by Ruby Loren
The clamour of the penguins reached my ears long before I arrived at the gate outside their enclosure. I placed the buckets by my feet. My hand fumbled for the ring of keys I’d grabbed from the key board. The gate swung open when I attempted to slide the key in the lock. Hairs on the back of my neck stood up and a shiver jumped down my spine.
Something didn’t feel right.
I tried to tell myself that Ray must have forgotten to lock the gate when he’d left at the end of yesterday, but I could see an assortment of tools and bits of wood, left strewn around near the penguins’ lodge. I flicked on the lights that softly illuminated the penguin’s pool for the benefit of the zoo’s visitors.
It wasn’t until I walked round the corner, buckets in hand, that I saw the body.
At first, my mind refused to accept what it was seeing. There was a dark shape at the bottom of the pool. The movement of the water, caused by a few of the smarter penguins swimming in anticipation of the fish being thrown in made it hard to see clearly. What I couldn’t pretend to overlook was the familiar dark green polo shirt that the corpse was wearing and the way a cloud of brown hair floated back and forth with the currents. It looked like Ray wasn’t caught up in traffic after all.
I glanced down at the buckets in my hands and concluded that I couldn’t feed the penguins the usual way, by tossing the lot into the pool and making them do a little bit of work for their breakfast. A few head shakes later and I was pretty sure I was thinking more clearly. I dumped the buckets of fish on a relatively flat piece of concrete and let the penguins fight it out.
“Reception, hello?” I said into the walkie talkie that all zookeepers carried.
“Oh hey Madi, how are you doing? I was just thinking of calling for a chat.”
I winced as Jenna Leary’s nasal voice came across the frequency. We were friends, but not really. She was the kind of girl who would compliment you to your face and then say the exact opposite the moment your back was turned. I shook those thoughts from my head and tried to focus. “There’s a body at the bottom of the penguin pool. I think it’s probably Ray, the penguin keeper.”
“You’re kidding! He’s dead?”
“Unless he’s just broken the world record for the longest time spent underwater without breathing, I’m going to say yes,” I said, and then immediately regretted it when Jenna asked me to clarify if he was really dead or not. With hindsight, it probably was a little too soon for jokes.
“Just call the police and tell them someone’s…” I hesitated. Murdered? Killed? “…had a fatal accident,” I finished, figuring that was the safest option. A zookeeper had ended up at the bottom of the penguin pool and I doubted it was the penguins who had put him there. The tools and wood suggested that Ray had probably been doing repair work before something had happened and he’d wound up at the bottom of the pool.
I took a few steps closer to the edge of the water and could vaguely make out a smaller, darker shape, lying a few feet away from where Ray had come to rest.
A quick trip down to the underwater viewing window revealed a little more than I would have liked to see. It was Ray Myers all right. His eyes were still open and his head was turned towards the window, giving me the perfect view of his gaping mouth. His head was the wrong shape.
My gaze rested upon the other item at the bottom of the pool. It was a large sledgehammer. I joined the dots and was willing to bet that Ray’s head had almost certainly come into contact with that hammer.
I don’t know how I long I stood there, looking at the face of death, but it felt like an age had passed before I heard the fall of many feet and realised that the police had arrived. The next hour consisted of me sitting and waiting for the police to get around to asking their questions, or whatever it was they would want from me. Blue, police tape had gone up across the entrance to the penguin enclosure, blocking it from public access. It was something that I should have thought to do myself, but my mind was elsewhere.
I rubbed my ear, half listening to the discussions among the police as they discussed their theories about what had transpired. The sledgehammer had been recovered from the bottom of the pool. I’d overheard that it was strangely free from fingerprints, which apparently wouldn’t wash off in water that quickly. A few greasy smears were all that had been uncovered.
That was when talk of a second person began.
“You’re a zookeeper here, aren’t you?” One of the police officers had turned my way and I realised I recognised him. It was Detective Rob Treesden. He often came into the zoo to run child safety workshops for the local school kids in one of the rooms we rented out for events.
It wasn't surprising that he didn’t know who I was. I’d only ever known him by sight, but Jenna had a tendency to go on about him for weeks after he’d run one of his workshops.
I looked at his tanned face, noting the deep crows feet at the corner of each eye and the way the skin at his jaw was just starting to sag and become jowly. To his credit, he possessed two bright blue eyes that looked like chips of aquamarine and a full-head of salt and pepper hair, but I still thought he was way too old to be considering a date with. Jenna had a thing for older men. And younger men. And any men in-between those parameters.
I realised the detective was still waiting for an answer, so I nodded in response.
“Could you tell me how you came to find the deceased?” he asked.
I gave an account of my brief day at work, while he wrote it all down.
“Do you think it was an accident?” I asked when he’d closed his notebook and seemed to be done with questions. He fixed me with a look from those vivid, blue eyes.
“We won’t know for sure what happened until we’ve reviewed all of the facts,” he said. That was definitely code for ‘it’s none of your business’.
I nodded slowly and turned to go. It was clear I wasn’t needed or wanted in the area any more. Plus, there were animals that needed feeding and checking on and I was not naive enough to hope that any of the other keepers would have taken on my duties after they’d heard I’d been caught up. All of Ray’s aquatic animals were probably now my responsibility, too. I mentally waved goodbye to my lunch break.
