Anansi Boys

Chapter Ten

Fat Charlie sat on the blanket on the metal bed and waited for something to happen, but it didn’t. What felt like several months passed, extremely slowly. He tried to go to sleep but he couldn’t remember how.

He banged on the door.

Someone shouted, “Shut up!” but he couldn’t tell whether it was an officer or a fellow inmate.

He walked around the cell for what, at a conservative estimate, he felt must have been two or three years. Then he sat down and let eternity wash over him. Daylight was visible through the thick glass block at the top of the wall that did duty as a window, by all appearances the same daylight that had been visible when the door was locked behind him that morning.

Fat Charlie tried to remember what people did in prison to pass the time, but all he could come up with was keeping secret diaries and hiding things in their bottoms. He had nothing to write on, and felt that a definite measure of how well one was getting on in life was not having to hide things in one’s bottom.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman—

When the door was unlocked, Fat Charlie nearly cheered.

“Right. Exercise yard. You can have a cigarette if you need one.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Filthy habit anyway.”

The exercise yard was an open space in the middle of the police station surrounded by walls on all sides and topped by wire mesh, which Fat Charlie walked around while deciding that, if there was one thing he didn’t like being in, it was police custody. Fat Charlie had had no real liking for the police, but until now, he had still managed to cling to a fundamental trust in the natural order of things, a conviction that there was some kind of power—a Victorian might have thought of it as Providence—that ensured that the guilty would be punished while the innocent would be set free. This faith had collapsed in the face of recent events and had been replaced by the suspicion that he would spend the rest of his life pleading his innocence to a variety of implacable judges and tormenters, many of whom would look like Daisy, and that he would in all probability wake up in cell six the following morning to find that he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach. He had definitely been transported to the kind of maleficent universe that transformed people into cockroaches—

Something dropped out of the sky above him onto the wire mesh. Fat Charlie looked up. A blackbird stared down at him with lofty disinterest. There was more fluttering, and the blackbird was joined by several sparrows and by something that Fat Charlie thought was probably a thrush.

They stared at him; he stared back at them.

More birds came.

It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn’t coo, or caw, or trill, or sing. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.

“Go away,” said Fat Charlie.

As one bird, they didn’t. Instead, they spoke. They said his name.

Fat Charlie went over to the door in the corner. He banged on it. He said, “Excuse me,” a few times, and then he started shouting, “Help!”

A clunk. The door was opened, and a heavy-lidded member of Her Majesty’s constabulary said, “This had better be good.”

Fat Charlie pointed upward. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The constabular mouth dropped open peculiarly wide, and it hung there slackly. Fat Charlie’s mother would have told the man to shut his mouth or something would fly into it.

The mesh sagged under the weight of thousands of birds. Tiny avian eyes stared down, unblinkingly.

“Christ on a bike,” said the policeman, and he ushered Fat Charlie back into the cellblock without saying another word.

Maeve Livingstone was in pain. She was sprawled on the floor. She woke, and her hair and face were wet and warm, and then she slept, and when next she woke her hair and face were sticky and cold. She dreamed and woke and dreamed again, woke enough to be conscious of the hurt at the back of her head, and then, because it was easier to sleep, and because when she slept it did not hurt, she allowed sleep to embrace her like a comfortable blanket.

In her dreams she was walking through a television studio, looking for Morris. Occasionally she would catch glimpses of him on the monitors. He always looked concerned. She tried to find her way out, but all ways led her back to the studio floor.

“I’m so cold,” she thought, and knew that she was awake once more. The pain, though, had subsided. All things considered, thought Maeve, she felt pretty good.

There was something she was upset about, but she was not entirely sure what it was. Perhaps it had been another part of her dream.

It was dark, wherever she was. She seemed to be in some kind of broom closet, and she put out her arms to avoid bumping into anything in the darkness. She took a few nervous steps with her arms outstretched and her eyes closed, then she opened her eyes. Now she was in a room she knew. It was an office.

Grahame Coats’s office.

She remembered then. The just-awake grogginess was still there—she wasn’t yet thinking clearly, knew she wouldn’t be properly all there until she had had her morning cup of coffee—but still, it came to her: Grahame Coats’s perfidiousness, his treachery, his criminality, his—

Why, she thought, he assaulted me. He hit me. And then she thought, The police. I should call the police.

She reached down for the phone on the table and picked it up, or tried to, but the phone seemed very heavy, or slippery, or both, and she was unable to grasp it properly. It felt wrong for her fingers.

I must be weaker than I thought, Maeve decided. I had better ask them to send a doctor as well.

In the pocket of her jacket was a small silver phone which played “Greensleeves” when it rang. She was relieved to find the phone still here, and that she had no problems at all in holding it. She dialed the emergency services. As she waited for someone to answer she wondered why they still called it dialing when there weren’t dials on telephones, not since she was much younger, and then after the phones with dials came the trim-phones with buttons on them and a particularly annoying ring. She had, as a teenager, had a boyfriend who could and continually did imitate the breep of a trimphone, an ability that was, Maeve decided, looking back, his only real achievement. She wondered what had happened to him. She wondered how a man who could imitate a trimphone coped in a world in which telephones could and did sound like anything—

“We apologize for the delay in placing your call,” said a mechanical voice. “Please hold the line.”

Meave felt oddly calm, as if nothing bad could ever happen to her again.

A man’s voice came on the line. “Hello?” it said. It sounded extremely efficient.

“I need the police,” said Maeve.

“You do not need the police,” said the voice. “All crimes will be dealt with by the appropriate and inevitable authorities.”

“You know,” said Maeve, “I think I may have dialed the wrong number.”

“Likewise,” said the voice, “all numbers are, ultimately, correct. They are simply numbers and cannot thus be right or wrong.”

