by Bill Broun
“The London Zoo will recover from this calamity,” he was saying.
One of the ITV autonews producers, a muscular woman with a green and yellow trainer jacket, slipped away from Beauchamp and approached Astrid as soon as she saw her. With her tidy uniform and shiny baton, Astrid did seem to know what she was doing, at least more than the meretricious bigmouth in Chillcreem.
“What’s he on about—a calamity? I don’t see any calamity.”
“There are some little jackal dogs out,” said Astrid. “Bloody knows how it happened. But that’s off the record, mind you. You’ll have to call the constabulary’s headquarters in the morning if you want it official, right? You guys have been played, you have. This is overkill.”
“Would you agree to being paraphrased as ‘an official source’? Or how about just ‘a police source’? No direct quotes, I promise.”
Astrid said, “No, sorry, I have to insist that you contact the constabulary. I can’t be quoted. Please. Talk to the governor—Chief Inspector Omotoso.”
“Have you or anyone contacted him yet?”
“He will be there, soon enough.”
The producer began waving to a cameraman, clearly trying to get the man to come over toward her. A double-ponytailed cameraman nodded, jogged away from the ITN van, and switched his on-camera ultralight on. Suddenly Astrid was in blinding irradiance.
“Jackals?” the producer asked Astrid.
Then she spoke in a lower voice, looking down, turning away from Astrid, and speaking to someone obviously appearing by Opticall on her corneas. “Molly—they’re telling me there are jackals loose. What do you think?” She hunched protectively away from the bright lights, speaking quietly. “Yeah, it’s great stuff. Yeah. Let’s put something together on this. It’s great. I mean RTS-award-great.”
While the producer began planning her coverage with her team, and the cameraman switched off his on-camera light—he looked terribly bored—Astrid tried to steal away. She wanted to stand off to the side with Atwell until she could talk with Beauchamp and work out what to do. The night was starting to seem utter lunacy to her. The world seemed to be going crazy over a few African dogs.
But Beauchamp ran over to her before she could make it out of earshot of the pompous press briefing. Beauchamp was smiling with his thin, quavering lips, and it looked forced.
“Inspector,” he said with a barely veiled derision. “How are you?”
“I’ve been better. This is all a bit much, isn’t it?”
Beauchamp’s smile fell. Sneering slightly, he said, “Listen: to be brief, did you seal the perimeter, as I requested?”
“Erm, well, we never quite made it all the way around—”
Beauchamp grimaced. “Oh, that’s ace! You’re a dab hand for a copper, aren’t you? That was the most important thing—the only bit that mattered!”
“There’s two of us. More park police are on the way.”
Astrid felt furious. She brushed her hand against the gun in her trousers, just for the feeling of calm power it afforded her.
“We did our best,” she said. “We—”
“Do you know what that means? Do you?” demanded Beauchamp, nearly shouting.
As far as Astrid was concerned, it mostly meant that Beauchamp was making life harder for her.
She said to him, in a loud voice, “The Royal Parks Constabulary’s full resources are at your pleasure, sir. If you want to get snarky, that’s your business. What’s done is done. We’ll cover the perimeter, or go into the zoo and investigate the trouble. There’s apparently a man in there, perhaps some kind of vagrant in there. But I don’t understand how animals could have escaped.”
The producer and cameraman began walking toward them, attracted by the tense exchange. The big camera light snapped on, and Astrid immediately regretted being shrill.
“You don’t need to understand, do you?” asked Beauchamp.
With that ill-judged remark, Beauchamp looked pompous and self-conscious for a fleeting moment; he began rubbing his hands together and nodding. He said, “I just think we need to get inside the zoo as soon as possible, Inspector. A vagrant molesting the animals is worse than anyone could have possibly imagined.”
“Mmm,” said Astrid. “It may be that, but I doubt it.”
“Did you alert the Met? And the Watch?”
“Of course. The Met. We don’t call the Watch. They come—you know that. That’s their ridiculous frightcopter up there.” She pointed straight up without looking.
“Are you really trying hard enough?” Beauchamp snapped.
There was silence for a moment. Astrid tried to work out how she could explain her delays that night. She said, “Of course, we’ll get support.” She felt flustered now. She needed to get to the comm-port, fast, and make as many Opticalls as she could manage.
“At bloody least the entire AnimalSafe team is on the way,” said Beauchamp. “They should be here straightaways now.” He blew into his hands. The park did seem to have grown colder, Astrid thought. There was rime forming on the grass.
Beauchamp said, “Inspector, you know there’s also Dawkins. He’s the night—”
“Yes, we’ve already conferred with Mr. Dawkins. He’s discussing matters with my colleague now. In the pandaglider.”
“I warn you,” said Beauchamp, leaning in close and confidentially. Astrid was struck by the unnatural luster and taut look of his hair. “That Dawkins, he’s . . . shady. Occasionally, you know, his mother visits him at his apartment—very much against regulations—and she could be in there tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dawkins is at the bottom of all this nonsense.”
“I don’t think so,” said Astrid, trying to interrupt before Beauchamp forced her to make life more difficult for Dawkins than it already was.
“Mr. Beauchamp, I don’t mean to abandon you, but I do need to go now. I was just about to consult again . . . with the constabulary . . . and I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to . . . delay?”
“No,” Beauchamp said, nearly spitting. “Oh, the park force has dawdled quite enough.” He breathed hard through his nostrils, and added: “And I can’t do much with my squad if we don’t have proper police control of the situation, can I? Go!”
A picture-perfect quintessence of assholedom, she thought with some satisfaction.
There was, abruptly, a tremendous “knock” and a shattering-glass sound, very definitely from inside the zoo. Everyone gathered on the Broad Walk—the autonews producers, the freelance writer, Beauchamp, Astrid—looked in the same direction.
