He pressed the button again. “Hullo,” he said. “Just wanted to see if I could fill my water bottle here.”
There was no reply. Perhaps he had only imagined that there was someone at the window. He seemed extremely prone to imagining things here: he started to fancy that he was being watched, not by someone in the house, but by someone or something in the bushes that bordered the road. “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said into the speaker, and clambered back onto his bike. It was downhill from here all the way to Williamstown. He was sure that he’d pass a café or two on the way, or another house, a friend
ly one.
He was on his way down the road—the cliffs had become a steepish hill down to the sea—when a black car came up behind him and accelerated forward with a roar. Too late, Fat Charlie realized that the driver had not seen him, for there was a long scrape of car against the bike’s handlebars, and Fat Charlie found himself tumbling, with the bike, down the hill. The black car drove on.
Fat Charlie picked himself up halfway down the hill. “That could have been nasty,” he said aloud. The handlebars were twisted. He hauled his bike back up the hill and onto the road. A low bass rumble alerted him to the approach of a minibus, and he waved it down.
“Can I put my bike in the back?”
“No room,” said the driver, but he produced several bungee cords from beneath his seat, and used them to fasten the bike onto the roof of the bus. Then he grinned. “You must be the Englishman with the lime.”
“I don’t have it on me. It’s back at the hotel.”
Fat Charlie squeezed onto the bus, where the booming bass resolved itself, extremely improbably, into Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Fat Charlie squeezed in next to a large woman with a chicken on her lap. Behind them two white girls chattered about the parties they had attended the previous night and the shortcomings of the temporary boyfriends they had accumulated during their holiday.
Fat Charlie noticed the black car—a Mercedes—as it came back up the road. It had a long scratch along one side. He felt guilty, hoping his bike hadn’t scraped the paintwork too badly. The windows were tinted so dark that the car might have been driving itself…
Then one of the white girls tapped Fat Charlie on the shoulder and asked him if he knew of any good parties on the island that night, and when he said he didn’t, started telling him about one that she’d been to in a cave two nights before, where there was a swimming pool and a sound system and lights and everything, and so Fat Charlie completely failed to notice that the black Mercedes was now following the minibus into Williamstown, and that it only went on its way once Fat Charlie had retrieved his bike from the roof of the minibus (“next time, you should bring the lime”) and carried the bike into the hotel lobby.
Only then did the car return to the house on the cliff top.
Benjamin the concierge examined the bike and told Fat Charlie not to worry, and they’d have it all fixed and good as new by tomorrow.
Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the color of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop.
“You’re no help,” he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime; there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.
STORIES ARE WEBS, INTERCONNECTED STRAND TO STRAND, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.
Daisy, for example.
Daisy could not have lasted as long as she had in the police force without having a sensible side to her nature, which was mostly all anybody saw. She respected laws, and she respected rules. She understood that many of these rules are perfectly arbitrary—decisions about where one could park, for example, or what hours shops were permitted to open—but that even these rules helped the big picture. They kept society safe. They kept things secure.
Her flatmate, Carol, thought she’d gone mad.
“You can’t just leave and say you’re going on holiday. It doesn’t work like that. You’re not on a TV cop show, you know. You can’t just zoom all over the world to follow up a lead.”
“Well, then, in that case I’m not,” Daisy had retorted untruthfully. “I’m just going on holiday.”
She said it so convincingly that the sensible cop who lived at the back of her head was shocked into silence and then began to explain to her exactly what she was doing wrong, beginning with pointing out that she was about to go off on an entirely unauthorized leave—tantamount, muttered the sensible cop, to neglect of duty—and moving on from there.
It explained it on the way to the airport, and all across the Atlantic. It pointed out that even if she managed to avoid a permanent black mark in her Personal File, let alone being thrown out of the police force altogether, even if she did find Grahame Coats, there was nothing she could do once she found him. Her Majesty’s constabulary look unkindly on kidnapping criminals in foreign countries, let alone arresting them, and she rather doubted she would be able to persuade him to return to the UK willingly.
It was only when Daisy got off the little plane from Jamaica and tasted the air—earthy, spicy, wet, almost sweet—of Saint Andrews that the sensible cop stopped pointing out the sheer ill-considered madness of what she was doing. That was because it was drowned out by another voice. “Evildoers beware!” it sang. “Beware! Take care! Evildoers everywhere!” and Daisy was marching to its beat. Grahame Coats had killed a woman in his office in the Aldwych, and he had walked out of there scot-free. He had done it practically under Daisy’s nose.
She shook her head, collected her bag, brightly informed the immigration officer that she was here on her holidays, and went out to the taxi rank.
“I want a hotel that’s not too expensive, but isn’t icky, please,” she said to the driver.
“I got just the place for you darlin‘,” he said. “Hop in.”
SPIDER OPENED HIS EYES AND DISCOVERED THAT HE WAS staked-out, face down. His arms were tied to a large stake pounded into the earth in front of him. He could not move his legs or twist his neck enough to see behind him, but he was willing to bet that they were similarly hobbled. The movement, as he tried to lift himself out of the dirt, to look behind him, caused his scratches to burn.
He opened his mouth, and dark blood drooled onto the dust, wetting it.
He heard a sound and twisted his head as much as he could. A white woman was looking down at him curiously.