“That’s all very well for you to say,” said Maeve. “But I do need to speak to the police. I may also need an ambulance. And I have obviously called a wrong number.” She ended the call. Perhaps, she thought, 999 didn’t work from a cell phone. She pulled up her onscreen address book and called her sister’s number. The phone rang once, and a familiar voice said. “Let me clarify: I am not saying that you dialed a wrong number on purpose. What I trust that I am saying is that all numbers are by their nature correct. Well, except for Pi, of course. I can’t be doing with Pi. Gives me a headache just thinking about it, going on and on and on and on and on—”

Maeve pressed the red button and ended the call. She dialed her bank manager.

The voice that answered said, “But here am I, wittering on about the correctness of numbers, and you’re undoubtedly thinking that there’s a time and a place for everything—”

Click. Called her best friend.

“—and right now what we should be discussing is your ultimate disposition. I’m afraid traffic is extremely heavy this afternoon, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting where you are for a little while, you will be collected—” It was a reassuring voice, the voice of a radio vicar in the process of telling you his thought for the day.

If Maeve had not felt so placid, she would have panicked then. Instead, she pondered. Seeing that her phone had been—what would they call it, hacked?—then she would simply have to go down to the street and find a police officer and make a formal complaint. Nothing happened when Maeve pressed the button for the lift, so she walked down the stairs, thinking that there was probably never a police officer about when you wanted one anyway, they were always zooming about in those cars, the ones that went neenorneenor. The police, Maeve thought, should be strolling around in pairs telling people the time or waiting at the bottom of drainpipes as burglars with bags of swag over their shoulder make their descent—

At the very bottom of the stairs, in the hallway, were two police officers, a man and a woman. They were out of uniform, but they were police all right. There was no mistaking them. The man was stout and red-faced, the woman was small and dark and might, in other circumstances, have been extremely pretty. “We know she came this far,” the woman was saying. “The receptionist remembered her coming in, just before lunchtime. When she got back from lunch, they’d both gone.”

“You think they ran off together?” asked the stout man.

“Um, excuse me,” said Maeve Livingstone, politely.

“It’s possible. There’s got to be some kind of simple explanation. The disappearance of Grahame Coats. The disappearance of Maeve Livingstone. At least we’ve got Nancy in custody.”

“We certainly did not run off together,” said Maeve, but they ignored her.

The two police officers got into the lift and slammed the doors behind them. Maeve watched them judder up and away, toward the top floor.

She was still holding her cell phone. It vibrated in her hand now and then began to play “Greensleeves.” She glanced down at it. Morris’s photograph filled the screen. Nervously, she answered the phone. “Yes?”

“ ‘Ullo love. How’s tricks?”

She said, “Fine thank you.” Then she said, “Morris?” And then, “No, it’s not fine. It’s all awful, actually.”

“Aye,” said Morris. “I thought it might be. Still, nothing that can be done about that now. Time to move on.”

“Morris? Where are you calling from?”

“It’s a bit complicated,” he said. “I mean, I’m not actually on the phone. Just really wanted to help you along.”

“Grahame Coats,” she said. “He was a crook.”

“Yes, love,” said Morris. “But it’s time to let all that go. Put it behind you.”

“He hit me on the back of the head,” she told him. “And he’s been stealing our money.”

“It’s only material things, love,” said Morris, reassuringly. “Now you’re beyond the vale—”

“Morris,” said Maeve. “That pestilent little worm attempted to murder your wife. I do think you should try to show a little more concern.”

“Don’t be like that, love. I’m just trying to explain—”

“I have to tell you, Morris, that if you’re going to take that kind of attitude, I’ll simply deal with this myself. I’m certainly not going to forget about it. It’s all right for you, you’re dead. You don’t have to worry about these things.”

“You’re dead, too, love.”

“That is quite beside the point,” she said. Then, “I’m what?” And then, before he could say anything, Maeve said, “Morris, I said that he attempted to murder me. Not that he succeeded.”

“Erm,” the late Morris Livingstone sounded lost for words. “Maeve. Love. I know this may come as a bit of a shock to you, but the truth of the matter is that—”

The telephone made a “plibble” noise, and the image of an empty battery appeared on the screen.

“I’m afraid I didn’t get that, Morris,” she told him. “I think the telephone battery is going.”

“You don’t have a phone battery,” he told her. “You don’t have a phone. All is illusion. I keep trying to tell you, you’ve now transcended the vale of oojamaflip, and now you’re becoming, oh heck, it’s like worms and butterflies, love. You know.”

“Caterpillars,” said Maeve. “I think you mean caterpillars and butterflies.”

“Er, that sounds right,” said Morris’s voice over the telephone. “Caterpillars. That was what I meant. So what do worms turn into, then?”

“They don’t turn into anything, Morris,” said Maeve, a little testily. “They’re just worms.” The silver phone emitted a small noise, like an electronic burp, showed the picture of an empty battery again, and turned itself off.

Maeve closed it and put it back into her pocket. She walked over to the nearest wall and, experimentally, pushed a finger against it. The wall felt clammy and gelatinous to the touch. She exerted a little more pressure, and her whole hand went into it. Then it went through it.

“Oh dear,” she said, and felt herself, not for the first time in her existence, wishing that she had listened to Morris, who after all, she admitted to herself, by now probably knew rather more about being dead than she did. Ah well, she thought. Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.

She walked out the front door, and found herself coming through the wall at the back of the hall, into the building. She tried again, with the same result. Then she walked into the travel agency that occupied the bottom floor of the building, and tried pushing through the wall on the west of the building.

She went through it, and came out in the front hall again, entering from the east. It was like being in a TV set and trying to walk off the screen. Topographically speaking, the office building seemed to have become her universe.

She went back upstairs to see what the detectives were doing. They were staring at the desk, at the debris that Grahame Coats had left when he was packing.

“You know,” said Maeve helpfully, “I’m in a room behind the bookcase. I’m in there.”

They ignored her.

The woman crouched down and rummaged in the bin. “Bingo,” she said, and pulled out a man’s white shirt, spattered with dried blood. She placed it into a plastic bag. The stout man pulled out his phone.

“I want Forensic down here,” he said.

