Night of the Animals(85)
She found a disused, old phone box with broken windows, across from a train ticket window, and she ducked inside and Opticalled PC Atwell, ignoring the video option and sticking to audio only.
“Hello?” asked Atwell.
Astrid cleared her throat. “Sullivan here. Hope you don’t mind if I kill the camera.”
“Oh, no, thank you, ma’am,” said Atwell. “I actually appreciate it. I smoked a cigarette, and I feel like my head’s on Neptune. I can’t believe I did that—a stupid git, I am.” She gave a little cough. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am. Very sorry. Are you all right, guv? It took awhile. You sound . . .”
“No worries, Atwell,” she said, trying to sound weary (but not too weary).
“Well, ma’am, at first I was thinking it’s probably nothing, yeah? But now I think it’s—a something. A potential emergency.”
“I’m sorry? What?”
Atwell continued, “I’m parked on the Broad Walk, in the pandaglider, of course—I’m not getting out alone—and several sets of lights have come on at the zoo and—are you sure you’re OK, ma’am? And there’s an occupied autonews glider here, with its dish set up, and at least one solar-frightcopter.”
“A frightcopter?” said Astrid. “Bloody hell. Probably triggered by the autoreporters. That’s how these things go—lights trigger autonews, autonews triggers Watch, Watch sends up frightcopters, then we beg Watch to go home, and the bastards blame us for everything.” She needed to put a stop to this nonsense. It was rarely good to draw scrutiny from the Watch. You never knew how it would end up—with a demotion, a new title, reclassification, or a Nexar hood, or dinner with the king. “Did you call the night keeper? That’s protocol.”
“Night keeper, ma’am?”
“At the zoo, Atwell. There’s this legendary weirdo. He’s in the old Reptile House—name’s Dawkins.” Astrid knew every centimeter of the three thousand hectares in the royal parks, and especially those she was charged with policing—Hyde, Kensington Gardens, and Regent’s. Directional details were a point of pride. She could explain every curve of the Serpentine, or navigate blindfolded through the fifty thousand roses of Queen Mary’s Garden. But the zoo. Now that was a bit of a blank for Astrid. It was part of the royal parks, but not, too. It was in her constabulary’s domain, but not really. The police ignored it. It wasn’t even wholly London, not when she thought about it.
New Parkies were required to attend zoo crisis drills, but no one took them seriously. Astrid recalled her own training sessions on the zoo several years back when she hired on; and three years ago (through a special arrangement with the Metropolitan Police), she herself had been allowed to help train the keepers to use their neuralzingers, which were kept in a locked case at the security office. The guns were effective against even the largest mammals, but no keeper had ever used one that she recalled.
Like the Open Air Theatre, the zoo was fenced in and required a fee, and generally, you didn’t worry about it from a policing perspective. Jurisdictionally, it wasn’t parkland, and constables normally would have required explicit permission to enter the zoo, even if in hot pursuit. In fact, the zoo had developed its own security squad, sanctioned by Royal Parks bylaws, and this included an animal recovery team. The team members were all very specialized but very relaxed. One man wore dreadlocks, another a beard as puffy and long as Karl Marx’s. But they knew how to coax a lion, how to calm a zebra, or call to an escaped eagle, and now how to kill one of these animals if necessary.
Dubbed the AnimalSafe Squad, it was headed by a very tall, passionate man named David Beauchamp. Astrid didn’t particularly like him. Beauchamp didn’t fit in with the others, who could have passed for hemp farmers or festival-following crusties. He talked a great, great deal. And he seemed to have zero respect for the constabulary. Chief Inspector Omotoso described him to Astrid as “self-serving, pompous, manipulative, and hostile.” Omotoso claimed that Beauchamp secretly wanted to see the parks police taken over by the Watch.
“My team are pros,” he once said to Astrid, his voice entirely gravied-over with a rich, thick condescension. “We take our roles seriously. We’re not some PC Plods force arresting litterers. Not that the RPC is that—of course not.” The not-so-subtle dig at the constabulary was stinging, but Astrid could only wince and get on with work.
The AnimalSafe Squad had had their firearms training, and they now trained their own. Few in the constabulary seriously contemplated any one of the AnimalSafers ever gunning anything down.
“Inspector?”
Astrid stared through the phone box window onto the walk.
“Inspector, you were saying . . . about the night keeper?”
“Right, yes, Atwell, let the standard zoo staff—not their security detail, mind you—handle this one. They’ve got their own way of doing things. They’re animal-friendly. And see that the Watch knows we know. They’ll blow up the whole zoo if we don’t stop them.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I think—you with me?—the problem is actually an emergency—of some sort, yeah?” She was sounding exasperated, and Astrid felt her guidance wasn’t proving genius. She said, “The thing is, the second time that I freq’d you, it wasn’t simply the light. It was the bizarre sounds, ma’am.”