He looked up at her as if he wasn’t certain exactly what he was looking at. “It’s not a playground game of tag. If they kept the rules, they’d be on our side. If he comes back, then we arrest him.” He squashed a little Plasticine man into a Plasticine ball and began to mash it out into a flat sheet, pinching it between finger and thumb. “In the old days,” he said, “they could claim sanctuary in a church. If you stayed in the church the law couldn’t touch you. Even if you killed a man. Of course, it limited your social life. Right.”
He looked at her as if he expected her to leave now. She said, “He killed Maeve Livingstone. He’s been cheating his clients blind for years.”
“And?”
“We should be bringing him to justice.”
“Don’t let it get to you,” he said.
Daisy thought,
“Don’t let it get to you,” he repeated. He folded the Plasticine sheet into a rough cube, then squeezed it viciously between finger and thumb. “I don’t let any of it get to me. Think of it as if you were a traffic warden. Grahame Coats is just a car that parked on the double yellow lines but drove off before you were able to give him a ticket. Yes?”
“Sure,” said Daisy. “Of course. Sorry.”
“Right,” he said.
She went back to her desk, went to the Police internal Web site, and examined her options for several hours. Finally, she went home. Carol was sitting in front of Coronation Street, eating a microwavable chicken korma.
“I’m taking a break,” said Daisy. “I’m going on holiday.”
“You don’t have any holiday time left,” pointed out Carol reasonably.
“Too bad,” said Daisy. “I’m too old for this shit.”
“Oh. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to catch a crook,” said Daisy.
Fat Charlie liked Caribbeair. They might have been an international airline, but they felt like a local bus company. The flight attendant called him “darlin’” and told him jus’ to sit anywhere that struck his fancy.
He stretched out across three seats and went to sleep. In Fat Charlie’s dream he was walking beneath copper skies and the world was silent and still. He was walking toward a bird, vaster than cities, its eyes aflame, its beak agape, and Fat Charlie walked into the beak and down the creature’s throat.
Then, in the way of dreams, he was in a room, its walls covered with soft feathers and with eyes, round like the eyes of owls, which did not blink.
Spider was in the center of the room, his legs and arms extended. He was held up by chains made of bone, like the bones of a chicken’s neck, and they ran from each corner of the room, and held him tightly, like a fly in a web.
The bone chains pulled and tugged at Spider’s flesh, and Fat Charlie could see the pain in his face.
There was a pause. The two brothers stared at each other.
Fat Charlie woke, shivering. The flight attendant brought him coffee, and he drank it gratefully. He was awake now, and he had no desire to go back to sleep, so he read the Caribbeair Magazine and learned many useful things about Saint Andrews.
He learned that Saint Andrews is not the smallest of the Caribbean Islands, but it tends to be one of the ones that people forget about when they make lists. It was discovered by the Spanish around 1500, an uninhabited volcanic hill teeming with animal life, not to mention a multiplicity of plants. It was said that anything that you planted in Saint Andrews would grow.
It belonged to the Spanish, and then to British, then to the Dutch, then to the British again, and then, for a short while after it was made independent in 1962, it belonged to Major F. E. Garrett, who took over the government, broke off diplomatic relations with all other countries except Albania and the Congo, and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett’s fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island’s sole hospital. Since then, Saint Andrews had been ruled by a beneficent and elected local government and was everybody’s friend.
It had miles of sandy beaches and an extremely small rainforest in the center of the island; it had bananas and sugarcane, a banking system that encouraged foreign investment and offshore corporate banking, and no extradition treaties with anybody at all, except possibly the Congo and Albania.
If Saint Andrews was known for anything, it was for its cuisine: the inhabitants claimed to have been jerking chickens before the Jamaicans, currying goats before the Trinidadians, frying flying fish before the Bajans.
There were two towns on Saint Andrews: Williamstown, on the southeast side of the island, and Newcastle, on the north. There were street markets in which anything that grew on the island could be bought, and several supermarkets, in which the same foodstuffs could be bought for twice the price. One day Saint Andrews would get a real international airport.
It was a matter of opinion whether the deep harbor of Williamstown was a good thing or not. It was indisputable that the deep harbor brought the cruise ships, though, floating islands filled with people, who were changing the economy and nature of Saint Andrews as they were changing the economy of many Caribbean islands. At high season there would be up to half a dozen cruise ships in Williamstown Bay, and thousands of people waiting to disembark, to stretch their legs, to buy things. And the people of Saint Andrews grumbled, but they welcomed the visitors ashore, they sold them things, they fed them until they could eat no more and then they sent them back to their ships—
The Caribbeair plane landed with a bump that made Fat Charlie drop his magazine. He put it back into the seat pocket in front of him, walked down the steps and across the tarmac.
