“There,” she said. And then she seemed to take pity on him, for she touched Spider’s face in a way that was almost kindly, and she said, “Sleep.”
He slept.
ROSIE’S MOTHER, NOW BATHED, REAPPEARED REFRESHED, INVIGORATED and positively glowing.
“Before I give you both a ride into Williamstown, can I give you a hasty guided tour of the house?” asked Grahame Coats.
“We do have to get back to the ship, thanks all the same,” said Rosie, who had not been able to convince herself that she wanted a bath in Grahame Coats’s house.
Her mother checked her watch. “We have ninety minutes,” she said. “It won’t take more than fifteen minutes to get back to the harbor. Don’t be ungracious, Rosie. We would love to see your house.”
So Grahame Coats showed them the sitting room, the study, the library, the television room, the dining room, the kitchen and the swimming pool. He opened a door beneath the kitchen stairs that looked as if it would lead to a broom cupboard, and walked his guests down the wooden steps into the rock-walled wine cellar. He showed them the wine, most of which had come with the house when he had bought it. He walked them to the far end of the wine cellar to the bare room that had, back in the days before refrigeration, been a meat storage locker. It was always chilly in the meat locker, where heavy chains came down from the ceiling, the empty hooks on the ends showing where once whole carcases had hung long before. Grahame Coats held the heavy iron door open politely while both the women walked inside.
“You know,” he said, helpfully, “I’ve just realized. The light switch is back where we came in. Hold on.” And then he slammed the door behind the women, and he rammed closed the bolts.
He picked out a dusty-looking bottle of 1995 Chablis Premier Cru from a wine rack.
He went upstairs with a swing in his step and let his three employees know that he would be giving them the week off.
It seemed to him, as he walked up the stairs to his study, as if something were padding soundlessly behind him, but when he turned there was nothing there. Oddly, he found this comforting. He found a corkscrew, opened the bottle and poured himself a pale glass of wine. He drank it and, although he had never previously had much time for red wines, he found himself wishing that what he was drinking was richer and darker. It should be, he thought, the color of blood.
As he finished his second glass of Chablis, he realized that he had been blaming the wrong person for his plight. Maeve Livingstone was, he saw it now, merely a dupe. No, the person to blame, obviously and undeniably, was Fat Charlie. Without his meddling, without his criminal trespass into Grahame Coats’s office computer systems, Grahame Coats wouldn’t be here, an exile, like a blond Napoleon on a perfect, sunny Elba. He wouldn’t be in the unfortunate predicament of having two women imprisoned in his meat locker. If Fat Charlie was here, he thought, I would tear out his throat with my teeth, and the thought shocked him even as it excited him. You didn’t want to screw with Grahame Coats.
Evening came, and Grahame Coats watched the Squeak Attack from his window as it drifted past his house on the cliff and off into the sunset. He wondered how long it would take them to notice that two passengers were missing. He even waved.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
IN WHICH
FAT CHARLIE
DOES
SEVERAL
THINGS
FOR THE FIRST TIME
THE DOLPHIN HOTEL HAD A CONCIERGE. HE WAS YOUNG AND bespectacled, and he was reading a paperback novel with a rose and a gun on the cover.
“I’m trying to find someone,” said Fat Charlie. “On the island.”
“Who?”
“A lady named Callyanne Higgler. She’s here from Florida. She’s an old friend of my family.”
The young man closed his book thoughtfully, then he looked at Fat Charlie through narrowed eyes. When people do this in paperback books it gives an immediate impression of dangerous alertness, but in reality it just made the young man look like he was trying not to fall asleep. He said, “Are you the man with the lime?”
“What?”
“The man with the lime?”
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
“Lemme see it, nuh?”
“My lime?”
The young man nodded, gravely.
“No, you can’t. It’s back in my room.”
“But you are the man with the lime.”
“Can you help me find Mrs. Higgler? Are there any Higglers on the island? Do you have a phone book I could look at? I was hoping for a phone book in my bedroom.”
“It’s a kinda common name, you know?” said the young man. “The phone book not going to help.”
“How common could it be?”
“Well,” said the young man, “For example, I’m Benjamin Higgler. She over there, on reception, she name Amerila Higgler.”
“Oh. Right. Lots of Higglers on the island. I see.”
“She on the island for the music festival?”
“What?”
“It going on all this week.” He handed Fat Charlie a leaflet, informing him that Willie Nelson (canceled) would be headlining the St. Andrews Music Festival.
“Why’d he cancel?”
“Same reason Garth Brooks cancel. Nobody tell them it was happening in the first place.”
“I don’t think she’s going to the music festival. I really need to track her down. She’s got something I’m looking for. Look, if you were me, how would you go about looking for her?”
Benjamin Higgler reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a map of the island. “We’re here, just south of Williamstown….” he began, making a felt pen mark on the paper. From there, he began marking out a plan of campaign for Fat Charlie: he divided the island into segments that could easily be covered in a day by a man on a bicycle, marked out each rum shop and café with small crosses. He put a circle beside each tourist attraction.
Then he rented Fat Charlie a bicycle.
Fat Charlie pedaled off to the south.
There were information conduits on Saint Andrews that Fat Charlie, who, on some level believed that coconut palms and cellular telephones ought to be mutually exclusive, had not expected. It did not seem to make any difference who he talked to: old men playing draughts in the shade; women with breasts like watermelons and buttocks like armchairs and laughter like mockingbirds; a sensible young lady in the tourist office; a bearded rasta with a green, red, and yellow–colored knit cap and what appeared to be a woollen miniskirt: they all had the same response.
“You the one with the lime?”
“I suppose so.”
“Show us your lime.”
“It’s back at the hotel. Look, I’m trying to find Callyanne Higgler. She’s about sixty. American. Big mug of coffee in her hand.”
“Never heard of her.”
Bicycling around the island, Fat Charlie soon discovered, had its dangers. The chief mode of transportation on the island was the minibus: unlicensed, unsafe, always overfilled, the minibuses hurtled around the island, tooting and squealing their brakes, slamming around corners on two wheels whilst relying on the weight of their passengers to ensure they never tipped over. Fat Charlie would have been killed a dozen times on his first morning out were it not for the low thud of drum and bass being played over each bus’s sound system: he could feel them in the pit of his stomach even before he heard their engines, and he had plenty of time to wheel the bicycle over to the side of the road.