Fat Charlie now found himself viewing his cell as a refuge rather than as a prison. Cells were deep inside the building, for a start, far from the haunts of even the most adventurous birds. And his brother was nowhere to be seen. He no longer minded that nothing ever happened in cell six. Nothing was infinitely preferable to most of the somethings he found himself coming up with. Even a world populated exclusively with castles and cockroaches and people named K was preferable to a world filled with malignant birds that whispered his name in chorus.

The door opened.

“Don’t you knock?” asked Fat Charlie.

“No,” said the policeman. “We don’t, actually. Your solicitor’s finally here.”

“Mister Merryman?” said Fat Charlie, and then he stopped. Leonard Merryman was a rotund gentleman with small gold spectacles, and the man behind the cop most definitely wasn’t.

“Everything’s fine,” said the man who wasn’t his solicitor. “You can leave us here.”

“Buzz when you’re done,” said the policeman, and he closed the door.

Spider took Fat Charlie by the hand. He said, “I’m busting you out of here.”

“But I don’t want to be busted out of here. I didn’t do anything.”

“Good reason for getting out.”

“But if I leave then I will have done something. I’ll be an escaped prisoner.”

“You’re not a prisoner,” said Spider, cheerfully. “You’ve not been charged with anything yet. You’re just helping them with their inquiries. Look, are you hungry?”

“A bit.”

“What do you want? Tea? Coffee? Hot chocolate?”

Hot chocolate sounded extremely good to Fat Charlie. “I’d love a hot chocolate,” he said.

“Right,” said Spider. He grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand and said, “Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“It makes it easier.”

Fat Charlie closed his eyes, although he was not certain what it would make easier. The world stretched and squeezed and Fat Charlie was certain that he was going to be sick. Then the inside of his mind settled down, and he felt a warm breeze touch his face.

He opened his eyes.

They were in the open air, in a large market square, somewhere that looked extremely un-English.

“Where is this?”

“I think it’s called Skopsie. Town in Italy or somewhere. I started coming here years ago. They do amazing hot chocolate here. Best I’ve ever had.”

They sat down at a small wooden table. It was painted fire-engine red. A waiter approached and said something to them in a language that didn’t sound like Italian to Fat Charlie. Spider said “Dos Chocolatos, dude,” and the man nodded and went away.

“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Now you’ve got me into even deeper trouble. Now they’ll just do a manhunt or something. It’ll be in the papers.”

“What are they going to do?” asked Spider with a smile. “Send you to jail?”

“Oh please.”

The hot chocolate arrived, and the waiter poured it into small cups. It was roughly the same temperature as molten lava, was halfway between a chocolate soup and a chocolate custard, and it smelled astonishingly good.

Spider said, “Look, we’ve made rather a mess of this whole family reunion business, haven’t we?”

“We’ve made rather a mess of it?” Fat Charlie managed outrage extremely well. “I wasn’t the one who stole my fiancée. I wasn’t the one who got me sacked from work. I wasn’t the one who got me arrested—”

“No,” said Spider. “But you were the one who brought the birds into it, weren’t you?”

Fat Charlie took a very small initial sip of his hot chocolate. “Ow. I think I’ve just burned my mouth.” He looked at his brother and saw his own expression staring back at him: worried, tired, frightened. “Yes, I was the one who brought the birds into it. So what do we do now?”

Spider said, “They do a really nice sort of noodly-stew thing here, by the way.”

“Are you sure we’re in Italy?”

“Not really.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Spider nodded.

Fat Charlie tried to think of the best way to put it. “The bird thing. Where they all turn up and pretend they’ve escaped from an Alfred Hitchcock film. Do you think it’s something that only happens in England?”

“Why?”

“Because I think those pigeons have noticed us.” He pointed to the far end of the square.

The pigeons were not doing the things that pigeons usually do. They were not pecking at sandwich crusts or bobbing along with their heads down hunting for tourist-dropped food. They were standing quite still, and they were staring. A clatter of wings, and they were joined by another hundred birds, most of them landing on the statue of a fat man wearing an enormous hat that dominated the center of the square. Fat Charlie looked at the pigeons, and the pigeons looked back at him. “So what’s the worst that could happen?” he asked Spider, in an undertone. “They crap all over us?”

“I don’t know. But I expect they can do worse than that. Finish your hot chocolate.”

“But it’s hot.”

“And we’ll need a couple of bottles of water, won’t we? Garçon?”

A low susurrus of wings; the clack of more arriving birds; and beneath it all, low, burbling secretive coos.

The waiter brought them bottles of water. Spider, who was, Fat Charlie observed, now wearing his black-and-red leather jacket once more, put them into his pockets.

“They’re only pigeons,” said Fat Charlie, but even as he said it, he knew the words were inadequate. They were not just pigeons. They were an army. The statue of the fat man had almost vanished from view beneath the gray and purple feathers.

“I think I preferred birds before they thought about ganging up on us.”

Spider said, “And they’re everywhere.” Then he grabbed Fat Charlie’s hand. “Close your eyes.”

The birds rose as one bird then. Fat Charlie closed his eyes.

The pigeons came down like the wolf on the fold—

There was silence, and distance, and Fat Charlie thought, I’m in an oven. He opened his eyes and realized that it was true: an oven with red dunes that receded into the distance until they faded into a sky the color of mother-of-pearl.

“Desert,” said Spider. “Seemed like a good idea. Bird-free zone. Somewhere to finish a conversation. Here.” He handed Fat Charlie a bottle of water.

“Thanks.”

“So. Would you like to tell me where the birds come from?”

Fat Charlie said, “There’s this place. I went there. There were lots of animal-people there. They um. They all knew Dad. One of them was a woman, a sort of bird woman.”

Spider looked at him. “There’s this place? That’s not exactly very helpful.”

“There’s a mountainside with caves in it. And then there are these cliffs, and they go down into nothing. It’s like the end of the world.”

“It’s the beginning of the world,” corrected Spider. “I’ve heard of the caves. A girl I knew once told me all about them. Never been there, though. So you met the Bird Woman, and—?”

“She offered to make you go away. And, um. Well, I took her up on it.”

“That,” said Spider, with a movie-star smile, “was really stupid.”

