“These rough-sleepers,” said Astrid, “and I don’t say this in judgment, but they can be quite, well, tricky, god bless ’em. Trust me—this man’s OK, as much as any Indigent can be these days. And the jackals—the fact is, they seem, PC Atwell, . . . they’re small. We’ll sort this.”
Atwell, taking a breath, looked as if she wanted to interrupt Astrid, whose patronizing tone had made things awkward.
“The man,” said Atwell, “he was quite distressed. Really, ma’am, I don’t think he was sleeping rough. Like I said before, he says his mother’s in—”
“Yes, his mother. I heard you the first time.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There was a hesitation, and then Atwell looked straight at Astrid. “Guv . . . it’s not my place to say, but we all admire you, guv. What’s the matter? What’s got you? You seem . . . frustrated. We’re on the same team, yeah? And I really like you. What’s wrong?”
Astrid began working her mouth, slowly. Her lips were quivering a bit, but no words came out. After a few more seconds, she said, in a husky whisper: “I can’t say.” She couldn’t very well list the litany of second withdrawal’s horrors to the officer she supervised.
Frustrated—that was a funny word for it.
“Inspector, I hear you. All is well.”
But nothing was “well,” Astrid thought. Indeed, she might at that moment half enjoy some errant tiger burning bright, in the park’s forest of the night, springing upon her, thrashing her withdrawal apart like a dirty pangolin. For if being near the zoo had initially eased the horrors inside her, new anxieties now seemed to be unhatching, and fast. And she felt sure of a terrible fact: she was going to end up drinking Flōt that night. Her life of sobriety was ending. FA could fuck itself. She’d had enough of being strong.
Just one orb, Astrid tried to tell herself, ruefully. She knew that even a mouthful of Flōt would restart her addiction in all its ugly fury. A drink of Flōt would be the beginning of the end of her life. She couldn’t escape that reality.
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 fucking 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.”