“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Well,” he said, “It’s been, um. Interesting.”
And then he said, “I don’t suppose you’d like. To get some food. With me. One day?”
“Dim sum,” she said. “Sunday lunchtime. We’ll go dutch. You’ll need to be there when they open the doors at eleven-thirty, or we’ll have to queue for ages.” She scribbled down the address of a restaurant and handed it to Fat Charlie. “Watch out for birds on the way home,” she said.
“I will,” he said. “See you Sunday.”
THE LOCKSMITH UNFOLDED A BLACK CLOTH WALLET AND took out several slim pieces of metal.
“Honestly,” he said. “You’d think they’d learn. It’s not like good locks are expensive. I mean, you look at that door, lovely piece of work. Solid that is. Take you half a day to get through it with a blow torch. And then they let the whole thing down with a lock that a five-year old could open with a spoon-handle…. There we go…. Easy as falling off the wagon.”
He pulled on the door. The door opened and they saw the thing on the floor.
“Well, for goodness’ sake,” said Maeve Livingstone. “That’s not me.” She thought she’d have more affection for her body, but she didn’t; it reminded her of a dead animal at the side of the road.
Soon enough the room was filled with people. Maeve, who had never had much patience for detective dramas, was quickly bored, only taking an interest in what was happening when she felt herself being pulled, unarguably, downstairs and out the front door, as the human remains were taken away in a discreet blue plastic bag.
“This is more like it,” said Maeve Livingstone.
She was out.
At least she was out of the office in the Aldwych.
Obviously, she knew, there were rules. There had to be rules. It’s just that she wasn’t very sure what they were.
She found herself wishing she’d been more religious in life, but she’d never been able to manage it: as a small girl she had been unable to envision a God who disliked anyone enough to sentence them to an eternity of torture in Hell, mostly for not believing in Him properly, and as she grew up her childhood doubts had solidified into a rocky certainty that Life, from birth to grave, was all there was and that everything else was imaginary. It had been a good belief, and it had allowed her to cope, but now it was being severely tested.
Honestly, she wasn’t sure that even a life spent attending the right sort of church would have prepared her for this. Maeve was rapidly coming to the conclusion that in a well-organized world, Death should be like the kind of all-expenses-included luxury vacation where they give you a folder at the start filled with tickets, discount vouchers, schedules, and several phone numbers to ring if you get into trouble.
She didn’t walk. She didn’t fly. She moved like the wind, like a cold autumn wind that made people shiver as she passed, that stirred the fallen leaves on the pavements.
She went where she always went first when she came to London: to Selfridges, the department store in Oxford Street. Maeve had worked in the cosmetics department of Selfridges when she was much younger, 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 Morris Livingstone, I Presume.
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.”