“Do you think that’s likely?”
She picked a dumpling up from her plate with her chopsticks, popped it into her mouth.
“No,” she said. “My guess is that he’s gone somewhere with no extradition treaty. Probably Brazil. Killing Maeve Livingstone might have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, but everything else was so meticulous. He had a system in place. Money went into client accounts. Grahame took his fifteen percent off the top and standing orders ensured that a whole lot more came off the bottom. Lot of foreign checks never even made it into the client accounts in the first place. What’s remarkable is how long he had kept it up.”
Fat Charlie chewed a rice ball with something sweet inside it. He said, “I think you know where he is.”
Daisy stopped chewing her dumpling.
“It was something about the way you said he’d gone to Brazil. Like you know he wasn’t there.”
“That would be police business,” she said. “And I’m afraid I cannot possibly comment. How’s your brother?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s gone. His room wasn’t there when I got home.”
“His room?”
“His stuff. He’d taken his stuff. And no sign of him since.” Fat Charlie sipped his jasmine tea. “I hope he’s all right.”
“You think he wouldn’t be?”
“Well, he’s got the same phobia that I have.”
“The birds thing. Right.” Daisy nodded sympathetically. “And how’s the fiancée, and the future mother-in-law?”
“Um. I don’t think either description is, um, currently operative.”
“Ah.”
“They’ve gone away.”
“Was this because of the arrest?”
“Not as far as I know.”
She looked across at him like a sympathetic pixie. “I’m sorry.”
“Well,” he said. “Right now I don’t have a job, I don’t have a love life, and—thanks mostly to your efforts—the neighbors are now all convinced I’m a yardie hit man. Some of them have started crossing the road to avoid me. On the other hand, my newsagent wants me to make sure the bloke who knocked up his daughter is taught a lesson.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth. I don’t think he believed me though. He gave me a free bag of cheese-and-onion crisps and a pack of Polo mints, and told me there would be more where that came from once I’d done the job.”
“It’ll blow over.”
Fat Charlie sighed. “It’s mortifying.”
“Still,” she said. “It’s not as if it’s the end of the world.”
They split the bill, and the waiter gave them two fortune cookies with their change.
“What does yours say?” asked Fat Charlie.
“Persistence will pay off,” she read. “What about yours?”
“It’s the same as yours,” he said. “Good old persistence.” He crumpled up the fortune into a pea-sized ball and dropped it into his pocket. He walked her down to Leicester Square tube station.
“Looks like it’s your lucky day,” said Daisy.
“How do you mean?”
“No birds around,” she said.
As she said it, Fat Charlie realized it was true. There were no pigeons, no starlings. Not even any sparrows.
“But there are always birds in Leicester Square.”
“Not today,” she said. “Maybe they’re busy.”
They stopped at the tube, and for one foolish moment Fat Charlie thought that she was going to kiss him good-bye. She didn’t. She just smiled and said “bless,” and he half-waved at her, an uncertain hand movement that might have been a wave and could as easily have been an involuntary gesture, and then she was down the stairs and out of sight.
Fat Charlie walked back across Leicester Square, heading for Piccadilly Circus.
He pulled out the fortune cookie slip from his pocket and un-crumpled it. “Meet you by Eros,” it said, and next to that was a hasty little drawing of something that looked like large asterisk, and might, conceivably, have been a spider.
He scanned the skies and the buildings as he walked, but there were no birds, and that was strange because there were always birds in London. There were always birds everywhere.
Spider was sitting beneath the statue, reading the News of the World. He looked up as Fat Charlie approached.
“It’s not actually Eros, you know,” said Fat Charlie. “It’s the statue of Christian Charity.”
“So why is it naked and holding a bow and arrow? That doesn’t seem a particularly charitable or Christian thing to do.”
“I’m just telling you what I read,” said Fat Charlie. “Where have you been? I was worried about you.”
“I’m all right. I’ve just been avoiding birds, trying to get my head around all this.”
“You’ve noticed there aren’t any birds around today?” said Fat Charlie.
“I’ve noticed. I don’t really know what to make of it. But I’ve been thinking. And you know,” said Spider, “there’s something wrong with this whole thing.”
“Everything, for a start,” said Fat Charlie.
“No. I mean there’s something wrong with the Bird Woman trying to hurt us.”
“Yup. It’s wrong. It’s a very, very bad thing to do. Do you want to tell her, or shall I?”
“Not wrong like that. Wrong like—well, think about it. I mean, despite the Hitchcock film, birds aren’t the best thing to hurt someone with. They may be death-on-wings for insects but they really aren’t very good at attacking people. Millions of years of learning that, on the whole, people will probably eat you first. Their first instinct is to leave us alone.”
“Not all of them,” said Fat Charlie. “Not vultures. Or ravens. But they only turn up on the battlefield, when the fighting’s done. Waiting for you to die.”
“What?”
“I said, except for vultures and ravens. I didn’t mean anything….”
“No.” Spider concentrated. “No, it’s gone. You made me think of something, and I almost had it. Look, have you got hold of Mrs. Dunwiddy yet?”
“I phoned Mrs. Higgler, but there isn’t any answer.”
“Well go and talk to them.”
“It’s all very well for you to say that, but I’m skint. Broke. Cleaned out. I can’t keep flying back and forwards across the Atlantic. I don’t even have a job any longer. I’m—”
Spider reached into his black-and-scarlet jacket and pulled out a wallet. He took out a sheaf of notes in an assortment of currencies, pushed them into Fat Charlie’s hand. “Here. This should be enough to get you there and back. Just get the feather.”
Fat Charlie said, “Listen. Has it occurred to you that maybe Dad isn’t dead after all?”
“What?”
“Well, I was thinking. Maybe all this was one of his jokes. It feels like the kind of thing he’d do, doesn’t it?”
Spider said, “I don’t know. Could be.”
Fat Charlie said, “I’m sure it is. That’s the first thing I’m going to do. I’m going to head down to his grave and—”