Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo

He started down Water Lane, the cobbles slimy underneath his bare feet from the fallen leaves. As he approached Wakefield Tower, his thoughts turned to the odious ravens, which had been put to bed in their pens in the tower’s shadow. Their luxurious accommodation, with its running water, under-floor heating, and supply of fresh squirrel meat at the taxpayer’s expense, had been a constant source of irritation ever since he had discovered the true depth of their villainy.

His wife had taken an instant dislike to the famous birds when the family first arrived at the Tower. ‘They taste of shrouds,’ announced Hebe Jones, who, with the exception of peacock, which she deemed inauspicious, claimed to have eaten most species of animals.

However, the ravens had been an instant source of curiosity to Balthazar Jones. During his first week, he wandered over to one perched on the wooden staircase leading to the entrance of the White Tower, begun by William the Conqueror to keep out the vile and furious English. As the bird eyed him, he stood admiring the thousands of colours that swam in the oily blackness of its feathers in the sunlight. He was equally impressed when the Ravenmaster, the Beefeater responsible for looking after the birds, called the creature’s name, and it arrived at the man’s feet following a shambolic flight due to the fact that its wings had been clipped to prevent it absconding. And when Balthazar Jones discovered that they had a weakness for blood-soaked biscuits, he went out of his way to provide them with a splendid breakfast comprised of the delicacy.

Several days later, Milo, who was six at the time, shrieked ‘Daddy!’ and pointed to a raven standing on top of Mrs Cook, the family’s historic tortoise. All affection instantly vanished. It wasn’t just that it was extraordinary bad manners to hitch a ride – albeit at the most sedate of paces – aloft another creature that infuriated Balthazar Jones. Neither was it the fact that the bird had just left a copious runny deposit on top of his pet. What drove the Beefeater into a state of fury was the raven pecking at Mrs Cook’s fleshy bits with its satanic beak. And given the tortoise’s age of one hundred and eighty-one, there was a noticeable delay before she was able to draw her head and limbs into her worn shell away from the vicious assault.

It was by no means an isolated incident. Several days later, Balthazar Jones noticed that the ravens had assembled into what was indisputably an attack formation outside the Salt Tower, once used to store saltpetre. One of the birds squatted on top of the red phone box, three stood on a cannon, another perched on the remains of a Roman wall, and a pair sat on the roof of the New Armouries. The situation continued for several days as it took considerable time for Mrs Cook to explore her new lodgings. Eventually, she was ready for a change of scenery. But as soon as she set a wizened leg out of the front door, there was a uniform advance of one hop from the massed ravens. The birds displayed remarkable patience, for it took several hours for Mrs Cook to make sufficient ground out of the door to warrant a second hop. The Ravenmaster blamed the fact that it was well past their lunchtimes for what happened next. Balthazar Jones, however, vehemently insisted that their scandalous behaviour was not only a result of their allegiance to Beelzebub, but how they had been raised, an insult that pierced so deeply it was never forgotten. Whatever the reason, one thing was for certain: by late afternoon Mrs Cook, the oldest tortoise in the world, no longer had a tail, and one of the Tower ravens was too full for supper.

As Balthazar Jones passed Wakefield Tower, the sound of the Thames lapping through Traitors’ Gate seemed louder than usual in the darkness. He looked to his left and saw the vast wooden watergates that had once opened to let in the boats carrying trembling prisoners accused of treason. But he spared not a thought for such matters, the details of which he had to relate countless times during his working day to the tourists who were only interested in methods of torture, executions and the whereabouts of the lavatories. Instead, he pressed on, past the Bloody Tower with its red rambling rose, said to have produced snow-white blossoms before the murder of the two little princes. Neither did he notice the dancing candlelight at one of its windows, where the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh nibbled the end of his quill as he sat at his desk in what had been his prison for thirteen years.

Climbing up the stone steps, the Beefeater quickly reached the battlements. In front of him stretched the Thames where Henry III’s white bear had once swum for its dinner. But Balthazar Jones kept his pale blue eyes raised as he tried to work out from which direction the precious rain would come. Touching his white beard with his fingertips as he made his calculations, he scoured the sky through which the dawn was starting to leak.

