“Indeed it has!” exclaimed Fuchsia indignantly. “Someone broke in here two nights ago and stole my fledgling Alpha-Pickle.”

“Your… what?”

“My Alpha-Pickle. It’s the progeny of Cuthbert here and will develop into an even finer specimen. Mind you, the Alpha-Pickle is worthless without the skills to make it develop. In untrained hands it will be good only for… salad.”

After that they showed him Goldilocks’s photo to see if he had seen her, but he hadn’t. He couldn’t throw any light on the blast on the Nullarbor Plain either. Deserts, he told them, were not great places in which to grow cucumbers. They asked him again if he would move somewhere else, but once again he refused, stoically declaring that he would, as an Englishman, defend his cucumbers to the death. Quite how much fight they thought an octogenarian would put up was questionable, but McGuffin, if alive, would be sixty-eight, so perhaps he had a chance after all.

“What do you think?” asked Jack as they took the road back to Reading.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“No idea. Winning a cucumber championship where the first prize is twenty quid and a trophy seems the slenderest of motives for a triple murder. And if Goldilocks’s “scoop” was about deceit, skulduggery, murder, faked death and high drama in the world of competitive cucumber growing, would it really be necessary to kill her, too? I must say, I’m pretty flummoxed by it all.”

“I’m the same,” retorted Mary, “but more so. No matter. I’ll use my feminine wiles on Briggs to see if we can’t get some sort of protection for Fuchsia. I’m sure he’ll agree to it.”

24. Overquotaing

“Let me get this straight,” said Briggs. “You want me to sanction the overtime for a twenty-four-hour surveillance operation on a cucumber?”

“Not just any cucumber,” said Mary, who was standing in front of Briggs’s desk an hour later. “This one is a world champion, and if you read the report on the blast at Obscurity—”

“It was an unexploded wartime bomb, Mary. Official. You don’t honestly expect me to believe that someone is going around bumping off the competition solely to win a cucumber championship?”

Mary bit her lip. It was almost exactly what Jack thought he’d say, but she had to try. “I’d like your refusal to be noted, sir.”

Briggs looked up at her. “That’s very impertinent, Sergeant.”

“It reflects my certainty that Fuchsia’s life is in danger, sir.”

“Your passion in this matter is certainly intriguing,” replied Briggs thoughtfully. “Tell me, is there a lot of money in cucumber championships? A six-figure payout or something?”

“A twenty-pound book coupon, sir—and a dented cup.”

He shook his head sadly. “You’re as mad as Spratt. Perhaps madder. Sonning isn’t far—if this Fuchsia fellow gets suspicious, he can call us. Just speak to beautiful Pippa and have him put on ‘expedite’ in the control room.”

“But, sir—”