Half an hour later, someone came and led him to the interrogation room.
“HULLO,” SAID DAISY, WITH A SMILE. “WOULD YOU LIKE A cup of tea?”
“You might as well not bother,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve seen the telly. I know how it goes. This is that whole good-cop bad-cop thing, isn’t it? You’ll give me a cup of tea and some Jaffa cakes, then some big hard-bitten bastard with a hair-trigger temper comes in and shouts at me and pours the tea away and starts eating my Jaffa cakes and then you stop him from physically attacking me, and make him give me my tea and Jaffa cakes back, and in my gratitude I tell you everything you want to know.”
“We could skip all that,” said Daisy, “and you could just tell us what we want to know. Anyway, we don’t have any Jaffa cakes.”
“I told you everything I know,” said Fat Charlie. “Everything. Grahame Coats gave me a check for two grand and told me to take two weeks off. He said he was pleased I’d brought some irregularities to his attention. Then he asked for my password and waved me good-bye. End of story.”
“And you still say you don’t know anything about the disappearance of Maeve Livingstone?”
“I don’t think I ever actually met her properly. Maybe once when she came through the office. We talked on the phone a few times. She’d want to talk to Grahame Coats. I’d have to tell her the check was in the post.”
“Was it?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was. Look, you can’t believe I had anything to do with her disappearance.”
“No,” she said, cheerfully, “I don’t.”
“Because I honestly don’t know what could have—you what?”
“I don’t think you had anything to do with Maeve Livingstone’s disappearance. I also don’t believe that you had anything to do with the financial irregularities being perpetrated at the Grahame Coats Agency, although someone seems to have worked very hard to make it look like you did. But it’s pretty obvious that the weird accounting practices and the steady syphoning off of money predates your arrival. You’ve only been there two years.”
“About that,” said Fat Charlie. He realized that his jaw was open. He closed it.
Daisy said, “Look, I know that cops in books and movies are mostly idiots, especially if it’s the kind of book with a crime-fighting pensioner or a hard-arsed private eye in it. And I’m really sorry that we don’t have any Jaffa cakes. But we’re not all completely stupid.”
“I didn’t say you were,” said Fat Charlie.
“No,” she said. “But you were thinking it. You’re free to go. With an apology if you’d like one.”
“Where did she, um, disappear?” asked Fat Charlie.
“Mrs. Livingstone? Well, the last time anyone saw her, she was accompanying Grahame Coats into his office.”
“Ah.”
“I meant it about the cup of tea. Would you like one?”
“Yes. Very much. Um. I suppose your people already checked out the secret room in his office. The one behind the bookcase?”
It is to Daisy’s credit that all she said, perfectly calmly, was “I don’t believe they did.”
“I don’t think we were supposed to know about it,” said Fat Charlie, “but I went in once, and the bookshelf was pushed back, and he was inside. I went away again,” he added. “I wasn’t spying on him or anything.”
Daisy said, “We can pick up some Jaffa cakes on the way.”
FAT CHARLIE WASN’T CERTAIN THAT HE LIKED FREEDOM. THERE was too much open air involved.
“Are you okay?” asked Daisy.
“I’m fine.”
“You seem a bit twitchy.”
“I suppose I am. You’ll think this is silly, but I’m a bit—well, I have a thing about birds.”
“What, a phobia?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, that’s the common term for an irrational fear of birds.”
“What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?” He nibbled the Jaffa cake.
There was silence. Daisy said, “Well, anyway, there aren’t any birds in this car.”
She parked the car on the double yellow lines outside the Grahame Coats Agency offices, and they went inside together.
ROSIE LAY IN THE SUN BY THE POOL ON THE AFT DECK OF A KOrean cruise ship* with a magazine over her head and her mother beside her, trying to remember why she had ever thought a holiday with her mother would be a good idea.
There were no English newspapers on the cruise ship, and Rosie did not miss them. She missed everything else, though. In her mind the cruise was a form of floating purgatory, made bearable only by the islands they visited every day or so. The other passengers would go ashore and shop or parasail or go for rumsodden trips on floating pirate ships. Rosie, on the other hand, would walk, and talk to people.
She would see people in pain, see people who looked hungry or miserable, and she wanted to help. Everything seemed very fixable to Rosie. It just needed someone to fix it.
MAEVE LIVINGSTONE HAD EXPECTED DEATH TO BE A NUMBER of things, but irritating had never been one of them. Still, she was irritated. She was tired of being walked through, tired of being ignored, and, most of all, tired of not being able to leave the offices in the Aldwych.
“I mean, if I have to haunt anywhere,” she said to the receptionist, “why can’t I haunt Somerset House, over the road? Lovely buildings, excellent view over the Thames, several architecturally impressive features. Some very nice little restaurants as well. Even if you don’t need to eat any longer, it’d be nice for people-watching.”
Annie the receptionist, whose job since the vanishment of
Grahame Coats had been to answer the phone in a bored voice and say, “I’m afraid I don’t know” to pretty much any question she was asked, and who, when she was not performing this function, would phone her friends and discuss the mystery in hushed but excitable tones, did not reply to this, as she had not replied to anything Maeve had said to her.
The monotony was broken by the arrival of Fat Charlie Nancy, accompanied by the female police officer.
Maeve had always rather liked Fat Charlie, even when his function had been to assure her that a check would soon be in the mail, but now she saw things she had never seen before: there were shadows that fluttered about him, always keeping their distance: bad things coming. He looked like a man on the run from something, and it worried her.
She followed them into Grahame Coats’s office and was delighted to see Fat Charlie head straight over to the bookshelf at the back of the room.
“So where’s the secret panel?” asked Daisy.
“It’s not a panel. It was a door. Behind the bookshelf over here. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a secret catch or something.”
Daisy looked at the bookshelf. “Did Grahame Coats ever write an autobiography?” she asked Fat Charlie.
“Not that I’ve ever heard about.”
She pushed on the leatherbound copy of My Life by Grahame Coats. It clicked, and the bookshelf swung away from the wall, revealing a locked door behind it.
“We’ll need a locksmith,” she said. “And I don’t really think we need you here any longer, Mr Nancy.”