“I didn’t tell her to hurt you.”

“What did you think she was going to do to get rid of me? Write me a stiff letter?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think. I was upset.”

“Great. Well, if she has her way, you’ll be upset, and I’ll be dead. You could have simply asked me to leave, you know.”

“I did!”

“Er. What did I say?”

“That you liked it in my house and you weren’t going anywhere.”

Spider drank some of the water. “So what exactly did you say to her?”

Fat Charlie tried to remember. Now he thought about it, it seemed an odd sort of thing to say. “Just that I was going to give her Anansi’s bloodline,” he said, reluctantly.

“You what?”

“It was what she asked me to say.”

Spider looked incredulous. “But that’s not just me. That’s both of us.”

Fat Charlie’s mouth was suddenly very dry. He hoped it was the desert air, and sipped his bottled water.

“Hang on. Why the desert?” asked Fat Charlie.

“No birds. Remember?”

“So what are those?” He pointed. At first they looked tiny, and then you realized that they were simply very high: they were circling, and wobbling on the wing.

“Vultures,” said Spider. “They don’t attack living things.”

“Right. And pigeons are scared of people,” said Fat Charlie. The dots in the sky circled lower, and the birds appeared to grow as they descended.

Spider said, “Point taken.” Then, “Shit.”

They weren’t alone. Someone was watching them on a distant dune. A casual observer might have mistaken the figure for a scarecrow.

Fat Charlie shouted, “Go away!” His voice was swallowed by the sand. “I take it all back. We don’t have a deal! Leave us alone!”

A flutter of overcoat on the hot wind, and the dune was now deserted.

Fat Charlie said, “She went away. Who would have thought it was going to be that simple?”

Spider touched his shoulder, and pointed. Now the woman in the brown overcoat was standing on the nearest ridge of sand, so close that Fat Charlie could see the glassy blacks of her eyes.

The vultures were raggedy black shadows, and then they landed: their naked mauve necks and scalps—featherless because that’s so much easier when you’re putting your head into rotting carcasses—extended as they stared shortsightedly at the brothers, as if wondering whether to wait until the two men died or if they should do something to hurry the process along.

Spider said, “What else was there in the deal?”

“Um?”

“Was there anything else? Did she give you something to seal the bargain? Sometimes things like this involve a trade.”

The vultures were edging forward, a step at a time, closing their ranks, tightening the circle. There were more black slashes in the sky, growing and wobbling toward them. Spider’s hand closed around Fat Charlie’s hand.

“Close your eyes.”

The cold hit Fat Charlie like a punch to the gut. He took a deep breath and felt like someone had iced his lungs. He coughed and coughed while the wind howled like a great beast.

He opened his eyes. “Can I ask where we are this time?”

“Antarctica,” said Spider. He zipped up the front of his leather jacket, and did not seem to mind the cold. “It’s a bit chilly, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t you have any middle gears? Straight from desert to ice field.”

“No birds here,” said Spider.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just to go and sit inside a building that’s nice and bird-free? We could have lunch.”

Spider said, “Right. Now you’re complaining, just because it’s a little bit nippy.”

“It’s not a little bit nippy. It’s fifty below. And anyway, look.”

Fat Charlie pointed at the sky. A pale squiggle, like a miniature letter m chalked onto the sky, hung unmoving in the cold air. “Albatross,” he said.

“Frigate,” said Spider.

“Pardon?”

“It’s not an albatross. It’s a frigate. He probably hasn’t even noticed us.”

“Possibly not,” admitted Fat Charlie. “But they have.”

Spider turned, and said something else that sounded a lot like “frigate.” There may not have been a million penguins waddling and slipping and belly-sliding toward the brothers, but it certainly looked that way. As a general rule, the only things properly terrified by the approach of penguins tend to be small fish, but when the numbers get large enough—

Fat Charlie reached out without being told, and he held Spider’s hand. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he was somewhere warmer, although opening his eyes made no difference to what he saw. Everything was the color of night. “Have I gone blind?”

“We’re in a disused coal mine,” said Spider. “I saw a photo of this place in a magazine a few years back. Unless there are flocks of sightless finches who have evolved to take advantage of the darkness and eat coal chips, we’re probably fine.”

“That’s a joke, isn’t it? About the sightless finches?”

“More or less.”

Fat Charlie sighed, and the sigh echoed through the underground cavern. “You know,” he said, “If you’d just gone away, if you’d left my house when I asked you to, we’d not be in this mess.”

“That isn’t very helpful.”

“It wasn’t meant to be. God knows how I’m going to explain all this to Rosie.”

Spider cleared his throat. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that.”

“Because—?”

“She’s broken up with us.”

There was a long silence. Then Fat Charlie said, “Of course she has.”

“I made a kind of a sort of a mess of that part of things.” Spider sounded uncomfortable.

“But what if I explain it to her? I mean, if I tell her that I wasn’t you, that you were pretending to be me—”

“I already did. That was when she decided she didn’t want to see either of us ever again.”

“Me as well?”

“ ‘Fraid so.”

“Look,” said Spider’s voice in the darkness. “I really never meant to make—. Well, when I came to see you, all I wanted to do was say hello. Not to. Um. I’ve pretty much completely cocked this all up, haven’t I?”

“Are you trying to say sorry?”

Silence. Then, “I guess. Maybe.”

More silence. Fat Charles said, “Well, then I’m really sorry I called the Bird Woman to get rid of you.” Not seeing Spider while they were talking made it easier, somehow.

“Yeah. Thanks. I just wish I knew how to get rid of her.”

“A feather!” said Fat Charlie.

“No, you’ve lost me.”

“You asked if she gave me anything to seal the deal. She did. She gave me a feather.”

“Where is it?”

Fat Charlie tried to remember. “I’m not sure. I had it when I woke up in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s front room. I didn’t have it when I got on the plane. I suppose that Mrs. Dunwiddy must still have it.”

The silence that met this was long and dark and unbroken. Fat Charlie began to worry that Spider had gone away, that he had been left abandoned in the darkness under the world. Eventually he said, “Are you still there?”

