Fuchsia seemed entirely unconcerned by the risk that he seemed to be facing. The fact hadn’t been lost on Mary either.

“Has it struck you,” she said slowly, “that all your fellow cucumberistas have died in blazing fireballs?”

“Goodness,” said Fuchsia thoughtfully, “I’d never even considered it before. Do you suppose the Men in Green are after me, too?”

Mary looked at Jack. “Protective custody?” she queried. “Or just section him?”

Jack shook his head. “Can you imagine trying to run this request past Briggs? We’ll try, but I think I know what he’ll say.”

They turned back to Fuchsia.

“It’s likely you’re in very grave danger,” said Mary. “Is there anyone you can stay with for a few weeks?”

“Impossible!” spluttered Fuchsia, waving a hand in the direction of Cuthbert and his family. “A gap in the continuity of care right now could set me back decades. Four people may have died in explosions, but this is something well worth the risk!”

“Four?”

“What?”

“You said four had died. Who was the fourth?”

“Cripps, Katzenberg, Prong and… McGuffin.”

“You knew McGuffin?” asked Mary.

“Indeed!” he said jovially, “Myself, Howard, Prong, McGuffin and Cripps began this whole cucumber thing together in the sixties. It was Simon’s idea, I suppose, the growing of heavy cucumbers. A distraction from the… ah, rigors of work.” He thought for a moment and added, “To be honest, I don’t think McGuffin loved cucumbers half as much as he loved blowing things up. He left us in the early eighties to conduct his own experiments over at QuangTech.”

“What sort of a man was he?”

“Mad as a barrel of skunks. Brilliant, but impetuous. He wanted to grow heavy cucumbers like us, but he was always too impatient. He said he was going to fast-forward the years of crossbreeding and grow a champion to beat all champions in his retirement.”

Jack thought about this. If McGuffin were alive, perhaps he was planning on doing precisely that.

“Has… anything been stolen from you recently?” asked Mary.

“Indeed it has!” exclaimed Fuchsia indignantly. “Someone broke in here two nights ago and stole my fledgling Alpha-Pickle.”

“Your… what?”

“My Alpha-Pickle. It’s the progeny of Cuthbert here and will develop into an even finer specimen. Mind you, the Alpha-Pickle is worthless without the skills to make it develop. In untrained hands it will be good only for… salad.”

After that they showed him Goldilocks’s photo to see if he had seen her, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t throw any light on the blast on the Nullarbor Plain either. Deserts, he told them, were not great places in which to grow cucumbers. They asked him again if he would move somewhere else, but once again he refused, stoically declaring that he would, as an Englishman, defend his cucumbers to the death. Quite how much fight they thought an octogenarian would put up was questionable, but McGuffin, if alive, would be sixty-eight, so perhaps he had a chance after all.

“What do you think?” asked Jack as they took the road back to Reading.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“No idea. Winning a cucumber championship where the first prize is twenty quid and a trophy seems the slenderest of motives for a triple murder. And if Goldilocks’s “scoop” was about deceit, skulduggery, murder, faked death and high drama in the world of competitive cucumber growing, would it really be necessary to kill her, too? I must say, I’m pretty flummoxed by it all.”

“I’m the same,” retorted Mary, “but more so. No matter. I’ll use my feminine wiles on Briggs to see if we can’t get some sort of protection for Fuchsia. I’m sure he’ll agree to it.”

24. Overquotaing

“Let me get this straight,” said Briggs. “You want me to sanction the overtime for a twenty-four-hour surveillance operation on a cucumber?”

“Not just any cucumber,” said Mary, who was standing in front of Briggs’s desk an hour later. “This one is a world champion, and if you read the report on the blast at Obscurity—”

“It was an unexploded wartime bomb, Mary. Official. You don’t honestly expect me to believe that someone is going around bumping off the competition solely to win a cucumber championship?”

Mary bit her lip. It was almost exactly what Jack thought he’d say, but she had to try. “I’d like your refusal to be noted, sir.”

Briggs looked up at her. “That’s very impertinent, Sergeant.”

“It reflects my certainty that Fuchsia’s life is in danger, sir.”

“Your passion in this matter is certainly intriguing,” replied Briggs thoughtfully. “Tell me, is there a lot of money in cucumber championships? A six-figure payout or something?”

“A twenty-pound book coupon, sir—and a dented cup.”

He shook his head sadly. “You’re as mad as Spratt. Perhaps madder. Sonning isn’t far—if this Fuchsia fellow gets suspicious, he can call us. Just speak to beautiful Pippa and have him put on ‘expedite’ in the control room.”

“But, sir—”

“Before you go, Sergeant, one other thing. There seems to be a bizarre rumor making its way around the station that you’re going on a date with that alien. Is this true?”

Mary bit her lip. She still wanted to wriggle out of the date if she could, but she didn’t like Briggs’s attitude. Despite a few obvious failings, Ash was a good officer, and part of the team.

“Yes, sir,” she said defiantly, “it’s all true. And his name’s Ashley.”

“Well,” said Briggs with a patronizing air, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” He returned to staring at several reports on his desk.

“Yes, sir.”

When Mary got back to the office she found Jack in conversation with Copperfield, who had aged five years since the Gingerbreadman inquiry had begun. His eyes were dark-rimmed and hollow, and he was chain-smoking again. There had been several near misses, but the Gingerbreadman had remained tantalizingly out of his reach, despite the buildup of almost three hundred troops and armed-response groups from as far away as Newcastle. You couldn’t walk anywhere in Reading without seeing somebody in uniform carrying a weapon standing at a street corner.

“Any leads on the crazy cookie?” asked Jack.

“No… and he’s a cake.”

“I don’t think so,” replied Jack firmly. “A cookie goes soft when—”

“And it’s not getting any better,” added Copperfield, who hadn’t the inclination to listen to Jack’s cookie/cake debate.

“We’ve got nothing, but nothing, to go on. We’re getting these twice a day, all mailed from the center of town—look.”

He passed a photocopied note to Jack, who read it carefully: “‘I’ll run and run and jump with glee. I’m the Gingerbreadman—you can’t catch me.’"