Unable to sleep since her husband woke her as he left, Hebe Jones sneezed twice, irritated by the dust on her pillow. Rolling on to her back, she dragged a clump of damp hair from the corner of her mouth. Instead of coursing down her back as it had done during the lusty days of youth, it meandered slowly to her shoulders. Despite her age, apart from the odd strand that flashed like a silver fish in certain lights, it was the same luminous black it had been when Balthazar Jones first met her, a defiance of nature that he put down to his wife’s obstinacy.

As she lay in the darkness, she imagined her husband walking through the Tower’s grounds in his pyjamas, clutching an Egyptian perfume bottle in a hand that no longer caressed her. She had tried her best to rid him of his compulsion. During his first few attempts, she had caught him before he reached the bedroom door. But he soon improved his technique, and before long he was able to make it halfway down the stairs before he heard the seven words which he had grown to dread, uttered with the same red breath as his mother’s: And where do you think you’re going? However, dedication to the high art of vanishing resulted in a number of spectacular successes.

Hebe Jones began to monitor the escape manuals he borrowed from the public library, and locked the bedroom door before they turned out their reading lights, hiding the key while her husband was in the bathroom battling with the loneliness of constipation. But the trick backfired one morning when she could not remember where she had put it. Through a mouthful of humiliation which threatened to choke her, she asked him to help her in her search. He removed the loose stone next to one of the lattice windows, but all he found were the more aromatic love letters he had sent her during their courtship. He then strode to the fireplace, put his hand up the vast stone hood, and retrieved an old sweet tin from a ledge. Upon opening it he discovered a pair of silver cufflinks bearing his initials in the most alluring of scripts. His wife revealed that it was a gift she had bought for him four Christmases ago, which she had never been able to put her hands on. Her joy at seeing them again, and Balthazar Jones’s delight at suddenly receiving an unexpected present, distracted them both from their predicament. But before long, the hunt resumed until Balthazar Jones found what was indisputably a sex aid in the drawer of his wife’s bedside table. ‘What on earth is this for?’ he asked, pushing a button. Their dilemma was forgotten again for the next thirty-four minutes, during which many questions were asked. The answers that were forthcoming led to further questions, which in turn produced a series of accusations from both sides.

It was over an hour before they returned to their search. By then the cufflinks were back in the tin up the chimney with the announcement that he would have to wait until Christmas for them. Eventually, the pair admitted defeat, and Balthazar Jones reached for the phone and called the Chief Yeoman Warder to release them. The man made four attempts before the spare key sailed through one of the open windows. It was then that Hebe Jones spotted the original still in the keyhole, and she secretly removed it.

From then on the bedroom door remained unlocked, and no amount of protests would keep the Beefeater from his nocturnal wandering. It was with relief that Hebe Jones took the news one morning that her husband had been caught by the Chief Yeoman Warder. However, her relief turned to indignation when the rumours quickly followed that Balthazar Jones was carrying out a secret liaison with Evangeline Moore, the Tower’s young resident doctor, who quickened the heart rate of many of her patients. The claim was not without credibility as most affairs conducted by the Tower’s inhabitants took place within its walls, as they were locked in from midnight. While Hebe Jones knew instantly that there was no truth in the rumour – since Milo’s death her husband hadn’t allowed himself the pleasure of love-making – she nevertheless banished him from the matrimonial bed for a fortnight. Feet either side of the taps, Balthazar Jones slept in the bath. He endured the cramped, damp conditions dreaming amongst the spiders of being lost at sea in a sinking boat. Each morning Hebe Jones would get up early to run a bath, being careful not to remove her husband beforehand, and always ensuring that she ran the cold water first.

