Anansi Boys

Chapter Twelve

The Dolphin Hotel had a concierge. He was young and bespectacled, and he was reading a paperback novel with a rose and a gun on the cover.

“I’m trying to find someone,” said Fat Charlie. “On the island.”

“Who?”

“A lady named Callyanne Higgler. She’s here from Florida. She’s an old friend of my family.”

The young man closed his book thoughtfully, then he looked at Fat Charlie through narrowed eyes. When people do this in paperback books it gives an immediate impression of dangerous alertness, but in reality it just made the young man look like he was trying not to fall asleep. He said, “Are you the man with the lime?”

“What?”

“The man with the lime?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“Lemme see it, nuh?”

“My lime?”

The young man nodded, gravely.

“No, you can’t. It’s back in my room.”

“But you are the man with the lime.”

“Can you help me find Mrs. Higgler? Are there any Higglers on the island? Do you have a phone book I could look at? I was hoping for a phone book in my bedroom.”

“It’s a kinda common name, you know?” said the young man. “The phone book not going to help.”

“How common could it be?”

“Well,” said the young man, “For example, I’m Benjamin Higgler. She over there, on reception, she name Amerila Higgler.”

“Oh. Right. Lots of Higglers on the island. I see.”

“She on the island for the music festival?”

“What?”

“It going on all this week.” He handed Fat Charlie a leaflet, informing him that Willie Nelson (canceled) would be headlining the St. Andrews Music Festival.

“Why’d he cancel?”

“Same reason Garth Brooks cancel. Nobody tell them it was happening in the first place.”

“I don’t think she’s going to the music festival. I really need to track her down. She’s got something I’m looking for. Look, if you were me, how would you go about looking for her?”

Benjamin Higgler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a map of the island. “We’re here, just south of Williamstown—” he began, making a felt pen mark on the paper. From there, he began marking out a plan of campaign for Fat Charlie: he divided the island into segments that could easily be covered in a day by a man on a bicycle, marked out each rum shop and café with small crosses. He put a circle beside each tourist attraction.

Then he rented Fat Charlie a bicycle.

Fat Charlie pedaled off to the south.

There were information conduits on Saint Andrews that Fat Charlie, who, on some level believed that coconut palms and cellular telephones ought to be mutually exclusive, had not expected. It did not seem to make any difference who he talked to: old men playing draughts in the shade; women with breasts like watermelons and buttocks like armchairs and laughter like mockingbirds; a sensible young lady in the tourist office; a bearded rasta with a green, red, and yellow—colored knit cap and what appeared to be a woollen miniskirt: they all had the same response.

“You the one with the lime?”

“I suppose so.”

“Show us your lime.”

“It’s back at the hotel. Look, I’m trying to find Callyanne Higgler. She’s about sixty. American. Big mug of coffee in her hand.”

“Never heard of her.”

Bicycling around the island, Fat Charlie soon discovered, had its dangers. The chief mode of transportation on the island was the minibus: unlicensed, unsafe, always overfilled, the minibuses hurtled around the island, tooting and squealing their brakes, slamming around corners on two wheels whilst relying on the weight of their passengers to ensure they never tipped over. Fat Charlie would have been killed a dozen times on his first morning out were it not for the low thud of drum and bass being played over each bus’s sound system: he could feel them in the pit of his stomach even before he heard their engines, and he had plenty of time to wheel the bicycle over to the side of the road.

While none of the people he spoke to were exactly what you could call helpful, they were still all extremely friendly. Fat Charlie stopped several times on his day’s expedition to the south and refilled his water bottle: he stopped at cafés and at private houses. Everyone was so pleased to see him, even if they didn’t know anything about Mrs. Higgler. He got back to the Dolphin Hotel in time for dinner.

On the following day he went north. On his way back to Williamstown, in the late afternoon, he stopped on a cliff top, dismounted, and walked his bike down to the entry gate of a luxurious house that sat on its own, overlooking the bay. He pressed the speakerphone button and said hello, but no one replied. A large black car sat in the driveway. Fat Charlie wondered if perhaps the place was deserted, but a curtain twitched in an upper room.

He pressed the button again. “Hullo,” he said. “Just wanted to see if I could fill my water bottle here.”