“Still here.”

“That’s a relief. If you abandoned me down here I don’t know how I’d get out.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

More silence.

Fat Charlie said, “What country are we in?”

“Poland, I think. Like I said, I saw a picture of it. Only they had the lights on in the photo.”

“You need to see photos of places to go to them?”

“I need to know where they are.”

It was astounding, thought Fat Charlie, how truly quiet it was in the mine. The place had its own special silence. He started to wonder about silences. Was the silence of the grave different in kind to the silence of, say, outer space?

Spider said, “I remember Mrs. Dunwiddy. She smells of violets.” People have said, “All hope has fled. We’re going to die,” with more enthusiasm.

“That’s her,” said Fat Charlie. “Small, old as the hills. Thick glasses. I suppose we’ll just have to go and get the feather from her. Then we’ll give it back to the Bird Woman. She’ll call off this nightmare.” Fat Charlie finished the last of the bottled water, carried here from the little square somewhere that wasn’t Italy. He screwed the top back onto the bottle and put the empty bottle down into the darkness, wondering if it was littering if no one was ever going to see it. “So let’s hold hands and go and see Mrs. Dunwiddy.”

Spider made a noise. The noise was not cocky. It was unsettled and unsure. In the darkness Fat Charlie imagined Spider deflating, like a bullfrog or a week-old balloon. Fat Charlie had wanted to see Spider taken down a peg; he had not wanted to hear him make a noise like a terrified six-year-old. “Hang on. You’re scared of Mrs. Dunwiddy?”

“I—I can’t go near her.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I was scared of her, too, when I was a kid, and then I met her again at the funeral and she wasn’t that bad. Not really. She’s just an old lady.” In his mind she lit the black candles once more and sprinkled the herbs into the bowl. “Maybe a bit spooky. But you’ll be okay when you see her.”

“She made me go away,” said Spider. “I didn’t want to go. But I broke this ball in her garden. Big glass thing, like a giant Christmas tree ornament.”

“I did that, too. She was pissed.”

“I know.” The voice from the dark was small and worried and confused. “It was the same time. That was when it all started.”

“Well. Look. It’s not the end of the world. You take me to Florida, I can go and get the feather back from Mrs. Dunwiddy. I’m not scared. You can stay away.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t go to where she is.”

“So, what are you trying to say? She’s taken out some kind of magical restraining order?”

“More or less. Yes.” Then Spider said, “I miss Rosie. I’m sorry about. You know.”

Fat Charlie thought about Rosie. He found it peculiarly hard to remember her face. He thought about not having Rosie’s mother as his mother-in-law; about the two silhouettes on the curtains in his bedroom window. He said, “Don’t feel bad about it. Well, you can feel bad about it if you want, because you behaved like a complete bastard. But maybe it was all for the best.” There was a twinge in the general region of Fat Charlie’s heart, but he knew that he was speaking the truth. It’s easier to say true things in the dark.

Spider said, “You know what doesn’t make sense here?”

“Everything?”

“No. Only one thing. I don’t understand why the Bird Woman got involved. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Dad pissed her off—”

“Dad pissed everybody off. She’s wrong, though. And if she wanted to kill us, why doesn’t she just try to do it?”

“I gave her our bloodline.”

“So you said. No, something else is going on, and I don’t get it.” Silence. Then Spider said, “Hold my hand.”

“Do I need to close my eyes?”

“May as well.”

“Where are we going? The moon?”

“I’m going to take you somewhere safe,” said Spider.

“Oh good,” said Fat Charlie. “I like safe. Where?”

But then, without even opening his eyes, Fat Charlie knew. The smell was a dead giveaway: unwashed bodies and unflushed toilets, disinfectant, old blankets and apathy.

“I bet I would have been just as safe in a luxury hotel room,” he said aloud, but there was nobody there to hear him. He sat down on the shelflike bed of cell six and wrapped the thin blanket around his shoulders. He might have been there forever.

Half an hour later, someone came and led him to the interrogation room.

“Hullo,” said Daisy, with a smile. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“You might as well not bother,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve seen the telly. I know how it goes. This is that whole good-cop bad-cop thing, isn’t it? You’ll give me a cup of tea and some Jaffa cakes, then some big hard-bitten bastard with a hair-trigger temper comes in and shouts at me and pours the tea away and starts eating my Jaffa cakes and then you stop him from physically attacking me, and make him give me my tea and Jaffa cakes back, and in my gratitude I tell you everything you want to know.”

“We could skip all that,” said Daisy, “and you could just tell us what we want to know. Anyway, we don’t have any Jaffa cakes.”

“I told you everything I know,” said Fat Charlie. “Everything. Grahame Coats gave me a check for two grand and told me to take two weeks off. He said he was pleased I’d brought some irregularities to his attention. Then he asked for my password and waved me good-bye. End of story.”

“And you still say you don’t know anything about the disappearance of Maeve Livingstone?”

“I don’t think I ever actually met her properly. Maybe once when she came through the office. We talked on the phone a few times. She’d want to talk to Grahame Coats. I’d have to tell her the check was in the post.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was. Look, you can’t believe I had anything to do with her disappearance.”

“No,” she said, cheerfully, “I don’t.”

“Because I honestly don’t know what could have—you what?”

“I don’t think you had anything to do with Maeve Livingstone’s disappearance. I also don’t believe that you had anything to do with the financial irregularities being perpetrated at the Grahame Coats Agency, although someone seems to have worked very hard to make it look like you did. But it’s pretty obvious that the weird accounting practices and the steady syphoning off of money predates your arrival. You’ve only been there two years.”

“About that,” said Fat Charlie. He realized that his jaw was open. He closed it.

Daisy said, “Look, I know that cops in books and movies are mostly idiots, especially if it’s the kind of book with a crime-fighting pensioner or a hard-arsed private eye in it. And I’m really sorry that we don’t have any Jaffa cakes. But we’re not all completely stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were,” said Fat Charlie.

“No,” she said. “But you were thinking it. You’re free to go. With an apology if you’d like one.”

