Free The Lamplighter by Anthony O'Neill

years ago. Everything. Lynxes, jackals, llamas, even a Tasmanian devil. A retired bank manager bought a black panther and walked it each evening like a trained beagle, until it ate his neighbor’s whippets. There are likely a few of those lamentable beasts still in Edinburgh, chained in coops and stables somewhere. I suppose one of them might be capable of the savagery you mention, assuming it got loose. But you’ll need more than good luck if you’re meaning to track them all down.”
    Groves recalled a biblical verse that Piper McNab had been wont to quote: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” The sage piper had been drawing a connection to Arthur’s Seat, the volcanic plug that dominated the city’s eastern skyline and from certain angles looked uncannily like a great lion ready to pounce. Which only meant, according to the good piper’s philosophy, that the inhabitants of fair Edinburgh should be uniquely aware that evil lurked in the most unlikely places and should be especially alert lest they be snatched in a moment of inattentiveness.
    Groves decided he had no option but to take seriously the insinuations of Professors Whitty and Moir, and indeed of Piper McNab, and pursue such lines of investigation vigorously. He went first to New-some’s Hippodrome on Nicolson Street, but here found only tightrope walkers, trained Arabian steeds, laughing mirrors, and twirlie pokes. A similar story at Cooke’s Circus, set in a substantial brick palace in Fountainbridge. But at Moss’s Second Year Carnival at Waverley Market, in an inferno of flaring greaselamps and colored smoke, he discovered Count Batavia’s Colossal Den of Performing Lions, being a couple of scrawny beasts in a cage stuffed with moldering straw. The Count himself seemed openly amused by the suggestion that his “bastards” might have broken loose or been trained for some nefarious purpose, and encouraged Groves to venture his hand through the bars and tickle their ears. But Groves had no intention of doing any such thing, thinking it might be some rash plan to have him eaten before he could manufacture more nettlesome questions. So the Count squeezed into the cage with his cats and slapped them, tugged at their tails, sat on their backs, and smothered them with kisses, and the beasts did little more than blink and rumble disconsolately. They were sedated with measured doses of whisky, he explained, even while performing, so that one would be in more danger from an organ grinder’s monkey. And despite the man’s crude mouth and Cockney accent, Groves felt inclined to believe him. He watched one of the somnolent lions as its lips curled back on glistening enamel fangs, feeling curiously aroused.
    In a tormented state of half-sleep that night, however, he wondered if he had been unduly narrow in his focus, and was haunted by some of the freaks he had glimpsed in the course of the day, many of whom, like Chang the Mongolian giant, were of fearsome size and obvious mental instability. And in a state of semi-delirium he remembered the clown elephants of Moss’s Carnival and had a startling vision of a rogue pachyderm goring Professor Smeaton to death, recalling also that the 78th Highlanders had years earlier shipped home a teary-eyed Ceylonese specimen that marched at the head of the regiment as a ceremonial mascot. He knew the beasts had sizable memories, too, and he thought it entirely feasible that Professor Smeaton might have inflicted some indignity upon it, many years ago, for which he had been hunted through the lanes and crescents of the New Town before being speared through the face with a well-directed tusk.
    In the light of dawn, feeble and misty as it was, such whimsies appeared unlikely even to Groves, and he decided that in this entire angle of investigation he had wasted invaluable time. He cursed