“Eat your porridge.”
They finished their porridge and their tea. They put the bowls in the dishwasher and, because it was not yet full, did not turn it on. Then they drove in to work. Carol, who was now in uniform, did the driving.
Daisy went up to her desk, in a room filled with empty desks.
The phone rang as she sat down. “Daisy? You’re late.”
She looked at her watch. “No,” she said. “I’m not. Sir. Now is there anything else I can do for you this morning?”
“Too right. You can call a man named Coats. He’s a friend of the chief super. Fellow Crystal Palace supporter. He’s already texted me about it twice this morning. Who taught the chief super to text, that’s what I want to know?”
Daisy took down the details and called the number. She put on her most businesslike and efficient tone of voice and said, “Detective Constable Day. How can I help you?”
“Ah,” said a man’s voice. “Well, as I was telling the chief superintendent last night, a lovely man, old friend. Good man. He suggested I talk to someone in your office. I wish to report. Well, I’m not actually certain that a crime has been committed. Probably a perfectly sensible explanation. There have been certain irregularities, and, well, to be perfectly frank with you, I’ve given my bookkeeper a couple of weeks’ leave while I try to come to grips with the possibility that he may have been involved in certain, mm, financial irregularities.”
“Suppose we get the details,” said Daisy. “What’s your full name, sir? And the bookkeeper’s name?”
“My name is Grahame Coats,” said the man on the other end of the telephone. “Of the Grahame Coats Agency. My bookkeeper is a man named Nancy. Charles Nancy.”
She wrote both names down. They did not ring any bells.
FAT CHARLIE HAD PLANNED TO HAVE AN ARGUMENT WITH SPIDER as soon as Spider came home. He had rehearsed the argument in his head, over and over, and had won it, both fairly and decisively, every time.
Spider had not, however, come home last night, and Fat Charlie had eventually fallen asleep in front of the television, half-watching a raucous game show for horny insomniacs, which seemed to be called Show Us Your Bum!
He woke up on the sofa, when Spider pulled open the curtains. “Beautiful day,” said Spider.
“You!” said Fat Charlie. “You were kissing Rosie. Don’t try to deny it.”
“I had to,” said Spider.
“What do you mean, you had to? You didn’t have to.”
“She thought I was you.”
“Well, you knew you weren’t me. You shouldn’t have kissed her.”
“But if I had refused to kiss her, she would have thought it was you not kissing her.”
“But it wasn’t me.”
“She didn’t know that. I was just trying to be helpful.”
“Being helpful,” said Fat Charlie, from the sofa, “is something you do that, generally speaking, involves not kissing my fiancée. You could have said you had a toothache.”
“That,” said Spider, virtuously, “would have been lying.”
“But you were lying already! You were pretending to be me!”
“Well, it would have been compounding the lie, anyway,” explained Spider. “Something I only did because you were in no shape to go to work. No,” he said, “I couldn’t have lied further. I would have felt dreadful.”
“Well, I did feel dreadful. I had to watch you kissing her.”
“Ah,” said Spider. “But she thought she was kissing you.”
“Don’t keep saying that!”
“You should feel flattered.” Spider said, “Do you want lunch?”
“Of course I don’t want lunch. What time is it?”
“Lunchtime,” said Spider. “And you’re late for work again. It’s a good thing I didn’t cover for you again, if this is all the thanks I get.”
“S’okay,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve been given two weeks off. And a bonus.”
Spider raised an eyebrow.
“Look,” said Fat Charlie, feeling like it was time to move to the second round of the argument, “it’s not like I’m trying to get rid of you or anything, but I was wondering when you were thinking of leaving?”
Spider said, “Well, when I came here, I’d only planned to visit for a day. Maybe two days. Long enough to meet my little brother, and then I’d be on my way. I’m a busy man.”
“So you’re leaving today.”
“That was my plan,” said Spider. “But then I met you. I cannot believe that we have let almost an entire lifetime go by without each other’s company, my brother.”
“I can.”
“The ties of blood,” said Spider, “are stronger than water.”
“Water’s not strong,” objected Fat Charlie.
“Stronger than vodka, then. Or volcanoes. Or, or ammonia. Look, my point is that meeting you—well, it’s a privilege. We’ve never been part of each other’s lives, but that was yesterday. Let’s start a new tomorrow, today. We’ll put yesterday behind us and forge new bonds—the bonds of brotherhood.”
“You’re totally after Rosie,” said Fat Charlie.
“Totally,” agreed Spider. “What do you plan to do about it?”
“Do about it? Well, she’s my fiancée.”
“Not to worry. She thinks I’m you.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
Spider spread his hands in a saintly gesture, then ruined the effect by licking his lips.
“So,” said Fat Charlie, “what are you planning to do next? Marry her, pretending to be me?”
“Marry?” Spider paused and thought for a moment. “What. A horrible. Idea.”
“Well, I was quite looking forward to it, actually.”
“Spider does not marry. I’m not the marrying kind.”
“So my Rosie’s not good enough for you, is that what you’re saying?”
Spider did not answer. He walked out of the room.
Fat Charlie felt like he’d scored, somehow, in the argument. He got up from the sofa, picked up the empty foil cartons that had, the previous evening, held a chicken chow mein and a crispy pork balls, and he dropped them into the bin. He went into his bedroom, where he took off the clothes he had slept in in order to put on clean clothes, discovered that, due to not doing the laundry, he had no clean clothes, so brushed yesterday’s clothes down vigorously—dislodging several stray strands of chow mein—and put them back on.
He went into the kitchen.
Spider was sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying a steak large enough for two people.
“Where did you get that from?” said Fat Charlie, although he was certain that he already knew.
“I asked you if you wanted lunch,” said Spider, mildly.
“Where did you get the steak?”
“It was in the fridge.”
“That,” declaimed Fat Charlie, wagging his finger like a prosecuting attorney going in for the kill, “that was the steak I bought for dinner tonight. For dinner tonight for me and Rosie. The dinner I was going to be cooking for her! And you’re just sitting there like a, a person eating a steak, and, and eating it, and—”