Now, as she looked at the bedside clock, fury coursed through her veins at yet another night of disturbed sleep. Her usual revenge, performed each time her husband returned to bed reeking of the night, was an anatomical masterstroke. Once she heard the muddy breath of a man descended deep into his dreams, she would suddenly leap from the bed and make the short journey to the bathroom with the gait of a demented sentry. Once installed on the lavatory, she would proceed to empty her bladder with the door wide open. The clamour of the catastrophic downpour was such that her husband would immediately wake in terror, convinced that he was lying in a nest of snakes. When the infernal hissing eventually came to an end, the Beefeater would instantly sink back to his dreams. But several seconds later, in a feat of immaculate timing, his wife would release a second, much shorter but equally deafening cascade, which would finish with a tone-perfect rising pitch, and wake her husband as brutally as the first.

Pulling the shabby blanket up to her chin, Hebe Jones thought of the cabinets of Egyptian perfume bottles filled with rain in the top room of the Salt Tower, and then of the cruelty of grief. Compassion suddenly chilled her rage. Ignoring the glass of water on her bedside table that she usually drank in its entirety on such occasions, she turned back on to her side. When her husband eventually returned home with his empty vessel after the clouds had fled, Hebe Jones pretended to be asleep. And when the torment of a full bladder woke her an hour later, she rolled on to her back to alleviate the suffering that eventually reached her ears.

2 (#ulink_705256f7-1556-5026-a831-67d1474fc61e)

It was the sight of her husband’s dressing gown hanging on the back of the bedroom door, an Egyptian perfume bottle still in its pocket, that reignited Hebe Jones’s anger the following morning. She pressed down on the latch with irritation, having lost all compassion for her husband because of a headache brought on by her broken night’s sleep. She descended the stairs in her pink leather slippers and nightclothes, recalling the previous occasions that her dreams had been disturbed by her husband’s obsession. When he joined her for breakfast at the kitchen table, she placed in front of him a plate of eggs that had been scrambled more vigorously than usual, then released the full fury inside her.

Several minutes later, the Beefeater’s stomach shrank again as she suddenly veered away from his compulsion, and launched into the many injustices of living within the fortress. She started with the Salt Tower roof that was such a poor exchange for her beloved garden at their house in Catford, which the wretched lodgers had let go to seed. Then there was the gossip that spread through the monument like fire. And finally there were the mournful sounds that permeated their home, once the prison of numerous Catholic priests during the reign of Elizabeth I, which both had pretended to Milo that they couldn’t hear.

For a moment Balthazar Jones closed his ears, having heard the complaints on countless previous occasions, and picked up his knife and fork. But suddenly his wife came up with a wholly new deprivation that caught his attention. Despite her unrepentant aversion to Italian food, which her husband put down to her nation’s historic distrust of Italy, she suddenly declared: ‘All I want in life is to be able to get a takeaway pizza!’ He remained silent as there was no escaping the fact that they lived at an address that cab drivers, washing machine repairmen, newspaper boys, and every official who had ever given them a form to fill in, assumed to be fictitious.

He put down his cutlery, and looked up at her again with eyes the colour of pale opals, something people who met him never forgot. ‘Where else could you live surrounded by nine hundred years of history?’ he asked.

She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Virtually anywhere in Greece,’ she replied. ‘And it would be a lot older.’

‘I don’t think you realise how lucky I was to get this job.’

‘A lucky person is someone who plants pebbles and harvests potatoes,’ she said, evoking the Greek mysticism of her grandparents. She then hunted around, searching amongst the rubble of their relationship for past hurts that she held up again in front of him. Balthazar Jones responded in kind, taking her examiner’s torch and shining it on ancient grievances. No shadow was left unlit and by the time they left the table, every fissure of their teetering love had been exposed to the damp morning air.

With furious, quick steps, Hebe Jones scuffed back up the stone spiral staircase to the bedroom. Dressing for work, she thought with regret at the part she had played in helping her husband secure a job at the Tower after his second career failed. As he had been a master stitch in the army, responsible for altering the magnificent Foot Guard uniforms, tailoring had seemed an obvious choice when he finally hung up his bearskin. When he suggested renting some premises, his wife thought of the mortgage they were still paying off, and warned: ‘Don’t extend your feet beyond your blanket.’ So he commandeered the front room of their terrace house in Catford, and built a counter behind which he presided, his measuring tape hanging around his neck with the sanctity of a priest’s stole.

