“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?”

6. The Gingerbreadman Is Out

Jack insisted they take 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.

Because of this the roads and streets were spookily empty. Mary and Jack passed almost no one until they arrived at a police roadblock just outside the village, from where they parked the car and walked past TV-network vans and police mobile-incident trucks. They ducked under a Do Not Cross barrier and after a few hundred yards were met by such a scene of unrestrained violence and aggression that Mary, with never the strongest stomach, had to do a rapid about-face and tell Jack she’d see him later.

The St. Cerebellum’s van that had transported the Gingerbreadman was lying on its side with the rear doors torn off. The bodies of the three who died instantly were still there, uncovered, being photographed. Already SOCO had started to record everything at the crime scene. The Gingerbreadman had undertaken the gruesome attack with a ferocity at least equal to or even greater than when he was last at liberty. A torn-off arm lay in the street, and the body of a man in a suit lay in an awkward position, half out of the passenger seat of the van. It looked as though he had been twisted until he broke.

“Shit,” muttered Jack under his breath. It was worse than he imagined. The memories of twenty years came back in a flurry of painful, unwanted images.

“Spratt?” said a familiar voice behind him. It was Superintendent Briggs, Jack’s immediate superior. A middle-aged man with a well-developed paunch, he had kindly eyes and one of those anachronistic comb-over hairstyles to disguise the fact he was going bald, but it fooled no one. Although Jack was head of the NCD, Briggs acted as his liaison with the rest of the force and had the power to tell him to drop any case he didn’t feel was worth pursuing. Their relationship usually swung between hot and cold, and Briggs had made it his sworn duty to suspend Jack at least once during any investigation, more for dramatic effect than anything else.

“Good morning, sir, we came as quick as we could,” responded Jack, noticing that Briggs was with DI Copperfield, a contemporary of Jack’s who worked CID at Reading Central.

“We?” asked Briggs, looking around.

“Mary’s not too good with bodies, sir—I think she’s honking up in the bushes. Good morning, David.”

“Jack,” replied Copperfield cheerily. He was the same age as Jack but looked younger than their shared forty-five years. His boyish good looks and absence of gray meant he could easily pass for thirty, and frequently did.

“You caught him the last time,” Briggs said to Jack. “Your experience in this matter might be invaluable.”

“When did he escape?”

“Ninety-seven minutes ago,” replied Copperfield. “Killed two male nurses and his doctor with his bare hands. The other three orderlies who accompanied him are critical in the hospital.”

“Critical?”

“Yes. Don’t like the food, beds uncomfortable, waiting lists too long—usual crap. Other than that they’re fine.”