“BROWN-HORROCKS!” he yelled once more, now looking around the wreckage for any clue as to what had happened to him, no matter how gruesome.
“Where is he?” asked Mary, who’d arrived by Jack’s side.
“I don’t know. Shit. Killing a Guild examiner. And he was a giant. I’ll never live this down at the station.”
“I’m six foot nine,” came an indignant voice behind them. “I’m not a giant.”
They turned to find him staggering up from the side of the road. He had been thrown in a quite different direction and been deposited in a muddy ditch.
“Thank God,” said Jack. “Turn around.”
He turned around for them, and they checked him over. Apart from some singed hair and a few cuts and bruises, he was fine.
“I expect you’ll want to call it a day after that?”
“On the contrary,” said Brown-Horrocks in a resolute tone, “I’m curious to see how this turns out.”
Jack shook his mobile phone, and some bits fell out. “Buggered. Where’s yours, Mary?”
“Car.”
They walked back towards the Allegro to find a dent in the hood and a nail that had pierced the door skin like a crossbow bolt.
“Look what they’ve done to my car!”
“Did someone just try to kill us?” asked Mary as her mobile hunted for a signal.
“I think so,” replied Jack as he opened the door and took a seat.
She got through to the NCD and told Ashley to have uniform close the road and get the fire service down there — and the bomb squad, too. She snapped the mobile shut and sat on the hood. “I owe you, sir. How did you know?”
Jack ran his fingers through his hair and picked out several bits of debris.
“The interior light had been pried off and a small piece of wire ran down the inside of the door pillar. It might have been nothing, but I wasn’t going to risk it.”
“I have to say I’m very glad you didn’t.”
“So am I,” said Brown-Horrocks, making a note on his muddy and singed clipboard.
“Probably about two pounds of high explosive,” explained Lee Whriski, a young major in the bomb squad, “attached to a short time-delay fuse. We’ll be able to tell you which explosive it was given a few days, but not much more, I’m afraid. This kind of thing is not hard to do — obtaining the explosives is harder — but when we find out what it was, we might be able to narrow the search. You were lucky.”
They were standing on the road surrounded by several drab green army vehicles. The road had been closed while the bomb squad made a detailed search of the area.
Jack thanked him and walked over to where Mary was being checked by a medic.
“You know you’re near the target when you start to cop flak,” said Mary.
“Yes,” agreed Jack. “But which target?”
“Don’t you know?” asked Brown-Horrocks.
“Of course,” replied Jack hastily. “It was a rhetorical question. I’m just waiting for them… to make a mistake. Then we’ll have them.”
“I see,” said Brown-Horrocks, clearly not believing Jack in the least. “And how many assassination attempts do you think you can survive before they make a mistake?”
“It’s all in hand, sir,” replied Jack unconvincingly.
“I hope so. By the way, how many giants have you killed? I ask only by way of curiosity and self-preservation, you understand.”
“Technically speaking, only one,” replied Jack with a sigh. “The other three were just tall.”
“To kill one giant might be regarded as a misfortune,” said Brown-Horrocks slowly. “To kill four looks very much like carelessness.”
“I was cleared on all counts.”
“Of course,” said the Guild man, making another note on his clipboard.
“Sir?” said Mary, who had been going around collecting debris that might have been in Humpty’s car. It was surprising how much had survived — explosions are quixotic beasts. Most of it was worthless. A portion of poultry-feed packaging, a charred couple of pages from last week’s Mole, the remains of the Zephyr’s service manual. But one particular item caught Jack’s attention. It was part of some promotional material advertising the Goring Foot Museum. Jack and Mary exchanged looks, and Mary called the office to ask Baker whether he knew anything about the museum. She listened intently for a while, then hung up.
“Well?” asked Jack.
“Know the way to Goring, sir?”
“Sure. You going to tell me why?”
“Thomas Thomm was a research assistant there. That was the job that Humpty had got for him.”
“That’s the lead we’re looking for,” said Jack in the manner that Chymes used.
Brown-Horrocks raised an eyebrow but was otherwise unmoved.
“I’ll go in the back,” he said. “I’m meant to be just an observer anyway.”
And with a sinuous movement of folding arms and limbs, he compacted his large frame sufficiently to fit in the rear seat.
40. The Goring Foot Museum
The foot is, of course, a wonderful piece of engineering. It allowed mankind freedom from quadripedal movement and thus to develop the use of his hands. Without the foot we would have no hands.
Jack had been to the Foot Museum only once before, when he was at school. It had been considered the low point of the school year, only marginally less interesting than Swindon’s Museum of the Rivet or Bracknell’s collection of doorstops. The museum was another Spongg bequest and was an impressive structure built in the Greek style, and despite being sandwiched between a supermarket and a fast-food restaurant, had lost little of its imposing grandeur.
They were met by a white-haired gentleman of perhaps sixty. He had a bad stoop and walked with uncertain steps. He had to look at them sideways, as his chin was almost resting on his chest.
“Professor Tarsus? I am Detective Inspector Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division, Reading Police. This is Detective Sergeant Mary Mary.”
“I’ll never remember all that. I’ll just call you Ronald and Nancy. Who’s he?”
“This is Mr. Brown-Horrocks from the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives.”
“Ah. You can be Ronald as well. Took your time, didn’t you?”
He had a heavy, gravelly voice that sounded like thimbles on a washboard.
“Pardon me?” asked Jack, unsure of his meaning.
“You chaps don’t seem to be interested at all. I had a couple of you johnnies around about three months ago, just after the theft. Ronald and, er…Ronald, I think their names were. They promised to make inquiries, and that was that. Bad show, I call it.”
“We’re not here about the theft, sir.”
The Professor appeared not to hear and beckoned them to follow him past the rows of ancient foot-orientated exhibits. The interior was as old and dusty as Jack remembered, the leaded windows caked with grime and the hard flags smoothed from three-quarters of a century of bored, shuffling feet. The Professor led them through a door marked “Private” and into a modern laboratory. Racks of jars lined the walls, most of them containing some sort of chiropodic specimen pickled in formaldehyde.
“What’s this?” asked Jack, pointing to an acrylic and polypropylene test foot in a worn jogging boot being sprayed with a foul-smelling liquid inside a glass case. The foot and its stainless-steel leg trod a rolling road in a convincing manner.
“Our test foot. I call him Michael. We can program it for any type of walking gait. We can even,” he continued excitedly, “simulate a dropped arch to investigate what type of shoe offers the best support. We have it sweating a salt-nutrient mixture and then analyze the bacteria that grows in the gaps between the toes. Would you care to take a look?”