“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.”