“Can I come to work with you?”

It was Caliban, sitting on the kitchen table.

“I’m on leave.”

“Sure you are.”

“I am. And get off the table.”

“Please?” implored Caliban as he jumped to the floor.

“There is no place for you in—Hang on,” he added, suddenly thinking of something. “You’re a thieving little swine, aren’t you?”

“One of the finest,” replied Caliban proudly, puffing out his chest.

“Then I may have a job for you.”

“Sorry,” said the ape, wagging a finger at him. “I never steal to order—that would be immoral. I only do it for fun.”

“Okay, then—do you want to have some seriously good fun?”

Caliban nodded vigorously, and Jack ran upstairs to get dressed. He kissed Madeleine, who mumbled something in her sleep along the lines of “Knock ’em dead, tiger.”

Forty minutes later Jack was bumping down the track to the gravel pit and Mary’s Short Sunderland flying houseboat. It was still not yet six-thirty, and the lake was a flat calm. Not so much as a ripple broke the broad expanse of silver, and when Jack walked along the jetty, he could see fish feeding in the gin-clear shallows. It was almost idyllic, and hard to believe that, as likely as not, a ten-mile radius would encompass not only this picture of calm and tranquillity but also a raging psychopath and a fugitive member of Parliament wanted for murder.

Jack knocked twice on the hull door, and after a few minutes it was opened by Mary, who was wrapped up in a dressing gown. She blinked sleepily.

“Shit, Jack, what’s the time?”

“Early.”

“What happened to your face?”

“This one was Briggs,” he said, pointing to his chin, “and this one was Madeleine.”

“Madeleine?”

“It’s all right—we made up. Can I have some coffee?”

“You know where it is. I’ll get dressed.”

Jack walked through the main part of the hull and up into the flight deck, where he lit the gas and put on the kettle. He sat in the copilot’s seat and stared absently at the view. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but he hoped he could fit all the pieces together before the shitstorm really began.

Mary reappeared a few minutes later, drying her damp hair with a towel.

“You have an alien stuck to the ceiling,” observed Jack.

“I know,” said Mary, pouring some coffee. “He needed somewhere to stay.”

“How did the date go?”

“Probably the oddest I’ve ever been on. I think our two species are so fundamentally different that any form of physical bond between us is almost inconceivable. Still, he’s fun to be with—and his family is completely nuts. His brother’s called Graham, he has a dopey sister named Daisy, and he—”

Mary realized that she had been gushing a little too much and stopped. Jack hid a smile, and she took a sip of coffee.

“So… what’s going on Jack?”

“Everything. If we don’t get to the bottom of it all within the next twelve hours, then I’m a dead man.”

Mary’s eyes narrowed. “You were serious about all that Bartholomew-being-innocent stuff last night?”

“Absolutely. There’s something rotten in the city of Reading, and it’s up to the NCD to do something about it.”

“So where does the twelve-hour death thing enter into it?”

“Because that’s how long it’ll be before Danvers or Briggs starts checking Bartholomew’s phone records and… and… finds out that it was me who tipped him off.”

Mary was stunned. She couldn’t quite believe it.

“You called him so he could escape?”

“I did.”

“Jack—that’s not good. In fact, it’s very much worse than not good—it’s illegal. Really illegal. You’ll be bounced out of the force and banged up into the bargain.”

“I had to do it to save his life. He didn’t kill Goldilocks. He’s the patsy, the fall guy. And like all fall guys in a frame-up, he won’t live twenty-four hours. If I hadn’t told him to run, we would have found him hanging by his pajama cord with a convenient confession close by. Everyone walks away, and Goldilocks’s murderer goes free. More important, the reason for her death remains secret.”

“So… she wasn’t killed over illegal porridge quotas?”

“Of course not. They were both good friends to bears. They were into that harmless little scam together—easing the burden of the average bear by free handouts of porridge midmonth. They were working together when photographed at the Coley Park Bart-Mart—and with Vinnie Craps in the background, monitoring them.”

“I get it. So who framed him?”

Jack paused for a minute. “NS-4. I thought at first they were protecting him, but they weren’t—they were setting him up to take the blame for Goldy’s death. They planted the Post-it note in the three bears’ house about Bartholomew meeting Goldilocks on Saturday morning, and they knew he wouldn’t have an alibi for that time period.”

“How did you know it was a plant?”

“Easy. The note referred to ‘Andersen’s Wood.’ Ed never called it a wood. It was always a forest.”

“As you say,” breathed Mary, feeling a bit stupid that she hadn’t spotted it, “easy. But NS-4? That means this is all wrapped in that dodgy beast known as ‘national interest.’"

“National interest be damned,” replied Jack. “Goldilocks is dead, and the Bruins are fighting for their lives. I tell you, someone’s going to go down for this.”

“Are you going to take it to Briggs?”

Jack sighed. “I can’t. He’s a good cop, but he’s politically motivated. He’ll blab to the seventh floor, and the shutters will bang down tight. As long as NS-4 thinks we’ve bought into the whole Bartholomew/porridge scenario, then we’re safe. Any hint that we’re not and the pair of us could find ourselves in a trillion pieces at SommeWorld—or somewhere equally imaginative.”

“Good morning,” said a voice from the door. It was Ashley, dressed only in a pair of yellow boxer shorts. “The short pauses and nervous intakes of breath woke me up.”

“There’s some cooking oil in the cupboard,” said Mary. Ash poured himself a glass of oil and sat down.

“So if Bartholomew didn’t kill Goldilocks,” said Mary, “who did?”

“There was someone else in the cottage that morning.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because of the porridge temperature differential. It’s been bothering me for days. How could the three bears’ porridge be at such widely varying temperatures when it was all poured at the same time?”

“I don’t know,” said Mary. “Because… of the different bowl sizes?”

“The Guv’nor’s right,” remarked Ashley. “From a thermodynamic point of view, that’s just not possible. The bowl with the smallest volume would cool fastest, making Junior’s the coolest—yet his was warmer than Mrs. Bruin’s.”

“Perhaps it’s about surface area?” suggested Mary.

“If that was the case, then Ed’s would have been cooler,” replied Ashley.

“Exactly,” said Jack. “This is the scenario as I see it: Goldilocks is investigating the murder of champion cucumber growers around the globe. She is talking to someone who may or may not be a long-dead scientist named McGuffin, who, aside from taking a cheery delight in blowing things up, also dabbled in cucumbers and was connected for a time to QuangTech. Every serious world-championship contender has had his cucumber strain destroyed and himself with it. She is about to go public with what she found out—but someone wants to keep her quiet at all costs and lures her to the three bears’ cottage on Saturday morning by telling her Bartholomew will be waiting for her.”

“How do you know they used Bartholomew as the lure?”

“She was naked in bed when the three bears found her.”

“Of course. And the porridge?”

“I’m coming to that. Her assailant tells her to be there at eight-fifteen, and he arrives just after the three bears left for their walk but just before Goldilocks arrived. He waits—but the smell of porridge is too tempting, and he eats the coolest porridge—baby bear’s. Then he refills it. But… he’s still hungry, so he eats father bear’s porridge, too. And then he refills that.”