Night of the Animals(101)
“Sod it all!” bellowed Omotoso. “How could this happen? You and Atwell are the only constables there, Inspector?”
“Yes. Sir, I wasn’t here until a short while ago. I was only on-call tonight. And when I got here, it . . . it was hard to tell what was going on. It all struck me as routine. Initially. The Watch had a frightcopter up—but they—”
“They always put their useless frightcopters up. I know. Never a help to us, mind you.”
“Yeah, guv. But still . . . it had seemed routine.” She felt like the night was a blur at that moment. “See, Atwell had Opticalled me earlier. I was in the Docklands. And we saw the head of a goat and chewed up and—”
“The fecking head of a goat? And you thought that was routine, Inspector, did you? You?”
A raw humiliation flushed Astrid’s cheeks, and she found herself almost unable to talk. She felt a strong desire to punch herself in the head.
“Sir, I’m sorry, sir. We’re trying to secure the perimeter,” she said. “Beauchamp’s idea. Does that sound wise?”
Omotoso sighed loudly on the phone. “Yes,” he said. “The parks minister wants the Met to declare a major incident. We’ll have the Met’s SO19* units coming—and that’s not all. This all looks bad—we—you should have declared it, Astrid.”
“Yes, sir, I know, sir. I know.” She felt grievous self-reproach. Why had she treated Atwell’s initial call with anything other than deadly seriousness? It was as if a Flōt relapse were already derailing her life before the drink touched her lips.
Omotoso made a long fricative noise with his teeth, an extended hissing that melted into the white noise of the Opticall line. There was silence. He finally said, “Look, I am a bit hacked off, but I’ve just been awakened in the middle of the night and told that there are chimpanzees in Baker Street and ITN or Sky are there and I’m the officer responsible for it all. Only I am not now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We just need to get on with it, right? I just hope no lives are lost.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “So, let’s see. You and Atwell—hold the position. Try to help Beauchamp get his people together, but keep that bastard in his place. And get the bloody autonewsmedia into their gliders for now. There are animals on the loose, aren’t there?”
“I believe so, sir,” said Astrid.
“Then now is not the time to lose your bottle, right—I mean—in a manner of speaking—sorry, bad choice of words. Sorry, Astrid. I respect your recovery. Deeply!”
“No worries,” Astrid said.
“And you’re officer in charge of the scene, at least for the next two seconds, right? You’re liable to see a huge crush of new personnel, and I’ve asked for all the parks constables to come in. For a little while, you’ll be in charge of the scene. Good luck.”
“Right. Sir.”
“That’s it then. Steady now. Bye-yee!” He signed off.
Indeed, far from “losing her bottle,” Astrid felt she was heading for one all too fast. A small part of her was beginning to worry that this whole night was nothing more than a phantasmagoric waking dream, an extended psychotic fugue brought on by insomnia and second withdrawal. Or perhaps she was already spiring, after eleven years clean? Had she already gulped an orb, and this was the ensuing nightmare in which she rode some feral bear into the shadowlands?
“No,” she said aloud, trying forcefully to steady herself, as if she were her own FA sponsor. She wanted frantically to feel the confidence that Omotoso still somehow placed in her. “I’m still sober. I can do this.”
automatic news no more
WALKING BACK TO THE PALADIN, ASTRID COULD not help but marvel at the sheer number, variety, and sirening intensity of emergency vehicles that had begun to arrive, so precipitously, since her Opticall with Omotoso.
The idea of a crisis seemed to have been communicated to the highest authorities, and probably, Astrid reckoned, without Omotoso’s direct knowledge. Those powers had responded with unusual vigor and alacrity, a fact that corroborated, for her, that neither she nor the constabulary were any longer in charge.
Meanwhile, as a sort of case in point, Atwell and Dawkins seemed to have conceded their respective professional roles. Together, they had left the Paladin to have “a gander at the faff,” as Dawkins then put it, like common rubberneckers. Astrid thought of saying something, but it seemed futile.
Two new Met solarcopters now thumped very low in the sky above everyone, their huge spotlight beams chopping anxiously across the zoo. The small autonews drone Astrid had seen earlier in the cabcab backed away, immediately, and the Red Watch frightcopter ascended to a high, observational altitude.
Half a dozen yellow-and-green checkered paramedigliders, one after another, shot up the Broad Walk, all slamming their brakes when they neared the growing vehicle logjam. A flabbergasting range of white and fluorange “jam butty” fast-response microgliders, ARV vans, estate gliders, and Met police saloons muscled into the area where Atwell had parked the lonely Royal Parks panda.
All the fluorescent stripes and squares on the vehicles left blinding scintillations of digital orange, green, and yellow on the night air. Soon, various shiny, cherry-colored appliances from the London Fire Brigade also appeared, including the renowned, seventy-person staffed Rescueglider NHS Prime hospital. Half a dozen gliderpumps began edging slowly up the Broad Walk, their huge 100-boson engines knocking and shuddering, their fat glider-pads flattening the park grass, all the hulks crawling along with the colossal hospital gilder like blind red elephants trying to squeeze down a garden foot-pavement with their fat mama.