The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (30 page)

He took his pint to the table, where he sat, head slumped in his hand, drawing lines in the condensation on his glass. The sound of the chair opposite him scraping against the flagstones suddenly interrupted his rumination. He looked up to see Rev. Septimus Drew sitting down, and placing his glass of red wine on the table. With the wild enthusiasm of a man who had just unearthed the Holy Grail, the clergyman started telling him about his amazing discovery. It had taken him many months of endeavour, he explained, but finally he had managed to prise the archives from the covetous fingers of the Keeper of Tower History. He had spent night after night bent over the age-stained pages looking for a hint of an explanation, and had been about to give up, when suddenly he found what he was looking for: the scandalous story behind the bullet hole in the bar.

Balthazar Jones’s eyes dropped to the table in disinterest, but the clergyman continued. One night in 1869, two Beefeaters got so drunk in the Rack & Ruin that the landlord was unable to rouse them after calling time. Leaving them to sleep
with their heads collapsed on the tables, he retired upstairs. During the night, one shook the other awake, convinced that he had seen the ghost of a Jesuit priest. The Beefeater told his terrified colleague that he must have been dreaming, returned his head to the table, and went back to sleep. But the man went to the bar to retrieve the landlord’s pistol and sat with his back against the wall, waiting for the apparition to return. The Tower chaplain, who was always armed at night in case one of the Beefeaters attempted to steal his bells, crept into the tavern to help himself to the gin. At the same time, the landlord appeared on the bottom step brandishing his wife’s pistol, roused by the noise downstairs.

“Suddenly a shot was fired!” Rev. Septimus Drew cried, gripping the Beefeater’s arm as he worked himself up to his explosive denouement. But before the clergyman could reveal who shot whom, the door to the Rack & Ruin burst open, and the Yeoman Gaoler stormed in.

“Where’s Yeoman Warder Jones?” he demanded.

The Beefeater stood up.

“I’ve just seen the Komodo dragon running past the White Tower!” the Yeoman Gaoler shouted.

The Keeper of the Royal Menagerie was followed out of the door by the rest of the drinkers, who immediately abandoned their pints in order to see the spectacle. As soon as they reached the White Tower, they discovered that the giant lizard wasn’t the only creature to have escaped. Two howler monkeys were running across Tower Green, and judging by the stench that flooded the air, the zorilla was also on the loose. As he started after the monkeys, Balthazar Jones noticed that the door to the Brick Tower was wide open. Charging up the spiral
steps, he reached the aviary and found that it was also open. All the birds had vanished, apart from the wide-eyed albatross sitting alone in the middle of the enclosure, its white head sunk into its body. The Beefeater ran down the stairs and searched the night sky. But all he saw was the sugar glider’s pale stomach as it sailed over his head like a tiny furry kite. Spotting the Duchess of York in the distance, he immediately headed after her. But sprinting towards him on their hind legs as he turned into Water Lane were the Jesus Christ lizards. He stopped for a moment, resting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath, watching the golden snub-nosed monkey turn into Mint Lane. As he shot clouds of panic-fumed breath into the night, the Komodo dragon lumbered past him, flicking its forked tongue. Turning to see where it had come from, he spotted the reclusive ringtail possums lying motionless on the cobbles. He ran over and knelt down beside them, taking each one in his arms. But no matter how often he ran a trembling hand across their silken heads, not one of them could be roused.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL THE WATERY GLOW
of a new morning appeared that Balthazar Jones finally scuffed his way up the Salt Tower’s spiral steps. Despite not having eaten since the previous lunchtime, he fetched just a glass of water from the kitchen before making his way upstairs. Too defeated for a bath, he lay on his side of the bed still in his uniform and closed his eyes. But he was kept from his dreams by images of the last frightful few hours he had spent trying to get the animals safely back into their enclosures.

He had gone after the howler monkeys first, unable to stand their demonic shrieks that pinned the Beefeaters’ wives to their beds in terror. He cornered the first one with the help of a sentry, whom the beast was attempting to scale, lured by his bearskin hat. The other three ran to Rev. Septimus Drew’s house, which he had forgotten to lock when he rushed back to fetch a torch. The Beefeater was relieved that the chaplain hadn’t been there to witness the destruction. The teapot for one was smashed, four dining-room chairs upended, and neat piles of documents in his study took to the air in a paper
blizzard that momentarily suspended pursuit until vision was finally restored. After a diversion involving a freshly laundered cassock, the monkeys finally sprinted out of the front door, only to be corralled outside the Rack & Ruin by a number of Beefeaters who had joined the chase. The creatures were eventually coaxed back to the Devereux Tower with the help of cheese-and-pickle rolls scavenged from the pub.

