Anansi Boys

“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.”

“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 kn

ocked 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?”