He pressed the end-call button and handed the mobile back.

“He said he was very sorry to hear about your accident and he’ll call you later. I don’t think he believed me.”

“No, it’s going to take more than my death to put him off, but thanks anyway. What’s your name?”

“Constable Tibbit.”

“Sergeant Mary Mary,” said Mary, shaking Tibbit’s hand,

“pleased to meet you.”

The young officer thought hard for a moment, then said, “Arrange a… symmetry.”

Mary arched an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

He didn’t answer for a moment but again thought hard and finally said in triumph, “Many… martyrs agree.”

“Are you okay?”

“Of course!” replied the young constable brightly. “It’s an anagram. If you take ‘Sergeant Mary Mary’ and rearrange the letters you get ‘Arrange a symmetry’ or ‘Many martyrs agree.’ The trick is to have them make sense. I could have given you ‘My matey arrangers’ or ‘My artery managers,’ but they sort of sound like anagrams, don’t you think?”

“If you say so.”

She had thought that perhaps Tibbit might have been a life raft of normality that she could somehow cling to for sanity, but that hope was fast retreating. It was little wonder he had been allocated to the division.

“It’s a palindrome,” continued the young constable.

“Sorry?”

“Tibbit. Easy to remember. Reads the same backwards as forwards. Tibbit.”

Mary raised an eyebrow. “You mean, like ‘Rats live on no evil star’?”

He nodded his head excitedly. “I prefer the more subtle ones, myself, ma’am, such as ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.’”

Mary sighed. “Sure you’re in the right job?”

Tibbit appeared crestfallen at this, so Mary changed the subject.

“How long have you been here?”

“Six months. I was posted down here for three months, but I think they’ve forgotten about me. I don’t mind,” he added quickly.

“I like it.”

“First name?”

“Otto,” he replied, then added by way of explanation, “Palindrome as well. My sister’s name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times world Scrabble champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score. He spent the greater part of his life campaigning to have respelt those words that look as though they are spelt wrongly but aren’t.”

“Such as…?”

“Oh, skiing, vacuum, freest, eczema, gnu, diarrhea, that sort of thing. He also thought that ‘abbreviation’ was too long for its meaning, that ‘monosyllabic’ should have one syllable, ‘dyslexic’ should be renamed ‘O’ and ‘unspeakable’ should be respelt ‘unsfzpxkable.’

“How did he do?”

“Apart from the latter, which has met with limited success, not very well.”

Mary’s eyes narrowed. She feared she was having her leg pulled, but the young man seemed to be sincere.

“Okay. Here’s the deal. You stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours. Get me St. Cerebellum’s number and make Jack a cup of coffee.”

The armory and ballistics division was run by George Skinner. He was a large man with a bad stoop, graying hair and a permanent hangdog expression. He wore pebble specs and a shabby herring-bone suit that seemed as though he had inherited it from his father. Looks can be deceptive and were definitely so in Skinner’s case. Not only was he an inspired ballistics and weapons expert, able to comment expertly and concisely on everything from a derringer to a bazooka, he was also highly watchable in the documentaries that often followed one of Chymes’s investigations. But despite his somewhat sober appearance, he was also a lively fixture of Reading’s nightlife. He could outdrink almost anyone, and if there was a report of someone dancing naked on the tables down at the Blue Parrot, you could bet safe money it was Skinner.

Jack knocked on the open door. “Hello, George.”

“Come in, Jack,” said Skinner without turning around.

Jack walked over and watched him for a moment. Like Mrs. Singh, Skinner was one of the few officers who didn’t treat the NCD with the derision that seemed to hallmark Jack’s association with the rest of the station. Friedland swore by Skinner, and Friedland expected the best—it galled him something rotten that Skinner was so chummy with Jack. Jack waited patiently while Skinner finished what he was doing, and then he produced the sawed-off shotgun.

“What do you make of this?” he asked.

“Ah!” said Skinner thoughtfully, signing the evidence label before removing the gun and carefully checking to make sure it was empty. “I make this a Marchetti twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Illegal, as all pumps are, and shortened like this, it’s a nasty piece of work.”

Skinner replaced his glasses, making his eyes appear twice as big as they were. He peered at Jack for a moment and then pulled a file off a shelf. He looked up the make against reported stolen or missing guns.

“Oh,” he said in a tone that made Jack nervous.

“What?”

He looked at the frame number again.

“Bingo. Jack, meet the weapon that was stolen from Mr. Christian. It could be the murder weapon in the Andersen’s Wood murders. That was one of Friedland’s, wasn’t it?”

“One of the many,” replied Jack with a sigh.

The wood murders had all the characteristics of the sort of drama that Chymes liked to unravel. Mr. Christian had been murdered along with his wife eighteen months earlier in Andersen’s Wood, a large forest to the west of Reading. The only possible motive was connected to the substantial amount of cash that had been found at their humble dwelling on the edge of the forest. Mr. Christian was a poor woodcutter, yet close to seven thousand pounds was found in their house, and no clue as to how they came by it. Friedland, in a typical display of bravado, had uncovered a sinuous trail of money laundering that led from East Malvonia and involved several hitherto unheard-of and only marginally plausible secret societies and ended up implicating the Vatican. During a daring raid on an address in Cleethorpes, the two prime suspects were killed and a large quantity of arms and cash recovered. The investigation was so complex that it had to be published as an annotated two-parter in Amazing Crime Stories. The only survivor of the raid confessed a few weeks later and was currently doing time in Reading Gaol.

“This gun was used to kill the Christians?”

“No, this gun belonged to the woodcutter. I can tell you if it was the one used to kill them by comparing the two spent cartridges they found at the scene. Who had it?”

“Humpty Dumpty.”

“As in ‘sat on a wall’?”

“No, as in ‘had a great fall.’ He was found dead this morning.”

“Ah,” replied Skinner knowingly. “I thought murdered woodcutters were NCD jurisdiction?”

“Friedland insisted they were real woodcutters, and Briggs agreed with him. As it turned out, he was right. Thanks, Skinner, you’ve been a lot of help.”

Jack walked back into the station, stepped into the lift and pressed the button to go down to the basement. The lift, however, was already programmed to go up, so he went on an excursion to the seventh floor. The shotgun puzzled him. Humpty was undeniably shady, but he’d never been violent.