It wasn’t a type-specimen, one of those bottled Platonic essences that define everything like them. Still, the squid was complete, and it would never be cut.
Other specimens in the room would eventually snare a bit of visitor attention. A ribbon-folded oarfish, an echidna, bottles of monkeys. And there at the end of the room was a glass-fronted cabinet containing thirteen small jars.
“Anyone know what these are?” Billy would say. “Let me show you.”
They were distinguished by the browning ink and antique angularity of the hand that had labelled them. “These were collected by someone quite special,” Billy would say to any children. “Can you read that word? Anyone know what that means? ‘The Beagle’?”
Some people got it. If they did they would gape at the subcollection that sat there unbelievably on an everyday shelf. Little animals collected, euthanized, preserved and catalogued on a journey to the South American seas, two centuries before, by the young naturalist Charles Darwin.
“That’s his writing,” Billy would say. “He was young, he hadn’t sorted out his really big notions when he found these. These are part of what gave him the whole idea. They’re not finches, but these are what got the whole thing started. It’s the anniversary of his trip soon.”
Very rarely, someone would try to argue with him over Darwin’s insight. Billy would not have that debate.
Even those thirteen glass eggs of evolutionary theory, and all the centuries’-worth of tea-coloured crocodiles and deep-sea absurdities, evinced only a little interest next to the squid. Billy knew the importance of that Darwin stuff, whether visitors did or not. No matter. Enter that room and you breached a Schwarzschild radius of something not canny, and that cephalopod corpse was the singularity.
That, Billy knew, was how it would go. But this time when he opened the door he stopped, and stared for several seconds. The visitors came in behind him, stumbling past his immobility. They waited, unsure of what they were being shown.
The centre of the room was empty. All the jars looked over the scene of a crime. The nine-metre tank, the thousands of gallons of brine-Formalin, the dead giant squid itself were gone.
Chapter Two
AS SOON AS BILLY STARTED CLAMOURING HE WAS SURROUNDED by colleagues, all gaping and demanding to know what was going on and what the hell, where was, where was the goddamn squid?
They hurried the visitors out of the building. Afterward, all Billy recalled of that rushed dismissal was the little boy sobbing, desolate that he had not been shown what he had come to see. Biologists, guards, curators came and stared with stupid faces at the enormous lack in the tank room. “What…?” they said, just like Billy had, and “Where did…?”
Word spread. People ran from place to place as if they were looking for something, as if they had misplaced something, and might find it under a cupboard.
“It can’t have, it can’t have,” a biophysicist called Josie said, and yes, no, it couldn’t have, not disappeared, so many metres of abyss meat could not have gone. There were no suspicious cranes. There were no giant tank-nor squid-shaped holes cartoon-style in the wall. It could not have gone, but there it was, not.
There was no protocol for this. What to do in the event of a chemical spill-that was planned. If a specimen jar broke, if results did not tally, even if a tour member became violent, you run a particular algorithm. This though, Billy thought. What the hell?
THE POLICE ARRIVED AT LAST, COMING IN A STAMPY GANG. THE staff stood waiting, huddled exactly as if cold, as if drenched in benthic water. Officers tried to take statements.
“I don’t understand, I’m afraid…” one might say.
“It’s gone.”
The crime scene was off-limits, but since Billy was the discoverer he was allowed to stay. He gave his statement, standing by the lack. When he was done and his questioner distracted, he stepped aside. He watched the police work. Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.
They measured the room as if maybe the dimensions were hiding things. Billy had no better ideas. The room looked huge. All the other tanks looked forlorn and far away, the specimens apologetic.
Billy stared at the stands on which the Architeuthis tank should be. He was still adrenalized. He listened to the officers.
“Search me for a fucking clue, mate…”
“Shit, you know what this means, don’t you?”
“Don’t even get me started. Hand me that tape measure.”
“Seriously, I’m telling you, this is a handover, no question…”
“What are you waiting for, mate? Mate?” That was to Billy, at last. An officer was telling him just-courteously to fuck off. He joined the rest of the staff outside. They milled and muttered, congregating roughly by jobs. Billy saw a debate among directors.
“What’s that about?” he said.
“Whether or not to close the museum,” Josie said. She was biting her nails.
“What?” Billy said. He took off his glasses and blinked at them aggressively. “What’s the sodding debate? How big does something have to be before its nickage closes us down?”
“Ladies and Gents.” A senior policeman clapped his hands for attention. His officers surrounded him. They were muttering to and listening to their shoulders. “I’m Chief Inspector Mulholland. Thanks for your patience. I’m sorry to’ve kept you all waiting.” The staff huffed, shifted, bit their nails.
“I’m going to ask you to please not talk about this, ladies and gents,” Mulholland said. A young female officer slipped into the room. Her uniform was unkempt. She was speaking on some phone hands-free, muttering at nothing visible. Billy watched her. “Please don’t talk about this,” Mulholland said again. The whispering in the room mostly ceased.
“Now,” Mulholland said, after a pause. “Who was it found it gone?” Billy put up his hand. “You, then, would be Mr. Harrow,” Mulholland said. “Can I ask the rest of you to wait, even if you’ve already told us what you know? My officers’ll speak to you all.”
“Mr. Harrow.” Mulholland approached him as the staff obeyed. “I’ve read your statement. I’d be grateful if you’d show me around. Could you take me on exactly the route you did with your tour?” Billy saw that the young female officer had gone.
“What is it you’re looking for?” he said. “You think you’re going to find it…?”
Mulholland looked at him kindly, as if Billy were slow. “Evidence.”
Evidence. Billy ran his hand through his hair. He imagined marks on the floor where some huge perfidious pulley system might have been. Drying puddles of preserver in a trail as telltale as crumbs. Right.
Mulholland summoned colleagues, and had Billy walk them through the centre. Billy pointed out what they passed in a terse parody of his usual performance. The officers poked at bits and pieces and asked what they were. “An enzyme solution,” Billy said, or, “That’s a time sheet.”
Mulholland said: “Are you alright, Mr. Harrow?”
“It’s kind of a big thing, you know?”
That wasn’t the only reason Billy glanced repeatedly behind him. He thought he heard a noise. A very faint clattering, a clanking like a dropped and rolling beaker. It was not the first time he had heard that. He had been catching little snips of such misplaced sound at random moments since a year after he had started at the centre. More than once he had, trying to find the cause, opened a door onto an empty room, or heard a faint grind of glass in a hallway no one could have entered.