It was only when I walked back through the gate, empty buckets in hand, that something important occurred to me.
“Detective,” I called, and the salt and pepper policeman turned from his discussion with barely concealed annoyance. “I turned the penguin pool lights on when I got here this morning. Someone must have turned them off last night.”
“Could Mr Myers have turned them off before he started work?” the detective asked, now a little less annoyed.
I thought about it. “No, he’d have no reason to. They get turned off overnight but he’d have wanted to do whatever fixing he was planning on doing while it was still light. If he was here as late as twilight, the lights probably would have helped him to see. Especially if he was working on the pool itself.” I nodded towards the crime scene photographer, who was leaning over the high side of the pool, photographing a jagged hole in the side. I was guessing the police had deduced that this was probably what Ray had been trying to fix when the fatal accident had occurred.
I frowned a little as I finally made it beyond the gate. Had it been an accident? If you paired the lack of fingerprints on the mallet with what I’d noticed about the light switch, it did start to look like Ray hadn’t been here alone last night. Had the other person present panicked and tried to cover it up when disaster had struck, or was it no accident at all that Ray Myers had ended up at the bottom of the penguin pool?
I found myself back at the food store and tried to put the events of the morning behind me. I had several aquariums full of fish I didn’t know how to feed to deal with and then there was my usual odds and ends round. Capybaras, echidnas, lemurs, porcupines, and wallabies, the list just went on and on. I knew by the time I’d finished breakfast it would be time to start the evening feed.
Already the stress of the day w
as mounting up, and by the time I’d thrown the fruit and veg in the general direction of the lemurs, I was almost tempted to snag some for myself. My stomach was growling and my mood was heading south. That was why I nearly bit off Tiffany’s head.
“Hi, you look like you’re working hard,” she said, appearing from nowhere carrying a box of stuffed animals.
Tiffany Wallace had been my friend ever since I started work at the zoo. She was just a shop assistant back then, but had since risen up to be manager of commerce. Technically, that made her a little above my pay grade but with someone who possessed as much natural charm as Tiff, it never got in the way. Naturally blessed with unusual strawberry blonde hair, her skin was unfairly flawless and usually took on a light gold hue, despite her hair’s colouring. Slender and tall, she turned heads anywhere she went and still managed to stay well-grounded.
It was enough to make you sick.
“All work, no play,” I said, with a touch more bitterness than I’d intended.
Tiff must have noticed because her smile slipped for all of a millisecond before she bounced back. “Oh, of course, how could I? You’ll have heard about Ray Myers, the penguin keeper,” she carried on, sensitivity permeating her voice while she automatically made an allowance for my snappish behaviour.
“I was the one who found him,” I admitted, surprised that it wasn’t common knowledge. The power of the rumour mill at the zoo usually meant everyone knew when something had happened what felt like mere seconds after it had occurred.
Tiff’s mouth turned into a perfect ‘o’. “Are you serious? It was you who found him? Jenna made it sound as though she was the one who…” She trailed off and threw me a bemused smile.
I managed to return it. “That figures,” I said, thinking about Jenna. At the same time, I was kind of glad she was taking the credit and any resulting limelight. With the amount of work I had to do, being bombarded with questions was not going to speed along my day.
“Hey, did you hear anyone mention that they stayed to help Ray out last night?” I asked.
Tiff threw me a sharp-eyed look. “I think I heard Tom say that he remembered Ray mentioning staying late to fix a hole in the penguin pool. A couple of the workmen on site saw him before they clocked off at the end of the day yesterday, but none of them mentioned seeing anyone else. Do the police think that… he had company?” Tiff tactfully probed.
“I don’t know what they’ve concluded but I’m pretty sure someone else was there.” I thought back to the way Ray’s head had looked and that big, heavy hammer, which I was sure had been the cause of his demise. Would somehow dropping it on his own head have caused that level of damage, or had the scene just been arranged that way to help the police draw the simplest conclusion?
“I hope the police interview those animal rights crazies. They make me feel so uncomfortable. It’s like they think I’m a criminal,” Tiff said, following my own line of thought.
The ‘animal rights crazies’ were a rag tag bunch of protesters, who were currently camped outside the zoo entrance. Every day they’d be there waving their signs and shouting about alleged animal abuse taking place in the zoo. Some months, the group dwindled or even evaporated entirely, as the activists presumably found more pressing animal abuse allegations to take a stand against. Unfortunately, a recent incident at the zoo had drawn them back and they’d come like bees to honey. Or rather, flies to the stinking heap of dung that was the zoo’s unwanted PR leak.
“I can’t really see why they’d do something like this though,” I said, carefully. “To go from waving signs around outside a zoo and shouting abuse at employees to murder is quite a leap.”
Tiff’s blue and gold eyes darkened for a second and she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Yes, but I’ve heard rumours that another group is coming here. People who have a reputation for taking matters further.”
My dark, and rather unruly, eyebrows shot up. It was the first I’d heard of more extreme activists. What if they’d already arrived?
