Justin Cartwright was a South African-born British novelist whose fiction included Look At It This Way, In Every Face I Meet and The Promise of Happiness.
Justin Cartwright
Look At It This Way
1990. Picador/Pan, 1991.
The two men sat in the cab of the truck, waiting for the traffic on the Outer Circle to ease. From time to time they could feel the heavy, uneasy movements of the lion rocking the whole truck. The truck was backed right up against a temporary fence on to the park itself. After perhaps an hour, the driver climbed out of the cab with a pair of bolt cutters and cut through the fence immediately behind the truck
Chaka is being returned to the park after four weeks in captivity at a chicken farm. Prior to the abduction there have been frequent visits to the zoo by a journalist hoping to set up a confrontation between Chaka and a former lion-tamer. 'I watched [the lion] through the keeper's observation window. Round and round he walked, looking beyond the children in nylon parkas, beyond the goat mountain, beyond the mosque. Nothing within hundreds of yards interested him'.
the Zoo was closed until the lion had been found. Residents of the elegant terraces near by had been advised to keep their dogs at home. People were advised not to walk along the canal or anywhere in the park...The press had taken up position with long lenses all around Regent's Park. They were hoping that the lion would kill a duchess; failing that they were hoping that it would kill a duchess's poodle
There had been no clues as to Chaka's whereabouts.