“Where did she, um, disappear?” asked Fat Charlie.

“Mrs. Livingstone? Well, the last time anyone saw her, she was accompanying Grahame Coats into his office.”

“Ah.”

“I meant it about the cup of tea. Would you like one?”

“Yes. Very much. Um. I suppose your people already checked out the secret room in his office. The one behind the bookcase?”

It is to Daisy’s credit that all she said, perfectly calmly, was “I don’t believe they did.”

“I don’t think we were supposed to know about it,” said Fat Charlie, “but I went in once, and the bookshelf was pushed back, and he was inside. I went away again,” he added. “I wasn’t spying on him or anything.”

Daisy said, “We can pick up some Jaffa cakes on the way.”

Fat Charlie wasn’t certain that he liked freedom. There was too much open air involved.

“Are you okay?” asked Daisy.

“I’m fine.”

“You seem a bit twitchy.”

“I suppose I am. You’ll think this is silly, but I’m a bit—well, I have a thing about birds.”

“What, a phobia?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, that’s the common term for an irrational fear of birds.”

“What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?” He nibbled the Jaffa cake.

There was silence. Daisy said, “Well, anyway, there aren’t any birds in this car.”

She parked the car on the double yellow lines outside the Grahame Coats Agency offices, and they went inside together.

Rosie lay in the sun by the pool on the aft deck of a Korean cruise ship with a magazine over her head and her mother beside her, trying to remember why[2] she had ever thought a holiday with her mother would be a good idea.

There were no English newspapers on the cruise ship, and Rosie did not miss them. She missed everything else, though. In her mind the cruise was a form of floating purgatory, made bearable only by the islands they visited every day or so. The other passengers would go ashore and shop or parasail or go for rumsodden trips on floating pirate ships. Rosie, on the other hand, would walk, and talk to people.

She would see people in pain, see people who looked hungry or miserable, and she wanted to help. Everything seemed very fixable to Rosie. It just needed someone to fix it.

Maeve Livingstone had expected death to be a number of things, but irritating had never been one of them. Still, she was irritated. She was tired of being walked through, tired of being ignored, and, most of all, tired of not being able to leave the offices in the Aldwych.

“I mean, if I have to haunt anywhere,” she said to the receptionist, “why can’t I haunt Somerset House, over the road? Lovely buildings, excellent view over the Thames, several architecturally impressive features. Some very nice little restaurants as well. Even if you don’t need to eat any longer, it’d be nice for people-watching.”

Annie the receptionist, whose job since the vanishment of Grahame Coats had been to answer the phone in a bored voice and say, “I’m afraid I don’t know” to pretty much any question she was asked, and who, when she was not performing this function, would phone her friends and discuss the mystery in hushed but excitable tones, did not reply to this, as she had not replied to anything Maeve had said to her.

The monotony was broken by the arrival of Fat Charlie Nancy, accompanied by the female police officer.

Maeve had always rather liked Fat Charlie, even when his function had been to assure her that a check would soon be in the mail, but now she saw things she had never seen before: there were shadows that fluttered about him, always keeping their distance: bad things coming. He looked like a man on the run from something, and it worried her.

She followed them into Grahame Coats’s office and was delighted to see Fat Charlie head straight over to the bookshelf at the back of the room.

“So where’s the secret panel?” asked Daisy.

“It’s not a panel. It was a door. Behind the bookshelf over here. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a secret catch or something.”

Daisy looked at the bookshelf. “Did Grahame Coats ever write an autobiography?” she asked Fat Charlie.

“Not that I’ve ever heard about.”

She pushed on the leatherbound copy of My Life by Grahame Coats. It clicked, and the bookshelf swung away from the wall, revealing a locked door behind it.

“We’ll need a locksmith,” she said. “And I don’t really think we need you here any longer, Mr Nancy.”

“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Well,” he said, “It’s been, um. Interesting.”

And then he said, “I don’t suppose you’d like. To get some food. With me. One day?”

“Dim sum,” she said. “Sunday lunchtime. We’ll go dutch. You’ll need to be there when they open the doors at eleven-thirty, or we’ll have to queue for ages.” She scribbled down the address of a restaurant and handed it to Fat Charlie. “Watch out for birds on the way home,” she said.

“I will,” he said. “See you Sunday.”

The locksmith unfolded a black cloth wallet and took out several slim pieces of metal.

“Honestly,” he said. “You’d think they’d learn. It’s not like good locks are expensive. I mean, you look at that door, lovely piece of work. Solid that is. Take you half a day to get through it with a blow torch. And then they let the whole thing down with a lock that a five-year old could open with a spoon-handle—. There we go—. Easy as falling off the wagon.”

He pulled on the door. The door opened and they saw the thing on the floor.

“Well, for goodness’ sake,” said Maeve Livingstone. “That’s not me.” She thought she’d have more affection for her body, but she didn’t; it reminded her of a dead animal at the side of the road.

Soon enough the room was filled with people. Maeve, who had never had much patience for detective dramas, was quickly bored, only taking an interest in what was happening when she felt herself being pulled, unarguably, downstairs and out the front door, as the human remains were taken away in a discreet blue plastic bag.

“This is more like it,” said Maeve Livingstone.

She was out.

At least she was out of the office in the Aldwych.

Obviously, she knew, there were rules. There had to be rules. It’s just that she wasn’t very sure what they were.

She found herself wishing she’d been more religious in life, but she’d never been able to manage it: as a small girl she had been unable to envision a God who disliked anyone enough to sentence them to an eternity of torture in Hell, mostly for not believing in Him properly, and as she grew up her childhood doubts had solidified into a rocky certainty that Life, from birth to grave, was all there was and that everything else was imaginary. It had been a good belief, and it had allowed her to cope, but now it was being severely tested.

Honestly, she wasn’t sure that even a life spent attending the right sort of church would have prepared her for this. Maeve was rapidly coming to the conclusion that in a well-organized world, Death should be like the kind of all-expenses-included luxury vacation where they give you a folder at the start filled with tickets, discount vouchers, schedules, and several phone numbers to ring if you get into trouble.

