The anger cleared his head. The cobwebs surrounding his thoughts began to evaporate; the web of streets he was walking began to simplify. He turned a corner and found himself on the main road, next to the all-night “New Jersey Fried Chicken” outlet. He ordered a family pack of chicken, and sat and finished it off without any help from anyone else in his family. When that was done he stood on the pavement until the friendly orange light of a For Hire sign, attached to a large black cab, came into view, and he hailed the cab. It pulled up next to him, and the window rolled down.

“Where to?”

“Maxwell Gardens,” said Fat Charlie.

“You taking the mickey or something?” asked the cab driver. “That’s just around the corner.”

“Will you take me there? I’ll give you an extra fiver. Honest.”

The cabbie breathed in loudly through his clenched teeth: it was the noise a car mechanic makes before asking you whether you’re particularly attached to that engine for sentimental reasons. “It’s your funeral,” said the cabbie. “Hop in.”

Fat Charlie hopped. The cabbie pulled out, waited for the lights to change, went around the corner.

“Where did you say you wanted to go?” asked the cabbie.

“Maxwell Gardens,” said Fat Charlie. “Number 34. It’s just past the off-license.”

He was wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he wished he wasn’t. His mother had always told him to wear clean underwear, in case he was hit by a car, and to brush his teeth, in case they needed to identify him by his dental records.

“I know where it is,” said the cabbie. “It’s just before you get to Park Crescent.”

“That’s right,” said Fat Charlie. He was falling asleep in the backseat.

“I must have taken a wrong turning,” said the cabbie. He sounded irritated. “I’ll turn off the meter, all right? Call it a fiver.”

“Sure,” said Fat Charlie, and he snuggled down in the backseat of the taxi, and he slept. The taxi drove on through the night, trying to get just around the corner.

Detective Constable Day, currently on a twelve-month secondment to the Fraud Squad, arrived at the offices of the Grahame Coats Agency at 9:30A.M. Grahame Coats was waiting for her in reception, and he walked her back into his office.

“Would you care for a coffee, tea?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She pulled out a notebook and sat looking at him expectantly.

“Now, I cannot stress enough that discretion must needs be the essence of your investigations. The Grahame Coats Agency has a reputation for probity and fair dealing. At the Grahame Coats Agency, a client’s money is a sacrosanct trust. I must tell you, that when I first began to entertain suspicions about Charles Nancy, I dismissed them as unworthy of a decent man and a hard worker. Had you asked me a week ago what I thought about Charles Nancy, I would have told you that he was the very salt of the earth.”

“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 ohbollocks ohbollocks ohbollocks, 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.”