Astrid caught up and shined her light down. “My god,” she said.
Her first flare of thought was that she was looking down at the lean, masticated head of Satan. Smudged with dark, bloody fingerprints, to Astrid the ribbed horns appeared to have been curled not by eons of genetic adaptation, but by murderous demons. There was a sense, too, that the appalling object had come to meet her. It was out of the zoo, ready to swallow her with its skinny skull and one wet ear. For a moment, she even thought she heard a faint voice calling her, but she put that down to withdrawal.
“It’s a goat,” Astrid heard herself whisper hoarsely. “I’m fairly certain of that.”
“I don’t want to look,” said Atwell.
“Don’t,” Astrid said. She used her baton to roll the head over. There were no maggots or flies, no fetid smell. “This is part of the whole lights business,” she said. “Whatever did this did it tonight. Nothing to be worried about. It’s not a person that’s done it. People don’t chew goat snouts off.” People did much worse, she thought.
She turned to face Atwell, who seemed to be recovering, standing taller. Atwell finally glanced at it again.
“It’s just my stomach, ma’am—it’s been bothering me. Crikey! It’s horrible.” She turned her face away again. “I can’t look or I’m going to chunder. Don’t—look—at me—yeah, if I lose it, Inspector? It’s humiliating, guv, in front of you, yeah?”
Atwell bent over and vomited. Astrid gently placed her hand on her colleague’s back. It was hot and damp and muscular. “OK, I’m OK,” Atwell said. “OK, it’s passing. Good.” She breathed in thickly, then spat. “Fuck!”
“Easy,” said Astrid.
“This head, guv, it does fright me just a bit. I mean, I don’t want to go like this goat. Who did this?”
“Easy,” she said. She rubbed Atwell’s back. “Easy.” She said, “It’s what did it. This bit, it’s animals on animals. That’s precisely what we’re looking at.” Squinty faced and tilting her head, she held her hand up for quiet.
Then she was sure she heard a voice—a peculiar, persecuted one, quietly whinging from thin air.
Umm, kay-kay, femaleans! You’re flarking me out, kay-kay! It was high-pitched but distinctly male, and it came from above. There was no one in sight.
“Fuck all,” said Atwell.
“Now that is right crooked by half-fives,” said Astrid.
Atwell nodded and said, “Couldn’t be more. Do you think we . . . well, should keep walking, around the ‘perimeter’?”
“Oh—Beauchamp’s bloody perimeter. For fuck’s sake. No.” Astrid bit her lower lip. There was that anger. A rage before the Death. If she just held on. It was passing, wasn’t it? “Actually, yes. Sorry. Beauchamp’s right. We can walk, of course, we’ll get around, but I want to investigate that person who’s having a lark at our expense. It’s back toward the pandaglider. It may be the joker who tried to give you a scare, earlier.” She looked up at the sky. A cool night-breeze was blowing. She said, “It came from up. Up is a funny place for a person.” She pointed at the field beyond the grove of plane trees that lined the Broad Walk. She said, “Maybe in that direction?”
So they left the goat head and walked back toward the glider.
Had they made it around the southern tip of the zoo, just a few yards beyond the goat head, they would have encountered Cuthbert’s notable handiwork with the fence. They would have been able to raise the section of heavy ironwork fencing Cuthbert had pushed down into the turf, and plug up the only hole in the zoo in its two centuries.
up a tree like zacchaeus
THE JACKALS WERE ALREADY LONG GONE. THE five of them had scurried out of Regent’s Park and managed safely to cross the Marylebone Road. A young group of True Conservative politicos, drinking themselves silly at a local public house over Election Eve polls (LabouraTory was crushing them), had seen the jackals outside the window and mistook them for large bizarre cats (cats that lived, mysteriously, in packs).
“It’s a good sign—animals,” one of them slurred. “A jolly good one. As long as we’ve got our cats, England will dure.”
“Dure? Steady, Michael.”
“Yath!” Michael answered, quite definitively.
When Astrid and Atwell got back to the pandaglider, the sound of the high-pitched man whinging started up again, but it sounded even closer.
Femaleans, help me—kay-kay?
“Who’s there?” shouted Astrid.
“Up here. Here!”
Astrid and Atwell started jogging across a small pitch that fanned into the northeastern quadrant of the park, against Camden Town. They soon made it to another stand of young plane trees.