There was no reply. Perhaps he had only imagined that there was someone at the window. He seemed extremely prone to imagining things here: he started to fancy that he was being watched, not by someone in the house, but by someone or something in the bushes that bordered the road. “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said into the speaker, and clambered back onto his bike. It was downhill from here all the way to Williamstown. He was sure that he’d pass a café or two on the way, or another house, a friendly one.

He was on his way down the road—the cliffs had become a steepish hill down to the sea—when a black car came up behind him and accelerated forward with a roar. Too late, Fat Charlie realized that the driver had not seen him, for there was a long scrape of car against the bike’s handlebars, and Fat Charlie found himself tumbling, with the bike, down the hill. The black car drove on.

Fat Charlie picked himself up halfway down the hill. “That could have been nasty,” he said aloud. The handlebars were twisted. He hauled his bike back up the hill and onto the road. A low bass rumble alerted him to the approach of a minibus, and he waved it down.

“Can I put my bike in the back?”

“No room,” said the driver, but he produced several bungee cords from beneath his seat, and used them to fasten the bike onto the roof of the bus. Then he grinned. “You must be the Englishman with the lime.”

“I don’t have it on me. It’s back at the hotel.”

Fat Charlie squeezed onto the bus, where the booming bass resolved itself, extremely improbably, into Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Fat Charlie squeezed in next to a large woman with a chicken on her lap. Behind them two white girls chattered about the parties they had attended the previous night and the shortcomings of the temporary boyfriends they had accumulated during their holiday.

Fat Charlie noticed the black car—a Mercedes—as it came back up the road. It had a long scratch along one side. He felt guilty, hoping his bike hadn’t scraped the paintwork too badly. The windows were tinted so dark that the car might have been driving itself—

Then one of the white girls tapped Fat Charlie on the shoulder and asked him if he knew of any good parties on the island that night, and when he said he didn’t, started telling him about one that she’d been to in a cave two nights before, where there was a swimming pool and a sound system and lights and everyfink, and so Fat Charlie completely failed to notice that the black Mercedes was now following the minibus into Williamstown, and that it only went on its way once Fat Charlie had retrieved his bike from the roof of the minibus (“next time, you should bring the lime”) and carried the bike into the hotel lobby.

Only then did the car return to the house on the cliff top.

Benjamin the concierge examined the bike and told Fat Charlie not to worry, and they’d have it all fixed and good as new by tomorrow.

Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the color of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop.

“You’re no help,” he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.

Daisy, for example.

Daisy could not have lasted as long as she had in the police force without having a sensible side to her nature, which was mostly all anybody saw. She respected laws, and she respected rules. She understood that many of these rules are perfectly arbitrary—decisions about where one could park, for example, or what hours shops were permitted to open—but that even these rules helped the big picture. They kept society safe. They kept things secure.

Her flatmate, Carol, thought she’d gone mad.

“You can’t just leave and say you’re going on holiday. It doesn’t work like that. You’re not on a TV cop show, you know. You can’t just zoom all over the world to follow up a lead.”

“Well, then, in that case I’m not,” Daisy had retorted untruthfully. “I’m just going on holiday.”

She said it so convincingly that the sensible cop who lived at the back of her head was shocked into silence and then began to explain to her exactly what she was doing wrong, beginning with pointing out that she was about to go off on an entirely unauthorized leave—tantamount, muttered the sensible cop, to neglect of duty—and moving on from there.

It explained it on the way to the airport, and all across the Atlantic. It pointed out that even if she managed to avoid a permanent black mark in her Personal File, let alone being thrown out of the police force altogether, even if she did find Grahame Coats, there was nothing she could do once she found him. Her Majesty’s constabulary look unkindly on kidnapping criminals in foreign countries, let alone arresting them, and she rather doubted she would be able to persuade him to return to the UK willingly.

It was only when Daisy got off the little plane from Jamaica and tasted the air—earthy, spicy, wet, almost sweet—of Saint Andrews that the sensible cop stopped pointing out the sheer ill-considered madness of what she was doing. That was because it was drowned out by another voice. “Evildoers beware!” it sang. “Beware! Take care! Evildoers everywhere!” and Daisy was marching to its beat. Grahame Coats had killed a woman in his office in the Aldwych, and he had walked out of there scot-free. He had done it practically under Daisy’s nose.

