The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise (29 page)

ONCE HE HAD FED
the crested water dragons, Balthazar Jones headed through the rain for the Develin Tower, hoping the bearded pig would like its new ball. Just as he was passing the White Tower, he heard footsteps running up behind him. The next thing he knew he was pinned up against the wall by a hand round his throat.

“Which one of the animals did it?” demanded the Ravenmaster.

“Did what?” the Beefeater managed to reply.

“Savaged one of my birds.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Ravenmaster pressed his face up to Balthazar Jones. “I’ve just found Edmund on the lawn. His leg and neck were broken. Which one was it?” he repeated.

“They’re all locked up. Always have been.”

The Ravenmaster increased his grip on his colleague’s neck. “Well, one of them must have escaped,” he hissed.

“Maybe it was a fox, or even the Chief Yeoman Warder’s dog,” croaked Balthazar Jones.

“I know it was something to do with you,” the Ravenmaster said, then pointed a black leather finger at him and strode off.

Once he had caught his breath, Balthazar Jones readjusted his hat and picked up the swede that had tumbled to the ground. While it went against the creature’s nature, he wondered whether the bearded pig was responsible, as it was the only animal he hadn’t checked on that morning. But when he
reached the tower, he found that the door was still locked. Glancing over his shoulder to make sure that he wasn’t being watched, he turned the key. As he entered the room, the animal bounded up to him, its tasselled tail flying like a flag over its fulsome buttocks. After scratching the pig behind its ears, the Beefeater presented it with the root vegetable, which it immediately knocked across the floor and chased. He sat down on the straw, rested his back against the cold wall, and closed his eyes. Raising a hand, he felt his neck with the tips of his fingers.

After a while, he reached into his tunic pocket and drew out some of the love letters he had written to Hebe Jones all those years ago. He had taken them from her hidey-hole during the night while unable to sleep, but hadn’t brought himself to read any of them. He looked at the first envelope, with its address confused by love, and took out the letter. As he began to read, he remembered the girl with dark hair meandering down the front of her turquoise dress, and her eyes of a fawn that had fixed on him in the corner shop. He remembered that first night together and their horror as they realised they would be parted in the morning. He remembered the first time they had made love during a weekend in Orford, when a power cut in the bar of the Jolly Sailor Inn, built from the timbers of wrecked ships, had driven them to their room earlier than expected. The light from the candle given to them by the landlady lit up the ancient murals of ships, their sails engorged with wind. And, after they had sealed their love, they promised to be with each other until they were so old they had grown a third set of teeth, just like the Indian centenarian they had read about in the paper.

As the bearded pig came to sit by him, resting a whiskered cheek on his thigh, the Beefeater unfolded another letter, feeling the creature’s hot breath through his trousers. After reading the outpouring of devotion, he remembered the butterfly that had danced above the pews during their wedding, sending each member of the Grammatikos family into raptures over such a good omen. He remembered how they had vowed to stay together forever, despite what life threw at them, and how at the time it had seemed inconceivable to do otherwise. Looking down at his old man’s hands holding the letter he had composed all those years ago, he saw the scratched gold band that had never left his finger since his bride slipped it on at the altar. And he decided to write her another letter.

Carefully locking the door of the Develin Tower behind him, he headed home, a wind of hope behind him. He climbed to the top of the staircase, pressed down on the latch, and entered the room where German U-boat men had been imprisoned during the war. Ignoring the chalk swastikas and portrait of Field Marshal Göring drawn on the wall, he pulled back the wooden chair, which scraped mournfully against the pitching floorboards, and sat down at the table he had found in a junk shop. He selected a piece of writing paper from one of the piles and, with the same penmanship that hadn’t altered in three decades, wrote the words “Dear Hebe.”

The outpouring of affection that followed was as fulsome as it was frantic. He told his wife how the seed of their love had been planted during their first night together when she kissed the tip of each of his fingers that would have to get used to holding a gun. He told her how he had bitterly regretted having to leave her for the Army in the morning, but that the
shoots of their love had grown despite the distance between them. He told her how the butterfly had flown into the church and danced over their heads, attracted by their blossoming love. And he told her how Milo, the fruit of their love, had been his life’s greatest joy, along with being her husband.

Pausing for a moment, he raised his eyes to the mantelpiece on the other side of the room, seeing nothing but their son a few hours old in his mother’s arms, a moment for which they had waited so many years. But his thoughts suddenly turned to that terrible, terrible day, and the blade lodged in his heart plunged even deeper. Knowing his wife would never forgive him if she ever found out what he had done, he tore up the letter. And he sat at the table for the rest of the morning, head in his hands, bleeding with guilt as the rain pounded the windows.

