The Scent of Blood (2 page)

Just then, another keeper – whose name tag helpfully declared him to be Charlie Bales – came through the archway with an empty wheelbarrow, obviously heading towards the stores. When he saw the writing, he stopped, and the same look of grim satisfaction spread across his features. He nodded his head as if in approval.

“S.M.,” he said, dropping the barrow’s handles. “Well, well, well.” He looked at the assembled crowd and asked, “Anyone told our glorious leader?”

They all shook their heads but said nothing. Charlie Bales pulled a walkie-talkie from his top pocket and pressed a couple of buttons.

“April? It’s Charlie. Could you tell Mr Monkton that someone’s sprayed some graffiti out here?”

We could hear April relate the message to her boss in a broad Birmingham accent. There was a grunt of alarm – the sound of a man who’d rather not be bothered by the real world.

“You can deal with it, can’t you, April?” a timid voice protested. “Can’t you get someone to wash it off? What’s the man called? Jerry, is it? That chap in the maintenance department. Get him to do it.”

“April, tell Mr Monkton it’s not the protesters’ usual stuff,” Charlie said calmly. “This is on the wall of the house. I think he should take a look. This message seems … personal.”

“What does it say?” asked April. Charlie read out the words loud and clear. They were met with a long silence. Then April said to her employer, “I suppose you’d better have a look, sir. It won’t take a minute.” There was the sound of a chair being pushed back. Two minutes later, Anthony Monkton joined us in the courtyard with his secretary.

The sight of a man in a flowing yellow kaftan and purple beret was every bit as bizarre as I’d hoped. He looked as if he was wearing a nightie. His unruly grey hair poked out from the beret like a collection of rodents’ tails – rats trying to desert a sinking ship, I thought. He wore a necklace with a large crystal dangling from it, which he clung to with one hand as if it would give him magical protection.

It was the first time I’d ever been in close proximity to a genuinely eccentric person. I was gripped – and I wasn’t the only one. Every single member of staff stiffened and pulled themselves up a little when he appeared. Shoulders went back, chins were raised. It was almost as if they were standing to attention. But then I noticed that what showed in their eyes wasn’t respect. It varied from person to person, but I saw traces of pity. Disappointment. Dislike. And – in Charlie Bales’s face – open contempt.

Mr Monkton looked at the writing while the keepers looked at him, waiting for his reaction. Their boss rummaged in the pockets of his kaftan for his glasses. Once he found them he gave them a rub with a hanky before putting them on his nose. Eventually he said, “I don’t understand. S.M.? Who…?”

There was a tense silence. Every staff member apart from April wore the same expression. Disgust.

At last Charlie Bales spoke. “Sandy,” he said. The name seemed to thud onto the cobblestones.

“Sandy?” echoed Mr Monkton, baffled. “Sandy who?”

The female keeper gasped. Pain flashed across her face. The stick insect next to her scowled at his boss.

“Sandy Milford.” Charlie’s voice was quiet but deadly.

And yet Mr Monkton seemed entirely unaware of their seething emotions. His face contracted into a tight frown and he said vaguely, “Sandy Milford? The keeper who…? Oh dear… Yes, of course. Terrible thing. Very sad. Tragic.” A nerve twitched in his cheek. “April, sort it out, will you? Wash it off, or paint over it or something. I’ll be in my office if anyone needs me.” He took off his glasses but didn’t move. It was as though he couldn’t quite remember where his office was.

April came to his rescue. “Let’s go inside, shall we, sir?” She looked at the others. “Come on, everyone,” she said briskly. “Back to work. Mr Monkton doesn’t pay you just to stand around.”

Dismissed, the staff left the courtyard. Then April’s eyes fell on Mum and Becca standing uncertainly by the car. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Oh!” Mum looked flummoxed for a moment. “Er – we’re staying in the hotel. We won the raffle.”

“Ah, yes. Congratulations. Ms Fields, isn’t it? You’ll find the reception area through those double doors. Enjoy your stay.”

April pointed across the courtyard, then turned to lead Mr Monkton away.

It was only then that we realized someone had crept quietly up behind us. Someone who was now staring at the graffiti, a wide, toothy grin fixed in a striped orange and black face.

It was a tiger.

Or at least it was someone in a tiger suit – bright, fuzzy and fake.