She shook her head, collected her bag, brightly informed the immigration officer that she was here on her holidays, and went out to the taxi rank.

“I want a hotel that’s not too expensive, but isn’t icky, please,” she said to the driver.

“I got just the place for you darlin’,” he said. “Hop in.”

Spider opened his eyes and discovered that he was staked-out, face down. His arms were tied to a large stake pounded into the earth in front of him. He could not move his legs or twist his neck enough to see behind him, but he was willing to bet that they were similarly hobbled. The movement, as he tried to lift himself out of the dirt, to look behind him, caused his scratches to burn.

He opened his mouth, and dark blood drooled onto the dust, wetting it.

He heard a sound and twisted his head as much as he could. A white woman was looking down at him curiously.

“Are you all right? Silly question. Just look at the state of you. I suppose you’re another duppy. Do I have that right?”

Spider thought about it. He didn’t think he was a duppy. He shook his head.

“If you are, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Apparently, I’m a duppy myself. I hadn’t heard the term before, but I met a delightful old gentleman on the way here who told me all about it. Let me see if I can be of any assistance.”

She crouched down next to him and reached out to help loosen his bonds.

Her hand slipped through him. He could feel her fingers, like strands of fog, brushing his skin.

“I’m afraid I don’t seem able actually to touch you,” she said. “Still, that means that you’re not dead yet. So cheer up.”

Spider hoped this odd ghost-woman would go away soon. He couldn’t think straight.

“Anyway, once I had everything sorted out, I resolved to remain walking the Earth until I take vengeance on my killer. I explained it to Morris—he was on a television screen in Selfridges—and he said he rather thought I was missing the entire point of having moved beyond the flesh, but I ask you, if they expect me to turn the other cheek they have several other thinks coming. There are a number of precedents. And I’m sure I can do a Banquo-at-the-Feast thing, given the opportunity. Do you talk?”

Spider shook his head, and blood dripped from his forehead into his eyes. It stung. Spider wondered how long it would take him to grow a new tongue. Prometheus had managed to grow a new liver on a daily basis, and Spider was pretty sure that a liver had to be a lot more work than a tongue. Livers did chemical reactions—bilirubin, urea, enzymes, all that. They broke down alcohol, and that had to be a lot of work on its own. All tongues did was talk. Well, that and lick, of course—

“I can’t keep yattering on,” said the yellow-haired ghost-lady. “I’ve got a long way to go, I think.” She began to walk away, and she faded as she walked. Spider raised his head and watched her slip from one reality to another, like a photograph fading in the sunlight. He tried to call her back, but all the noises he could make were muffled, incoherent. Tongueless.

Somewhere in the distance, he heard the cry of a bird.

Spider tested his bonds. They held.

He found himself thinking, once again, of Rosie’s story of the raven who saved the man from the mountain lion. It itched in his head, worse than the claw tracks on his face and chest. Concentrate. The man lay on the ground, reading or sunbathing. The raven cawed in the tree. There was a big cat in the undergrowth—

And then the story reshaped itself, and he had it. Nothing had changed. It was all a matter of how you looked at the ingredients.

What if, he thought, the bird wasn’t calling to warn the man that there was a big cat stalking him? What if it was calling to tell the mountain lion that there was a man on the ground—dead or asleep or dying. That all the big cat had to do was finish the man off. And then the raven would feast on what it left—

Spider opened his mouth to moan, and blood ran from his mouth and puddled on the powdery clay.

Reality thinned. Time passed, in that place.

Spider, tongueless and furious, raised his head and twisted it to look at the ghost birds that flew around him, screaming.

He wondered where he was. This was not the Bird Woman’s copper-colored universe, nor her cave, but neither was it the place he had previously tended to think of as the real world. It was closer to the real world, though, close enough that he could almost taste it, or would have tasted it if he could taste anything in his mouth but the iron tang of the blood; close enough that, if he were not staked out on the ground, he could have touched it.

If he had not been perfectly certain of his own sanity, certain to a degree that normally is only found in people who have concluded that they’re definitely Julius Caesar and have been sent to save the world, he might have thought that he was going mad. First he saw a blonde woman who claimed to be a duppy, and now he heard voices. Well, he heard one voice anyway. Rosie’s.