Tiff absentmindedly flicked her hair back over her shoulder and at least three dads in the near vicinity tried not to openly drool. “I should let you get on, but I’ll be sure to tell you if I hear anything else.” Tiff tended to hear all of the best gossip because everyone loved talking to her. I was never quite sure why she’d picked me out to be her best friend, but there was seldom a day when I wasn’t grateful for it.
She sashayed off with her box of stuffed animals, leaving me to give the lemurs a once over. It wouldn’t be long before I’d be back with their second feed.
I spared a moment to sit down after I’d fed the wallabies. Taking some time out with bouncy marsupials was actually justifiable. It was only one month ago that Gina and Lowry, two of my favourite wallabies, had given birth. Now bulges were just beginning to show in their respective pouches. The vet was pleased with their progress but I still liked to hang out with the pair of mummy wallabies, just to check. More than once I’d had a gut feeling about something being wrong with an animal. I’d long since learned to go with those gut feelings, as you never knew when it could be the difference between life and death… or even a new life coming into existence.
I thought about the echidnas, Alan and Joan, who had surprised the world last year by hatching three puggles in a first for a UK zoo in decades. That same other sense had whispered in my ear months beforehand that the echidnas needed more variety in their enclosure. I’d managed to convince the managers to add a running stream of water that led to a shallow pool. I’d also landscaped the enclosure on several levels to give the pair more hidey-holes and interesting places for little echidnas to investigate. It hadn’t been long after, that they’d used the hollow tree log as a nesting site and the puggles had emerged, as healthy and happy as their parents.
Of course, the animal rights people had been furious. An incredulous smile formed on my lips. While animals were my life, I had no great love for the odd bunch who hung out every day in front of the entrance and generally did their very best to make a nuisance of themselves. They claimed to be animal lovers, but I’d always thought if they were truly that worried about the welfare of animals, they’d be doing something positive toward it. They could volunteer, or get a career that allowed them to have some say over the animal issues they particularly cared about. Instead, they spent their time harassing those who were actually trying to make difference.
I pursed my lips, as I thought over my very unpopular opinion. While I knew the majority of staff working at the zoo would most likely agree with me, pretty much no one would be stupid enough to say it out loud. You never knew who was listening and if recent events were anything to go by, someone was definitely telling tales to the other side.
I smiled and waved at Vanessa, the keeper who looked after the zoo’s insect, reptile and amphibian collection. If it was slithery or slimy, Vanessa liked it. Vanessa looked at me over the rims of her winged glasses and bared her teeth, which I’d grown to assume was what passed as a smile for her. She disappeared through the heavy plastic flaps that separated the outside world from the muggy interior of the insect house.
Vanessa was one of the most experienced keepers at the zoo, but she was a little hard to swallow at times. I had no problem with her fondness for the creepy and the crawly, but her suggestions of more interactive exhibits weren’t to everyone’s taste. Most notably, her suggestion for an experience where people could walk among hornets and killer bee. It often made me wonder if she didn’t secretly harbour hopes of an invertebrate world-takeover. Fortunately, the zoo board of directors shared my (and pretty much everyone else’s) scepticism. They were also in charge of the zoo’s insurance, which unsurprisingly wouldn’t stretch to cover deaths from hornets and killer bees caused by an ‘interactive’ exhibit. That hadn’t stopped Vanessa from resubmitting her proposal at every opportunity with a few slight modifications. I had heard hints that this summer’s concept would be swimming with snakes… but only the venomous ones.
; Gina’s furry wallaby head nudged my cheek and I was snapped back to the reality of my double duty. I pulled the timetable I’d hastily printed off in-between maniacally throwing food at various animals. Every animal had been fed their first meal of the day, despite some of them loudly protesting my tardiness. Now it was time to see to some of the other pressing jobs and I noted with a sinking heart that the penguin pool wasn’t the only bit of maintenance work Ray had been planning for the week.
The beavers’ dam had grown to such a size that it was a hazard, both to the beavers who had little clue about the flaws of the zoo’s artificial landscaping, and to the zoo’s structure. The deep pool of water they’d created by damming up the stream that ran through their enclosure had grown exponentially since they’d managed to fully dam up the stream. Now it was in danger of flooding out of their enclosure and through the non-water sealed viewing window. I rolled my eyes at this oversight. Sabotaging the beavers’ dam wasn’t a task I relished. I knew it amounted to deliberately making work for the animals, but who was I to argue with the gods of health and safety?
Armed with some beaver treats, waders, and a broom, I squelched into the enclosure. Once the beavers were suitably distracted and out of harm’s way, I set about poking holes in their dam and knocking off the topmost layer. There were plenty of trees and rocks in the enclosure, placed there for the very purpose of dam building, so I didn’t expect it to be long before this job would need doing again. By the time I’d slunk out of the enclosure, the beavers’ ‘eeh’ sounds of outrage were already filling my ears, as they discovered my subterfuge.
I hoped they didn’t hold grudges.
Although I wouldn’t have claimed it was my lucky day by any stretch of the imagination, the rest of the afternoon passed without anything else significant going wrong. It wasn’t long before I’d finished the evening feed and found it was only one hour after my official finishing time.