by Neil Gaiman
“I’m sure you would. So when did you become aware that money might have been diverted from clients’ accounts?”
“Well, I’m still not certain. I hesitate to cast aspersions. Or first stones, for that matter. Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
On television, thought Daisy, they say “just give me the facts.” She wished she could say it, but she didn’t.
She did not like this man.
“I’ve printed out all the anomalous transactions here,” he said. “As you’ll see, they were all made from Nancy’s computer. I must again stress that discretion is of the essence here: clients of the Grahame Coats Agency include a number of prominent public figures, and, as I said to your superior, I would count it as a personal favor if this matter could be dealt with as quietly as possible. Discretion must be your watchword. If, perchance, we can persuade our Master Nancy simply to return his ill-gotten gains, I would be perfectly satisfied to let the matter rest there. I have no desire to prosecute.”
“I can do my best, but at the end of the day, we gather information and turn it over to the Crown Prosecution Service.” She wondered how much pull he really had with the chief super. “So what attracted your suspicions?”
“Ah yes. Frankly and in all honesty, it was certain peculiarities of behavior. The dog that failed to bark in the nighttime. The depth the parsley had sunk into the butter. We detectives find significance in the smallest things, do we not, Detective Day?”
“Er, it’s Detective Constable Day, really. So, if you can give me the printouts,” she said, “along with any other documentation, bank records all that. We may actually need to pick up his computer, to look at the hard disk.”
“Absatively,” he said. His desk phone rang, and—“If you’ll excuse me?”—he answered it. “He is? Good Lord. Well, tell him to just wait for me in reception. I’ll come out and see him in a moment.” He put down the phone. “That,” he said to Daisy, “is what I believe you would call, in police circles, a right turn-up for the books.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“That is the aforementioned Charles Nancy himself, here to see me. Shall we show him in? If you need to, you may use my offices as an interview room. I’m sure I even have a tape recorder you might borrow.”
Daisy said, “That won’t be necessary. And the first thing I’ll need to do is go through all the paperwork.”
“Right-ho,” he said. “Silly of me. Um, would you…would you like to look at him?”
“I don’t see that that would accomplish anything,” said Daisy.
“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.”
“It wasn’t magic,” said Spider, offended. “It was a miracle.”
Fat Charlie pushed past him and stomped up the stairs. He walked into the bathroom, put in the plug, and turned on the taps. He leaned out into the hall. “I don’t care what it’s called. You’re doing it in my house, and you stopped me coming home last night.”
He took off the day-before-yesterday’s clothes. Then he put his head back around the door. “And the police are investigating me at work. Did you tell Grahame Coats that there were financial irregularities going on?”
“Of course I did,” said Spider.
“Hah! Well, he only suspects me, that’s what.”
“Oh, I don’t think he does,” said Spider.
“Shows all you know,” said Fat Charlie. “I talked to him. The police are involved. And then there’s Rosie. And you and I are going to have a very long conversation about Rosie when I get out of the bath. But first of all, I’m going to get into the bath. I spent yesterday night wandering around. I got the only sleep of the night in the backseat of a taxi. By the time I woke up it was five in the morning and my taxi driver was turning into Travis Bickle. He was conducting a monologue. I told him he might as well give up looking for Maxwell Gardens, and that it obvious
ly wasn’t a Maxwell Gardens kind of night, and eventually he agreed so we went and had breakfast in one of those places taxi drivers have breakfast. Eggs and beans and sausages and toast, and tea you could stand a spoon up in. When he told the other taxi drivers he’d been driving all around last night looking for Maxwell Gardens, well, I thought blood was going to be spilled. It wasn’t. But it looked a pretty close thing for a minute there.”
Fat Charlie stopped to take a breath. Spider looked guilty.
“After,” said Fat Charlie. “After my bath.” He shut the bathroom door.
He climbed into the bath.
He made a whimpering noise.
He climbed out of the bath.
He turned off the taps.