A year later, Milo arrived after two fruitless decades of conjugal contortion. Balthazar Jones took care of him while his wife was at the office. In between customers, he would set the infant’s basket on the counter, pull up a chair, and proceed to tell his son all he knew about life. There were warnings to work hard at school ‘otherwise you’ll end up an ignoramus, like your father’. The child was informed that he happened to have been born into a family whose members included the oldest tortoise in the world. ‘You’ll have to look after Mrs Cook when old age turns your mother and I cuckoo, for which your maternal grandparents have always shown a natural disposition,’ he said as he tucked in Milo’s blanket. And it was pointed out that of all the blessings that would come to him in life, none would be greater than having Hebe Jones as a mother. ‘I’ve pitied every man I’ve ever met for not being married to her,’ Balthazar Jones admitted. And Milo would listen, his dark eyes not leaving his father for a moment as he chewed his own toes.

For a while it appeared that he had made the right decision in opening a tailor’s. But gradually fewer and fewer customers knocked at the house with the tiny Greek flag flying from the roof of the birdhouse in the front garden. Some stayed away, unsettled by having to wait while a nappy was being changed. Later, others blamed the brevity of their trouser legs on the attention the bewitched tailor gave to the boy, who ran round the shop as his father refused to send him to nursery. And when Milo was finally at school, some of the new trade that Balthazar Jones managed to pick up never returned after being measured, unsettled by the brutal honesty of a former soldier.

When he realised how precarious the family’s finances were, Balthazar Jones thought about the ways in which other soldiers earned a living after leaving the army. He remembered the time he had spent on sentry duty at the Tower of London, and the Beefeaters in their splendid uniforms, who went by the exalted title of Yeoman Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeomen Guard Extraordinary. Not only were they all former warrant officers from Her Majesty’s Forces, but each had an honourable service record of at least twenty-two years. Fulfilling both requirements, he posted off an application form. Four months later, a letter arrived informing him of a vacancy for the historic position, which had once entailed guarding prisoners, as well as torturing them, but since Victorian times involved acting as an official tour guide.

Hebe Jones, whose own earnings were modest, knew that their savings would never stretch to the university education they both wanted for their son. Ignoring the dread that set like cement in her guts, she dismissed her husband’s warning that they would have to live at the Tower if he were successful. ‘It’s every woman’s dream to live in a castle,’ she lied, not turning round from the stove.

When Balthazar Jones discovered that she had never visited the famous monument, he asked how it was possible since she had spent most of her childhood in London. She explained that her parents had only ever taken their four daughters to the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles. The sound of Mr and Mrs Grammatikos weeping as they stood in front of the Greek exhibits pilfered by the English was so catastrophic that the family was eventually banned from the museum for life. The couple consequently refused to visit any British landmarks, a protest Hebe Jones had kept up in adulthood out of familial solidarity.

In case his wife wasn’t aware, Balthazar Jones pointed out that not only was the Tower of London a royal palace and fortress, but it had once been England’s state prison, had witnessed numerous executions, and was also widely believed to be haunted. But Hebe Jones simply disappeared into the garden shed, and emerged with a blue-and-white striped deck chair. She sat down and pulled out from a carrier bag a guide to the Tower that she had purchased to prepare her husband for his interview. With the ruthlessness of a gunner, she started to fire questions at the man who had failed his history O-Level to such a spectacular degree that the astonished marker kept a copy of his paper to cheer herself up during her most debilitating bouts of depression. Hebe Jones maintained the battery as her husband paced up and down the lawn, scratching the back of his neck as he searched for the answers in the empty birdcage of his head.