They heard a man cry out, “DRYSTAN! DRYSTAN!”
“What the bloody munkers was that?” Beauchamp said.
“I don’t know. It’s not a ‘what’—it’s a man, surely. Still,” she managed to say, her voice quavering a bit, “we’ll need more backup, just in case, and I better get on the comm-port, right? I need more support.”
Beauchamp sniffed at this. “Yes. Support,” he said with a simpering nod. “And we’re not going to forget the animals, are we? Don’t forget that. Yes, go. Go, go. Nip along, please!”
ASTRID DASHED BACK to the Paladin, where she found Atwell and Dawkins in the backseat, talking in friendly tones and warming themselves a bit, outwardly unmindful of the chaos around them. She wondered why Omotoso was taking so long to get back.
She tapped on the imagiglass. Putting her lips to its warm, tickling, invisible force field, she explained to Atwell, breathlessly, that—with jackals on the loose, the automedia out in force, the zoo’s AnimalSafe Squad assembling, and two potentially endangered people (Dawkins’s sister Una and a vagrant) still in the zoo—the operation was necessarily going to be expanded. They would need to summon more PCs from the constabulary, and escalate with the Met, too, who still hadn’t arrived.
“What we need now is air support,” Astrid said. “Everything is moving too slow. The Watch have eyes in the sky. The autonews have them. The officers in charge? We have David bloody Beauchamp.”
“Has Omo
toso got back?”
“Still . . . no,” said Astrid. “I’m a little surprised. Perhaps he knows already, and he knows something we don’t. I don’t know.”
Dawkins asked, “When am I getting my Diet Vanilla Coke?”
“Patience,” Atwell said, “pa-tience,” lengthening the syllables in soft susurrations.
“Oh god,” said Astrid, shaking her head at Dawkins. “Like it or lump it, you’ve got to wait. Will you cut us a break?” Turning to Atwell, she added, “Perhaps the guv’ll try to keep this whole operation small and nimble. I wouldn’t be shocked if he says manage this yourselves and tell the media to give public affairs a bell in the morning.”
Atwell said, “I hope you’re right.”
“Inspector,” Dawkins said sheepishly, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean anything when I was on about you lot and that crazy bloke’s cheekbones. It’s just doing me head in a bit, Inspector—this night.”
“Hasn’t it already been done in quite properly?” teased Atwell.
“I know,” said Astrid, trying to reassure Dawkins. “It’s OK.”
But she’d begun to wonder more about this stranger in the zoo. There was the faintest feeling of connection.
“Drystan?” she said to herself. “What a . . . name?” Something about “Drystan” sounded mysteriously familiar as well as beautiful and natural, too, like a dark soil she could push her hands into—dark soil, and speckled with gold. She didn’t know why, but Astrid felt a new, peculiar sense of duty, too—something that went far beyond her professional obligations—to look after the man, whatever that might mean. And he was desperate, plainly. She didn’t want to embrace the feeling, but she looked at it, with surprise and a respectful distance, as one might upon seeing, in a walk through an English forest, an otter.
the next two seconds
AS ASTRID STOOD BESIDE THE PANDAGLIDER, Chief Inspector Omotoso at long last contacted her via Opticall audio. She wanted privacy, so she quietly stole behind a mottled green-and-white plane tree, hunching down to take the call. (Since WikiNous implantation and corneal electronics had first become a public right, then the law, humans had developed a seemingly instinctual, distinctive way of “ducking” to answer Opticalls, colloquially called the “OptiDip.”)
“Inspector? Are you there?” Omotoso said. “Inspector? Astrid?” His voice wasn’t groggy at all. It was as if he’d been up for hours. (As a matter of fact, he had been awake for exactly twenty-two minutes, and he had been fielding the most outlandish series of Opticalls of his professional career.)
“Sir, very, very sorry. I’m here. This situation, at the zoo, we’re trying to—”
“Yes, yes,” Omotoso said, interrupting her—something he rarely did in their usual banter. “I’ve had several other Opticalls. Speak—fast now. Astrid? Brief me—very briefly.” His usual good-natured paternalism was gone. She could hear another Opticall bleeping in the background, on his end.
“Honestly, I hadn’t, at first—sorry, sir—I hadn’t grasped the gravity of the problem within. I thought, ‘It’s the zoo, innit?’ But yeah. I cocked it. There’s an intruder—and another vulnerable person. And there are animals out. I’ve got Atwell here, but—sir. Sir, the media’s here, in force, so to speak. This is more than we can handle, clearly. We need more officers. Beauchamp seems to have called every outlet. In, like, Britain.” She cleared her throat. “I think I saw SkyNews just now.”
“Fucking hell.” Omotoso gasped. “The animals on the prowl—I heard that bit already. I’d hoped the reports were a load of cack. I thought it must be stray dogs.”
“I know, sir. It’s unheard of. But I doubt it’s cack. At least not pure cack.”
“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 rubber
neckers. 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.
Throughout, an out-and-out swarm of news fotolivers and videographers poured forth from every direction like some massive, imploding galaxy sucking itself into the darkened hole of the zoo. Two of the news crews came in white transit-gliders with their round satellite discs starting to flip upright even as they came to a stop; the words SPOTLIGHT—LIVE AUTONEWS BY SATELLITE was emblazoned on the van from the BBC.
ASTRID DECIDED TO MARCH to the tightest cluster of reporters, where she expected to find Beauchamp jabbering at its sticky center to anyone who cared. The new command structure meant she would have to withdraw her casual offer to be at Beauchamp’s service—the old principle of police primacy would obtain from here on out, no more casual “arrangements” with the old, compliant, incompetent parks police pals.