But Anthony Monkton reacted as if he’d come face to face with a man-eating killer. His glasses dropped from his hand, the lenses smashing on the cobbles. And then he screamed.

Mr
Monkton’s scream echoed across the courtyard, bouncing from one wall to another, high and ear-piercingly loud. The tiger ripped off its head to reveal the flushed face of a young woman whose hair was dyed almost as orange as the suit she was wearing. “I’m so sorry, Mr Monkton!” she gabbled. “I didn’t mean to scare you! Are you all right?”

Faces had begun to appear at the basement windows, peering up at their boss in astonishment, and Mum and Becca were staring at him with their mouths open.

“Where did you get that?” April demanded. Her hands had bunched into fists and for a second I thought she might actually hit the girl.

The tiger-lady pulled at her fur. “This? It was on my desk. There was a memo attached. I thought you…”

April interrupted her roughly. “For pity’s sake, Zara, haven’t you got anything better to do than fool around in fancy dress? Go and get changed.”

April moved away, steering Mr Monkton down the stairs to the basement offices.

Graham and I were left standing beside Zara.

“But I
haven’t
got anything better to do,” she told us forlornly. “I’m supposed to keep the kids happy. It’s what I get paid for.” She sighed, replaced her head and stomped across the courtyard dejectedly, her long stripy tail trailing behind her. She disappeared into the education centre and there was a moment’s pause before Mum, looking slightly apprehensive about the weekend ahead, said, “Let’s go and get checked in, shall we?”

The Healing Harmony Hotel and Spa had the hushed, reverential atmosphere of an old-fashioned museum or library, or maybe even a Buddhist temple. It was all polished wood, slate and empty white walls. Wind chimes tinkled gently every time a door opened or closed, and the staff spoke softly, as if scared of disturbing the meditative atmosphere. Mum and Becca couldn’t wait to get on with some serious rest and relaxation. As soon as we’d dumped our bags in our rooms, they both disappeared in search of Mystical Energy, leaving Graham and I to explore. After collecting our information pack from the receptionist, we headed out across the courtyard. A man – presumably Jerry from the maintenance department – had already begun to wash the blood-red paint off the wall.

“Remember S.M.,” I said. “Sounds threatening, doesn’t it?”

“It does have a rather menacing tone,” agreed Graham.

“Sandy Milford,” I mused thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t need to remember him unless he wasn’t around any more, would you?”

“No,” said Graham. “That seems to be a fairly safe assumption.”

“So he’s probably dead. And as Mr Monkton said it was ‘tragic’, I think we can assume he didn’t die of old age.” I looked at Graham. He was trying to avoid meeting my eyes. “We can’t ignore it,” I told him. “We’re going to have to find out what happened.”

Gleaning information about Sandy Milford proved surprisingly easy. The Great British Public were out in force, so there were plenty of people milling around. As far as the staff were concerned, Graham and I were just like every other punter – i.e. totally invisible. Which provided us with plenty of opportunities for eavesdropping.

Everyone who worked in that place seemed to love a good gossip, and the people who had seen the graffiti before it got scrubbed off were having a great time telling the people who hadn’t. For the next hour or so, wherever we went we heard the events of the early morning being told over and over again. In the shop, in the café, by the burger bar – if two members of staff were standing together, they seemed to be having pretty much the same conversation. Each one was marked by the same ghoulish relish, and they all went something like this:

“In blood-red paint, it was. ‘Remember S.M.?’”

“Sandy Milford?”

“Who else?”

“Who did that, then?”

“No idea.”

“Poor Sandy. It was a shocking waste, really it was. No one should die like that.”

“Killed by a tiger!”

“Horrible!”

I glanced at Graham. He looked a little pale.

“It’s his kiddies I feel sorry for. Poor loves.”

“And his wife.”

“Mr Monkton was pretty upset when he saw it.”

“Serves him right. There are plenty of people around here who think it was all his fault. He just hasn’t kept up with things the way his father did, has he?”

“He screamed!”

“He never!”

“Yes, he did.”

“Why?”

“That new girl came up behind him. What’s her name? Zara. She was in that old tiger outfit.”

“I thought they got rid of that after the accident. Didn’t April say it was bad taste to keep it?”

“That’s what I heard. God knows how she ended up wearing it.”

“Someone’s idea of a joke?”