His wife’s determination was absolute. Balthazar Jones would receive a call at lunchtime asking not what he fancied for supper, but the name of the woman who was sent to the Tower in the thirteenth century for repulsing the advances of King John, who subsequently poisoned her with an egg. She would return home from work and enquire, not how her husband’s day had been, but in which tower the Duke of Clarence had been drowned in a butt of his favourite Malmsey wine. Bathed in sweat after love-making, she would lift her head from his chest and demand not that he reveal the depth of his devotion for her, but the name of the seventeenth-century thief who made it as far as the Tower wharf with the Crown Jewels. By the time the job offer arrived in the post, Balthazar Jones’s brain had been unsettled by so much English history, that it provoked in him a mania for the subject that afflicted him for the rest of his life.

Rev. Septimus Drew woke in his three-storey home overlooking Tower Green, and glanced at his alarm clock. There was still some time before the gates of the Middle Tower would open to let in the loathsome tourists, the worst of whom still thought that the Queen Mother was alive. At times the chaplain rose even earlier to capture more of this exquisite period. The place was never the same when the infernal hoards eventually left, the gates shut swiftly behind them, as the air in the chapel remained as putrid as a stable’s until nightfall.

His mind immediately turned to the new mousetrap he had painstakingly laid the previous evening. With the mounting excitement of a child about to inspect the contents of his Christmas stocking, the clergyman wondered what he would find. Unable to wait any longer, he swung his legs out of bed, and opened the windows to clear the room of the mists of unrequited love that had clouded them overnight. The movement sent tears of condensation running down the panes. He dressed quickly, his long, holy fingers still stiff from his endeavours in his workshop the night before. Pulling on his red cassock over his trousers and shirt, he screwed his sockless feet into his shoes, not bothering to unlace them. As he rushed down the two staircases, he clutched the front of his cassock so as not to trip, the back pouring down the battered wooden steps behind him like crimson paint. Despite his purchase of a jar of thick-cut Seville orange marmalade from Fortnum & Mason, he didn’t stop for breakfast in the tiny kitchen with its window overlooking Tower Green, screened with a net curtain to prevent the tourists seeing inside. Not, of course, that it stopped them from trying. The chaplain was forever coming out of his light blue door to find them with their hands cupped against the glass, jostling for position.

His beetle-black hair still in turmoil, he walked the short distance across the cobbles to the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula. He had never got used to it being included in the Beefeaters’ tours. Many of the sightseers ignored the instruction to take off their hats before entering, only to receive a retired soldier’s reprimand once inside. Some even attended the Sunday service, and the chaplain would watch them from the altar, his fury mounting as they sat amongst the Beefeaters and their families, gazing at the walls around them. And he knew that their wonderment had nothing to do with being in the House of God, but everything to do with the thrill of sitting in a chapel which housed the broken remains of three Queens of England who had been beheaded just outside.

He naturally blamed the tourists for the rat infestation, assuming they showered the place with tantalising crumbs as they snacked, listening to the Beefeaters’ talks. However, the sightseers were entirely blameless, for any food they made the grave mistake of purchasing from the Tower Café, which made a rude profit from dismaying the tourists, went straight into the bin after the first mouthful. The truth was that the current rat population were descendants of the rodents that moved in not long after St Peter’s was first built as an ordinary city parish church outside the Tower walls, before being incorporated into the castle following Henry III’s extensions. The rats had decamped briefly on the two occasions when the chapel was rebuilt, and for a third time during the nineteenth-century renovations when more than a thousand human corpses were discovered under the floor. But the vermin soon returned, lured by the succulence of the new tapestry kneelers. They had harassed a succession of chaplains to such a degree that each was obliged to wear his cassock several inches above the dusty chapel floor to prevent the ends from being ravished whenever he stood in contemplation. But it did nothing to stop the nibbling while they knelt in prayer. Rev. Septimus Drew found such radical tailoring one humiliation too far, and had devoted his eleven years in the post to the extermination of the creature not worthy of a mention in the Bible.

