“Yes. I talked to a spider. I suppose it was my own fault. I never expected anything to happen.”
A chorus of tuts and tsks and tchs ran around the table as Mrs. Higgler and Mrs. Dunwiddy and Mrs. Bustamonte and Miss Noles clicked their tongues and shook their heads. “He always used to say you were the stupid one,” said Miss Noles. “Your father, that is. I never believed him.”
“Well, how was I to know?” Fat Charlie protested. “It’s not as if my parents ever said to me, ‘By the way, Son, you have a brother you don’t know about. Invite him into your life and he’ll have you investigated by the police, he’ll sleep with your fiancée, he’ll not just move into your home but bring an entire extra house into your spare room. And he’ll brainwash you and make you go to films and spend all night trying to get home and—’” He stopped. It was the way they were looking at him.
A sigh went around the table. It went from Mrs. Higgler to Miss Noles to Mrs. Bustamonte to Mrs. Dunwiddy. It was extremely unsettling and quite spooky, but Mrs. Bustamonte belched and ruined the effect.
“So what do you want?” asked Mrs. Dunwiddy. “Say what you want.”
Fat Charlie thought about what he wanted, in Mrs. Dunwiddy’s little dining room. Outside, the daylight was fading into a gentle twilight.
“He’s made my life a misery,” said Fat Charlie. “I want you to make him go away. Just go away. Can you do that?”
The three younger women said nothing. They simply looked at Mrs. Dunwiddy.
“We can’t actually make him go away,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “We already…” and she stopped herself, and said, “Well, we done all we can about that, you see.”
It is to Fat Charlie’s credit that he did not, as deep down he might have wished to, burst into tears or wail or collapse in on himself like a problematic soufflé. He simply nodded. “Well, then,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you all. Thank you for the dinner.”
“We can’t make him go away,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, her old brown eyes almost black behind her pebble-thick spectacles. “But we can send you to somebody who can.”
IT WAS EARLY EVENING IN FLORIDA, WHICH MEANT THAT IN London it was the dead of night. In Rosie’s big bed, where Fat Charlie had never been, Spider shivered.
Rosie pressed close to him, skin to skin. “Charles,” she said. “Are you all right?” She could feel the goose pimples bumping the skin of his arms.
“I’m fine,” said Spider. “Sudden creepy feeling.”
“Somebody walking over your grave,” said Rosie.
He pulled her close then, and he kissed her.
And Daisy was sitting in the small common room of the house in Hendon, wearing a bright green nightdress and fluffy, vivid pink carpet slippers. She was sitting in front of a computer screen, shaking her head and clicking the mouse.
“You going to be much longer?” asked Carol. “You know, there’s a whole computer unit that’s meant to be doing that. Not you.”
Daisy made a noise. It was not a yes-noise and it was not a no-noise. It was an I-know-somebody-just-said-something-to-meand-if-I-make-a-noise-maybe-they’ll-go-away sort of noise.
Carol had heard that noise before.
“Oy,” she said. “Big bum. Are you going to be much longer? I want to do my blog.”
Daisy processed the words. Two of them sank in. “Are you saying I’ve got a big bum?”
“No,” said Carol. “I’m saying that it’s getting late, and I want to do me blog. I’m going to have him shagging a supermodel in the loo of an unidentified London nightspot.”
Daisy sighed. “All right,” she said. “It’s just fishy, that’s all.”
“What’s fishy?”
“Embezzlement. I think. Right, I’ve logged out. It’s all yours. You know you can get into trouble for impersonating a member of the royal family.”
“Bog off.”
Carol blogged as a member of the British Royal Family, young, male, and out-of-control. There had been arguments in the press about whether or not she was the real thing, many of them pointing to things she wrote that could only have been known to an actual member of the British Royal Family, or to someone who read the glossy gossip magazines.
Daisy got up from the computer, still pondering the financial affairs of the Grahame Coats Agency.
While fast asleep in his bedroom, in a large but certainly not ostentatious house in Purley, Grahame Coats slept. If there was any justice in the world, he would have moaned and sweated in his sleep, tortured by nightmares, the furies of his conscience lashing him with scorpions. Thus it pains me to admit that Grahame Coats slept like a well-fed milk-scented baby, and he dreamed of nothing at all.
Somewhere in Grahame Coats’s house, a grandfather clock chimed politely, twelve times. In London, it was midnight. In Florida it was seven in the evening.
Either way, it was the witching hour.
MRS. DUNWIDDY REMOVED THE PLASTICATED RED-AND-white check tablecloth and put it away.