“Tell me all about your cucumbers, but from the very beginning,” prompted Goldilocks enthusiastically.
“Really?” replied Cripps, whose favorite subject generally brought forth large yawns from even the most polite and committed listener.
“Yes,” replied Goldilocks without hesitation, “in as much detail as you can.”
Cripps spoke for almost two hours and only twice strayed from his favorite topic. He showed Goldilocks his alarmed and climate-controlled greenhouse and pointed out the contenders for this year’s prize.
“They’re remarkable,” said Goldilocks, and so they were. A deep shade of bottle green with a smooth, blemish-free skin and a gentle curve without any kinks. If cucumbers had gods, these would be they. One cucumber in particular was so magnificent, so flawless, so perfect in every detail that Stanley confided to Goldilocks he was finally in with a chance to snatch the crown from the indisputable emperor of cucumber extreme, Mr. Hardy Fuchsia. Unabashed rivals, they would doubtless lock antlers in the field of cucumbering at Vexpo2004, this year to be held in Düsseldorf.
“A shade under fifty kilos,” remarked Cripps, pointing at one specimen.
“Impressive,” replied Goldilocks, scribbling another note.
They spoke for an hour more, and she left just after eight, with a notepad full of observations that confirmed what she already suspected. But of one thing she was certain: Mr. Cripps was almost certainly unaware of the more sinister aspects of his hobby.
By ten-thirty that night, Stanley Cripps was tucked up in bed, musing upon the good fortune that would undoubtedly see his champion cucumber take all the prizes at everything he entered it for. He could almost hear the roar of the crowd, smell the trophy and visualize the cover story in Cucumber Monthly that would surely be his. As he sat in bed chuckling to himself with a cup of hot chocolate and a Garibaldi, the silent alarm was triggered and a cucumber-shaped light blinked at him from the control panel near his bed. There had been a couple of false alarms over the past few days, but his longtime experience of thieves told him to always be vigilant, as wily cucumber pilferers often set alarms off deliberately so you would ignore them when they struck with real intention. He pulled on his dressing gown, donned his slippers and, after thinking for a moment, dialed Goldilocks’s number on the cordless phone while he padded noiselessly down the stairs to the back door.
Even before he reached the greenhouse, he could see that this was no false alarm—its door had been forced, and the lights were on. Goldilocks’s phone rang and rang at the other end, and he was just about to give up when her answering machine clicked in.
“Hi!” she said in a bright and breezy voice. “This is Henny Hatchett of The Toad. If you’ve got a good story…”
Stanley was by now only semilistening. He mumbled a greeting and his name at the beep, then ventured forth into his inner cucumber-cultivating sanctum, stick in hand and apprehensive of heart. He stopped short and looked around with growing incredulity.
“Good heavens!” he said in breathless astonishment. “It’s… full of holes!”
An instant later Stanley’s property exploded in a flaming ball of white-hot heat that turned the moonless night into day. The shock wave rolled out at the speed of sound in every direction and carried in front of it the shattered remains of Stanley’s house and gardens, while the fireball arced and flamed up into the night sky. The property next door collapsed like a house of cards, and the old oak had its side facing the blast reduced to a foot of charcoal. Windows were broken up to five miles away, and the blast was heard as a dull rumble in Reading, some forty miles distant. As for Stanley, he and almost everything he possessed were atomized in a fraction of a second. His false teeth were found embedded in a beech tree a quarter of a mile away, and his final comment in this life recorded on Goldilocks’s answering machine. She would hear it with a sense of rising foreboding upon her return—and in just over a week she, too, would be dead.
2. A Cautionary Tale
Most underfunded police division: For the twentieth year running, the Nursery Crime Division in the Reading Police Department. Formed in 1958 by DCI Jack Horner, who felt the regular force was ill-equipped to deal with the often unique problems thrown up by a nursery-related inquiry. After a particularly bizarre investigation that involved a tinderbox, a soldier and a series of talking cats with varying degrees of ocular deformity, he managed to prove to his confused superiors that he should oversee all inquiries involving “any nursery characters or plots from poems and/or stories.” His legacy of fairness, probity and impartiality remains unaltered to this day, as do the budget, the size of the offices, the wallpaper and the carpets.
—The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition
The neighborhood in West Reading that centers on Compton Avenue is similar to much of Reading’s prewar urban housing. Bay windows, red brick, attached garage, sunrise doors. The people who live here are predominantly white collar: managers, stock controllers, IT consultants. They work, raise children, watch TV, fret over promotions, socialize. Commonplace for Reading or anywhere else, one would think, aside from one fact. For two decades this small neighborhood has harbored a worrying and unnatural secret: Their children, quite against the norms of acceptable levels of conduct… behave themselves and respect their parents. Meals are always finished, shoes neatly double-bowed and cries of please and thank you ring clearly and frequently throughout the households. Boys’ hair is always combed and cut above the collar, bedrooms are scrupulously clean, baths are taken at first request, and household chores are enthusiastically performed. Shocking, weird, unnatural—even creepy. But by far the most strenuously obeyed rule was this: Thumbs are never, repeat never, sucked.