Read Online Zorilla At Large! by William Stafford - Free Book Online

time to get the team together and working as well as she wanted. How could she remove one cog - any cog - and expect the wheels to keep turning?
    Fuck the bean flickers! She thumped the desk. No, I don’t mean flickers - I mean counters. What do they understand about police work? Everything is numbers to them. What do they care about how many murderers get away as long as the accounts balance?
    Fuck them all!
    She threw the pile of folders across the room and then Chief Inspector Karen Wheeler did something she hadn’t done since primary school.
    She cried.

Chapter Seven
    While the Serious team was listing words beginning with zed, like a foul-mouthed edition of Sesame Street , up the hill, in the town centre, Mavis Morris, attendant in Dedley’s museum, was tidying up.
    They’d had a school party in and they were always trouble. First there was the litter. Sweet wrappers, crisp packets, crusts torn from sandwiches. And chewing gum. The bastard who invented that abomination ought to be shot, in Mavis’s opinion. And, if he was already dead, he should be dug up and shot and then strung up from a lamppost. Yes! That was one exhibition Mavis would pay to see.
    After the litter, there were the fingerprints. Mavis attended to these and other assorted smears that besmirched the glass cabinets. It was as if DO NOT TOUCH was in a foreign language. Or the little bastards couldn’t read - What were they teaching them in those schools these days?
    Glass all polished, Mavis steeled herself to brave the worst of the horror: the toilets. They would be like a dirty protest at a sewage plant during which several bombs had gone off. Stink bombs and all.
    She retrieved the equipment and cleaning products from the walk-in cupboard and donned a second pair of rubber gloves over those she was already wearing. She muttered prayers to Messrs Sheen and Muscle for strength.
    It was always like this. Every time they mounted a new exhibition the school parties would come flocking in. As usual, the children couldn’t give a monkey’s for the new exhibits; all they cared about was the old stuff: the fossils and the dinosaur bones. The Viking axes. And what they could filch from the gift shop, the sticky-fingered bastards. If Mavis had a quid for every T. Rex pencil topper that had disappeared up the sleeve or into the pocket of a sticky urchin - well, she might just about break even.
    And so the latest display required the least of her attention. History of the Moving Image , it said on the posters. The kids weren’t bothered. Not now they’ve got their YouTubes and their selfie sticks and god-knows-what in the palms of their hands.
    On her way past the doors, something moved in the corner of her eye...
    Glad of the distraction from the Herculean task of cleaning the toilets, Mavis poked her head through the doors. All was stillness, all was in shadow. The screens were all off and the equipment was dormant. Photographs of film stars from pale-faced Buster Keaton to the tanned and buff Oscar Buzz smiled down at her from the star-spangled ceiling.
    Oscar Buzz... He’d been to Dedley only last year. Mavis would like five minutes alone with him and her rubber gloves. Pity he’d turned out to be one of them . What a bloody waste!
    She could put it off no longer and withdrew her head from the doorway. She turned and squawked in alarm. Then she laughed. She addressed the huge, stuffed bear that had startled her.
    â€œOh! Bloody hell! Had me going for a minute.”
    She swatted at the bear with a J-cloth and wheeled her trolley toward the toilets.
    Hang about, she froze.
    Since when have we had a stuffed bear?
    ***
    It was inevitable. The local papers got wind of the murders, despite the police’s best efforts to keep a lid on, and in the interests of boosting their circulation, splashed frightening and erroneous headlines across the front pages. It was as though exclamation marks were going out of fashion.