The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (19 page)

He remembered his meeting with the man from the Palace only when he spotted him striding across the fortress wrapped up against the cold. He hurried to the Rack & Ruin, cursing himself for not having come up with a credible explanation for the missing birds with yellow eyebrows, and pushed open the door.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN
that the penguins are missing?” Oswin Fielding asked, leaning across the table next to the framed signature of Rudolf Hess.

“They just never turned up,” Balthazar Jones replied, lowering his voice lest someone hear.

“So where are they?”

The Beefeater scratched at his white beard. “I’m not quite certain at the moment,” he replied. “The removal man says he
stopped for petrol and when he came back from paying, both the back and the passenger doors were open and they’d vanished.”

“Who was in the passenger seat?”

The Beefeater looked away. “One of the penguins,” he muttered.

“Damn,” said the equerry, running a hand through the remains of his hair. “The Argentineans are going to think we lost them on purpose. We don’t want to get on the wrong side of that lot again. Listen, if anyone asks where they are, tell them that they got travel sickness or something and they’re at the vet’s. I’ll make a few discreet enquiries.”

Oswin Fielding took a sip of his orange juice while studying the Beefeater carefully. “Is there anything else I should know?” he asked. “I don’t want any cock-ups when the menagerie opens.”

“Everything else has gone according to plan,” the Beefeater insisted. “Apart from the wandering albatross, all the animals have settled in well. The giraffes are loving the moat.”

The courtier frowned. “What giraffes?” he asked.

“The ones with the long necks.”

“Her Majesty doesn’t possess any giraffes.”

Balthazar Jones looked confused. “But there are four in the moat,” he said.

“But I gave you a list,” Oswin Fielding hissed. “There were no giraffes on it.”

“Well, someone thought they belonged to the Queen. They’d been loaded into a lorry by the time I arrived. I just assumed you’d forgotten to write them down.”

There was a pause as both men glared at each other.

“So, to sum things up then, Yeoman Warder Jones,” the equerry said, “the Queen’s penguins are missing and the Tower of London has kidnapped four giraffes that belong to London Zoo.”

The Beefeater shifted in his seat. “We can just send the giraffes back, and say there was a misunderstanding,” he suggested.

Oswin Fielding leant forward. “I very much doubt that we will be able to sneak four giraffes back across London without being spotted. It’ll be all over the papers and we’ll both look like complete idiots. I’ll call the zoo and explain that we’ve borrowed them. Hopefully they won’t kick up too much of a fuss, and we’ll send them back in a couple of months when things have quietened down. If they start being difficult, I’ll remind them what they did to Jumbo the elephant.”

“What did they do to Jumbo the elephant?” the Beefeater asked.

“They sold him to Barnum, the American circus man, for two thousand pounds. It caused an absolute stink: there were letters to
The Times
, the nation’s children were in tears, and Queen Victoria was furious.”

Oswin Fielding sat back in his chair with a sigh that would have woken the dead. “Is that shrew still alive?” he asked.

“I saw it move this morning.”

“That’s something at least.”

ONCE THE EQUERRY AND BEEFEATER HAD LEFT,
Ruby Dore collected their glasses and looked to see if it was still snowing. But as she peered through the window, on which was scratched
an eighteenth-century insult concerning the landlord’s personal hygiene, she saw that there were no traces of it left. Filled with disappointment, she remembered the winters of her childhood: her father pulling her around the moat on her sledge, and the Beefeaters’ snowball fights, which were more furious than their historic battle to defend the Tower against the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.

As the canary hopped from perch to perch in its cage, she returned to her stool behind the bar and finished writing an announcement that the thirty-five-year ban on Monopoly had been lifted. It had been introduced by her father, incensed that the Tower doctor had continued playing while his wife gave birth on the kitchen floor above. The board game’s prohibition had forced it underground, and a number of Beefeaters descended to their basements to brew their own ales with which to drown the torment of defeat as they played the Tower doctor in their sitting rooms. The practice, which had continued over the years, had resulted in a drop in the tavern’s profits, and now that her life was about to change forever, Ruby Dore was determined to claw back some turnover.

After pinning the notice on the board next to the door, she reread the rules she had listed underneath the announcement. In order to avoid resurrecting historic grievances, playing with the boot would be prohibited. Anyone caught cheating would be obliged to pay a fixed levy on their pints for the next six months. And the Tower doctor was only permitted to play in the absence of a medical emergency.

Not long afterwards, when Rev. Septimus Drew pushed open the heavy door carrying his weapon of seduction, he was
relieved to find that he was the only customer. But Ruby Dore was nowhere to be seen. He stood for several minutes on the worn flagstones wondering where she was, then placed the treacle cake on the bar, sat down on one of the stools, and took off his scarf. Picking up the nearest beer mat, he read the joke on the back of it. He then gazed around the bar, wondering whether it was unseemly for a man of the cloth to be looking for love armed with the fruits of his oven.