She didn’t walk. She didn’t fly. She moved like the wind, like a cold autumn wind that made people shiver as she passed, that stirred the fallen leaves on the pavements.

She went where she always went first when she came to London: to Selfridges, the department store in Oxford Street. Maeve had worked in the cosmetics department of Selfridges when she was much younger, between dancing jobs, and she had always made a point of going back whenever she could, and buying expensive makeup, just as she had promised herself she would in the old days.

She haunted the makeup department until she was bored, then took a look around home furnishings. She wasn’t ever going to get another dining room table, but really, there wasn’t any harm in looking—

Then she drifted through the Selfridges home entertainment department, surrounded by television screens of all sizes. Some of the screens were showing the news. The volume was off on each set, but the picture that filled each screen was Grahame Coats. The dislike rose burning hot within her, like molten lava. The picture changed and now she was looking at herself—a clip of her at Morris’s side. She recognized it as the “Give me a fiver and I’ll snog you rotten” sketch from Morris Livingstone, I Presume.

She wished she could figure out a way to recharge her phone. Even if the only person she could find was the irritating voice that had sounded like a vicar, she thought, she would even have spoken to him. But mostly she just wanted to talk to Morris. He’d know what to do. This time, she thought, she’d let him talk. This time, she’d listen.

“Maeve?”

Morris’s face was looking out at her from a hundred television screens. She thought for a heartbeat that she was imagining it, then that it was part of the news, but he looked at her with concern, and said her name again, and she knew it was him.

“Morris—?”

He smiled his famous smile, and every face on every screen focused on her. “Hullo, love. I was wondering what was taking you so long. Well, it’s time for you to come on over.”

“Over?”

“To the other side. Move beyond the vale. Or possibly the veil. Anyway, that.” And he held out a hundred hands from a hundred screens.

She knew that all she needed to do was reach out and take his hand. She surprised herself by saying, “No, Morris. I don’t think so.”

A hundred identical faces looked perplexed. “Maeve, love. You need to put the flesh behind you.”

“Well, obviously, dear. And I will. I promise I will. As soon as I’m ready.”

“Maeve, you’re dead. How much more ready can you be?”

She sighed. “I’ve still got a few things to sort out at this end.”

“For instance?”

Maeve pulled herself up to her full height. “Well,” she said. “I was planning on finding that Grahame Coats creature and then doing—well, whatever it is that ghosts do. I could haunt him or something.”

Morris sounded slightly incredulous. “You want to haunt Grahame Coats? Whatever for?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m not done here.” She set her mouth into a line and raised her chin.

Morris Livingstone looked at her from a hundred television screens at the same time, and he shook his head, in a mixture of admiration and exasperation. He had married her because she was her own woman, and had loved her for that reason, but he wished he could, just for once, persuade her of something. Instead, he said, “Well, I’m not going anywhere, pet. Let us know when you’re ready.”

And then he began to fade.

“Morris. Do you have any idea how I go about finding him?” she asked. But the image of her husband had vanished completely, and now the televisions were showing the weather.

Fat Charlie met Daisy for Sunday Dim Sum, in a dimly lit restaurant in London’s tiny Chinatown.

“You look nice,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I feel miserable. I’ve been taken off the Grahame Coats case. It’s now a full-scale murder investigation. I reckon I was probably lucky to have been with it as long as I was.”

“Well,” he said brightly, “if you hadn’t been part of it you would never have had the fun of arresting me.”

“There is that.” She had the grace to look slightly rueful.

“Are there any leads?”

“Even if there were,” she said, “I couldn’t possibly tell you about them.” A small cart was trundled over to their table, and Daisy selected several dishes from it. “There’s a theory that Grahame Coats threw himself off the side of a Channel Ferry. That was the last purchase on one of his credit cards—a day ticket to Dieppe.”

“Do you think that’s likely?”

She picked a dumpling up from her plate with her chopsticks, popped it into her mouth.

“No,” she said. “My guess is that he’s gone somewhere with no extradition treaty. Probably Brazil. Killing Maeve Livingstone might have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, but everything else was so meticulous. He had a system in place. Money went into client accounts. Grahame took his fifteen percent off the top and standing orders ensured that a whole lot more came off the bottom. Lot of foreign checks never even made it into the client accounts in the first place. What’s remarkable is how long he had kept it up.”

Fat Charlie chewed a rice ball with something sweet inside it. He said, “I think you know where he is.”

Daisy stopped chewing her dumpling.

“It was something about the way you said he’d gone to Brazil. Like you know he wasn’t there.”

“That would be police business,” she said. “And I’m afraid I cannot possibly comment. How’s your brother?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s gone. His room wasn’t there when I got home.”

“His room?”

“His stuff. He’d taken his stuff. And no sign of him since.” Fat Charlie sipped his jasmine tea. “I hope he’s all right.”

“You think he wouldn’t be?”

“Well, he’s got the same phobia that I have.”

“The birds thing. Right.” Daisy nodded sympathetically. “And how’s the fiancée, and the future mother-in-law?”

“Um. I don’t think either description is, um, currently operative.”

“Ah.”

“They’ve gone away.”

“Was this because of the arrest?”

“Not as far as I know.”

She looked across at him like a sympathetic pixie. “I’m sorry.”

“Well,” he said. “Right now I don’t have a job, I don’t have a love life, and—thanks mostly to your efforts—the neighbors are now all convinced I’m a yardie hit man. Some of them have started crossing the road to avoid me. On the other hand, my newsagent wants me to make sure the bloke who knocked up his daughter is taught a lesson.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. I don’t think he believed me though. He gave me a free bag of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pack of Polo mints, and told me there would be more where that came from once I’d done the job.”

“It’ll blow over.”

Fat Charlie sighed. “It’s mortifying.”

“Still,” she said. “It’s not as if it’s the end of the world.”

They split the bill, and the waiter gave them two fortune cookies with their change.

“What does yours say?” asked Fat Charlie.

“Persistence will pay off,” she read. “What about yours?”