His time had been spent studiously converting the humble mousetrap into a contraption of suitable robustness to annihilate a rat. First he turned one of the empty bedrooms, which he had hoped would be used by the family he had longed for, into a workshop. It was there that he laboured on his inventions late into the night, the shelves lined with books on basic scientific laws and theories. Numerous plans with perfectly to-scale drawings lay unfurled on a desk, weighed down by anaemic spider plants. A series of models, made out of pieces of cardboard, off-cuts of wood and garden twine, were laid out on a table. The arsenal of weapons included a tiny sling and marble, a razor blade which had once formed part of a doomed guillotine, a tiny trebuchet, and a pair of minuscule gates complete with murder holes in the top, through which deadly substances could be poured.

Arriving at the chapel door, he pressed down on the cold door handle. His hopes mounting for a formidable body count, he pushed open the door and made his way across the worn tiles to the door that led to the crypt. As he approached the tomb of Sir Thomas More where he had set up his latest apparatus (which had taken two months of planning and execution, as well as a call to a weapons expert at the Imperial War Museum), he heard a sound in the main body of the church. Irritated at being disturbed at such a delicious moment, he retraced his steps to determine the source of the noise.

His resentment at being interrupted immediately evaporated the moment he recognised the figure sitting in the front row of chairs next to the altar. Caught off guard by the sight of the woman who had chased away his dreams, he quickly hid behind a pillar and stood with his palms flat against the cold, smooth stone. It was the moment he had been imagining for months: a chance to speak to her alone, take her hand in his and ask whether there was any hope that she might feel for him the way he did about her. While still uncertain of the merits of such an antiquated approach, he considered it the best out of all those he had thought of since his heart had taken flight. But in all the wistful fantasies he had concocted as he stood at his window overlooking Tower Green hoping for a glimpse of her, his hair had always been perfectly combed into the style first inflicted at the age of eight, and his teeth had been brushed. Cursing himself for having left the house with hangman’s breath, he looked down at his skinny, bare ankles and deeply regretted not having taken the time to put on his socks.

As he berated himself for his unsavoury state, a burst of sobbing echoed round the ancient walls. Unable to ignore a soul in anguish, he decided to offer her comfort, despite his wretchedness. But at that very moment came a thud and a high-pitched squeak from the crypt. The woman jumped to her feet and fled, no doubt in fear of one of the many spectral apparitions said to haunt the Tower. Rev. Septimus Drew remained where he was, playing the scene over in his mind with a spectacularly different ending as the incense, which he burnt in copious amounts to mask the stench of rat droppings, curled around his skinny, bare ankles. When, eventually, he returned to the crypt, not even the sight of a slaughtered rat improved his mood.

When Balthazar Jones had recovered the will to report for duty after his disastrous breakfast, he clambered into his dark blue trousers and pulled on the matching tunic with the initials ER emblazoned in red across the front, surmounted by a red crown. He reached up to the top of the wardrobe for his hat, and pulled it on with both hands. Like all the Beefeaters before him, he had initially worn the Victorian uniform with pride. But it hadn’t been long before it became a source of utmost irritation. The outfits were unbearably hot in the summer and insufferably cold in the winter. Not only that, but they itched from the clouds of moth repellent sprayed on them twice a year while the Beefeaters were still wearing them lest they shrank.

Descending the Salt Tower’s stairs, he locked the door behind him, and turned right past the Tower Café. Assigned the post outside Waterloo Barracks, which housed the Crown Jewels, he chose a spot at sufficient distance from the sentry who had won a fistfight with a Beefeater the week before. His pale blue eyes instinctively searched the sky, and his thoughts drifted with the clouds on their way to drench the washing of the residents of Croydon. When his concentration briefly returned, he braced himself for the battery of ludicrous questions from the tourists who had started to seep in.

An hour later, Balthazar Jones had failed to realise that it had started to rain. Such was his expertise, his subconscious had instantly dismissed the downpour as a particularly common variety for January. He remained in exactly the same position, staring intently but seeing nothing, while the visitors had long since run for cover. When the man from the Palace eventually found him, he was still standing in the same spot, completely sodden and smelling fiercely of moth repellent. On hearing his name, Balthazar Jones turned his head, causing a raindrop to fall from the end of his nose on to the red crown embroidered on the front of his tunic. The man in the dry coat immediately covered the Beefeater with his silver-handled umbrella. Introducing himself as Oswin Fielding, an equerry to Her Majesty, he enquired as to whether he might have a word. Balthazar Jones hurriedly wiped his beard to rid it of water, but then found that his hand was too wet to offer. The man from the palace suggested that they had a cup of tea at the Tower Café. But as they approached, he sniffed twice, flinched at the affront to his nostrils, and headed straight for the Rack & Ruin.