Balthazar Jones then went to the aid of one of his colleagues who was in a standoff with the Jesus Christ lizards on Tower Green. Sensing a crisis as he approached, the creatures suddenly stood up on their hind legs and ran past the two men, their hands stretched out either side of them as they sought to maintain their balance during their ungainly green sprint. The pair chased them past Waterloo Barracks. They were eventually caught by two Beefeaters coming in the opposite direction in pursuit of the female lovebird, which had just hunted down its mate and savaged it, sending clouds of peach and green feathers drifting into the night. As ladders were erected to bring the sugar glider down from one of the White Tower’s window ledges, Balthazar Jones went in search of the zorilla, which, judging from the smell, was somewhere nearby. He found it asleep outside the Tower Café, its rank odour mingling with the stench of the discarded food in the bin outside. He then watched the Geoffroy’s marmosets, which had gathered on top of a cannon, declare a state of emergency as a group of Beefeaters smelling fiercely of beer slowly approached them with outstretched arms. The monkeys continued exposing themselves long after the men had fled, crimson beneath their beards.

As far as the birds had been concerned, it was a game of
patience. After considerable effort, Balthazar Jones persuaded the Yeoman Gaoler to surrender his drippings. The man returned from his house with pieces of bread covered with mean scrapings, which Balthazar Jones scattered on the ground underneath the trees. The first to give in was one of the toucans, which he swiftly captured with a fishing net. And after one final lap of victory around the White Tower, even the female lovebird succumbed to the fatty temptation.

But the hanging parrot, lit up by the moon, refused to abandon its position on one of the plane trees, where it swung upside down with the nonchalance of a trapeze artist. As the rest of the Tower residents headed to their beds in defeat, Balthazar Jones tried a succession of succulent titbits in an attempt to coax it to the ground. When they failed to work, he finally reached into his pocket and sacrificed the Fig Roll he had taken from a packet in the Yeoman Gaoler’s kitchen when visiting the Etruscan shrew. But not even a biscuit made from sun-ripened Turkish figs could make the tiny bird surrender its illicit perch.

Eventually, he gave up on gastronomic entrapment and rested a ladder against the trunk of the tree. The bird watched him with one eye as he made his way up the rungs with the surefootedness of a rum-soaked sailor climbing a mast. Just as he came within arm’s reach of the bird, the creature performed a spectacular double somersault and dropped to the branch below. The Beefeater descended several rungs and stretched out his slender fingers. But the bird shut both eyes and plunged to the floor with the weight of a corpse. Just before hitting the ground, it snatched the Fig Roll and flew up
to the White Tower roof, where it sat on a gold weathervane, swinging in the breeze as it showered Balthazar Jones with crumbs.

THE BEEFEATER DIDN’T REMEMBER
turning off the alarm clock when it rang several hours after he finally got to bed. The first thing he was aware of was the phone ringing on the bedside table next to him. He ignored it at first, pulling the covers over his head. Eventually it stopped, but started up again seconds later. He stuck out a hand from underneath the shabby blanket and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” he croaked.

“Good morning, it’s Oswin Fielding. I’m at the Rack & Ruin. It’s already twenty past. You were meant to be here at nine.”

Assuring the equerry he was on his way, the Beefeater flung back the bedclothes and found his way to the bathroom. As he battled against the might of constipation, he remembered the forlorn bodies of the reclusive ringtail possums, and he wondered how he was going to explain their deaths to the equerry.

He had no doubt who was responsible for letting the animals loose: the same person whose white vest was hanging in his airing cupboard. His anger rose as he remembered the Ravenmaster pinning him up against the White Tower. He hadn’t trusted the man since their confrontation over the loss of Mrs. Cook’s tail when the family first arrived at the Tower eight years ago. Neither did he like the way the man treated his wife, a woman as thin as parchment who was so rarely seen in
the Rack & Ruin that Hebe Jones once declared: “He shuts her up in a walnut.”

On his way out, Balthazar Jones looked at his creased uniform in the bedroom mirror, and regretted not having taken it off before going to sleep. He pulled on his hat over his tumultuous hair and headed down the stairs, apprehension turning his empty insides.

Shielding his eyes from the glare of the alabaster clouds on his way to the Rack & Ruin, he opened the tavern door and found relief in the beer-scented gloom. He ordered a cup of tea from the landlady, who refused to serve alcohol before ten o’clock, a custom started by one of her ancestors to ensure that all Tower residents were in charge of their faculties when emptying their piss-pots. Muttering his thanks to her for rounding up the fancy rats, he carried his tea past the empty tables to Oswin Fielding, who was peering at a file.

“There you are,” said the equerry, looking up. “I hear there was an incident last night.”

The Beefeater sat down opposite him in silence.

“When I came in this morning I spotted the possums sitting in one of the trees. The Chief Yeoman Warder told me all about last night’s mayhem. The only saving grace seems to be that none of the animals in the moat escaped, so the public should be none the wiser.”

Balthazar Jones thought of the pile of bodies on the cobbles of Water Lane. “I thought the Komodo dragon had killed the possums,” he found himself saying.

“They must have been playing dead. They’re fit as a fiddle now,” Oswin Fielding replied. He took off his spectacles and started cleaning them on a blue handkerchief.