The Scent of Blood (3 page)

Kylie made no attempt to explain the red-rimmed eyes or pink-tipped nose that clearly showed she’d been crying. Instead she got straight down to business. First she gave us a Health and Safety talk, then we had to don the matching green overalls she handed us, and after that she took us off to the “jungle”. She was pretty much running on automatic pilot, giving the same tour she’d obviously given to loads of kids before us, but I still found it interesting. The problem was, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to ask her what we really wanted to know: just how, exactly, was she related to Sandy Milford?

The first animals she introduced us to were a pair of Brazilian tapirs – furry pig-sized creatures with what looked like miniature trunks. We watched them over the barrier for a moment or two before Kylie announced that we were going in. I have to confess I was a bit nervous. I couldn’t help wondering how big their teeth were, and Graham looked as though he might refuse altogether. But I took a deep breath and did what I was told, and when Kylie instructed me on where to scratch them (right between the shoulder blades), to my surprise they became absolutely blissed out. First their eyelids started to flutter and then their little trunky noses went all floppy. Then their knees gave way, and finally they sank to the ground with a contented sigh and literally rolled over.

“Brilliant!” I said.

“Extraordinary.” Graham flashed me one of his blink-and-you-miss-it grins.

“Works every time.” Kylie threw a quick smile at the animals.

After that it was time to feed the spider monkeys, who came right up to the wire mesh to take pieces of banana from us with their delicate, bony fingers. Then Kylie took us to a little private room behind the enclosure. In a small cage on the table, a tiny snub-nosed proboscis monkey clung to a large furry teddy bear.

“This is Basil,” she announced, her face softening with almost maternal pride.

“What’s the teddy bear for?” I asked.

“He needs something to cuddle when I’m not here,” she explained. “He was rejected by his mum so I’ve been hand-rearing him.”

“I understand that’s a terribly demanding task to undertake,” said Graham. “From what I’ve read, it seems to be extremely hard work.”

“Yep, it’s pretty tiring. This little fella needs feeding every two hours, night and day. He comes home with me every evening. I haven’t had much sleep lately – but he’s worth it, aren’t you, baby?”

She began to warm his bottle.

“What will you do with him?” I asked as she fed him.

“Oh – he’ll go in with the others when he’s old enough. I’ll keep a careful eye on him, but he should be fine.”

I touched the fur on the top of his head and felt the heat through his paper-thin skin and the tiny, rapid beat of his pulse. “You must be really attached to him,” I said. “Won’t it be hard giving him back?”

“Of course. But he’s a wild animal, not a pet. You can’t go getting sentimental over them.” When Basil had finished his bottle, Kylie lifted him into his cage and he climbed into the welcoming arms of his teddy-bear foster mother. “Anyway,” she added, “he doesn’t belong to me. I don’t get any say in the matter.” There was a touch of anger in her voice so I didn’t ask any more, and then she told us our next stop was the tigers.

“We’re not going in with them, are we?” quavered Graham.

“Yes,” said Kylie.

I gulped. “Is that safe?” I could barely squeeze the words out.

She laughed. “Don’t worry.” She led us to a huge pair of wooden gates that were big enough to drive a lorry through. A small, person-sized door was cut into the corner of one, which Kylie opened. “This is the service area,” she said as we followed her inside. “The bit the public don’t get to see.”

It was a small concrete yard. Cages with old-fashioned iron bars lined the walls. They were linked by heavy mesh tunnels with sliding gates at each end.

“We’ll get the tigers shut in here first, then we can go in to the public enclosure. We’ve had new doors fitted recently: there are at least four of them between you and the tigers. You’ll be fine.” Kylie slid open the one to the public enclosure and whistled. Like trained circus animals, three tigers responded to her summons. With practised ease she threw each one a small piece of meat, and before I’d had a chance to see what she’d done with the gates and tunnels, she had each of them safely contained in separate cages. Even though my conscious mind told me there were iron bars and bolts between us and them, I still experienced a clutch of panic. They were so big. So powerful. I thought of Sandy Milford and felt faint.

“They must be very dangerous,” I said weakly.

“All animals are dangerous if you don’t respect them,” Kylie replied shortly. She thrust a shovel towards me. “Hold that.”

