The Third Pig Detective Agency: The Complete Casebook. Bob Burke
The gates swung open very quietly and very quickly. I was a bit disappointed; I had imagined they’d be more imposing and ominous with lots of creaking and rattling.
The intercom crackled again. ‘Drive through,’ said the voice. ‘Follow the road around to the side. You’ll be met there.’
I followed the driveway up to the house, past lawns that looked as though they were manicured with nail scissors rather than mown. The house itself was a monument to bad taste or blind architects. Someone had clearly tried to incorporate my client’s eastern origins into a gothic pile. It was as if a giant (and we have plenty in the locality) had dropped the Taj Mahal on Dracula’s Castle and then cemented bits of Barad-dûr on afterwards for effect. Minarets jostled for space with pagodas, battlements and some downright ugly and bored-looking gargoyles. It hurt my eyes just to look at it, and I was wearing shades.
I drove around the side of this tasteless monstrosity to be greeted by another one. Waiting for me at what I presumed was the tradesman’s entrance was an ogre, proudly displaying his ‘Ogre Security – Not On Our Watch’ badge. He was an imposing figure – all muscle and boils. Slowly he checked my ID before letting me out of the car. I could see his lips move as he read the details. The fact that he could actually read impressed me no end – most ogres I knew preferred to eat books rather than read them. Good roughage, apparently.
‘So you weren’t watching the other night, then?’ I asked.
‘Huh?’ he replied.
I pointed to his badge.
‘The other night?’ I repeated. ‘On your watch? Did you guys take the night off when the lamp was stolen?’
‘What lamp?’
‘Your boss’s lamp. The one that …’ Seeing the blank look on his face it was obvious that Ogre Security provided the muscle to keep the grounds free of intruders but didn’t have too much input to the more sophisticated security inside the house. ‘Never mind. Can I go in now?’
He even held the door open for me as I entered the house. A polite security guard, whatever next?
Inside, my good friend Gruff was waiting for me and, by the look on his face, wasn’t relishing the job.
‘Ah Mr Gruff, so good of you to meet me. I recognised your foul stench as soon as I came aboard. Showers broken, eh?’
He looked at me and I could tell he was struggling to come back with a witty reply, or indeed any reply. I smiled at his discomfort.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘If you practise hard in front of a mirror maybe you’ll learn to string more than two words together for the next time we meet. Wouldn’t that be nice?’
He glowered as he led me through the house. It was just as tasteless on the inside as on the out. Furniture of various styles, shapes and sizes jostled for position with figurines, sculptures, assorted suits of exotic armour and a variety of plants. It looked like a storage depot for an antiques store run by a florist rather than a place someone actually lived in.
I was led through so many passages and rooms that I soon lost my way and had to depend on my guide to stop me from getting lost.
Eventually we arrived at a steel door that dominated the end of yet another long corridor. It was the kind of door that was more suited to the front of a large castle to keep invading hordes at bay rather than guarding a rich man’s trinkets.
‘The study,’ said Gruff. ‘I’ll let you in once I’ve switched off the security system.’
He pressed some numbers on a keypad beside the door. There was a grinding noise and some sequential clunking as locks were deactivated. The door slowly slid into the wall. Lights in the room flickered on as we entered. If the rest of the house had been a monument to clutter, this room was a testament to minimalism. Apart from a large cylindrical black pedestal in the middle of the room, it was completely empty. There were no windows and the only door was the one we had just come through.
I walked towards the pedestal to have a look. It was a column of black marble that came up roughly to my chest. On top was a smaller display stand covered in black velvet, upon which, presumably, the lamp had stood. On closer inspection I could still see the imprint of the lamp’s base in the cloth.
‘So this is where the lamp was kept,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said a familiar voice behind me. ‘Hi-tech security and surveillance systems and still it disappeared.’
Aladdin strode into the room and shook my trotter. ‘Glad you could make it.’
‘My pleasure. Exactly how hi-tech was the security here?’ I asked.
‘If you care to step back to the door, we can show you.’
We all walked back to the entrance and Aladdin turned to the goat.
‘Mr Gruff, if you would be so kind.’
Gruff punched some more numbers on the keypad and the lights in the room dimmed again.
‘Firstly,’ began my employer/landlord, ‘the floor is basically one giant pressure pad. Once the security system is switched on anything heavier than a spider running across the room will trigger the alarm. Observe.’ Taking a very clean, very expensive and very unused silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket he lobbed it gently into the room. It floated slowly downwards and had hardly touched the floor when strident alarms rang all over the house.
‘In addition,’ he continued, as Gruff frantically pressed buttons to silence the ringing, ‘there is a laser grid in the room which will detect anyone that might, for example, try to suspend themselves from the ceiling and lower themselves down to the pedestal.’
Another flourish of the arm, some more button-punching from Gruff and suddenly a bright red criss-cross of beams filled the room. It looked like a 3-D map of New York. A network of lasers covered every part of the space, wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Anything that might possibly get into the room certainly wouldn’t get very far without breaking one of the beams. I didn’t need the alarm to be triggered again to tell me that.
‘Cameras?’ I enquired.
‘On the wall,’ came the reply and he pointed to a lens that tracked back and forth across the room. ‘It scans the room constantly and the output is monitored from our security centre, which you may visit shortly. The entire system is controlled via this keypad here.’ He pointed to the unit on the wall. ‘It is activated every night at ten and disabled again at seven each morning. All access is monitored and recorded. On the night of the … ah … disappearance none of the systems were deactivated, the cameras showed nothing else in the room and the lasers weren’t triggered. It is most intriguing.’
Intriguing wasn’t the word I’d have used; downright baffling was the phrase that came into my head, but I suspected Aladdin was trying to maintain an outward demeanour of cool in keeping with his image.
‘Has the camera footage been examined?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Aladdin. ‘But it didn’t show anything. On one sweep the lamp was there, on the next it was gone.’
‘Well, just to be on the safe side, I’d like to have a look. Maybe something was missed.’
From the snort of indignation behind me, I assumed Gruff didn’t agree with my supposition. Good.
Aladdin led me to the security centre. The footage from the previous night was loaded by the guard on duty and the tape forwarded to when the lamp vanished. The camera scanned the room from left to right and the lamp was clearly on its pedestal. When it tracked back on its next sweep the lamp was just as clearly gone, as Aladdin had claimed.
‘See,’ said Gruff in a very superior tone, as if challenging me to find something he’d missed. ‘Now you see it; now you don’t. Any ideas?’
Not being one to refuse a challenge, I asked for the footage to be replayed and studied