Only now did it occur to him to lock the main door to his office.
There was, he noticed, blood on his shirt and on his hand, and on the sole of one shoe. He took off his shirt, and wiped down his shoe with it. Then he dropped the shirt into the bin beneath his desk. He surprised himself by putting his hand to his mouth and licking the gobbet of blood off it, like a cat, with his red tongue.
And then he yawned. He took Maeve’s papers from the desk, ran them through the shredder. She had a second set of documents in her briefcase, and he shredded them as well. He reshredded the shreddings.
He had a closet in the corner of his office, with a suit hanging in it, and spare shirts, socks, underpants, and so on. You never knew when you would need to head to a first night from the office, after all. Be prepared.
He dressed with care.
There was a small suitcase with wheels in it in the closet, too, of the kind that is meant to be placed in overhead lockers, and he put things into it, moving them around to make room.
He called reception. “Annie,” he said. “Would you pop out and get me a sandwich? Not from Prêt, no. I thought the new place in Brewer Street? I’m just wrapping up with Mrs Livingstone. I may actually wind up taking her out for a spot of real lunch, but best to be prepared.”
He spent several minutes on the computer, running the kind of disk-cleaning program that takes your data, overwrites it with random ones and zeroes, then grinds it up extremely small before finally depositing it at the bottom of the Thames wearing concrete overshoes. Then he walked down the hall, pulling his wheeled suitcase behind him.
He put his head around one office door. “Popping out for a bit,” he said. “I’ll be back in about three, if anyone asks.”
Annie was gone from reception, which, he thought, was a good thing. People would assume that Maeve Livingstone had already left the agency, just as they would expect Grahame Coats to return at any time. By the time they started looking for him, he would be a long way away.
He descended in the lift. This was all happening early, he thought. He would not turn fifty for more than a year. But the exit mechanisms were already in place. He needed simply to think of it as a golden handshake, or perhaps a golden parachute.
And then, pulling the wheelie suitcase behind him, he walked out of the front door into the sunny Aldwych morning, and out of the Grahame Coats Agency forever.
SPIDER HAD SLEPT PEACEFULLY IN HIS OWN ENORMOUS BED, in his place in Fat Charlie’s spare room. He had begun to wonder, in a vague sort of way, whether Fat Charlie had gone for good, and had resolved to investigate the matter the next time that he could in any way be bothered to do so, unless something more interesting distracted him or he forgot.
He had slept late, and was now on his way to meet Rosie for lunch. He would pick her up at her flat, and they would go somewhere good. It was a beautiful day in early autumn, and Spider’s happiness was infectious. This was because Spider was, give or take a little, a god. When you’re a god, your emotions are contagious—other people can catch them. When people stood near Spider on a day that he was this happy, their worlds would seem a little brighter. If he hummed a song, other people around him would start humming, in key, like something from a musical. Of course, if he yawned, a hundred people nearby would yawn, and when he was miserable it spread like a damp river-mist, making the world even gloomier for everyone caught up in it. It wasn’t anything he did; it was something that he was.
Right now, the only thing casting a damper on his happiness was that he had resolved to tell Rosie the truth.
Spider was not terribly good at telling the truth. He regarded truth as fundamentally malleable, more or less a matter of opinion, and Spider was able to muster some pretty impressive opinions when he had to.
Being an imposter was not the problem. He liked being an imposter. He was good at it. It fitted in with his plans, which were fairly simple and could until now have been summarized more or less as: (a) go somewhere; (b) enjoy yourself; and (c) leave before you get bored. And it was now, he knew deep down, definitely time to leave. The world was his lobster, his bib was round his neck, and he had a pot of melted butter and an array of grotesque but effective lobster-eating implements and devices at the ready.
Only….
Only he didn’t want to go.
He was having second thoughts about all this, something Spider found fairly disconcerting. Normally he didn’t even have first thoughts about things. Life without thinking had been perfectly pleasant—instinct, impulse, and an obscene amount of luck had served him quite well up to now. But even miracles can only take you so far. Spider walked down the street, and people smiled at him.
He had agreed with Rosie that he would meet her at her flat, so he was pleasantly surprised to see her standing at the end of the road, waiting for him. He felt a pang of something that was still not entirely guilt, and waved.
“Rosie? Hey!”
She came toward him along the pavement, and he began to grin. They would sort things out. Everything would work out for the best. Everything would be fine. “You look like a million dollars,” he told her. “Maybe two million. What are you hungry for?”
Rosie smiled and shrugged.
They were passing a Greek restaurant. “Is Greek okay?” She nodded. They walked down some steps and went inside. It was dark and empty, having only just opened, and the proprietor pointed them toward a nook, or possibly a cranny, toward the rear.
They sat opposite each other, at a table just big enough for two. Spider said, “There’s something that I wanted to talk to you about.” She said nothing. “It’s not bad,” he went on. “Well, it’s not good. But. Well. It’s something you ought to know.”
The proprietor asked them if they were ready to order anything. “Coffee,” said Spider, and Rosie nodded her agreement. “Two coffees,” said Spider. “And if you can give us, um, five minutes? I need a little privacy here.”
The proprietor withdrew.
Rosie looked at Spider inquiringly.
He took a deep breath. “Right. Okay. Let me just say this, because it isn’t easy, and I don’t know that I can…right. Okay. Look, I’m not Fat Charlie. I know you think I am, but I’m not. I’m his brother, Spider. You think I’m him because we sort of look alike.”
She did not say anything.
“Well, I don’t really look like him. But. Y’know, none of this really comes easy to me. Ookay. Uh. I can’t stop thinking about you. So I mean, I know you’re engaged to my brother, but I’m sort of asking if you, well, if you’d think about maybe dumping him and possibly going out with me.”
A pot of coffee arrived on a small silver tray, with two cups.
“Greek coffee,” said the proprietor, who had brought it.
“Yes. Thanks. I did ask for a couple of minutes….”
“Is very hot,” said the proprietor. “Very hot coffee. Strong. Greek. Not Turkish.”
“That’s great. Listen, if you don’t mind—five minutes. Please?”
The proprietor shrugged and walked away.
“You probably hate me,” said Spider. “If I was you I’d probably hate me, too. But I mean this. More than I’ve ever meant anything in my life.” She was just looking at him, without expression, and he said, “Please. Just say something. Anything.”