“From a distance. I think. I think. Yes, I thought I did. I was too terrified to get close. He looked rather desperate. He—this is odd—he—”
“Take your time, sweet pea,” said Atwell.
Dawkins smiled at her, blinking. “I am a sweet pea, to be honest. But a fucking cold one!” He starting hugging himself with his arms, but could not, in his exhaustion, muster much vigor. “Well,” he continued. “Here’s something funny.” He rubbed his hand on his thigh and looked at Astrid. “I could have sworn the man, well, he weren’t at all the spit of you, no, Inspector, and he’d be a minging, plug-ugly version of you. But he sort of ’ad your cheekbones, like, vaguely mind you, and a sort of similar something about his face, though he did look badly battered—and drunk. Typical Flōt sot, I should think. Do you know him?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“You ain’t some . . . type of . . . cousin?”
Dawkins’s claim disturbed Astrid, and her heart began racing. She said, “Ha! Now you’re off your chump.” But her anxiety hadn’t gone. The idea of her drunken doppelg?nger, in the zoo, created an instant sense of unreality that signaled, for her, the last gasp of her own sanity. The travails of second withdrawal were far worse than she’d imagined, it seemed.
Nonetheless, she decided to try an old FA trick—to “act as if,” that is, to pretend she wasn’t really crazy. She said, “Now, will you come down from the tree? Or will we need to send something up to get you?”
“Yes, a Flōt sot!” Dawkins repeated. He seemed pleased to be able to condescend to anyone.
He didn’t say anything for a while, and then, with an agility that took Astrid and Atwell by surprise, he started to lower himself to the ground, unfurling one arm, taking hold of a branch, and so on, again and again, with balletic grace.
“I’ve been getting more fit,” he said. “It’s more attractive. I’m going to be sex on a stick someday.”
“Yes you are, love,” said Atwell. She put her hand on Dawkins’s back and gave him a few puppy-pats. At first, he jumped forward, then he leaned back into her hand. “Let’s get you warm now,” she was saying.
Just as Atwell said that, several huge sets of headlamps exploded onto the Broad Walk and on all the area around them. It was not illumination; it was the national autonewsmedia, or a leading edge of it—a white squarish satellite truck from ITN/WikiNous, a tired, slightly shit-faced reporter from the Sun/WikiNous, and some kind of European woman freelancer in a Lancia glider with a smashed-in front end. This little trio alone had the power to do lasting damage, or bring great approbation, to almost any public figure or institution in Britain, provided the target wasn’t one of the king’s favorites. How they got wind of the zoo occurrences seemed beside the point, but Astrid felt she knew whose long-fingered hand had given the media’s naughty bits a throttle in the night.
“Unbelievable,” said Atwell, stating the obvious.
Dawkins looked newly terrified. “I want to hide,” he said. “If they put me on TV, I’ll sue the bastards.”
a cry in the night
YES, THE MASTURBATORY STAGECRAFT OF DAVID Beauchamp was unmistakable. An ugly blue hatchback glider was zooming up behind the others. It was he, long and sallow and perfectly humorless. He wanted the nation to see how the zoo handled a crisis—and perhaps position himself better for the zoo director’s role.
Before Astrid and Atwell had got Dawkins back to the pandaglider, Beauchamp was waving his arms around, gathering the reporters, and starting an ersatz, melodramatic “press briefing.”
“And I emphasize,” Beauchamp was saying. He was got up in some purple shiny-tie-and-powerwool-shirt combo from Burton Menswear and trendy, loose, star-pleated trousers. On top, he appeared to be two parts Chillcreem to hair.
“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?”