She was saying, “I dunno. I thought it would be a holiday, but seeing those kids, without anything, it breaks your heart. There’s so much they need.” And then, while Spider was trying to assess the significance of this, she said, “I wonder how much longer she’s going to be in the bath. Good thing you’ve got plenty of hot water here.”

Spider wondered if Rosie’s words were meant to be important, whether they held the key to escaping from his predicament. He doubted it. Still, he listened harder, wondering whether the wind would carry any more words between the worlds. Apart from the crash of the waves on breakers behind and far below him, he heard nothing, only silence. But a specific kind of silence. There are, as Fat Charlie once imagined, many kinds of silences. Graves have their own silence, space has its silence, mountaintops have theirs. This was a hunting silence. It was a stalking silence. In this silence something moved on velvet-soft pads, with muscles like steel springs coiled beneath soft fur; something the color of shadows in the long grass; something that would ensure that you heard nothing it did not wish you to hear. It was a silence that was moving from side to side in front of him, slowly and relentlessly, and with every arc it was getting closer.

Spider heard that in the silence, and the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. He spat blood onto the dust by his face, and he waited.

In his house on the cliff top, Grahame Coats paced back and forth. He walked from his bedroom to the study, then down the stairs to the kitchen and back up to the library and from there back to his bedroom again. He was angry with himself: how could he have been so stupid as to assume that Rosie’s visit was a coincidence?

He had realized it when the buzzer had sounded and he had looked into the closed-circuit TV screen at Fat Charlie’s inane face. There was no mistaking it. It was a conspiracy.

He had imitated the action of a tiger, and climbed into the car, certain of an easy hit-and-run: if they found a mangled bicycle rider, people would blame it on a minibus. Unfortunately, he had not counted on Fat Charlie’s cycling so close to the road’s drop-off: Grahame Coats had been unwilling to push his car any closer to the edge of the road, and now he was regretting it. No, Fat Charlie had sent in the women in the meat locker; they were his spies. They had infiltrated Grahame Coats’s house. He was lucky that he had tumbled their scheme. He had known there was something wrong about them.

As he thought of the women, he realized that he had not fed them yet. He ought to give them something to eat. And a bucket. They would probably need a bucket after twenty-four hours. Nobody could say that he was an animal.

He had bought a handgun in Williamstown, the previous week. You could buy guns pretty easily on Saint Andrews, it was that sort of island. Most people didn’t bother with buying guns though, it was that sort of island too. He took the gun from his bedside drawer and went down to the kitchen. He took a plastic bucket from under the sink, tossed several tomatoes, a raw yam, a half-eaten lump of cheddar cheese, and a carton of orange juice into it. Then, pleased with himself for thinking of it, he fetched a toilet roll.

He went down to the wine cellar. There was no noise from inside the meat locker.

“I’ve got a gun,” he said. “And I’m not afraid to use it. I’m going to open the door now. Please go over to the far wall, turn around, and put your hands against it. I’ve brought food. Cooperate and you will both be released unharmed. Cooperate and nobody gets hurt. That means,” he said, delighted to find himself able to deploy an entire battalion of clichés hitherto off-limits, “no funny business.”

He turned on the lights inside the room, then pulled the bolts. The walls of the room were rock and brick. Rusting chains hung from hooks in the ceiling.

They were against the far wall. Rosie looked at the rock. Her mother stared over her shoulder at him like a trapped rat, furious and filled with hate.

Grahame Coats put down the bucket; he did not put down the gun. “Lovely grub,” he said. “And, better late than never, a bucket. I see you’ve been using the corner. There’s toilet paper, too. Don’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you.”

“You’re going to kill us,” said Rosie. “Aren’t you?”

“Don’t antagonize him, you stupid girl,” spat her mother. Then, assuming a smile of sorts, she said, “We’re grateful for the food.”

“Of course I’m not going to kill you,” said Grahame Coats. It was only as he heard the words coming out of his mouth that he admitted to himself that, yes, of course he was going to have to kill them. What other option did he have? “You didn’t tell me that Fat Charlie sent you here.”

