Seventy-Seven Clocks

∨ Seventy-Seven Clocks ∧

41

Tiger, Tiger

At five twenty-seven the following morning, the elegant Chiswick home of Christian and Deborah Whitstable lay in darkness, and would remain so until an alarm rang in one hour and three minutes. Only a small porch light, operating on a time switch, stayed alight. The two officers May had insisted on appointing to secure the house were about to come off duty, and waited together in the front garden for the day shift to replace them.

Christian Whitstable had been badly disturbed by his sister Isobel’s trauma. Little Daisy had remained mute since her rescue. Her mother’s health had declined so alarmingly that she had been admitted to a private hospital in Fulham. And he’d heard that Pippa’s mother was not doing much better, either.

Despite the danger, Christian had opted out of the police-protection scheme, preferring to spend Christmas at home. There had been too much reliance on the authorities, and what had they done but consistently let them down?

He and Deborah had argued bitterly over the decision. Having seen what had happened to her niece’s child, Deborah was keen to place her own children in the safekeeping of the police, but her husband had refused to join the rest of the clan huddled together in William Whitstable’s gloomy house. He believed in being the master of his fate, and extended that philosophy to his children, even if they were not yet old enough to appreciate the concept.

Deborah had complained that her husband’s misplaced sense of machismo was putting their children in harm’s way.

“Nonsense,” Christian had retorted over their cold turkey supper the previous evening. “We have the police guarding us day and night. There are always two of them outside, in plain view where the children can see them. And even if, God forbid, someone managed to slip inside the house, we’d be able to summon help before anything untoward happened. There’s only one door at the front and one at the back. They’d never be able to escape without capture.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Deborah had sighed, knowing that she could never win an argument with a Whitstable. She had taken to sleeping with a carving knife beneath the bed. If she had little faith in her husband, she certainly had none in their guards. One of the night officers, PC Graham Watson, looked around seventeen years old, and was as thin as a stick. He spent his time sitting on the porch disconsolately picking his nose and reading Ian Fleming novels until the shift was over.

Now he was standing by the garden gate, looking up into the black sky, adjusting the strap of his helmet and hoping that the shift change would arrive before the rain began again. He looked around for his partner, who had gone to carry out a final check at the rear of the house, and had not yet returned.

Behind him, somewhere on the right-hand side of the overgrown front garden, the bushes rustled heavily, water shaking from the leaves.

“Dez?” His portly partner for the night shift, PC Derek Brownlow, was not the most zealous of officers, and was in the habit of sneaking into the garden’s potting shed with a Mars Bar and a copy of Health & Efficiency. Now it sounded as if he had lost his way.

“Dez, what are you doing in there?” Watson pulled the pocket torch free of his rain mac. The porch light had just snapped off, throwing the garden into darkness. He had been meaning to tell Mr Whitstable that he should reset his timer.

He shone his torch into the bushes and walked slowly along the path, watching raindrops glitter in the fractured pool of light. Ahead, the shrubbery shook violently once more.

“Dez?” he called softly. “If that’s you, I’ll bloody kill you. Come on out, you’re making me nervous.”

♦

Deborah Whitstable hadn’t been able to sleep properly since Daisy had been found. No such trouble afflicted her husband. He was lying on his back, snoring lightly. The bedroom door was ajar, and a cool draught was blowing into the room. She hadn’t noticed it when she went to bed. It was always colder at this time, before the thermostat kicked in to heat the boiler and warm the children as they sleepily descended to the breakfast room.

She slipped silently from the bed and padded across to the window, moving aside the curtain. No sign of the policeman who was supposed to be guarding them, she noted, but the porch light had turned itself off, so she wouldn’t be able to see him standing there anyway.

There was a definite draught coming into the room, as if someone had left a door open. She stopped to pull on her dressing gown, then walked out into the hall. Immediately she noted the smell, musty and brackish. Had she remembered to empty the kitchen bin? She switched on a light and peered over the balustrade, down into the hall. It looked as if something had been thrown across the grey slate floor tiles. Then she realized that a batch of newspapers had been torn and scattered over the floor. It looked as if mud had been trodden in. The papers had been neatly piled when they had gone to bed. Who had knocked over the stack and rummaged through it so carelessly?

She was still trying to puzzle out the mystery when she heard the terrible breathing. Deep and rasping, asthmatic and obscene. And she saw the door to the children’s room moving back, widening slowly.

Her first thought was to run back to her bedroom and wake her husband. She considered calling to him, but knowing what a heavy sleeper he was, Christian would not hear her. It was when she saw what stood in the doorway that she attempted to scream.

Eight feet away from her, in the entrance to the room where Justin and Flora were fast asleep, was a fully grown male Bengal tiger.

It was insanity to think of such a creature standing in a suburban London house. But there it was, watching Deborah with ancient yellow eyes, its tail restlessly swinging, rhythmically thumping against the door jamb.

The beast was over six feet long, and its shoulders rose higher than the door knob behind it. It was old and distraught, confused by its unfamiliar surroundings. Long white hair hung from its sunken cheeks. Its fur was a deep orange-brown, beautifully marked with dark ochre transverse stripes. Its underparts were a dirty cream, its large splayed paws covered in mud and hooked with vicious black claws.

As the creature raised its enormous head and dilated its nostrils, picking up her scent, it began to pad towards her, and she saw its ribs sticking painfully out beneath its hide. She had read somewhere that old or disabled tigers would eat human flesh if they were hungry and considered their prey to be weaker than themselves. The animal moving in her direction looked half mad from starvation.

As Deborah’s shrill scream filled the air, the tiger loped forward and threw up its forepaws in a half-hearted leap, smashing her to the floor. Within seconds she heard shouts from her son and daughter, and even the sound of Christian attempting to rouse himself, but the body of the beast was crushing the life from her, its fetid breath blasting over her as it batted her head with its claws.

The creature opened its jaws to reveal rows of tall brown teeth, and stinking saliva poured on to her face as it reached down to clamp its mouth around her head and bite down hard, cracking bone and flesh, tearing sinew and skin from its thrashing, defenceless prey.

As Christian stepped into the hall in his pyjamas, his eyes widening in disbelief, the tiger dropped the victim it was lifting by the head. Attracted by the sound of the children screaming behind him, it turned its attention towards a more tender meal.