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
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 fiancee, 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.
“
“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.
