by R. N. Morris
It envied him, he knew it. Why wouldn’t it? It had been wrested far from its home, to be gawped at by the world and his wife. And with only raw dead fish from a stinking bucket to feed on. Not to mention having to defecate in the same place as it dined. Even a bear must object to that.
He could feel its hostility and its envy.
Now and then, he could even hear the bear’s evil thoughts. Naturally, the animal was not capable of verbal thought. Which was how he knew that it was the bear’s thoughts he was hearing. They came to him as unpleasant vibrations and strident screeches that he felt in his solar plexus. And even though they were wordless, there was no doubt about the malice they bore.
Oh, it was a sly one all right. Pretending to be absorbed in the fish, or from time to time breaking off to consider the long claws of its toes with perfect complacency.
It seemed to be saying to him, ‘It would be an easy thing for me to rip you apart, you know.’
Harold noticed how it turned its head in every direction except towards him. Sly! Very sly!
He looked around to see if anyone else shared his suspicions and his outrage. But no, the other visitors to the Mappin Terraces at London Zoo seemed perfectly enchanted by the bear’s demeanour.
Could they not see how it wished them all harm?
The polar bear was man’s enemy. The only thing that had prevented war between man and polar bears was the accident of geography; neither had very much interest in the other’s territory.
But the zoo authorities had made a fatal mistake in bringing this beast to London and placing it in the midst of the civilian population, without any form of military supervision. Not only that, they fed it and kept it alive, with only a low railing and a shallow pit to protect the public.
The bear could easily climb out and run rampage. Go berserk, in fact. A teacher had once told him that the word berserk had something to do with bears. Wasn’t it to do with warriors who fought like bears, ripping their enemies apart with their teeth and bare hands? Who fought without arms or armour, protected only by the bestial rage that possessed them.
He seemed to remember it came from the Norse. Or was it Russian?
He couldn’t remember exactly what the teacher had said now. The lesson had been given in the context of his own behaviour at the time. Apparently he had gone berserk himself, and old Mr Beesley couldn’t resist the opportunity for a lesson in etymology.
The bear looked peaceful enough now. At this moment it was holding its toes, as if it had only just discovered they were attached to it. Feigning simplicity, Harold had no doubt. It liked to give the impression that it was some kind of arctic Buddha. It was fat enough. A deceitful smile played about its chops. But Harold knew what was really going on. It was trying to hide its envy with a smile. But it lacked the control over its facial muscles to pull it off: the bear was not a good actor.
It pretended to be a simple creature, content with a bucket of fish and a pond to swim in. But it did not know that Harold could hear its malign thoughts.
He had the measure of that bear, all right. He knew how, despite its demonstration of placidity, deep down, it hated all humans. And Harold especially. Perhaps it had an inkling of his power as a bear mind-reader and feared him as its natural master. All creatures hate that which they fear.
Did it expect them all to bow in homage to it? Or to pay it tribute of some kind? To throw it iced buns or a freshly sacrificed child?
It must have sensed that it would never receive such obeisance from Harold. And hated him all the more for that reason.
No, he would never bow to it. On the contrary, he would teach that bloody polar bear a lesson!
He would wipe the deceitful grin off its face.
But most of all, he would silence the din of its thoughts crashing into his head uninvited.
Harold began to pull at his clothes. He was hardly conscious of what he was doing, or why.
The clamour of the bear’s ill will left little room for thoughts of his own.
First his jacket came off, discarded carelessly on the ground behind him. Next he tore away his waistcoat, and then the shirt, which was ripped apart with the force of his undressing. He would meet the bear on equal terms, without the trappings of civilization or even basic humanity. If anything he would become more bear than the bear. He would not have it said that he had an unfair advantage over his adversary.
As Harold kicked away his shoes and stepped out of his trousers, the bear’s rage filled his head with its noise. It seemed it had found a way to transmit the screams of the human females, whom it was bent on attacking as soon as it was at liberty.
