‘Well, some date
In the darkness of the reptile house’s observation deck, Jack sought out Ianto’s hand and squeezed it affectionately. ‘You’re a bit of a charmer yourself, Mr Jones.’
Ianto watched the taipan. It had already lost interest, and slithered its olive-green body to the other side of the glass exhibit space. ‘I didn’t charm him. Or maybe her.’
‘What d’ya expect?’ Jack grinned. ‘Staring out from a glass box for years on end. Who’d want that?’ He nodded at the exit. ‘C’mon, you can buy me an ice cream.’
They stepped out from the gloomy reptile house and into the cold, crisp, bright November air of Torlannau Zoo. The attraction had not long opened for the day, but already it was getting busy. Kids were chattering and screaming with delight at the antics of monkeys or horror at the smells of the hippos. Parents were already being pestered for ice creams. Zoo staff chaperoned and pointed, easily marked out in the growing crowds by their brightly coloured uniforms.
Ianto said, ‘We keep Janet in a glass box. Down in the cells.’
‘Never had you picked out as an animal liberationist.’ Jack was pretending to look shocked. He checked the wristband above his free hand. He never seemed to take that damned thing off – not even in bed, though that did sometimes have imaginative compensations. Ianto suspected that Jack had only agreed with today’s suggestion for a date at the zoo because Toshiko had mentioned some earlier Rift activity. And that ill-disguised glance was at least the tenth time Jack had scrutinised his wrist readout. He probably thought he was being surreptitious.
‘You’re off duty, Captain Harkness.’ Ianto tugged Jack’s hand, as though he could drag him away from work. ‘Hey, what’s the collective noun for…’ He looked around for a nearby display area. ‘Yeah… meerkats?’
‘Is this a date or a pop quiz?’
‘I’ll take that to mean that you don’t know,’ persisted Ianto, pulling Jack into the walkway and the conversation at the same time.
‘Or don’t care.’
‘Anyway, the answer is “a mob”. How about… lions?’
‘Easy! A pride. Like lions and cheetahs and all those pack animals.’
‘Pack animals carry things,’ Ianto objected. ‘Y’know, beasts of burden.’
‘Or they live in packs,’ noted Jack. ‘Y’know, like the word suggests.’ He grinned at Ianto, and swung his hand forward. ‘No, no, it’s my turn. How about… Weevils?’
Ianto considered this briefly, before concluding: ‘It’s a shitload, obviously.’
They both laughed vigorously at this. An old couple were walking past them on the tarmac path. The pair had their collars turned up against the cold, hands shoved well into the pockets of their matching beige anoraks. The little old guy narrowed his eyes at Ianto. ‘Language, please!’ he said mildly. ‘There are children about.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Ianto, trying not to laugh more. Jack wasn’t helping by stroking the hairs on the back on Ianto’s hand with his fingers.
The beige anorak studied them. ‘You’re a bit old to be holding hands.’
Jack smiled pleasantly. ‘You have no idea.’
The elderly woman took her hand from her coat and tugged at her husband’s sleeve. ‘You’re never too old to hold hands, Walter,’ she chided him gently. ‘You just carry on, boys.’
Walter’s face relaxed into a smile, and he and his wife walked on down the path, their translucent fingers now intertwined in an affectionate knot.
‘It’s not a pack of leopards,’ began Ianto.
Jack groaned. ‘Are we still on that?’
‘Or tigers…’
‘Hey, we’re near the tigers. Let’s ask.’ Jack had spotted a big guy in a grey boiler suit. Had to be one of the zoo staff. ‘Hello!’ Jack called to him. ‘Do you know what you call a whole loada tigers? Like a crowd, or a pride, or…?’
The boiler suit barely registered them. He was a huge, tall guy. Maybe two metres from his solid mud-caked combat boots to the tip of his spiky red hair. A ginger wardrobe of a man, whose huge hands dwarfed the PDA he was manipulating.
‘D’you mind?’ Jack was insisting.
Ianto had walked over to join him. ‘Not one of the zoo staff,’ he said. He’d spotted that the crossed-keys logo on the man’s grey uniform read ‘Achenbrite’. The zoo uniforms, now he came to think of it, were blue-and- yellow.
The huge ginger guy snapped his PDA shut with a twitch of his sausage fingers. He hared away off the tarmac path, giant strides eating up the expanse of grass between the animal displays. A flock of flamingos startled and strutted away across their pen in a pink cloud of anxiety.
‘Achenbrite?’ mused Jack.
‘I noticed,’ agreed Ianto. ‘Did you spot the earpiece?’
A shrill scream cut across the still air. It came from the opposite direction, and it wasn’t the exhilarated squeal of a kid spotting a giraffe. This was full-throated terror. Ianto considered the directional signs, orienting himself with location information before running. There was the scream again. The signs indicated it came from over by the big cats.
Jack chased after him up the incline towards the Bengal compound. ‘Did you see that sign?’ he grumbled. ‘They spelled “tiger” wrong.’
Ianto tutted. ‘It’s
‘Long enough.’
‘Long enough to have learned a bit of Welsh, that’s for sure,’ puffed Ianto.
Jack pouted. ‘I promise to be fluent by the time you introduce me to your family.’
‘Then you have plenty of time to learn,’ muttered Ianto. They skidded to a halt in front of the tiger enclosure. Two blue-uniformed zoo staff were directing a nosy crowd of visitors reluctantly away from the area. The squat burly man with a moustache made of broom bristles was having more success than his lanky counterpart. Jack and Ianto got past him during this distraction.
Ianto shoved at the access gate. ‘Shouldn’t this one be shut when the other is open?’
‘Gives you some idea about what’s in here,’ Jack said.
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Nothing. The animals have escaped.’ Jack was checking his wristband again, with no attempt to disguise it from Ianto.
Another young guy was in there ahead of them. He had his hair tied back in a lank brown pony tail, for all the world like a zoo animal himself. He was struggling to comfort a shrieking woman, also in staff uniform. ‘It’s gonna be all right, Bethan,’ he was saying, repeatedly, like a mantra.
‘No it’s not gonna be all right, Jordy!’ she yelled at him. Snot and saliva hung down from her puce face. ‘The tiger’s already killed Malcolm.’ She gestured wildly to a bloodied heap by the tree at the centre of the compound. Pony-tailed Jordy wasn’t able to look, and concentrated instead on Bethan. She was having none of it. ‘I spotted his body when the enclosure wall disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’ Jordy’s voice was shrill with incredulity, until he remembered he was supposed to be calming her. He stepped over to the exterior wall and slapped its unyielding surface with the palm of his hand. ‘It hasn’t disappeared. See?’
‘It came back,’ she grunted, her voice low and emphatic. She stared at the wall accusingly, as though daring it to be there in defiance of everything she’d said. Ianto followed the curve of the enclosure wall with his eyes. Beyond the moat that encircled the compound was an enormous glass observation window. Through it, Ianto could see that members of the public were being hustled away from the area.
Jack nudged Ianto to get his attention. ‘The ground in here is sodden.’ He was doing that thing he enjoyed – talking through the evidence as he took it in, encouraging confirmation or contradiction from Ianto. ‘The pool in the middle there has overflowed. Backing up from the drain, maybe? Or was the victim hosing the place down before he got attacked?’