Rosie said, “We came on a cruise ship. This evening we’re meant to be in Barbados for the fish fry. Fat Charlie’s in England. I don’t even think he knows where we’ve gone. I didn’t tell him.”

“It doesn’t matter what you say,” said Grahame Coats. “I’ve got the gun.”

He pushed the door closed and bolted it. Through the door he could hear Rosie’s mother saying, “The animal. Why didn’t you ask him about the animal?”

“Because you’re just imagining it, Mum. I keep telling you. There isn’t an animal in here. Anyway, he’s nuts. He’d probably just agree with you. He probably sees invisible tigers himself.”

Stung by this, Grahame Coats turned off their lights. He pulled out a bottle of red wine and went upstairs, slamming the cellar door behind him.

In the darkness beneath the house, Rosie broke the lump of cheese into four bits and ate one as slowly as she could.

“What did he mean about Fat Charlie?” she asked her mother after the cheese had dissolved in her mouth.

“Your bloody Fat Charlie. I don’t want to know about Fat Charlie,” said her mother. “He’s the reason that we’re down here.”

“No, we’re here because that Coats man is a total nutjob. A nutter with a gun. It’s not Fat Charlie’s fault.” She had tried not to let herself think about Fat Charlie, because thinking about Fat Charlie meant that she inevitably found herself thinking about Spider—

“It’s back,” said her mother. “The animal is back. I heard it. I can smell it.”

“Yes Mum,” said Rosie. She sat on the concrete floor of the meat cellar and thought about Spider. She missed him. When Grahame Coats saw reason and let them go, she’d try to locate Spider, she decided. Find out if there was room for a new beginning. She knew it was only a silly daydream, but it was a good dream, and it comforted her.

She wondered if Grahame Coats would kill them tomorrow.

A candle flame’s thickness away, Spider was staked out for the beast.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was low behind him.

Spider was pushing at something with his nose and lips: it had been dry earth, before his spit and blood had soaked into it. Now it was a ball of mud, a rough marble of reddish clay. He had pushed it into a shape that was more or less spherical. Now he flicked at it, getting his nose underneath it and then jerking his head up. Nothing happened, as nothing had happened the previous how-many times. Twenty? A hundred? He wasn’t keeping count. He simply kept on. He pushed his face further into the dirt, pushed his nose further under the ball of clay, jerked his head up and forward—

Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen.

He needed another approach.

He closed his lips on the ball, closed them around it. He breathed in through his nose, as deeply as he could. Then he expelled the air through his mouth. The ball popped from his lips, with a pop like a champagne cork, and landed about eighteen inches away.

Now he twisted his right hand. It was bound at the wrist, with the rope pulling it tightly toward the stake. He pulled the hand back, bent it around. His fingers reached for the lump of bloody mud, and they fell short.

It was so near—

Spider took another deep breath but choked on the dry dust and began to cough. He tried again, twisting his head over to one side to fill his lungs. Then he rolled over and began to blow, in the direction of the ball, forcing the air from his lungs as hard as he could.

The clay ball rolled—less than an inch, but it was enough. He stretched, and now he was holding the clay in his fingers. He began to pinch the clay between finger and thumb, then turning it and doing it again, Eight times.

He repeated the process once more, this time squeezing the pinched clay a little tighter. One of the pinches fell off onto the dirt, but the others held. He had something in his hand that looked like a small ball with seven points coming out of it, like a child’s model of the sun.

He looked at it with pride: given the circumstances, he felt as proud of it as anything a child has ever brought home from school.

The word, that would be the hardest part. Making a spider, or something quite like it, from blood and spit and clay, that was easy. Gods, even minor mischief gods like Spider, know how to do that. But the final part of Making was going to prove the hardest. You need a word to give something life. You need to name it.

He opened his mouth. “Hrrurrrurrr,” he said, with his tongueless mouth.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. “Hrrurrurr!” The clay sat, a dead lump in his hand.

His face fell back into the dirt. He was exhausted. Every movement tore the scabs on his face and chest. They oozed and burned and—worse—itched. Think! he told himself. There had to be a way of doing this—To talk without his tongue—

His lips still had a layer of clay on them. He sucked at them, moistening as well as he could, without a tongue.