Harold was completely naked by the time he scaled the railings to the enclosure. The polar bear maintained its show of serenity, but he could tell it was rattled. It had cranked up its mental assault, amplifying the sounds of women screaming in his head.
Still the bear feigned interest in its toes. It seemed to have sated its appetite for dead fish.
Harold held on to the horizontal bar of the railings. It was about a ten-foot drop to the terrace where the bear was. The strain began to tear at his fingers and arms. He would have to let go soon. His arms were about to pop out of their sockets. But the pain was worse when he let go. It ripped across his thighs and torso and snagged at his penis as his body scraped down the concrete wall.
He landed heavily, feeling the kick in his ankles before toppling over on to his side.
He screamed himself back into his rage before clambering to his feet.
The stench down in the enclosure was ripe. He could smell the raw fish, of course, warming in the sun. And then there was the smell of the excrement produced by a diet consisting solely of raw fish. On top of that there was the animal smell the bear produced to mark out its territory.
Harold breathed in all this but it did not intimidate him.
He felt an instinctive repulsion.
He stretched out his arms and extended himself to his full height as he faced up to the bear. His mouth opened and his throat vibrated with a howl of primal rage. The roar drowned out all other sounds, silencing at last the violent screeches and clangs and screams transmitted by the bear.
The bear broke off consideration of its toes and looked up. Its expression was mildly curious, though there was perhaps an air of being inconvenienced that might have given a more perceptive intruder pause for thought. For a second or two it seemed to be engaged in some kind of calculation.
In the end, it decided to overcome its natural indolence to defend itself. It rose on its hind legs, to its full massive height, towering over its adversary. It gave an answering growl, an effortless bass rumble that suggested untapped resources of power and violence.
But Harold was deaf to such alarm signals. He rushed towards the sound. He kept up his own roar, but to any ears other than his own it must have sounded puny by comparison.
He held his hands tensed open in front of him as if he fully expected to tear his foe apart.
The bear watched him approach with a kind of bemused indignation and, at the last possible moment, merely batted him away with its unfurled claw, as a man might swat a bothersome insect.
The man’s body sprawled with everything akimbo as it flew through the air. The skull struck the concrete first, with a sickening crack. The man fell as limp as a crumpled sack and lay unmoving.
The bear’s nostrils twitched. In the scent of fresh blood it detected the promise of an unexpected variation from the monotony of its diet.
THREE
Silas Quinn sat at his desk in the attic office of the Special Crimes Department in New Scotland Yard. The ceiling sloped sharply along one side. It looked like a segment of the room had been cut away. Quinn always had the sense that they were being hampered by their environment. The missing space seemed to represent the missing pieces in whatever investigation they were pursuing. If he could solve the case, he would restore all the corners of the room. But that never happened. Which left him dogged by a sense
of permanent failure. On top of that, the three of them invariably banged their heads if they rose too sharply from their desks. And it was in the nature of police work that one was often called upon to rise sharply from a desk.
Outside, a light spring shower intensified into a thorough downpour, noisily slung against the window panes by a loutish squall. The temperature in the attic room dropped perceptibly.
Quinn’s herringbone ulster and bowler hat were hung on the coat stand by the door, the shoulders of the ulster speckled with damp. More than just items of clothing, they were the accoutrements of his office. The props, almost, of his dramatis persona. When he put them on, he manifestly became the great detective he was reputed to be. But the truth was Quinn no longer believed in his own myth, if he ever had. He felt that all the success he had achieved as a detective had been down to nothing more than good luck. More and more these days, when a new case came in, he found himself entirely stumped as to how to proceed. He allowed his subordinates – Sergeants Inchball and Macadam – to suggest competing plans, and he would alternately favour one and then the other. It was no way to run a department, he knew.
He refused to read the newspapers any more, because it was in the newspapers – especially in the pages of the gutter rag The Daily Clarion – that his reputation had been forged.