“It’s the same as yours,” he said. “Good old persistence.” He crumpled up the fortune into a pea-sized ball and dropped it into his pocket. He walked her down to Leicester Square tube station.

“Looks like it’s your lucky day,” said Daisy.

“How do you mean?”

“No birds around,” she said.

As she said it, Fat Charlie realized it was true. There were no pigeons, no starlings. Not even any sparrows.

“But there are always birds in Leicester Square.”

“Not today,” she said. “Maybe they’re busy.”

They stopped at the tube, and for one foolish moment Fat Charlie thought that she was going to kiss him good-bye. She didn’t. She just smiled and said “bless,” and he half-waved at her, an uncertain hand movement that might have been a wave and could as easily have been an involuntary gesture, and then she was down the stairs and out of sight.

Fat Charlie walked back across Leicester Square, heading for Piccadilly Circus.

He pulled out the fortune cookie slip from his pocket and un-crumpled it. “Meet you by Eros,” it said, and next to that was a hasty little drawing of something that looked like large asterisk, and might, conceivably, have been a spider.

He scanned the skies and the buildings as he walked, but there were no birds, and that was strange because there were always birds in London. There were always birds everywhere.

Spider was sitting beneath the statue, reading the News of the World. He looked up as Fat Charlie approached.

“It’s not actually Eros, you know,” said Fat Charlie. “It’s the statue of Christian Charity.”

“So why is it naked and holding a bow and arrow? That doesn’t seem a particularly charitable or Christian thing to do.”

“I’m just telling you what I read,” said Fat Charlie. “Where have you been? I was worried about you.”

“I’m all right. I’ve just been avoiding birds, trying to get my head around all this.”

“You’ve noticed there aren’t any birds around today?” said Fat Charlie.

“I’ve noticed. I don’t really know what to make of it. But I’ve been thinking. And you know,” said Spider, “there’s something wrong with this whole thing.”

“Everything, for a start,” said Fat Charlie.

“No. I mean there’s something wrong with the Bird Woman trying to hurt us.”

“Yup. It’s wrong. It’s a very, very bad thing to do. Do you want to tell her, or shall I?”

“Not wrong like that. Wrong like—well, think about it. I mean, despite the Hitchcock film, birds aren’t the best thing to hurt someone with. They may be death-on-wings for insects but they really aren’t very good at attacking people. Millions of years of learning that, on the whole, people will probably eat you first. Their first instinct is to leave us alone.”

“Not all of them,” said Fat Charlie. “Not vultures. Or ravens. But they only turn up on the battlefield, when the fighting’s done. Waiting for you to die.”

“What?”

“I said, except for vultures and ravens. I didn’t mean anything—”

“No.” Spider concentrated. “No, it’s gone. You made me think of something, and I almost had it. Look, have you got hold of Mrs. Dunwiddy yet?”

“I phoned Mrs. Higgler, but there isn’t any answer.”

“Well go and talk to them.”

“It’s all very well for you to say that, but I’m skint. Broke. Cleaned out. I can’t keep flying back and forwards across the Atlantic. I don’t even have a job any longer. I’m—”

Spider reached into his black-and-scarlet jacket and pulled out a wallet. He took out a sheaf of notes in an assortment of currencies, pushed them into Fat Charlie’s hand. “Here. This should be enough to get you there and back. Just get the feather.”

Fat Charlie said, “Listen. Has it occurred to you that maybe Dad isn’t dead after all?”

“What?”

“Well, I was thinking. Maybe all this was one of his jokes. It feels like the kind of thing he’d do, doesn’t it?”

Spider said, “I don’t know. Could be.”

Fat Charlie said, “I’m sure it is. That’s the first thing I’m going to do. I’m going to head down to his grave and—”

But he said nothing else, because that was when the birds came. They were city birds; sparrows and starlings, pigeons and crows, thousands upon thousands of them, and they wove and wound as they flew like a tapestry, forming a wall of birds coming toward Fat Charlie and Spider down Regent Street. A feathered phalanx huge as the side of a skyscraper, perfectly flat, perfectly impossible, all of it in motion, weaving and fluttering and swooping; Fat Charlie saw it, but it would not fit inside his mind, slipping and twisting and thinning the whole time inside his head. He looked up at it and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

Spider jerked at Fat Charlie’s elbow. He shouted “Run!”

Fat Charlie turned to run. Spider was methodically folding his newspaper, putting it down on the bin.

“You run too!”

“It doesn’t want you. Not yet,” said Spider, and he grinned. It was a grin that had, in its time, persuaded more people than you can imagine to do things they did not want to do; and Fat Charlie really wanted to run. “Get the feather. Get Dad, too, if you think he’s still around. Just go.”

Fat Charlie went.

The wall of birds swirled and transformed, became a whirlwind of birds heading for the statue of Eros and the man beneath it. Fat Charlie ran into a doorway and watched as the base of the dark tornado slammed into Spider. Fat Charlie imagined he could hear his brother screaming over the deafening whirr of wings. Maybe he could.

And then the birds dispersed and the street was empty. The wind teased a handful of feathers along the gray pavement.

Fat Charlie stood there and felt sick. If any of the passers-by had noticed what had happened, they had not reacted. Somehow, he was certain that no one had seen it but him.

There was a woman standing beneath the statue, near where his brother had been. Her ragged brown coat flapped in the wind. Fat Charlie walked back to her. “Look,” he said, “When I said to make him go away, I meant just to get him out of my life. Not do whatever it is you’ve done to him.”

She looked into his face and said nothing. There is a madness in the eyes of some birds of prey, a ferocity that can be perfectly intimidating. Fat Charlie tried not to be intimidated by it. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m willing to pay for it. Take me instead. Bring him back.”

She continued to stare. Then she said, “Do not doubt your turn shall come, Compé Anansi’s child. In time.”

“Why do you want him?”

“I don’t want him,” she told him. “Why would I want him? I had an obligation to another. Now I shall deliver him, and then my obligation shall be done.”

The newspaper fluttered, and Fat Charlie was alone.