The Fourth Bear

Mary’s voice came out with a twinge of apprehension in it that triggered the hairs on the back of her neck to prickle, and she shivered. The hot, sweet smell was stronger, and she took a deep breath and slowly climbed the stairs. When she reached the tenth step, it creaked ominously, and she stopped to listen. There was silence for a moment and then a strange sound of destructive tearing, as though someone were undertaking some form of localized demolition. Then silence—followed by the noise of water escaping under pressure. She frowned. This definitely wasn’t right. While she stood on the stairs undecided whether to return to Jack or continue forward, the door upstairs exploded off its hinges as a cast-iron bathtub full of water was thrown through it. It was hurled with such force that the tub, taps, soap and several loofahs all sailed clean over her head and landed in the hall below with a teeth-jarring crash as the iron bathtub shattered, unleashing a flood of water across the parquet flooring. She was not so lucky with the bidet that quickly followed. It caught her on the shoulder and pitched her on a painful and untidy tumble down the stairs, where she ended up, bruised, winded and mildly concussed in a pool of cold, soapy bathwater. She looked up, but her vision was blurred and all she could see was a large brown object at the top of the stairs. Her assailant bounded down the stairs four at a time, landing with one large foot on Mary’s hand. She winced, expecting pain, but none came. The foot that had landed on her hand was soft and spongy. And the smell. Hot and sweet, but not honey—ginger.

Jack was sitting in the Allegro, speaking on his cell phone.

“How many?”

There was a pause.

“1000100 Currys in Reading,” repeated Ashley. “Now what?”

“That’s sixty-eight,” Jack muttered to himself. “Okay, we need to eliminate a few. Find out their ages and take out anyone under sixteen and over sixty-five. Sorry, that’s—let me think—anyone under 10000 and—Whoa! ”

A movement in the house caught his eye, and a second later the Gingerbreadman came bounding out and with a single stride from the middle of the front garden cleared both the garden gate and the Allegro. He landed in the street in front of a car that swerved violently and hit a mailbox. He then ran off down the road in a series of large, powerful strides.

Jack started the car and tore off in pursuit, shouting into the phone to Ashley, “Tell Copperfield I’m following the Gingerbreadman west down Radnor Road!”

Jack accelerated rapidly, the Allegro’s more-powerful-than-usual-but-still-a-bit-crappy engine howling enthusiastically. The Gingerbreadman was ru

“Turning left into Silverdale Road!” shouted Jack as he cornered hard, the tires screeching in protest as they desperately tried to cling to the asphalt. The Gingerbreadman ducked down an alley, and Jack followed, oblivious to any damage that he might possibly inflict on the car. He caught a post on the way in and bent a suspension arm; the car vibrated violently as he turned left toward a block of garages and drove over a low brick wall that tore the front wheel off, shattered the windshield and pushed the engine back into the scuttle with a metallic crunch. The car came to a halt over the rubble of the demolished wall, one rear wheel in the air. The engine died with a shudder. Ahead of him the Gingerbreadman had stopped ru

Jack fumbled with his phone and yelped into it, “Garages behind Crawford Close, and get a car to 7 Radnor Road for—Ahhh!”

The Gingerbreadman had lunged forward, plucked the handset from Jack and crushed it between a massive thumb and forefinger. Jack looked up as the Gingerbreadman loomed over him. He was seven feet tall, broad at the shoulder and massively powerful, despite being less than four inches thick. His glacé cherry eyes burned with unhinged intellect, and his licorice mouth curled into a cruel smile. He was enjoying himself for the first time in a quarter of a century and had no intention of returning to St. Cerebellum’s.

“Hello, Inspector,” said the Gingerbreadman, his voice a low, cakey rumble. “How are things with you?”

“At this precise moment? Not terrific,” replied Jack, his hand feeling for the nightstick he always kept hidden between the seats. “What about you?”

“Prison? Oh, I can take it or leave it.”

“So I see.”

“Aren’t you going to arrest me?” asked the Gingerbreadman with a chuckle.

“Would there be any point?”

“Not really. You—”

Jack pulled out the nightstick and made a wild, desperate swipe in the direction of the psychopath’s head. The blow stopped short as the Gingerbreadman caught it in midair, wrenched it from Jack’s grasp and snapped it like a breadstick. He was fast—astonishingly so.