Just to look at a front page was enough to bring Quinn out in a flush of humiliation and shame. Should he not have been proud of his celebrity? Of his soubriquet of Quick-fire Quinn? No. It was a profound embarrassment. It mocked the dead, and made light of the risks his men faced at his command. As if policing was just another branch of the entertainment industry.
He knew better than anyone at what price his spectacular success rate had been achieved. How many people had died. Some of them, it was true, were violent criminals, whose deaths few would mourn. But there had been other deaths along the way too.
And for all his supposed investigative genius, he had not been able to stem the tide of death. In fact, he had the sense that death was marshalling its forces and building momentum as it led them all towards some great tour de force.
Quinn could not shake off a sense of impending catastrophe.
All his days seemed to be shaped around death. It was only to be expected. He was a murder detective. Death was his occupation. He could not get the stench of it out of his nostrils. The colour of it haunted his dreams.
The last straw had been the death of Miss Dillard, the lonely inebriate spinster who had lodged at the same house as him. It was strange how her death had affected him more than any other recently. He felt that he bore a greater share of responsibility in it than the others. Not simply that he had failed to save her life, but that he had caused her death.
And suicides always upset him.
So many deaths, of so many people. And he was the one thing that connected them all.
‘Penny for your thoughts, guv?’ The enquiry came from Sergeant Inchball. But Quinn felt the solicitous gaze of both his sergeants on him.
The idea of sharing his thoughts frankly appalled him. And yet it seemed that something was expected of him. They would not let him be until he gave some response. ‘We must be vigilant, Inchball.’
‘Vigilant, you say. What are we looking out for in particular, guv?’
Quinn angled his head with slow deliberation. It was a gesture designed to convey supreme acuity of thought. Quinn wondered if it was enough to satisfy Inchball. He suspected not. Inchball was your bullish, blunt breed of copper, the sort who insisted on calling a spade a spade. Enigmatic, ambiguous gestures rarely cut it with him. And long silences invariably made him fidgety. Quinn sensed this one had probably gone on too long already. ‘For anything … unusual.’
Confusion drew in Inchball’s eyebrows. The man couldn’t help it, but there was always something belligerent about his expression.
Macadam was arguably more sensitive to the nuances of a situation. And he tried now to deflect what threatened to be a dangerous turn of the conversation, to rescue Quinn with an exercise of his initiative.
‘You mean something like this, sir?’ Macadam had the day’s papers spread out on his desk. ‘A very unusual case. It’s in all the papers. You must have seen it?’
‘No.’ Quinn’s answer came a little too quickly. He wondered if they had noticed his wince of dismay at Macadam’s mention of the papers.
‘A young man, mauled to death by a polar bear.’
‘Well! What’s to investigate?’ cried Inchball disdainfully. ‘It’s the bear what done it, you said so yourself.’
‘No, no, but the circumstances of the death are very unusual. The man entered the bear pit willingly, and – I should say – naked. That is to say, he took off his clothes before he jumped in. And he ran at the bear, as if inviting his own destruction.’
‘A madman, obviously,’ said Inchball.
‘I agree with Inchball,’ said Quinn. ‘I don’t see what there is for us to investigate here.’
‘Perhaps not,’ conceded Macadam, a little dejectedly. ‘But you have to admit it is unusual.’
‘Are you suggesting that we should prosecute the zoo authorities for not sufficiently safeguarding this man from his own desire for death?’
‘No, no. I just wonder what made him do it, that’s all.’
‘What makes anyone do anything?’ From the way Inchball barked out the question, it was clear that he neither expected nor wanted an answer. ‘Especially if he’s a nutter, as this geezer obviously was. I mean, what did he have against polar bears?’
‘I can’t help feeling that there’s something more to this,’ insisted Macadam. ‘I have noticed that there is a mood among the young today. A death wish.’