He wrapped a towel around his midriff and opened the bathroom door. “No hot water,” he said much, much too calmly. “Do you have any idea why we have no hot water?”
Spider was still standing in the hallway. He hadn’t moved. “My hot tub,” he said. “Sorry.”
Fat Charlie said, “Well, at least Rosie doesn’t. I mean, she wouldn’t have—” And then he caught the expression on Spider’s face.
Fat Charlie said, “I want you out of here. Out of my life. Out of Rosie’s life. Gone.”
“I like it here,” said Spider.
“You’re ruining my bloody life.”
“Tough.” Spider walked down the hallway and opened the door to Fat Charlie’s spare room. Golden tropical sunlight flooded the hallway momentarily, then the door was closed.
Fat Charlie washed his hair in cold water. He brushed his teeth. He rummaged through his laundry hamper until he found a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that were, by virtue of being at the bottom, practically clean once more. He put them on, along with a purple sweater with a teddy bear on it his mother had once given him that he had never worn but had never got around to giving away.
He went down to the end of the corridor.
The boom-chagga-boom of a bass and drums penetrated the door.
Fat Charlie rattled the door handle. It didn’t budge. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, “I’m going to break it down.”
The door opened without warning, and Fat Charlie lurched inward, into the empty box room at the end of the hall. The view through the window was the back of the house behind, what little you could see of it through the rain that was now lashing the windowpane.
Still, from somewhere only a wall’s thinness away, a stereo was playing too loudly: everything in the box room vibrated to a distant boom-chagga-boom.
“Right,” said Fat Charlie conversationally. “You realize, of course, that this means war.” It was the traditional war cry of the rabbit when pushed too far. There are places in which people believe that Anansi was a trickster rabbit. They are wrong, of course; he was a spider. You might think the two creatures would be easy to keep separate, but they still get confused more often than you would expect.
Fat Charlie went into his bedroom. He retrieved his passport from the drawer by his bed. He found his wallet where he had left it in the bathroom.
He walked down to the main road, in the rain, and hailed a taxi.
“Where to?”
“Heathrow,” said Fat Charlie.
“Right you are,” said the cabbie. “Which terminal?”
“No idea,” said Fat Charlie, who knew that, really, he ought to know. It had only been a few days, after all. “Where do they leave for Florida?”
GRAHAME COAT SHAD BEGUN PLANNING HIS EXIT FROM THE Grahame Coats Agency back when John Major was prime minister. Nothing good lasts forever, after all. Sooner or later, as Grahame Coats himself would have delighted in assuring you, even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked. While his planning had been good—one never knew when one might need to leave at a moment’s notice—and he was not unaware that events were massing, like gray clouds on the horizon, he wished to put off the moment of leaving until it could be delayed no longer.
What was important, he had long ago decided, was not leaving, but vanishing, evaporating, disappearing without trace.
In the concealed safe in his office—a walk-in room he was extremely proud of—on a shelf he had put up himself and had recently needed to put up again when it fell down, was a leather vanity case containing two passports, one in the name of Basil Finnegan, the other in the name of Roger Bronstein. Each of the men had been born about fifty years ago, just as Grahame Coats had, but had died in their first year of life. Both of the passport photographs in the passports were of Grahame Coats. The case also contained two wallets, each with its own set of credit cards and photographic identification in the name of one of the names of the passport holders. Each name was a signatory to the funnel accounts in the Caymans, which themselves funneled to other accounts in the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.
Grahame Coats had been planning to leave for good on his fiftieth birthday, a little more than a year from now, and he was brooding on the matter of Fat Charlie.
He did not actually expect Fat Charlie to be arrested or imprisoned, although he would not have greatly objected to either scenario had it occurred. He wanted him scared, discredited, and gone.
