Mortonhall Crem was packed out. The whole Meadows Tennis Club had come to say goodbye to Erin Strachan, along with her university mates, old school friends, and a large family spread around Erin’s distraught mother. Dorothy and Archie wheeled the coffin down the aisle and were joined by Erin’s father and three brothers at the plinth. They lifted it between them. Dorothy arranged the bouquet and sat.
This was all so familiar to her. The seventies décor of the building, the echoing words of the minister, the insufferable pain of the front row. A twenty-one-year-old was very hard, and sudden death from a stroke made it harder. Dorothy had got the medical details from Erin’s mum, suddenly an expert in intracerebral haemorrhage. She’d channelled her grief into finding a reason, but Erin had no congenital condition that predisposed her to stroke, no high-risk factors, normal blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides, healthy lifestyle, not a smoker or drug taker. Yet she keeled over playing an easy backhand at the net in a tennis game and that was that. What was the Beckett thing? ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’
Erin’s youngest brother read a short Raymond Carver poem, then the eldest tried to give a eulogy, broke down in tears, his parents sobbing too. You didn’t often see grown men cry in Scotland but Alex Strachan was shaking with grief, clutching his wife’s hand as if they could save each other from drowning.
Dorothy imagined Hannah in the coffin and felt herself well up. She thought of Einstein torn to pieces, two bodies out there without feet. She remembered watching her husband’s body burn in her back garden. She felt Archie’s hand on her back but didn’t stop, kept channelling the grief of the world.
Winona Pepe came out of the enclosure smelling of raw meat. Dorothy had watched her empty buckets of the stuff while the tigers were being held inside, their guttural roars as they smelled the food making Dorothy’s ribcage shudder. Winona dumped the buckets and washed her hands long and hard at the sink. She joined Dorothy at the Perspex window as the tigers were released. Dharma and Maya sauntered towards lunch and began ripping the flesh apart. Part of the meal was a deer’s leg and Dharma’s teeth sunk into the thigh as her muzzle turned red. Dorothy thought of Whiskers gnawing at her arm, heard Einstein bark in her mind, felt the weight on her chest stopping her from breathing.
‘Are you OK?’ Winona said.
Dorothy nodded. ‘They’re incredible, aren’t they?’
Winona smiled but didn’t take her eyes off the tigers. ‘I love them.’
The way she said it, quietly but with force, Dorothy felt that love.
‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure?’ Winona said.
Dorothy turned. There was something very likeable about Winona. She was so comfortable with herself, tattoos and bright hair, the musty smell of tigers on her skin. There was something attractive about people who’d found their place in life. She wondered if she gave off the same air.
‘I met Whiskers,’ she said.
It took Winona a moment to twig. She looked at Dorothy’s bandaged arm and raised her eyebrows.
‘Yeah,’ Dorothy said.
Winona’s eyes went wide. ‘Holy shit, are you OK?’
Dorothy touched the bandage. ‘This is the worst of it. And some bruised ribs.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘My dog didn’t make it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘He saved me.’ If she kept saying it she might feel the truth in her bones.
‘What’s she like?’ Winona said. ‘Whiskers, I mean.’
Dorothy thought about the question. ‘She’s beautiful.’ The jaguar wasn’t really black, she’d noticed as Whiskers came at her, she had a spotted pattern under the darkness, like an oil slick on the surface of her body.
‘I bet,’ Winona said. ‘But terrifying.’
‘For sure.’
Maya snarled at his mate in the enclosure, a throaty growl that seemed to shake the earth. Dharma stood her ground, not removing her teeth from the deer leg but turning to face him, showing off her prize. Maya slunk away with a chunk of flesh of his own.
‘I want to ask you all about it,’ Winona said. ‘But I guess you’re not too keen on reliving it.’
‘Not really.’
‘Fair enough.’ Winona looked inside the enclosure for a long time, then turned. ‘So why are you here?’
Why was Dorothy here? She liked to read novels where the characters knew everything about their own motivations, why they did what they did, how they logically came to the right conclusions. But real life wasn’t like that. It was a chaotic mix of intuition and farce, we all stumble along trying to find meaning as we go, reverse engineering motives and reasons, trying to make a linear story from the mess of existence.
‘Honestly, I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I just need to find out more. It sounds stupid but I feel a connection to that animal now. She could easily have killed me but she didn’t. I was so lucky. I want to find her and make sure she’s OK, make sure no idiot ends up shooting her.’
To Dorothy’s surprise Winona wrapped her in a hug. Her ribs moaned with pain, but she welcomed the embrace all the same. Eventually she pulled away.
‘You said before there are private breeders wherever there’s money.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But you’d need expert knowledge too, right?’
‘Sure.’
‘I wondered if someone who used to work here might be involved, someone who seemed a bit off or had a grudge?’
Winona considered the question carefully, narrowed her eyes. ‘I’ve been here six years and we have a pretty stable team. It’s not the kind of job people do for a couple of years, tends to be for life once you’re into it.’
‘No disgruntled employees?’
Winona smiled. ‘Honestly, no. I pride myself on looking after the team and we’re close-knit. I’m sure none of them would be involved in anything like this. It’s so bad for the cats, like imprisonment or torture, really.’
Dorothy rubbed at her bandage and nodded. ‘What about before you were here?’
Winona rubbed her chin. ‘The guy I took over from, Neil Unwin, I never heard anything bad about him but he was old school.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Took early retirement,’ Winona said. ‘He knew which way the wind was blowing with zoo policy and animal treatment.’
‘Any idea how I can get in touch with him?’
‘I’ll have his address in the office, come on.’
She walked away from the enclosure and Dorothy followed, as Dharma let out another roar, reminding the world she was a force to be reckoned with.