Graham looked as pale as I felt, but Kylie was unsympathetic. She shoved a broom into his hand, dropped a sack of meat into a wheelbarrow and, grabbing its handles, told us to follow her. Before long we found ourselves in the tiger enclosure with the Great British Public on the other side of the glass, gawping and making sarcastic remarks like “Funny-looking tigers!”

“That one’s got no fur.”

“Oi! I paid to see animals, not a pair of kids. I want my money back.”

Kylie ignored their witticisms and led us over to where a wooden pole was sticking out of the ground, as thick and as tall as a tree trunk. Opening the sack of meat, she spiked a large piece with a lethal-looking hook and proceeded to hoist it to the top of the pole on a rope and pulley.

“What are you doing?” Graham was intrigued.

“It’s called environmental enrichment,” explained Kylie. “Keeps them busy. They have to climb if they want to eat. It makes them work for their food in the same way as they would in the wild.”

“Ingenious,” Graham commented approvingly.

When Kylie finished with the meat, she pulled a bottle of aftershave from her pocket. Strangely, mystifyingly, she began to pour it into various holes drilled in the pole. “They like different smells,” she told us curtly. “I vary what I pour in from day to day. It stops them getting bored.”

When she’d emptied the last drops from the bottle, she turned to me and Graham looking faintly amused. “Now it’s your turn,” she said. “Time to do the mucking out.”

Tiger poo is very big and very smelly. By the time Graham and I had shovelled the last of it gingerly into the wheelbarrow, our eyes were watering and we were both feeling slightly queasy, despite the fact it was nearly lunchtime.

When we’d finished the job to Kylie’s satisfaction, she led us back out and performed the reverse manoeuvre with the safety gates. The three tigers sort of flowed with brutal grace back into their outside enclosure.

“That’s your lot, then,” she said briskly. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was glad to be getting rid of us at last. “I’ve done my bit. You’re in the Frozone this afternoon, aren’t you?”

Graham didn’t need to check our schedule. It was already imprinted on his super-retentive brain. “Yes.”

“OK, then. Bye.” Kylie turned to go. We were dismissed.

It was now or never. “It must be a difficult job looking after tigers,” I blurted out. “People must get hurt every now and then, however careful they are.”

“Well, yes.” Kylie gave me a hard stare. “Tigers sometimes kill their keepers. But the most dangerous animal in captivity is the elephant.”

“Really?” Surprise threw me off my line of questioning. “I thought elephants were quite docile. People ride on them all the time in India, don’t they? I’ve seen it on TV.”

“True. But they kill more keepers than all the other animals put together. The director of Grampian Zoo was crushed to death last year. Sometimes I think…” She broke off, but her eyes had narrowed and her expression had become intense and ruthless. I could almost see the thought rising like a bubble from her head.

Kylie Milford was fervently wishing that Anthony Monkton had suffered a similar fate.

I
felt a bit shaky after we’d mucked out the tiger enclosure. I couldn’t decide which I’d found more frightening: the animals or Kylie. She was like a volcano, simmering with heated anger. What would it take to make her erupt?

We had an hour free before we were due in the Frozone, so Graham and I bought ourselves a burger and Coke each and settled down on a bench overlooking the waterhole in the African Savannah. It had been cleverly designed so that the meat-eaters were separated from the vegetarians by moats, electric fences and the occasional see-through barrier. From where we were sitting it looked as if they were all together on the grassy plain: lions, hyenas, zebras, hippos, rhinos, elephants and giraffes. But it was the same here as in the rest of the zoo: the signs were peeling and faded, the glass unwashed, the bench cracked and wobbly.

“So…” I began. “That graffiti means that someone’s trying to upset Mr Monkton. They blame him for Sandy’s death. Especially Kylie.”

“That seems to be an accurate summary of what we’ve heard so far,” agreed Graham.

“I tell you what, though. The timing’s a bit odd.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, if the accident happened a year ago, why wait until this morning to spray graffiti on the wall?”

Graham sipped his drink. “Kylie mentioned a judge. As you know, in cases of accidental death there has to be an inquest. There must have been some sort of inquiry, but these things can take months. It might only just have been completed.”

“What difference would that make?”

“It’s conceivable that the graffiti artist was hoping to obtain what they considered to be justice through the official channels. If Mr Monkton was cleared of all blame, that person might have been provoked into taking matters into his or her own hands.”