He took a deep breath, and let the air push through his lips, controlling it as best he could, saying a word with such certainty that not even the universe could argue with him: he described the thing on his hand, and he said his own name, which was the best magic he knew: “hhssspphhhrrriiivver.”

And on his hand, where the lump of bloody mud had been, sat a fat spider, the color of red clay, with seven spindly legs.

Help me, thought Spider. Get help.

The spider stared at him, its eyes gleaming in the sunlight. Then it dropped from his hand to the earth, and it proceeded to make its lopsided way into the grass, its gait wobbly and uneven.

Spider watched it until it was out of sight. Then he lowered his head into the dirt, and he closed his eyes.

The wind changed then, and he smelled the ammoniac scent of male cat on the air. It had marked its territory—

High in the air, Spider could hear birds caw in triumph.

Fat Charlie’s stomach growled. If he had had any superfluous money he would have gone somewhere for dinner, just to get away from his hotel, but he was, as near as dammit, now quite broke, and evening meals were included in the cost of the room, so as soon as it turned seven, he went down to the restaurant.

The maitre d’ had a glorious smile, and she told him that they would open the restaurant in just a few more minutes. They had to give the band time to finish setting up. Then she looked at him. Fat Charlie was beginning to know that look.

“Are you—?” she began.

“Yes,” he said, resigned. “I’ve even got it with me.” He took the lime out of his pocket and showed it to her.

“Very nice,” she said. “That’s definitely a lime you’ve got there. I was going to say, are you going to want the à la carte menu or would you rather do the buffet?”

“Buffet,” said Fat Charlie. The buffet was free. He stood in the hall outside the restaurant holding his lime.

“Just wait a moment,” said the maitre d’.

A small woman came down the corridor from behind Fat Charlie. She smiled at the maitre d’ and said, “Is the restaurant open yet? I’m completely starved.”

There was a final thrum-thung-thfum from the bass guitar and a plunk from the electric piano. The band put down their instruments and waved at the maitre d’. “It’s open,” she said. “Come in.”

The small woman stared at Fat Charlie with an expression of wary surprise. “Hello Fat Charlie,” she said. “What’s the lime for?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well,” said Daisy. “We’ve got the whole of dinnertime ahead of us. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

Rosie wondered whether madness could be contagious. In the blind darkness beneath the house on the cliff, she had felt something brush past her. Something soft and lithe. Something huge. Something that growled, softly, as it circled them.

“Did you hear that too?” she said.

“Of course I heard it, you stupid girl,” said her mother. Then she said, “Is there any orange juice left?”

Rosie fumbled in the darkness for the juice carton, passed it to her mother. She heard the sound of drinking, then her mother said, “The animal will not be the one that kills us. He will.”

“Grahame Coats. Yes.”

“He’s a bad man. There is something riding him, like a horse, but he would be a bad horse, and he is a bad man.”

Rosie reached out and held her mother’s bony hand in her own. She didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything much to say.

“You know,” said her mother, after a while, “I’m very proud of you. You were a good daughter.”

“Oh,” said Rosie. The idea of not being a disappointment to her mother was a new one, and something about which she was not sure how she felt.

“Maybe you should have married Fat Charlie,” said her mother. “Then we wouldn’t be here.”

“No,” said Rosie. “I should never have married Fat Charlie. I don’t love Fat Charlie. So you weren’t entirely wrong.”

They heard a door slam upstairs.

“He’s gone out,” said Rosie. “Quick. While he’s out. Dig a tunnel.” First she began to giggle, and then she began to cry.

Fat Charlie was trying to understand what Daisy was doing on the island. Daisy was trying, equally as hard, to understand what Fat Charlie was doing on the island. Neither of them was having much success. A singer in a long, red, slinky dress, who was too good for a little hotel restaurant’s Friday Night Fun, was up on the little dais at the end of the room singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Daisy said, “You’re looking for the lady who lived next door when you were a little boy, because she may be able to help you find your brother.”

“I was given a feather. If she’s still got it, I may be able to exchange it for my brother. It’s worth a try.”

She blinked slowly, thoughtfully, entirely unimpressed, and picked at her salad.

