severe mental problems and it might have had a bad influence on the others.

“You eavesdropped on Briggs’s private telephone conversations?” “Not at all,” replied Ashley. “I’ve eavesdropped on everyone’s conversations. How did you think I found out about Pippa and Peck?” “Well, that’s all right, then,” replied Jack, whose interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was becoming more elastic by the second.

“There were seven thermocuclear devices?” queried Parks, who had latched on to Jack’s outlandish explanation without too much difficulty, as should you.