Anansi Boys

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell him you were investigating him,” Grahame Coats assured her. “Otherwise he’d be off to the costa-del-crime before we could say prima facie evidence. Frankly, I like to think of myself as being extremely sympathetic to the problems of contemporary policing.”

Daisy caught herself thinking that anyone who would steal money from this man could not be all bad, which was, she knew, no way for a police officer to think.

“I’ll lead you out,” he said to her.

In the waiting room a man was sitting. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes. He was unshaven, and he looked a little confused. Grahame Coats nudged Daisy and inclined his head toward the man. Aloud, he said, “Charles, good Lord, man, look at the state of you. You look terrible.”

Fat Charlie looked at him blearily. “Didn’t get home last night,” he said. “Bit of a mix-up with the taxi.”

“Charles,” said Grahame Coats, “this is Detective Constable Day, of the Metropolitan Police. She is just here on routine business.”

Fat Charlie realized there was someone else there. He focused, saw the sensible clothes that might as well have been a uniform. Then he saw the face. “Er,” he said.

“Morning,” said Daisy. That was what she said with her mouth. Inside her head she was going oh bollocks oh bollocks oh bollocks, over and over.

“Nice to meet you,” said Fat Charlie. Puzzled, he did something he had never done before: he imagined a plainclothes police officer with no clothes on, and found his imagination was providing him with a fairly accurate representation of the young lady beside whom he had woken up in bed, the morning after his father’s wake. The sensible clothes made her look slightly older, more severe, and much scarier, but it was her, all right.

Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke. From this moment on, he suspected, nothing would surprise him. He could no longer be outweirded. He was done.

He was wrong, of course.

Fat Charlie watched Daisy leave, and he followed Grahame Coats back into his office.

Grahame Coats closed the door firmly. Then he perched his bottom against his desk, and smiled like a weasel who has just realized that he’s been accidentally locked into the henhouse for the night.

“Let us be blunt,” he said. “Cards on the table. No beating about the bush. Let us,” he elaborated, “let us call a spade a spade.”

“All right,” said Fat Charlie, “Let’s. You said you had something for me to sign?”

“No longer an operative statement. Dismiss it from your mind. No, let us now discuss something you pointed out to me several days ago. You alerted me to certain unorthodox transactions occurring here.”

“I did?”

“Two, as they say, Charles, two can play at that game. Naturally, my first impulse was to investigate. Thus the visit this morning from Detective Constable Day. And what I found will, I suspect, not come as a shock to you.”

“It won’t?”

“No indeed. There are, as you pointed out, definite indicators of financial irregularities, Charles. But alas, there is only one place to which the fickle finger of suspicion unerringly points.”

“There is?”

“There is.”

Fat Charlie felt completely at sea. “Where?”

Grahame Coats attempted to look concerned, or at least to look as if he were trying to look concerned, managing an expression which, in babies, always indicates that they are need of a good burping. “You, Charles. The police suspect you.”

“Yes,” said Fat Charlie. “Of course they do. It’s been that sort of a day.”

And he went home.

SPIDER OPENED THE FRONT DOOR. IT HAD STARTED RAINING, and Fat Charlie stood there looking rumpled and wet.

“So,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m now allowed home now, am I?”

“I wouldn’t do anything to stop you,” said Spider. “It’s your home, after all. Where were you all night?”

“You know perfectly well where I was. I was failing to come home. I don’t know what kind of magic ‘fluence you were using on me.”