Jack and Mary stood near the door and let the talk go over their heads. It was mostly about the feasibility of using the solar wind as a power source for telekinetics, the theoretic possibilities of the existence of a chronosynclastic infundibulum and the likelihood of capturing ball lightning in large glass jars to use as an indefinite light source. Jack and Mary applauded with the others when the talk ended, and they approached Parks as the students filed out.

“Inspector!” said Parks with a friendly smile. “I was meaning to call you.” He shook them both by the hand and started to pack up his notes and the carousel of slides that had accompanied his talk.

“You were?”

“Yes, I found some information about the blast on the Nullarbor Plain. In October 1992 a seismic survey on a routine oil exploration reported an explosion of some sort to the National Parks Authorities. They sent out a survey team, expecting to find a meteorite strike. Instead they found glass.”

“Glass?”

“Glass. Fused sand, to be precise. Circular in shape, about the size of a soccer field; the glass was four inches thick in the center and thinned out toward the edge. A few hundred thousand degrees for a very short time.”

“What do you think it was?”

Parks took the small piece of fired earth from the padded envelope. “I think it was the same type of blast we saw at Obscurity. Intense heat, very little radiation. Some form of advanced thermal weapon, tested clandestinely in the Nullarbor. If you wanted to sterilize an area of land quickly and easily, a heat bomb of the description I’ve given you would be just the way to do it. And if you didn’t want your competitors to figure out what was going on, you’d make damn sure you removed the evidence.”

“QuangTech,” murmured Jack. “Perhaps they didn’t disband their Advanced Weapons Division after all.”

“That would be good news for the conspiracy industry if true,” said Parks excitedly, adding after a moment’s thought, “or even if not true. Did you want to see me about something?”

“Yes,” replied Jack. “Do you have a scanning electron microscope?”

“Not officially, but the SEM operator here is heavily into the whole yeti/bigfoot/sasquatch noncontroversy and so could probably be swung.”

Jack showed him the gingerbread thumb, still in the evidence bag.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“It certainly is. I’d like you to see if there is anything unusual about it on the granular level. On the face of it, gingerbreadmen are usually passive victims at teatime and not homicidal maniacs, so I need to know more—and I need to know it now.”

“I’ll get onto it straightaway.”

They thanked Parks and walked out of the center.

“Why didn’t Copperfield think of doing that?” said Jack.

“Because he’s not NCD?” suggested Mary. “Or because he’s a twit?”

“Probably both.”

He pulled out his cell phone and called the NCD office.

“Hullo!” said Ashley cheerfully. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“The office has been bugged. When I got there, I could hear the buzz of the encoded binary radio transmission.”

“Tell me you’re not still in the office.”

“No. I’m in the roof space just behind the third-floor toilets reading the phone traffic as it leaves the exchange. It’s made me a bit tipsy. Did you know that Pippa has a bun in the oven?”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, she was talking to her mother all about it. And what’s more,” continued Ashley, “the father is Peck—you know, in uniform with the pockmarked face and the twin over in Palmer Park?”

“What’s going on?” asked Mary.

“Pippa’s pregnant by Peck.”

“Pippa Piper picked Peck over Pickle or Pepper?” exclaimed Mary incredulously. “Which of the Peck pair did Pippa Piper pick?”

“Peter ‘pockmarked’ Peck of Palmer Park. He was the Peck that Pippa Piper picked.”

“No, no,” returned Mary, “you’ve got it all wrong. Paul Peck is the Palmer Park Peck; Peter Peck is the pockmarked Peck from Pembroke Park. Pillocks. I’d placed a pound on Pippa Piper picking PC Percy Proctor from Pocklington.”

There was a pause.

“It seems a very laborious setup for a pretty lame joke, doesn’t it?” mused Jack.

“Yes,” agreed Mary, shaking her head sadly. “I really don’t know how he gets away with it.”

Jack turned his attention back to Ashley. “Has Briggs called the office?”

“Several times. I told him Mary was down at the Bob Southey, and I didn’t have a clue what was going on, as I’m merely window dressing for better alien-sapien relations. More interestingly, Agent Danvers has called Briggs on several occasions.”

“You eavesdropped on Briggs’s private telephone conversations?”

“Not at all,” replied Ashley. “I’ve eavesdropped on everyone’s conversations. How did you think I found out about Pippa and Peck?”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” replied Jack, whose interpretation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act was becoming more elastic by the second. “What did Danvers want?”

“She wanted to know where you were so she could have a chat. Briggs was commendably evasive—said you were dangerously insane and safely on leave, where you could do no real harm except possibly to yourself.”

“Did he, now? Did you get anything on Hardy Fuchsia?”

“And how. Before he retired, he spent forty years in the nuclear-power industry.”

“He referred to Prong, Cripps, McGuffin and Katzenberg as colleagues,” observed Jack thoughtfully.

“Precisely. They all worked together at various times—in nuclear-fusion R&D.”

Jack told him he was a star, Ashley asked him which one, Jack said it didn’t matter and then rang off.

“Let’s get over to Sonning and talk to Fuchsia,” said Jack. “It looks like our scatty and mostly dead cucumber fanciers were all retired nuclear physicists.”

33. Hardy Fuchsia and Bisky-Batt

There was no answer when they knocked on Fuchsia’s door.

“Keep trying,” said Jack. “I’m going to check around the back.”

After the third attempt, Mary entered the garden by the gate at the side and thumped even louder on the back door, then peered through the kitchen window. There was no sign of life, and the door was firmly locked.

“Over here!” yelled Jack from the greenhouse.

She found him kneeling near the empty bed that had once held Fuchsia’s collection of champion cucumbers. “Stolen?”

“Worse,” said Jack, pointing at the freshly disturbed earth.

Mary shivered. Poking up from the dirt were eight fingertips. They were held out in front of whoever was buried there in a position of terrified supplication. Jack donned a latex glove and scraped away at the dry earth with his fingertips. It was Fuchsia, barely six inches below the surface. His eyes and mouth were still open, and the soil was dark and heavy with blood.

“Damn and blast that Briggs!” cried Jack. “Why can’t he ever believe us?”

He stood up, and they quietly left the greenhouse.

“Cucumber extremists?” suggested Mary. “The Men in Green?”