Fat Charlie said, “Well, you’re here because you think that Grahame Coats came here after he killed Maeve Livingstone. But you’re not here as a cop. You just powered in under your own steam on the off-chance that he’s here. And if he is here, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

Daisy licked a fleck of tomato seed from the corner of her lips, and looked uncomfortable. “I’m not here as a police officer,” she said. “I’m here as a tourist.”

“But you just walked off the job and came here after him. They could probably send you to prison for that, or something.”

“Then,” she said, drily, “it’s a good thing that Saint Andrews doesn’t have any extradition treaties, isn’t it?”

Under his breath Fat Charlie said, “Oh God.”

The reason Fat Charlie said “Oh God,” was because the singer had left the stage and was now starting to walk around the restaurant with a radio microphone. Right now, she was asking two German tourists where they were from.

“Why would he come here?” asked Fat Charlie.

“Confidential banking. Cheap property. No extradition treaties. Maybe he really likes citrus fruit.”

“I spent two years terrified of that man,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m going to get some more of that fish-and-green-banana thing. You coming?”

“I’m fine,” said Daisy. “I want to leave room for dessert.”

Fat Charlie walked over to the buffet, going the long way around to avoid catching the singer’s eye. She was very beautiful, and her red sequined dress caught the light and glittered as she moved. She was better than the band. He wished she’d go back onto the little stage and keep singing her standards—he had enjoyed her “Night and Day” and a peculiarly soulful “Spoonful of Sugar”—and stop interacting with the diners. Or at least, stop talking to people on his side of the room.

He piled his plate high with more of the things he had liked the first time. The thing about bicycling around the island, he thought, was that it gave you an appetite.

When he returned to his table, Grahame Coats, with something vaguely beardish growing on the lower part of his face, was sitting next to Daisy, and he was grinning like a weasel on speed. “Fat Charlie,” said Grahame Coats, and he chuckled uncomfortably. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? I come looking for you here, for a little tête-à-tête, and what do I find as a bonus? This glamorous little police officer. Please, sit down over there and try not to make a scene.”

Fat Charlie stood like a waxwork.

“Sit down,” repeated Grahame Coats. “I have a gun pressed against Miss Day’s stomach.”

Daisy looked at Fat Charlie imploringly, and she nodded. Her hands were on the tablecloth, pressed flat.

Fat Charlie sat down.

“Hands where I can see them. Spread them on the table, just like hers.”

Fat Charlie obeyed.

Grahame Coats sniffed. “I always knew you were an undercover cop, Nancy,” he said. “An agent provocateur, eh? You come into my offices, set me up, steal me blind.”

“I never—” said Fat Charlie, but he saw the look in Grahame Coats’s eyes and shut up.

“You thought you were so clever,” said Grahame Coats. “You all thought I’d fall for it. That was why you sent the other two in, wasn’t it? The two at the house? Did you think I’d believe they were really from the cruise ship? You have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on me, you know. Who else have you told? Who else knows?”

Daisy said, “I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about, Grahame.”

The singer was finishing “Some of These Days”: her voice was bluesy and rich, and it twined around them all like a velvet scarf.

“You’re going to pay the bill,” said Grahame. “Then I’ll escort you and the young lady out to the car. And we’ll go back to my place, for a proper talk. Any funny business, and I shoot you both. Capiche? “

Fat Charlie capiched. He also capiched who had been driving the black Mercedes that afternoon and just how close he had already come to death that day. He was beginning to capiche how utterly cracked Grahame Coats was and how little chance Daisy and he had of getting out of this alive.

The singer finished her song. The other people scattered around the restaurant clapped. Fat Charlie kept his hands palms-down on the table. He stared past Graham Coats at the singer, and, with the eye that Grahame Coats could not see, he winked at her. She was tired of people avoiding her eyes; Fat Charlie’s wink was extremely welcome.

Daisy said, “Grahame, obviously I came here because of you, but Charlie’s just—” She stopped and made the kind of expression you make when someone pushes a gun barrel deeper into your stomach.

Grahame Coats said, “Listen to me. For the purposes of the innocent bystanders here assembled, we’re all good friends. I’m going to put the gun into my pocket, but it will still be pointing at you. We’re going to get up. We’re going to my car. And I will—”

He stopped. A woman with a red spangly dress and a microphone was heading for their table with an enormous smile on her face. She was making for Fat Charlie. She said into her microphone, “What’s your name, darlin’?” She put the microphone into Fat Charlie’s face.