“Any other bright ideas?” inquired the Gingerbreadman, raising his licorice eyebrows questioningly and giving out a whiff of ginger.

Jack scrabbled across the passenger seat, kicked the door open, rolled out and made a run for it. He wasn’t quick enough. The Gingerbreadman bounded across the car, grabbed Jack’s arm and twisted it around into a half nelson.

“Although I swore to do unsfzpxkable things to you twenty years ago when you caught me,” he whispered in Jack’s ear, the pungent smell of his gingery breath almost overpowering, “I’m not going to.”

“Why not?” grunted Jack.

“Only the Sicilians know how to do vengeance properly,” he said. “The rest of us are really just groping in the dark, to be honest. Random homicide, on the other hand, has a wonderful arbitrary feel to it, don’t you think? The choice between giving or taking life is the ultimate exercise of power, and for you, today, here and now, I choose… life. Cross my path again and you won’t find me so charitable.”

He then picked Jack up as though he weighed nothing at all and threw him bodily through the wooden doors of a nearby garage. He smiled again, gave a cheery wave and with a short run and a single leap cleared a nearby wall, then ran through the next five gardens as though they were a series of hurdles, vanishing over the last with a stylish Fosbury flop.

“Are you all right?” asked a kindly lady who had come out to see what the commotion was all about. Jack sat up among the remains of the garage door and blinked. He rubbed his neck and winced as his fingers discovered a painful cut at the back of his head.

“I’ll be all right—thank you.”

The kindly lady smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

The first of the squad cars arrived two minutes later as Jack emerged from the garage. It had been empty, which was perhaps just as well.

“Where did he go, sir?” asked Sergeant Fox.

“He’s long gone,” murmured Jack, leaning on a corner of his Allegro. “There’s nothing here but a bruised DCI.”

He carefully unclipped his tie and threw it onto the backseat of the Allegro, then executed a neat double take. The car didn’t have a single scratch on it. The front wheel was back on, the windshield mended, and the side that had scraped down the line of parked cars had miraculously mended itself. The car was perfect in every detail, with no evidence at all of the grueling punishment it had received not more than five minutes before. It seemed that Dorian Gray’s “guarantee” hadn’t been an idle boast. Jack was looking at the oil painting in the trunk—that of the even more wrecked Allegro—when Copperfield drove up with two other squad cars that disgorged police marksmen in a seemingly never-ending stream.

“You look as though someone insane just threw you through a door,” said Copperfield without any sense of irony.

“Fu

Copperfield whistled. He had read the reports about the Gingerbreadman’s phenomenal strength, but it had to be seen to be believed. He started to arrange a search pattern in nearby streets, but Jack wasn’t confident of any success. He had seen the Gingerbreadman run at speeds of up to forty miles an hour and not even be out of breath.

“I thought you were on sick leave?” said Copperfield. “And undergoing psychological assessment?”

“No secrets in the station, are there? It’s called counseling. And I just happened to be in the area with Mary.” He suddenly remembered and sat bolt upright. “Mary…?”

Jack jumped into the Allegro and made his way back to Radnor Road, where he found her sitting in the back of an ambulance with a red blanket draped across her shoulders.

“You all right?”

She nodded. “Bruised. He chucked a bathtub full of water at me.”

“How can he chuck a tubful of water?”

“With the bath still surrounding the water on most sides, quite easily. You?”

“He threw me into a lockup garage.”

“Lucky the doors were open.”

“They weren’t. I lost him a mile away.”

He sat down next to her as she related what had happened.

“The owner of the flat?”

“She’s dead—wallpapered over in the spare room. Good job, too. Despite the lumpiness, all the pattern matched up, and he’d bothered to line it first. No one does that anymore—not even the really class decorators.”

“Another one for the Gingerbreadman,” sighed Jack. “That makes one hundred and eight victims.” He thought for a moment.

“Any bears living here?”

“None—not even a small one. If Goldilocks was the Goldilocks, she kept herself to a conventional neighborhood.”

“Listen,” said Jack, “where NS-4 is involved, we can’t trust anyone. We keep the Goldilocks thing to ourselves. I was cadging a ride, and you were here checking on a potential ursine residential license infringement. You didn’t find anything.”