Free The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde Page B

the last night of a Home Counties tour of Romeo and Juliet . All went well until the fight between Romeo and Tybalt at the beginning of act three.”
    “What happened?”
    “Tybalt won.”
    Jack frowned. He was no culture vulture, but he could see the difficulties. “So the play ended?”
    “There was almost a riot. A fencing referee who happened to be in the audience was called onto the stage, and he declared it a fair fight. The play finished with the company improvising an ending where Paris married Juliet, then was led to his own suicide by his failure to compete successfully with the love that Juliet held for her dead first husband.”
    “Quick thinking.”
    “You said it.”
    “So where’s the crime?”
    “At the bookies’. Tybalt, never a strong favorite, had been pegged at sixty to one, and someone pulled in an estimated three hundred grand. We were informed, but it seemed as though the bookies were just complaining that they had to pay out. It wasn’t until a matinee performance of Macbeth three weeks later that the gang struck again. At the final big fight, Macduff was the clear favorite at even money. The bookies, now more vigilant, had placed Macbeth at three to one. It seemed a foregone conclusion; Macduff had fifty-eight pounds and eight years on Macbeth, not to mention some crafty footwork and a literary precedent that stretched back four hundred years.”
    “So Macbeth won?” asked Jack.
    Mary shook her head. “No. It was smarter than that: Banquo did.”
    “Banquo?” echoed Jack in surprise. “Doesn’t he get killed off earlier in the play?”
    “Usually,” replied Mary, “but this time he returned to the stage and made a brief speech explaining why he faked his own death, then slew Macbeth.”
    “I bet the bookies weren’t pleased,” observed Jack.
    “You could say that. They hadn’t suffered such a devastating loss since David beat Goliath. A rash of late bets had dropped Banquo’s odds from five hundred to one down to a hundred to one, but it wasn’t enough.”
    “How much did the gang make?”
    “Ten million.”
    Jack whistled softly, and Mary continued: “This time there could be no mistake; someone was rigging the fights. Flowwe was put in command, and I went undercover as Lady Anne in their upcoming production of Richard III . It didn’t take long before we caught them in the final act. After a matinee performance, I saw the theater director giving out script revisions. I alerted Flowwe, and that evening we had eight undercover officers hidden in the audience, disguised variously as popcorn salesmen, tourists from the Midlands and critics from the Basingstoke Bugle . I had sneaked a look at the ‘revisions’ and knew what they were up to. At a suitable moment, we pounced, halted the Battle of Bosworth Field and arrested not only Richard III, but Lords Richmond and Stanley as well. Plots had been laid to call the battle a draw and then form a governmental coalition, a surprise result that would have netted the perpetrators over three million quid. It led directly to Flowwe gaining an extra twelve places on his Amazing Crime ranking to a creditable twenty-fifth. No Basingstoke officer had ever been higher.”
    “And a commendation for you?”
    She blushed and tossed her head modestly. “That, too.”
    Jack remembered now where he had seen her name before. She had been commended not only for her sterling police work but also for her memorable performance as Lady Anne.
    “Impressive. Is there anything you want to know about me apart from the fact that I’m not Guild?”
    “Yes,” replied Mary. “What happened to your last DS?”
    “His name was Alan Butcher. A good man. He died in a car accident.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Not as sorry as I was; I was the one that ran over him in my wife’s Volvo. But it wasn’t my fault—he stepped out in front of me.”
    “Was he…tall?” asked Mary a bit recklessly.
    Jack shook his head sadly. “You’ve heard about the