“Charlie Nancy,” said Fat Charlie. His voice caught and wavered.

“And where you from, Charlie?”

“England. Me and my friends. We’re all from England.”

“And what do you do, Charlie?”

Everything slowed. It was like diving off a cliff into the ocean. It was the only way out. He took a deep breath and said it. “I’m between jobs,” he started. “But I’m really a singer. I sing. Just like you.”

“Like me? What kind of things you sing?”

Fat Charlie swallowed. “What have you got?”

She turned to the other people at Fat Charlie’s table. “Do you think we could get him to sing for us?” she asked, gesturing with her microphone.

“Er. Don’t think so. No. Absatively out of the question,” said Grahame Coats. Daisy shrugged, her hands flat on the table.

The woman in the red dress turned to the rest of the room. “What do we think?” she asked them.

There was a rustle of clapping from the diners at the other tables, and more enthusiastic applause from the serving staff. The barman called out, “Sing us something!”

The singer leaned in to Fat Charlie, covered the mike, and said, “Better make it something the boys know.”

Fat Charlie said, “Do they know ‘Under the Boardwalk’?” and she nodded, announced it, and gave him the microphone.

The band began to play. The singer led Fat Charlie up to the little stage, his heart beating wildly in his chest.

Fat Charlie began to sing, and the audience began to listen.

All he had wanted was to buy himself some time, but he felt comfortable. No one was throwing things. He seemed to have plenty of room in his head to think in. He was aware of everyone in the room: the tourists and the serving staff, and the people over at the bar. He could see everything: he could see the barman measuring out a cocktail, and the old woman in the rear of the room filling a large plastic mug with coffee. He was still terrified, still angry, but he took all the terror and the anger, and he put it into the song, and let it all become a song about lazing and loving. As he sang, he thought.

What would Spider do? thought Fat Charlie. What would my dad do?

He sang. In his song, he told them all exactly what he planned to do under the boardwalk, and it mostly involved making love.

The singer in the red dress was smiling and snapping her fingers and shimmying her body to the music. She leaned into the keyboard player’s microphone and began to harmonize.

I’m actually singing in front of an audience, thought Fat Charlie. Bugger me.

He kept his eyes on Grahame Coats.

As he entered the last chorus, he began to clap his hands above his head, and soon the whole room was clapping along with him, diners and waiters and chefs, everyone except Grahame Coats, whose hands were beneath the tablecloth, and Daisy, whose hands were flat on the table. Daisy was looking at him as if he was not simply barking mad, but had picked an extremely odd moment to discover his inner Drifters.

The audience clapped, and Fat Charlie smiled and he sang, and as he sang he knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that everything was going to be all right. They were going to be just fine, him and Spider and Daisy and Rosie, too, wherever she was, they’d be okay. He knew what he was going to do: it was foolish and unlikely and the act of an idiot, but it would work. And as the last notes of the song faded away, he said, “There’s a young lady at the table I was sitting at. Her name’s Daisy Day. She’s from England too. Daisy, can you wave at everyone?”

Daisy gave him a sick look, but she raised a hand from the table, and she waved.

“There’s something I wanted to say to Daisy. She doesn’t know I’m going to say this.” If this doesn’t work, whispered a voice at the back of his head, she’s dead. You know that? “But let’s hope she says yes. Daisy? Will you marry me?”

The room was quiet. Fat Charlie stared at Daisy, willing her to understand, to play along.

Daisy nodded.

The diners applauded. This was a floor show. The singer, the maitre d’, and several of the waitresses descended on the table, hauled Daisy to her feet, and pulled her over to the middle of the floor. They pulled her over to Fat Charlie, and, as the band played “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” he put his arm around her.

“You got a ring for her?” asked the singer.

He put his hand into his pocket. “Here,” he said to Daisy. “This is for you.” He put his arms around her and kissed her. If anyone is going to get shot, he thought, it will be now. Then the kiss was over, and people were shaking his hand and hugging him—one man, in town, he said, for the music festival, insisted on giving Fat Charlie his card—and now Daisy was holding the lime he had given her with a very strange expression on her face; and when he looked back to the table they had been sitting at, Grahame Coats was gone.