“Reckon so. It made Mr Monkton nearly jump out of his skin. Silly sod. Everyone in the office saw him.”

A heavy bout of sniggering brought each conversation to a close.

“They don’t seem to like Mr Monkton much, do they?” I said to Graham.

“No… And yet the man seems harmless enough,” he replied.

“Maybe that’s the point. I mean, you wouldn’t want someone harmless in charge, would you? You’d want someone who could do the job.” I thought back to the days when my mum had worked for the Town Parks Department. She’d complained endlessly about her boss because he wasn’t “up to it”. She’d left in the end and set up her own landscape gardening business, saying she’d rather live with her own mistakes than someone else’s.

“You could well be right,” mused Graham. “I read an article recently about what voters expect from their leaders. Charisma, intelligence, charm. They like a certain commanding presence; a superior quality. I suppose there’s no point following them otherwise.”

“Well, Mr Monkton certainly doesn’t seem to tick any of those boxes,” I said. “Maybe that explains why he’s not popular. And if he’s not running the place as well as his dad did, no wonder people are moaning.”

By 10.45 a.m. Graham and I knew that Sandy Milford had been a keeper who’d been killed by a tiger about a year ago, but we were no closer to knowing who’d sprayed the graffiti on the wall. And by then we were due to start our fun-filled schedule of Organized Activities.

“We’d better get going, I suppose,” I said, checking my watch. “Where exactly are we heading?”

Graham pulled out the information sheet the spa receptionist had given him. “According to this, we have to meet by the door marked ‘Staff only’, which is right next to the proboscis monkeys’ enclosure.”

“Funny name for a monkey,” I remarked.

“Proboscis means nose or snout,” Graham informed me. “I believe the males’ noses are particularly pendulous. They can grow up to eighteen centimetres long.”

It’s fantastically useful having a walking encyclopedia for a best friend. “I bet you memorized the map, too. Where do we go?”

“This way,” he said.

“And who are we meeting?” I looked over his shoulder at the neatly typed schedule and my mouth dropped open. We were spending the morning with someone called Kylie Milford! I pointed at her name and nudged Graham.

“Well, this is going to be interesting,” I said. “She’s got to be related to Sandy, hasn’t she?”

Graham looked at me and nodded. “I’d have thought it was highly likely. There would seem to be two possibilities. She’s either the dead man’s sister …”

I finished his sentence for him. “…or she’s his wife.”

When
we arrived in the Rainforest, the proboscis monkeys were all lined up on a branch fast asleep. Graham was right – even the females had ridiculously large noses, which dangled from their faces like water-filled balloons. The door marked S
TAFF
O
NLY
was slightly ajar, and through it we caught a glimpse of the keeper we’d seen in the courtyard that morning. She was attacking a pile of fruit with a gleaming knife, chopping it into tiny pieces with savage relish. We stopped in our tracks.

“Do you think that’s Kylie?” I asked nervously.

“Could be.”

Before we could take another step, the stick-insect man loped past us, pushed open the door and went inside. As one, Graham and I glided towards it like shadows, hoping to catch a bit of their conversation.

“Feeling better now, Kylie?” he asked her.

“A bit, yeah. Thanks, Pete.” She sniffed and blew her nose. “It’s silly, me getting so upset. It’s just seeing that writing brings it all back. I’m hardly likely to forget Sandy, am I? I think about him every day. Every minute. He’s always there, in my head. And when I think of the kids…!” She started crying and Pete patted her awkwardly on the back as if he didn’t quite know how to comfort her.

He tried to lighten the mood by saying, “Hey! At least it gave old Monkton a nasty shock. Did you see his face? I thought he was going to die!”

“I wish he would.” The bitterness in Kylie’s voice made Pete drop his arm and take a step back. “He deserves to. We all know what happened. That stupid judge can blame Archie Henshaw until he’s blue in the face. We know whose fault it really was. Look at what he’s done to this place! The man’s a joke. He deserves everything he gets.”

She attacked a melon, splitting it in two with a single blow. Pete flinched and hurriedly changed the subject. “You doing the Behind the Scenes stuff with those kids today, then?”

“Yes.” She checked her watch. “They ought to be here by now. I hate it when people are late.” She glared towards the door and, desperately hoping she hadn’t noticed us eavesdropping, I knocked on it to announce our arrival.