Quinn forced himself to engage in the discussion. ‘It seems to be a simple case of suicide. If you discount the more outlandish circumstances of the death.’
‘But, sir, haven’t you often said that it is the outlandish circumstances of a death that are the very things we should not discount?’
Quinn could not remember having ever said such a thing. He suspected it of being an original thought of Macadam’s, to which he hoped to lend authority by attributing it to his superior. ‘Did I say that?’
Macadam became evasive. ‘Well, I may not have remembered the exact words.’
Quinn shook his head impatiently, animated by a sudden energy. ‘We need something more concrete. What are the Irish up to these days?’
‘The usual,’ cried Inchball bitterly. ‘But tell me, guv, are we now to be an adjunct of the War Office? Are we military intelligence now? Because if that’s the case, nobody told me.’
‘In these times of heightened tension and uncertainty, we must respond to whatever call our country makes.’
‘Do you think it will come to war, sir?’
Quinn was taken aback by the question. ‘In Ireland?’
Macadam helped him out. ‘It’s a bloody mess there, I’ll grant you. A powder keg about to blow up. The unionists are willing to go to war with Great Britain, in order to remain part of Great Britain. It makes no sense, I know. Meanwhile the nationalists are amassing arms to fight the unionists, which would place them on our side in an Irish Home Rule war. Except the British Army would never fight the loyalists, as was proved at Curragh. So the nationalists are really amassing arms to use against us, to ensure that we push through with Home Rule. Then again, if there is war against Germany, the likelihood is that both Irish factions will fall in line and fight with us.’
‘Let’s hope that happens then,’ said Inchball brightly.
‘No, no. That would be the worst possible outcome!’ objected Macadam.
‘It’s doing my head in, I tell you,’ said Inchball. ‘So who are we to keep an eye on? The unionists or the nationalists?’
Quinn looked to Macadam for guidance, but his expression was as expectant and trusting as Inchball’s. ‘We must watch them all.’
‘Right you are,’ said Inchball, with an uneasy glance to M
acadam.
‘Particularly the known troublemakers.’
Inchball vented his feelings with an oath: ‘Bloody Micks!’
‘I tell you who I worry about, sir,’ said Macadam. ‘The pacifists.’
Inchball let out a wheezy guffaw. ‘The pacifists! You ain’t got nothing to worry about there! Pacifists! They don’t exactly go around blowing things up, do they? It’s against their principles.’
‘Even so, I worry about the damage they do to the nation’s moral fibre. Sapping the martial spirit. I wonder if it wasn’t their influence that led this young man to do what he did.’
‘What a load of tosh! Have you ever heard such rot, guv? I mean, from anyone other than old Mac here?’
Quinn was finding it hard to keep up with his sergeants’ squabbles. He couldn’t remember in whose favour he had intervened last, and to whom therefore he owed favour now. The important thing was to keep them occupied. ‘You’re right, Macadam. We must keep an eye on the pacifists. Compile a dossier on all known pacifists active in the city. Bring it to me as soon as it is complete. You, Inchball, your brief is to watch the Irish.’
‘Where do I start?’
‘I shall leave that to your discretion.’
‘In that case, I’ll go to the pub. It’s as good a place to watch the Irish as anywhere.’ Inchball’s shoulders heaved in appreciation of his own joke.
FOUR
Cedric looked down and gasped.
Shooting stars passed beneath him. He had never seen a single shooting star in his life before, and now, tonight, he couldn’t keep count of how many there were.
He’d obviously been looking in the wrong place until now. Everybody knew you had to look up if you wanted to see stars, shooting or otherwise. And yet, here he was, looking down at them.
An endless procession of shooting stars passed by. In fact, two processions, each passing the other in parallel transit. It was strange how every star he saw followed the precise path of the one in front of it. He had never known they moved like that. It must be something to do with gravitational pull and orbits. He tried to work it out, but it only made his head ache.