Grahame Coats truly enjoyed milking the clients of the Grahame Coats Agency, and he was good at it. He had been pleasantly surprised to discover that, as long as he picked his clientele with care, the celebrities and performers he represented had very little sense of money and were relieved to find someone who would represent them and manage their financial affairs and make sure that they didn’t have to worry. And if sometimes statements or checks were late in coming, or if they weren’t always what the clients were expecting, or if there were unidentified direct debits from client accounts, well, Grahame Coats had a high staff turnover, particularly in the bookkeeping department, and there was nothing that couldn’t easily be blamed on the incompetence of a previous employee or, rarely, made right with a case of champagne and a large and apologetic check.
It wasn’t that people liked Grahame Coats, or that they trusted him. Even the people he represented thought he was a weasel. But they believed that he was their weasel, and in that they were wrong.
Grahame Coats was his own weasel.
The telephone on his desk rang, and he picked it up. “Yes?”
“Mister Coats? It’s Maeve Livingstone on the phone. I know you said to put her through to Fat Charlie, but he’s off this week, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Shall I tell her you’re out?”
Grahame Coats pondered. Before a sudden heart attack had carried him off, Morris Livingstone, once the best-loved short Yorkshire comedian in the country had been the star of such television series as Short Back and Sides and his own Saturday-night variety-game show Morris Livingstone, I Presume. He had even had a top-ten single back in the eighties, with the novelty song, “It’s Nice Out (But Put It Away).” Amiable, easygoing, he had not only left all his financial affairs in the control of the Grahame Coats Agency, but he had also appointed, at Grahame Coats’s suggestion, Grahame Coats himself as trustee of his estate.
It would have been criminal not to give in to temptation like that.
And then there was Maeve Livingstone. It would be fair to say that Maeve Livingstone had, without knowing it, featured for many years in starring and costarring roles in a number of Grahame Coats’s most treasured and private fantasies.
Grahame Coats said, “Please. Put her through,” and then, solicitously, “Maeve, how lovely to hear from you. How are you?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
Maeve Livingstone had been a dancer when she met Morris, and had always towered over the little man. They had adored each other.
“Well, why don’t you tell me about it?”
“I spoke to Charles a couple of days ago. I was wondering. Well, the bank manager was wondering. The money from Morris’s estate. We were told we would be seeing something by now.”
“Maeve,” said Grahame Coats, in what he
thought of as his dark velvet voice, the one he believed that women responded to, “the problem is not that the money is not there—it’s merely a matter of liquidity. As I’ve told you, Morris made a number of unwise investments toward the end of his life, and although, following my advice, he made some sound ones as well, we do need to allow the good ones to mature: we cannot pull out now without losing almost everything. But worry ye not, worry ye not. Anything for a good client. I shall write you a check from my own bank account in order to keep you solvent and comfortable. How much does the bank manager require?”
“He says that he’s going to have to start bouncing checks,” she said. “And the BBC tell me that they’ve been sending money from the DVD releases of the old shows. That’s not invested, is it?”
“That’s what the BBC said? Actually, we’ve been chasing them for money. But I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on BBC Worldwide. Our bookkeeper’s pregnant, and things have been all at sixes and sevens. And Charles Nancy, who you spoke to, has been rather distraught—his father died, and he has been out of the country a great deal—”
“Last time we spoke,” she pointed out, “you were putting in a new computer system.”
“Indeed we were, and please, do not get me started on the subject of bookkeeping programs. What is it they say—to err is human, but to really, er, mess things up, you need a computer. Something like that. I shall investigate this forcefully, by hand if necessary, the old-fashioned way, and your moneys shall be wending their way to you. It’s what Morris would have wanted.”
“My bank manager says I need ten thousand pounds in right now, just to stop them bouncing checks.”
“Ten thousand pounds shall be yours. I am writing a check for you even as we speak.” He drew a circle on his notepad, with a line going off the top of it. It looked a bit like an apple.
“I’m very grateful,” said Maeve, and Grahame Coats preened. “I hope I’m not becoming a bother.”
“You are never a bother,” said Grahame Coats. “No sort of bother at all.”
He put down the phone. The funny thing, Grahame Coats always thought, was that Morris’s comedic persona had always been that of a hardheaded Yorkshireman, proud of knowing the location of every penny.