I was impressed by Graham’s reasoning. “OK,” I said. “That sounds about right. Kylie seems convinced it was Mr Monkton’s fault, doesn’t she? And as far as we know, lots of people agree with her. Who was that other man she mentioned this morning – Archie Henshaw?”

“Yes.” Graham nodded. “If we could get access to a computer we could probably find out who he is. But I don’t see how we can manage that just now.”

I drained my Coke and then said, “I tell you another weird thing about this morning. That girl Zara turning up and freaking out Mr Monkton. Didn’t someone say that the tiger suit had been got rid of?”

“Yes.”

“They also said she was new, so she can’t have known about it. Someone deliberately put it in her office.” I crushed my Coke can between my palms and threw it into the recycling bin. “I wonder if we can talk to her.”

After we’d eaten, we walked back towards the manor house in search of Zara. She wasn’t hard to find: she’d ditched the furry outfit, but her dyed orange hair was as bright as a Belisha beacon. We could see her from way across the front lawn, sitting in an open-sided yurt surrounded by a sea of Brownies. When we got closer, we realized she was doing a hands-on creepy-crawly session. Or at least she was trying to. Her audience was a little on the excitable side, wriggling around on the benches like an infestation of yellow maggots. There was a load of giggling and shrieking and girls-being-girlie-girlie over the insects, and even though she was using a microphone, Zara’s voice was too weak to cut through it.

“What I’m going to show you next is a special kind of insect all the way from the rainforests of Madagascar,” she said, her eyes widening in an attempt to convey the Marvellous Miracles of Mother Nature.

“Where’s that?” demanded one Brownie.

“Er… It’s near Africa. They’re quite big – when they’re adults they can grow to about eight centimetres. They’re excellent climbers and can even walk up a sheet of glass.”

“Big deal,” said another Brownie witheringly, and the girls either side of her giggled.

Zara took out a box labelled M
ADAGASCAN
H
ISSING
C
OCKRAOCHES
and the squealing reached a new intensity. One of the Brownies chose that moment to jump up, hands clapped over her mouth as if she was about to be sick. Brown Owl reacted like greased lightning, whipping out a paper bag and clamping it to the unfortunate girl’s mouth. But in doing so she caught Zara’s elbow and the box of cockroaches went flying.

Fifteen large cockroaches landed on the heads of fifteen small Brownies. The girls leapt hysterically off the benches, flapping at their hair and flicking the insects to the floor. The poor bewildered cockroaches scuttled in all directions. Zara tried frantically to retrieve them, but she didn’t have enough hands to scoop up more than one or two before the Brownies stampeded from the yurt. When the last of the yellow-clad squealers had fled across the lawn, she looked ready to burst into tears. It was too good an opportunity to miss.

“Do you want some help?” I asked.

“Oh yes, please,” Zara said gratefully.

So Zara, Graham and I spent the next twenty minutes rounding up hissing cockroaches.

There’s something bonding about hunting creepy-crawlies, and we got quite friendly as we crawled under the benches together. Miraculously we managed to locate all fifteen, although I have to say that one or two looked suspiciously like common-or-garden pests rather than their exotic cousins. After they’d been safely returned to their box, Zara rewarded our efforts by buying us another Coke in the Ballroom Café.

“What a day!” she said. “And it won’t be over until nearly midnight. I’m supposed to be a teddy bear at the staff party tonight. I’m entertaining the kids – and some of them are hideous.” She looked at us, suddenly aghast. “Oh, whoops – your parents don’t work here, do they?”

“No,” I assured her. “We’re visitors.”

“Oh, right. Didn’t I see you two first thing this morning?” she asked, opening her drink.

“Yes,” I said, adding pointedly, “when you were in the tiger suit.”

“That suit!” she exclaimed, banging her can down on the table so that the Coke frothed out. “That was so strange. Where did it come from? That’s what I want to know.”

“Do you?” I said as casually as I could manage.

Graham asked neutrally, “Why were you wearing it?”

Zara’s brow furrowed. “It was in my office this morning with a memo from April – Mr Monkton’s secretary – saying it was a replacement for the bear outfit. I have to dress as a teddy when we get big crowds in. It keeps the toddlers amused, you see.”