Jack peered more closely at Humpty’s features. He looked old, the ravages of time and excessive drinking having taken their toll. The face of the cadaver was a pale reflection of the last time they had met. Humpty had been a jolly chap then, full of life and jokes. Jack paused for a moment and stared silently at the corpse.
Mary, to whom every passing second was a second not spent furthering her career, had made a choice: She would keep her head down and then try to get a good posting when the division was disbanded. If she did really well with Jack, perhaps Chymes would take notice. Perhaps.
She said, “How did you know him?”
“He used to lecture on children’s literature and business studies at Reading University. Good company and very funny, but a bit of a crook. He was being investigated by the university in 1981 when Chymes and I questioned him—”
“Whoa!” said Mary suddenly. “You worked for Friedland Chymes?”
“No,” replied Jack with a sigh, “Friedland and I worked together. You didn’t know he started at the NCD, did you?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t spread it around. I’ve had some good officers through here, but they don’t stay for long.”
“Really?” said Mary, as innocently as she could.
“Yes. It’s a springboard to better things—if you consider that anything is better than this. Unless you run it, in which case—”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but Mary knew what he meant.
“So … how long have you been here?”
“Since 1978,” mused Jack, still staring at Humpty’s unseeing eye.
“Twenty-six years,” said Mary, perhaps with a little too much incredulity in her voice than she would have liked. Jack looked at her sharply, so she changed the subject.
“I heard Friedland Chymes was a joy to work with.”
“He’s an ambitious career officer who will lie, cheat and steal as he clambers over the rubble of used and discarded officers on his way to the top.”
“Boy, did I read that wrong,” she replied, not believing a word—she knew how the brightest stars always invoked jealousy from those left behind.
“Yes, you did. You’ve heard, I suppose, about the murder of Cock Robin?”
“No.”
Jack sighed. No one ever did these days. Chymes made certain of it. It had been two decades ago anyway.
“Well, it doesn’t matter—it’s ancient history. To get back to Humpty, Friedland and I questioned him about a racket in which he imported eight containerloads of spinning wheels the week before the government ban. The compensation deal netted him almost half a million, but he’d done nothing illegal. He was like that. Always up to something. Ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving. He was fired from the university when they suspected him of having his hands in the till.”
“They couldn’t fire him over suspicion, surely?”
“No, but he’d made the mistake of having an affair with the dean’s wife, and it didn’t go down too well. Last I heard of him, he had hit the sauce pretty badly and was into commodity speculation.”
Jack looked at Humpty’s features again. “How old was he?”
Mary consulted his driving license. “He was… er, sixty-five.”
Jack looked up at the wall again. Humpty had always sat on walls, it was his way. He’d even had one built in the lecture room where he taught, a plaster and wooden mockup that could be wheeled in when required.
“Have uniform been round to break the news to Mrs. Dumpty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We should have a word with her. Find out what state she’s in. Good morning, Gladys, what does this look like to you?”
Mrs. Singh stood up and stretched her back. She had just celebrated her fiftieth birthday and was the pathologist allocated by default to Jack and all his cases. In real life she was an assistant pathologist, but the chief pathologist wouldn’t do NCD work in case he got laughed at, so he sent along Mrs. Singh and rubber-stamped her reports without reading them. Like Jack, she was doing the best she could on limited resources. Unlike Jack, she loved cats and people who loved cats and had six grandchildren.
“They hung us out to dry over the pig thing, Jack,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Were you surprised?”
“To be honest, no. When was the last time we got a conviction?”
“Five years ago,” replied Jack without even having to think about it. “That guy who was running the illegal straw-into-gold dens. What was his name again?”
“Rumplestiltskin,” returned Mrs. Singh with a faint smile at the memory. “Twenty years, no remission. Those were the days. Who’s the new blood?”
“DS Mary Mary,” said Jack. “Mary, this is Mrs. Singh.”
“Welcome to the house of fun,” said Mrs. Singh. “Tell me, did you actually request to work here?”
“Not… as such.”
Mrs. Singh flashed an impish smile at Jack. “No,” she said,
“they never do.”
She waved a rubber-gloved hand at Humpty’s remains. “That’s a lot of shell. I never saw him alive—how big was he?”
Jack thought for a moment. “About four-foot-six high—three foot wide.”
She nodded. “That makes sense. He would have been quite heavy, and it’s a fall of over twelve feet. I’ll know a bit more when I get him back to the lab, but I can’t see anything that would preclude a verdict of either accidental death or suicide.”
“Any idea on the time of death?”
“Difficult to say. The rainstorm last night pretty much washed everything away. There are scraps of inner and outer membrane—and this.” She held up a gelatinous object.
“A jellyfish? This far inland?”
“I’m no expert when it comes to eggs,” confessed Mrs. Singh,
“but I’ll try to identify it.”
“What about time of death?”
She dropped the section of Humpty’s innards into a plastic Ziploc bag with a plop and thought for a moment. “Well, the remaining viscera are still moist and pliable, so sometime within the last twenty-four hours. Mind you, the birds would have had most of it if he’d fallen off the wall yesterday, so if you want me to make a guess, sometime between 1800 hours yesterday evening and 0300 this morning. Any later than that and the rain wouldn’t have had time to wash away all that albumen.”
Mary jotted it down in her notebook. Jack was sure there must be relatives, and they would almost certainly ask him one important question.