Fearing that one of the Beefeaters would come in at any moment and catch him in flagrante with his Tupperware box, he quickly got to his feet and strode out. As he stood in the cold tying his scarf, he heard a sound coming from the disused Well Tower. Unable to resist the lure of an open door, he stepped in. There, with her back to him, was Ruby Dore, instantly recognisable in the gloom by her ponytail. Just as he was about to reveal that he had left her a little something on the bar made according to his mother’s recipe, the landlady turned and greeted the chaplain with the words: “Come and have a look at the Queen’s fancy rats.”

The chaplain saw behind her a flash of villainous yellow teeth.

“The Keeper of the Royal Menagerie said I could look after them,” she continued, turning back towards them. “Aren’t they sweet? I used to have one when I was little, but it escaped. One of the Beefeaters said he spotted him by the organ in the chapel once, but we never found him. It was such a shame. We’d taught him all kinds of tricks. My dad made him a tiny barrel, and he used to push it across the bar. The Beefeaters would give him a penny each time he got to the end. He was
loaded by the time he escaped. Did you know that Queen Victoria used to have one?”

But when Ruby Dore turned round, all that was left of Rev. Septimus Drew was a hint of frankincense.

BY THE TIME VALERIE JENNINGS ARRIVED
at work, Hebe Jones was already entombed in the magician’s box used to saw glamorous assistants in two. Recognising instantly the horizontal position of defeat, Valerie Jennings unbuttoned her navy coat, hung it next to the inflatable doll, and sat at her desk waiting for the restoration of her colleague’s faculties. After a few moments, she glanced at her again, but her eyes were still closed and both her shoes had dropped to the floor. Eventually, she heard the telltale creak of the lid, and Hebe Jones emerged and muttered a greeting to her colleague, who watched as she returned to her desk, peered at the phone book, and picked up the receiver with renewed determination.

Valerie Jennings looked at her notebook but found herself unable to concentrate on reuniting the yellow canoe with its owner. She glanced at the cuckoo clock, dreading lunchtime. Despite the fact that Arthur Catnip was their favourite ticket inspector, she bitterly regretted having agreed to go out with him. She had never intended to enter the maze of romance again, with its hopeless dead ends. The last time she ventured inside, she had been encouraged by a neighbour unable to bear the sight of her mowing her lawn, a job she believed was decreed at birth to be that of a husband. She waited until Valerie Jennings was trimming the edge next to the fence, and seized the opportunity to rear her head. First she congratulated
her on her crosscutting technique, which her own husband also swore by. She then added in a breathless non sequitur that she had a single colleague who also liked books. But despite Valerie Jennings’s insistence that single men were almost as dangerous as married ones, the woman persisted until she reluctantly agreed to meet him.

For a week she convinced herself that the man would be entirely unsuitable. But as she got ready for their evening together, a spark of hope suddenly flickered inside her, and when she closed the front door behind her a gust of loneliness fanned it into an inferno of longing. She sat in the corner of the pub with her double vodka and orange, inspecting the pattern on her new dress, looking up each time someone came in. Eventually, a man opened the door and glanced around. They held each other’s gaze long enough for her to realise that it was him. She offered a timorous smile, but he turned on his heels and left with as much determination as he had shown on entering. It was a considerable time before Valerie Jennings was able to stand. She then pulled down her dress over her splendid thighs and walked out, leaving the embers of her dreams scattered behind her.

When the door of the cuckoo clock burst open and the tiny wooden bird shot out to deliver a single demented cry, Hebe Jones wished her good luck. “I’ve got some lipstick you can borrow, if you like,” she added.

“It’s okay, thanks. I wouldn’t want to encourage him,” she replied. She put on her navy coat over the skirt she had worn the previous day, and reluctantly turned the corner. Arthur Catnip was already waiting at the original Victorian counter, fingering a savage new haircut. The assault had taken place
that morning during his tea break. As soon as the barber heard that his customer was taking a woman out for lunch, he insisted that something more dramatic was required. But instead of the transformation he had been hoping for, when Arthur Catnip raised his eyes to the mirror after the man had finally laid down his scissors, he found that a massacre had taken place. Not even the peace dove of a waived bill could appease him. He wandered back to the staff room in defeat, hoping that Valerie Jennings would see past the carnage.

They headed out together into the cold, discussing the early morning snow that had failed to settle. As they passed the Hotel Splendid, Valerie Jennings glanced with regret at the marvellous columns and the uniformed doorman waiting on the top step, wondering where the ticket inspector was taking her.

It wasn’t long before the couple arrived at the entrance to Regent’s Park, and Valerie Jennings wished she was back in the warm, familiar office. As they passed the fountain, Arthur Catnip pointed to something in the distance and announced that they were almost there. Valerie Jennings peered through her smeared spectacles and saw what was undeniably a tea hut. “I think it’s going to rain,” she said.