Anansi Boys

Daisy’s father was nettled by this, enough that he shyly asked for a rematch on the following Wednesday, and on every successive Wednesday after that (excluding vacations and public holidays) for the next two years.

Their social interaction increased as their social skills and her spoken English improved. Together, they held hands as part of a human chain and protested the arrival of large trucks loaded with missiles. Together, although as part of a much larger party, they traveled to Barcelona in order to protest the unstoppable flood of international capitalism and to register stern protests at corporate hegemonies. This was also the time they got to experience officially squirted tear gas, and Mr. Day’s wrist was sprained as he was being pushed out of the way by the Spanish police.

And then, one Wednesday at the beginning of their third year at Cambridge, Daisy’s father beat Daisy’s mother at chess. He was made so happy by this, so elated and triumphant that, buoyed and emboldened by his conquest, he proposed marriage; and Daisy’s mother, who had been, deep down, afraid that as soon as he won a game he would lose interest in her, said yes, of course.

They stayed in England and remained in academia, and they had one daughter, whom they called Daisy because at the time they owned (and, to Daisy’s later amusement, actually rode) a tandem—a bicycle built for two. They moved from university to university across Britain: he taught computer sciences while his wife wrote books that nobody wanted to read about international corporate hegemonies, and books that people did want to read about chess, its strategies and its history, and thus in a good year she would make more money than he did, which was never very much. Their involvement in politics waned as they grew older, and as they approached middle age they had become a happy couple with no interests beyond each other, chess, Daisy, and the reconstruction and debugging of forgotten operating

systems.

Neither of them understood Daisy, not even a little.

They blamed themselves for not having nipped her fascination with the police force in the bud when it first began to manifest, more or less at the same time that she began talking. Daisy would point out police cars in the same excited way that other little girls might point out ponies. Her seventh birthday party was held in fancy dress to allow her to wear her junior policewoman’s costume, and there are still photographs in a box in her parents’ attic of her face suffused with a seven-year-old’s perfect joy at the sight of her birthday cake: seven candles ringing a flashing blue light.

Daisy was a diligent, cheerful, intelligent teenager who made both her parents happy when she went to the University of London to study law and computing. Her father had dreams of her becoming a lecturer in law; her mother nurtured dreams of her daughter taking silk, perhaps even becoming a judge and then using the law to crush corporate hegemonies whenever they appeared. And then Daisy went and ruined everything by taking the entry exams and joining the police force. The police welcomed her with open arms: on the one hand, there were directives on the need to improve the diversity of the force, while on the other, computer crime and computer-related fraud was on the increase. They needed Daisy. Frankly, they needed a whole string of Daisies.

At this point, four years on, it would be fair to say that a career in the police force had failed to live up to Daisy’s expectations. It was not, as her parents had warned her repeatedly, that the police force was an institutionally racist and sexist monolith that would crush her individuality into something soul-destroying and uniform, that would make her as much a part of the canteen culture as instant coffee. No, the frustrating part of it was getting other coppers to understand that she was a copper, too. She had come to the conclusion that, for most coppers, police work was something you did to protect Middle England from scary people of the wrong social background, who were probably out to steal their cell phones. From where Daisy stood it was about something else. Daisy knew that a kid in his den in Germany could send out a virus that would shut down a hospital, causing more damage than a bomb. Daisy was of the opinion that the real bad guys these days understood FTP sites and high-level encryption and disposable prepaid cell phones. She was not sure that the good guys did.

She took a sip of coffee from a plastic cup and made a face; while she had been paging through screen after screen, her coffee had gone cold.

She had gone through all the information that Grahame Coats had given her. There was certainly a prima facie case for thinking that something was wrong—if nothing else there was a check for two thousand pounds that Charles Nancy had apparently written to himself the previous week.

Except. Except something did not feel right.

She walked down the corridor and knocked on the superintendent’s door.

“Come!”

Camberwell had smoked a pipe at his desk for thirty years, until the building had instituted a no-smoking policy. Now he made do with a lump of Plasticine, which he balled and squashed and kneaded and prodded. As a man with a pipe in his mouth, he had been placid, good-natured, and, as far as those beneath him were concerned, the salt of the earth. As a man with a lump of Plasticine in his hand, he was uniformly irritable and short-tempered. On a good day he made it as far as tetchy.

“Yes?”

“The Grahame Coats Agency case.”

“Mm?”

“I’m not sure about it.”

“Not sure about it? What on earth is there not to be sure about?”

“Well, I think maybe I should take myself off the case.”

He did not look impressed. He stared at her. Down on the desk, unwatched, his fingers were kneading the blue Plasticine into the shape of a meerschaum. “Because?”

“I’ve met the suspect socially.”

“And? You’ve been on holiday with him? You’re godmother to his kids? What?”

“No. I met him once. I stayed overnight at his house.”

“So are you saying you and he did the nasty?” A deep sigh, in which world-weariness, irritation, and a craving for half an ounce of Condor ready-rubbed mingled in equal parts.

“No sir. Nothing like that. I just slept there.”

“And that’s your total involvement with him?”

“Yes sir.”

He crushed the Plasticine pipe back into a shapeless blob. “You realize you’re wasting my time?”