The tavern, from which members of the public had always been barred, was empty apart from the landlady, who was cleaning out her canary’s cage. Oswin Fielding walked past the empty tables, and chose one against the back wall. He hung up his coat, and approached the bar. Balthazar Jones, who had forgotten to remove his hat, sat down and tried to distract himself from his anxiety about what the man wanted by studying the framed signature of Rudolf Hess hanging on the wall. It had been given to a Beefeater during the Deputy Führer’s four-day imprisonment at the Tower. But Balthazar Jones had studied it so many times before, it failed to hold his attention.

The Beefeater’s hope that Oswin Fielding would be seduced by the real ales evaporated when he returned with two teas and the last Kit Kat. He watched in silence as the man from the Palace removed the red wrapper, and offered him half, which he refused on account of his fluttering insides. The equerry proceeded to dunk each finger before eating it, a process that doubled the length of consumption, while at the same time enquiring about the pub’s history. Balthazar Jones answered as briefly as possible, and failed to mention the fact that the man had chocolate on his chin lest it deterred him further from getting to the point. When the courtier spotted the framed signature of Rudolf Hess, the Beefeater instantly dismissed it as a fake as he could no longer bear waiting for the executioner’s axe to fall.

But much to his annoyance, Oswin Fielding started to talk about a golden monkey called Guoliang, which had belonged to the Queen. ‘It was a gift from the President of China following his state visit in 2005,’ he explained.

Balthazar Jones was not the least bit interested in golden monkeys, royal or not. He glanced out of the window and wondered whether the equerry had come about his lamentable record for catching pickpockets, which was the worst amongst the Beefeaters. By the time he opened his ears again, he realised that Oswin Fielding was still discussing the late Guoliang.

‘The creature’s death has caused Her Majesty immense personal sorrow,’ the equerry was saying, shaking his head, which barely possessed sufficient hair to warrant such a meticulous parting. ‘Someone at the Palace looked up its name, and discovered it means “May the Country Be Kind”, which makes its demise even more unfortunate. It caused the most stupendous diplomatic row. Golden monkeys are indigenous to China and there aren’t many of them left. We explained that we even got in a feng shui expert to redesign the enclosure as soon as it appeared off-colour, but the Chinese didn’t seem that impressed. For some reason they had got it into their heads that it would be kept at Buckingham Palace. But with the exception of horses, the Queen keeps all animals given to her by heads of state at London Zoo. Which is just as well, as the Palace is enough of a monkey house as it is.’ The courtier paused. ‘Don’t repeat that,’ he added hastily.

Just as Balthazar Jones could take no more, Oswin Fielding adjusted his rimless spectacles and announced that he had something of the utmost importance to tell him. The Beefeater stopped breathing.

‘As you will know, relations between Britain and China are in a rather delicate state, and as an emerging super power we need to keep them on side,’ the courtier said firmly. ‘No one has forgotten those unfortunate comments made by the Duke of Edinburgh, either. As a gesture of goodwill, China has sent Her Majesty a second golden monkey. Shame, really, as they haven’t got the most attractive combination of features – a snub nose, blue cheeks and hair the same colour as Sarah Ferguson’s. Anyway, the Queen is stuck with it. To make matters worse, the Chinese also noticed the similarity in hair colour, and have named it the Duchess of York. The Queen is understandably rather unsettled by that.’

The Beefeater was about to ask why exactly he had wanted to see him, but the equerry continued.

‘While the Queen has the utmost respect for London Zoo, she has decided to move the new monkey, as well as all her other gifts of animals that are kept there, to a more intimate location. The problem is that foreign rulers always take it as a personal slight if their creature dies.’