“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.”