Jasper Fforde - The Fourth Bear

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” he said excitedly, giving off wafts of expensive aftershave as he moved. “I followed the Humpty case with enthusiasm. Extremely impressive. My name is Gray, Dorian Gray—but you must call me Dorian. I for one do not believe a word when Josh Hatchett refers to you as ‘a bad joke’ or ‘a stain upon the good name of the Reading police force.’"

“You’re very kind,” said Jack a bit uneasily.

“Think nothing of it!” replied Dorian happily. “I’ve wanted to meet you for such a long time, but my diary is so very full. It was lucky, in fact, that you caught me when you rang. Society is such a drain on one’s energy. Would you follow me?”

He led Jack through the collection of battered wrecks that had nothing over two hundred pounds written on their windshields and on to a small lockup garage at the back of the lot. Dorian smiled again, carefully donned white gloves and pulled the doors open with a loud sqraunch of long-forgotten hinges.

Gray must have seen Jack looking doubtful, for he added quickly, “It has been in storage for a number of years, yet I don’t believe it has aged significantly.”

The garage opened to reveal an immaculate 1979 Allegro Equipe two-door sedan. It was painted silver with orange and red stripes down the sides and had alloy wheels and twin headlamps at the front. The paintwork glistened as though it had only just rolled off the production line. Dorian got in, started it at the first attempt and drove it into the sunshine.

“Remarkable!” said Jack after a pause.

“Isn’t it just?” answered Dorian as he got out, unlatched the hood and revealed an engine bay that didn’t have a spot of dirt or oil on it anywhere.

Jack smiled and got into the car. He could smell the freshness of the factory, and the orange velour seats still had the fuzz on them. He looked at the odometer. It had only 342 miles recorded.

“Where did you find it?” asked Jack incredulously. “This belongs in a museum. None would take it, of course, but it does.”

Dorian Gray looked to left and right and lowered his voice. “It’s not quite so strange as you think, Inspector. You see, every now and then I sell a car to a favored customer with my own… ahem… unique guarantee.”

Jack sensed a scam of some sort and narrowed his eyes. “Guarantee?”

“Yes. I guarantee that this car will never rust or even age significantly.”

“Waxoil and underseal, eh?”

“Better than Waxoil, Inspector. Allow me to demonstrate.”

They walked around to the back of the car, and Dorian opened the trunk. Inside was a finely painted oil of the same car, but in much shabbier condition. The car in the picture had rust holes showing up through the bodywork, a peeling vinyl roof, the trim was missing, and there was an unsightly scrape on the left rear, which had taken the bumper off. In short, a bit of a wreck. Jack looked at Dorian quizzically.

“See the rear windshield in the painting, Officer?”

Jack looked. It seemed normal enough. Dorian smiled again, removed the wheel brace from the trunk and shattered the rear window of the Allegro with one strong blow. Jack took a shocked step back at this apparently motiveless act of vandalism. Dorian, however, merely smiled.

“Look at the painting, Mr. Spratt.”

Jack frowned. He was certain that the car in the picture had not had a broken rear windshield before, but now it did. His frown deepened, but Dorian had another surprise for him.

“Look at the car.”

The rear window was intact.

“How…?”

Dorian Gray put the wheel brace away, shut the trunk and smiled the enigmatic smile of a conjuror who has just caught a speeding bullet in his teeth and no way on hell’s own earth was going to let on how he did it.

“Everything you do to the car happens to the picture, Inspector. It never needs cleaning, repairing or servicing. It will stay new forever. You may want to have rear seat belts fitted and replace the AM push-button radio, but I feel those are small inconveniences when you consider the vast savings this car has to offer.”

“Forever?”

Dorian stared absently at his perfectly manicured nails.

“ Nothing lasts forever,” he said carelessly, “but yes, for the foreseeable future.” He smiled disarmingly. “I’ve offered this warranty to only six other people, and do you know I’ve not had a single complaint?”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred guineas.”

“I’ll take it.”

Dorian was quite happy to accept a check and moved several cars so Jack could drive out, the engine purring like a kitten brought up on cream. Jack was just signing a buyer’s agreement, in Dorian’s red pen and thinking he had gotten the bargain of the century, when Mary knocked on the window in a state of some agitation. She was holding her cell phone and waved it at him.

“I need to speak to you as a matter of some urgency, sir.”

“Don’t worry.” Jack smiled. “I won’t insist you drive it all the time.”

“It’s not the Allegro. It’s the Gingerbreadman.”

“What about him?”

“He’s escaped.”

Jack laughed.

“Sure he has. I do this joke to Madeleine all the time, and she…”

He stopped talking as he noticed that Mary was doing everything but laughing and that Dorian Gray had turned on the television, where a news bulletin was under way. The volume was off, but it didn’t matter; the grim face of the anchorman with a stock picture of the gingery lunatic said it all. Jack felt a heavy hand fall on his heart. Not again. He and Friedland Chymes had captured him the first time around. Jack and Chymes had survived, Wilmot Snaarb had not. Jack could still see Snaarb’s look of agony as he had his arms torn from their sockets, his cries of pain and terror mixed with the maniacal cackle of the psychopathic snack. If Jack hadn’t tricked him into a shipping container, the Gingerbreadman would have stayed at liberty for longer. He was delivered to prison still inside the container, and it took fourteen men in riot gear to subdue him. It was nursery crime at its very worst.

“Who called you?” asked Jack, suddenly alert.

“Ashley,” replied Mary. “He said the whole station was in an uproar; Briggs was running around barking orders at people—and sometimes just barking.”

“And that’s what worries me,” said Jack, thanking Dorian and walking briskly from his office.

“That Briggs is rusty when it comes to panic?”

“No. I was the original arresting officer. The Gingerbreadman is clearly NCD—why didn’t they call us first?”

Most dangerous baked object:A hands-down win for the Gingerbreadman, incarcerated at St. Cerebellum’s secure hospital for the criminally deranged since 1984. He is currently serving a four-hundred-year sentence for the murder and torture of his 104 known victims; his crimes easily outrank those of the second-most-dangerous baked object, a fruitcake accidentally soaked in weed killer instead of sherry by Mrs. Austen of Pembridge, then served up to members of the Women’s Federation during a talk about the remedial benefits of basket weaving. The final death toll is reputed to have been 62.

Jack insisted theytake his new Allegro, and a few minutes later they were heading out of town to the south and the little village of Arborfield. Mary tuned in the wireless and heard a news bulletin on RadioToadReading informing everyone exactly why they should be panicking and what form this panicking should take. The broadcasts were uncannily successful, and in a few short hours a state of fear had descended on the town, with normally sensible citizens running around like headless chickens and generally behaving like idiots.