Night of the Animals(79)
Taking a long breath, she tapped her eyebrow and called up the dismissed alert text: Hello Insp Sullivan! Possible to pls. Opticall me? Lamps on @zoo. Sorry! PC JL Atwell.
The screaming stopped.
The zoo. What?
The new probationer—Jasmine Atwell. She was canny, too canny, thought Astrid. PC Atwell did everything by the book, and the upshot was extra work for everyone—at least until her regular sergeant came back from his latest weeklong sickie.
Lights on at zoo? What did that mean? At the zoo? False alarms and security-lamp trips were nightly annoyances in the royal parks because of the homeless Indigents who used them to sleep rough. The constables on call at night were unofficially encouraged to pay little heed to the alarms until they invariably stopped. But one at the zoo? A bit odd, that, thought Astrid.
Astrid was more dutiful than many of her colleagues, but she wanted to wait, this time, just a few minutes, before responding. She needed to calm herself. Her Flōt withdrawal hurt, and it made her feel bonkers. She felt stuck in a sort of cramped, curvilinear awareness with her mind as bare and dark and rubbery as the inside of a cracked tennis ball. Her heart pounded. The zoo! It wasn’t the English republicans shooting Mark 66 rockets at Hampton Court, right? It wasn’t even a purse snatch. Besides, she was also busy saving her own life, wasn’t she? To do that meant finishing two enormous, miserable pots of tea. That’s how FA worked. Serve and recover. A dozen fellow recovering Flōters, several drug addicts, an old-school alkie or two, and a few plain old psychic bomb-outs—nearly all Indigents—would be showing up within minutes, whinging about tea. Everyone, it seemed to her, complained that her tea was not made early enough, then complained about the tea itself.
Tea done? Tea done? Ooooh, good girl, loovly, loovly—but it’s a bit thin, innit?
a chest of drawers filled with tears
ASTRID TRIED TO HURRY UP, AND A METAL POT lid slipped from her hand and clattered on the floor. She made a big point of rinsing it off. Sykes, the Rest’s caretaker, was in his room, watching her every move, tonight as every night she was tea-maker.
She knew that her guv at the constabulary, Chief Inspector Bobby Omotoso, wouldn’t mind if she needed a few extra minutes to respond to this sort of freq. To her guv, Astrid’s being an abstinent, reformed Flōter suggested a noble destiny hard to find at the outmoded constabulary, and he tended to indulge her. She’d once spent a few years working at the Houston Police Department to boot, as part of an Interpol Prime exchange program. The experience put a bright Texas star above Astrid’s name in the guv’s mind.
“You will be something big someday,” he once opined, answering a question Astrid hadn’t asked, and sounding as if he ought to know its answer. “But how am I supposed to know what? How?”
A stout, overburdened Anglo-Nigerian from a family that practiced Yoruba religion, the guv was also fascinated by American policing methodologies and their implied moralistic bents. He felt Astrid’s Texas experience made the whole constabulary look better.
“Hugh-Stone, Texas, I’m sure, is London’s future,” he’d once said to a quietly chagrined Astrid. “There’s not all this English depression. And you know I’ve an uncle in Houston. And now, can you tell me how many officers would be scheduled to neuralzinger-range practice at once? I am trying to picture these astonishing training days in my head.”
“I think, erm, about ten per subdistrict. And there were about five subdistricts having a go at once, guv.”
“Impressive. That’s firepower! We send, what . . . two at a time? How are we going to win against the republicans, like that?”
Astrid glanced behind her and looked at the door where the caretaker was pretending to watch a tiny SkinWerks screen—god knows how he, as an Indigent, could afford it—he’d sprayed over his tremoring, skinny forearm. Astrid knew his telly-watching was partly an act. He was just waiting for her to try to pocket one of the church’s own teaspoons, or to burn the place down. They went through the same thing every week. The sobriety of FA members meant nothing to the suspicious Sykes, who may well have been a Red Watch informant. Henry IX, it was said, generally tolerated FA and other older self-help fellowships, but that didn’t mean he trusted them. If they kept English souls out of the suicide cults, and cost no Treasure, he would endure them. Meanwhile, people like Sykes stood ready to inform on them for the slightest sign of sedition.
Sykes shook his head, pretending to be outraged at whatever rubbish he was watching on his stingy-small screen; he met Astrid’s eyes with his own for an awkward second, then turned back to his flesh-telly.
“Lights,” she whispered to herself. It was surely not a big problem. It was an odd one, however. But what if it was a B&E?* Then what?
She realized that she’d forgotten to get out the artificial sweetener, a product called Smile invented in the 2030s. It came in tiny dissolving sheets you pulled from a pastel-green dispenser, and it tasted like bitter orange-blossom honey. The Flōtheads loved it. She bent down and reached far back into the cupboard, but there was something in the way.
She had to slide out a small, obstructing wooden box. It was a strange old thing she’d noticed before, designed to resemble a ship—the HMS Victory—with a profile of the famous yellow and black vessel painted on each side. She looked at it more closely. There was a tiny, rusty little padlock on it. The lock unclasped when she instinctively pulled on it. Broken, she thought. Figures. She threw open the box.