The Fourth Bear

“Right. We could never prove he snipped off the thumbs of errant suck-a-thumbs, but every lead we had pointed toward him. We never got to even interview him—the attacks suddenly stopped, and he just vanished into the night.”

“Moved on?”

“I wish. Ever met a Cautionary Valley child?”

“No.”

Jack shook his head sadly. “Sickeningly polite. A credit to their parents. Well mannered, helpful, courteous. We wanted to battle the Scissor-man and his cronies with everything the NCD could muster but were overruled by the local residents’ committee. They decided not to battle the cautionaries lurking in the woodwork but instead use them. They pursued a policy of ‘cautionary acquiescence’ by promulgating the stories and thus ensured that their children never had cause to accidentally invoke the cautionaries.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course. Believe me, once the hands really do grab your ankles when you get out of bed or the troll up the chimney does try to get you for not eating your greens, you make damn sure to do everything your parents tell you. But they’re still here,” added Jack as he looked around, “waiting in the fabric of the neighborhood. In the stone, earth and wood. Under beds and in closets. They’ll reappear when someone is leaning back on their chair, being slovenly, not eating their soup or—worst of all—sucking their thumb.”

They fell into silence and looked around, but all was normal. The summer’s night was cool and clear and the streets empty and quiet. They had been parked on Compton Avenue for twenty-five minutes, and nothing had appeared remotely out of the ordinary.

Things at the Nursery Crime Division were looking better than they had for many years, Jack admitted to himself. The success of the Humpty Dumpty inquiry four months earlier had placed himself and the NCD firmly in people’s consciousness. While not perhaps up there among cutting-edge police detection such as murder, serious robbery or the ever-popular “cold cases,” they were certainly more important than traffic or the motorcycle-display team. There were plans to increase the funding from its ridiculously low level and add a permanent staff beyond himself, DS Mary Mary and Constable Ashley.

“What’s the time?”

Ashley glanced at his watch.

“10010 past 1011.”

Jack did a quick calculation. Eighteen minutes past eleven. It was binary, of course, Ashley’s mother tongue. He generously spoke it as ones and zeros for Jack’s benefit—full-speed binary sounds like torn linen and is totally unintelligible. Ashley had no problem with English or any of the other twenty-three principal languages on the planet; it was the decimal numbering system he couldn’t get his head around. He was a Rambosian, an alien visitor from a small planet eighteen light-years away who had arrived quite unexpectedly along with 127 others four years previously. Every single one of the 70 billion or so inhabitants of Rambosia were huge fans of Earth’s prodigious output of television drama and comedy, and Ashley had been part of a mission to discover why there had never been a third series of Fawlty Towers and to interview John Cleese. But when the mission got to see just how much filing and bureaucratic data management there was on the planet, all 128 elected to stay.

Ashley had been in uniform for two years as part of the Alien Equal Opportunities Program and had found himself, after much reshuffling, at the Nursery Crime Division, where he could do no serious harm. His real name was 1001111001000100111011100100, but that was tricky to remember and even harder to pronounce. Get the emphasis wrong on the seventh digit and it could mean “My prawns have asthma.” He was about five feet tall with slender arms and legs that bent both ways at the elbows and knees. His head was twice the width of his shoulders, with big eyes, a small mouth and no nose. The UFO fraternity had got an alien’s appearance pretty much right, which surprised them all no end. His police uniform had been especially tailored to fit his unique physique, with a special elasticized girth, as Rambosians had a tendency to swell and contract depending on atmospheric pressure.

“So,” continued Jack, “ten minutes to go. What stories do Rambosians use to terrify their children into behaving themselves, Ash?”

“Vertical stripes, mainly.”

“Why?”

Jack watched Ashley think. Due to the Rambosian physiology of a translucent outer membrane filled with a blend of gelatinous liquid, Jack really could see his mind working. “Amorous linguini” was how one unkind observer put it—but that wasn’t far wrong.

“It’s the linear uniformity in the vertical plane,” Ashley explained with a shiver, and turned a darker shade of blue. “We don’t much fancy bar codes, railings or pinstripe suits either. Mind you, horizontally we have no problem with any of them—which is why we like to wear our pinstripes perpendicular to the norm.”