Night of the Animals(92)

From across the zoo’s fence, at a distance, the two women suddenly heard a pair of African wild asses, among the most endangered animals on earth, bray heinously.

“Is that so?” Astrid pretended to answer, with a clownish voice. “Well. Good luck to you, then!”

Atwell laughed.

Astrid asked, “And are you OK, Constable?”

Atwell seemed not to hear, and now she was looking above the zoo, toward the mackerel-striped sky. She said, abstractedly, “I feel terrible about locking that man out. Physically.” She was grinning eerily. “Crikey. I’m feverish. My head hurts. Oh, I don’t feel well, I really don’t, guv.” She shook her head, looking away from Astrid. She said, “I just want to do a good job, yeah?”

“I understand,” said Astrid.

“Do you?” Atwell glanced at her and good-naturedly scoffed. “Maybe ‘a good job’ seems like a piddling ambition, but it’s not to me, yeah? You know, my mother and father, from Guyana, they think law enforcement is, you know, povvy.* But I love it—I just do. They say they didn’t come to England so their children could work as coppers. Ha! Big ambitions, everyone had—before the reclassifications. They thought I should be a barrister. They still think I may yet, yeah?”

“Why not?”

“You know why. England’s going backward. Oliver Cromwell’s jumbie must be crying. Fucking King Hen—”

“Don’t, Jasmine,” she whispered. “Don’t say it. Not here. It’s good to fear the Watch. They’re everywhere.”

“Sorry, guv,” she whispered. “You’re so f*cking right. Ma’am.”

“For once.”

Atwell said, “Should we call Mr. Beauchamp?” She looked a little more awake now, and tense. She began picking expertly at a cuticle with her fingernail.

“Yes,” Astrid said. “Sadly.” She didn’t want to wake the zoo director, but she recognized the necessity of getting specialists on scene. “I suppose we can’t just shout, ‘Come along, Trixie!’ and just pick up a jackal like a lost cocker spaniel.”

It was Atwell who used the police glider’s old-but-secure comm-port for a few minutes to contact Beauchamp. Astrid could hear Beauchamp’s needly voice, whining in the background, taking up far too much of Atwell’s time. But she was glad she hadn’t had to deal with him. Atwell kept blinking during the call, as if trying to stay ready for the moment when the mountain that was Beauchamp’s grandiosity collapsed on her head.

“All set?” Astrid asked Atwell when the call ended. “Did he say anything useful?”

“Yes, guv. He said a lot. He said we needed to ‘get a perimeter.’ I asked about the jackals and he begged us, please, to leave them alone. He doesn’t think there’s much we can do about them anyway, since we lack proper training, for now, right? But I want to find that man.”

“Yes, the night keeper, Dawkins. Yes, we must. And anyone else in trouble. Have we heard anything from the Watch? Did Beauchamp say anything about them?”

“No, ma’am.”

“So typical. The Watch do things their way, and so does Beauchamp. No bleedin’ coordination—ever. Anyway, we should get moving.”

“That makes sense, Inspector,” said Atwell. She hesitated for a second. “Inspector, I feel the chills and I’m knackered and woozy.”

“You want to leave off?”

“Oh, no, no, no. I’m just . . . not myself, OK? I’m very sorry if I seem . . . odd. I’ve been hearing such terrible noises. And this zoo—I don’t know how to put it. Something about it just gives me gippy tummy to the core. I feel somehow extra soul-tired, just being near this bleeding place, guv. Like I’m part of something awful being born, and it’s not just the lost jackals. It’s more. It’s worse.”

“I feel it, too,” said Astrid. “It’s like something bigger than the biggest animal, fighting . . . for its life.”

“Yes. I think. Or we’re mad.”

“Could very well be.”

Astrid put her palm over Atwell’s forehead. It was damp and febrile and oh so vulnerable, like a sick child’s. She did look a little bluish somehow, and slightly awestruck, Astrid saw. Her eyes appeared poorly focused. They were greenish-brown eyes of a huge size she sometimes associated with people of Scottish ancestry. Her black, penciled-up eyebrows angled slightly into peaks, giving her a puckish expression that Astrid normally found winsome.

“Yes, you’re warm. Jeez. Very warm.”

“Right,” Atwell said. “But I can work, I tell you. ‘I be iree,’* as they say.”

Astrid said, “It’s also fine if you’re not fine, too. If you need to go home . . .”

“I’ll be OK, yeah?” Atwell chuckled a little, in the throaty, sniffly way someone does when she’s just been weeping. “That was funny, how you talked back to that animal. Right funny, that. Right.” She took a breath. “Shall we find this man now?” She started to get out of the car.

When she cracked the pandaglider’s door open, Astrid could smell her more completely. Atwell didn’t wear any kind of perfume—regulation discouraged strong fragrances—but for reasons she could not guess, Atwell possessed an agreeable scent, aromatic but bright, like almonds and watercress crushed along with something strong and rough, a tropical grass—vetiver?—that she could not name.