WHEN THE DOOR
of the cuckoo clock sprung open and the tiny wooden bird shot out to deliver eleven demented cries, Hebe Jones put out the “Back in 15 Minutes” sign and pulled down the shutter. She waited at her desk, hoping that her colleague’s resolve had finally cracked. But when Valerie Jennings stood up from rummaging in the fridge, instead of the butter-rich dainty Hebe Jones was hoping for, she drew out the same green apples that her colleague had had to endure longer than she cared to remember.

Despite the fact that Valerie Jennings had already told her every detail of the picnic lunch the previous week, Hebe Jones listened to her reminiscences, sipping her jasmine tea. She heard again about the rug Arthur Catnip had handed her to
keep out the cold. She heard again about the glasses he had brought for the wine, which were real crystal rather than plastic. And she heard again about the hours he must have spent the previous night preparing all the food, and how it was only polite of her to have tried his rhubarb and custard, despite her regime.

When elevenses were over, Hebe Jones stood rinsing the cups, remembering how her husband had always offered her a rug to defend her against the cold in the Salt Tower, and while he had never subjected himself to the torment of making pastry, he had been an expert at making tomato chutney, until the Chief Yeoman Warder spotted the plants he and Milo were growing up the side of their home and ordered their destruction.

As she hauled up the shutter, one of the ticket inspectors was already waiting at the counter. Standing next to him was a wooden sarcophagus with a chipped nose.

“Anything in it?” asked Hebe Jones, looking it up and down.

“Just a bit of old bandage,” he replied. “The mummy must have got out at an earlier stop.”

After noting it down in the ledgers, Hebe Jones helped him carry it down the aisle to the Egyptology section, a troublesome journey due to their vastly differing heights.

Back at her desk, she picked up the phone and called the Society of Woodworkers, having been assured by Thanos Grammatikos when he returned with the urn that morning that it was made from pomegranate wood. She spoke to the chairman, hoping he could put her in touch with someone who specialised in it. But he didn’t know of anyone, and promised
to send her a list of members who took on commissions to help her in her search. After hanging up, she glanced at her colleague to make sure she wasn’t looking, and opened the gigolo’s diary.

“The treachery of the Swedes,” Valerie Jennings suddenly announced.

“Pardon?” asked Hebe Jones, who had been engrossed in an encounter with an ice cube.

“The treachery of the Swedes,” her colleague repeated, closing the Latin dictionary she had borrowed from one of the bookshelves. “That’s what
perfidia Suecorum
means. It’s one of the few things I can make out on this manuscript. Terrible handwriting.”

Hebe Jones stopped to peer at it over her colleague’s shoulder on her way to answer the Swiss cowbell. As she rounded the corner, she saw Tom Cotton in his blue uniform standing at the counter. She raised a hand to her mouth and asked: “You haven’t lost something else, have you?”

“I was just wondering whether you fancied a coffee,” he said.

WHILE TOM COTTON STOOD
in the queue, Hebe Jones chose the same table at the back of the café where they had sat the previous time. As she waited she looked at him, trim in his uniform, talking to the girl behind the counter, and wondered why his wife had let him slip through her fingers. She lowered her eyes as he approached with a tray.

“So,” he said, sitting down and putting a cup and plate in front of her. “Anything interesting been handed in recently?”

Hebe Jones thought for a moment. “A tuba, which my colleague plays during moments of despair, and a sarcophagus,” she said.

She took a bite of her flapjack. “Saved any lives recently?” she asked.

“It’s the donors and doctors who save lives. I just fetch and carry,” he insisted, raising his cup to his lips.

Hebe Jones looked at the table. “We didn’t donate any of Milo’s organs,” she said, eventually raising her eyes. “They took his heart to be examined by a specialist. It was weeks before we got it back. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being without it.”

There was silence. Eventually Tom Cotton spoke: “You haven’t lost Milo completely, you know. I lost my sister when we were both very young. We always carry a part of those we loved tucked inside us.”

After she had dried her cheeks on the soft, white handkerchief that was offered to her, she looked at him through a shimmering kaleidoscope of tears. “Thank you,” she whispered, placing her tiny hand on his.

BALTHAZAR JONES HADN’T INTENDED
to go out once he had finished work for the day. But the top floor of the Salt Tower no longer felt like the sanctuary it once was, and after sitting slumped on the sofa in the darkness for an hour, he left to walk the battlements. As he strode, his hands sheltering in his pockets from the cold, he found that his problems had followed him. He stopped for a moment and gazed at Tower Bridge, lit up like a fairground attraction in the darkness, but
his troubles rose around him like a fog, and he was forced to move on. No matter how fast he walked, he was unable to shake them off.

Eventually, he sought refuge in the Rack & Ruin. Pushing open the great oak door, he stood for a moment on the worn flagstones wondering whether he could bear the company of so many people. Spotting an empty table next to a cabinet of Beefeater souvenirs, he ordered a drink, hoping that no one would notice him. But as he waited to be served, one of the Beefeaters standing at the bar turned to him and said: “Sorry to hear about your wife.”