Mrs. Dunwiddy took a large handful of wet cornbread and rammed it into the turkey with a force that would have made the turkey's eyes water, if it still had any. "Can't get him to go away?"

"Nope."

Sharp eyes peered through thick lenses. Then Mrs. Dunwiddy said, "I done it once. Can't do it again. Not that way."

"I know. But we got to do something."

Mrs. Dunwiddy sighed. "It's true what they say. Live long enough, you see all your birds come home to roost."

"Isn't there another way?"

Mrs. Dunwiddy finished stuffing the turkey. She picked up a skewer, pinned the flap of skin closed. Then she covered the bird with silver foil.

"I reckon," she said, "I put it on to cook late tomorrow morning. It be done in the afternoon, then I put it back into a hot oven early evening, to get it all ready for dinner."

"Who you got comin' to dinner?" asked Mrs. Higgler.

"You," said Mrs. Dunwiddy, "Zorah Bustamonte, Bella Noles. And Fat Charlie Nancy. By the time that boy gets here, he have a real appetite."

Mrs. Higgler said, "He's coming here?"

"Aren't you listening, girl?" said Mrs. Dunwiddy. Only Mrs. Dunwiddy could have called Mrs. Higgler "girl" without sounding foolish. "Now, help me get this turkey into the fridge."

IT WOULD BEFAIR TO SAY THAT ROSIE HAD, THAT EVENING, JUSThad the most wonderful night of her life: magical, perfect, utterly fine. She could not have stopped smiling, not even if she had wanted to. The food had been fabulous, and once they had eaten Fat Charlie had taken her dancing. It was a proper dance hall, with a small orchestra and people in pastel clothes who glided across the floor. She felt as if they had traveled in time together and were visiting a gentler age. Rosie had enjoyed dancing lessons from the age of five, but had no one to dance with.

"I didn't know you could dance," she told him.

"There are so many things about me you do not know," he said.

And that made her happy. Soon enough, she and this man would be married. There were things about him she did not know? Excellent. She would have a lifetime in which to find them out. All sorts of things.

She noticed the way other women, and other men, looked at Fat Charlie as she walked beside him, and she was happy she was the woman on his arm.

They walked through Leicester Square, and Rosie could see the stars shining up above them, the starlight somehow crisply twinkling, despite the glare of the streetlights.

For a brief moment, she found herself wondering why it had never been like this with Fat Charlie before. Sometimes, somewhere deep inside herself, Rosie had suspected that perhaps she had only kept going out with Fat Charlie because her mother disliked him so much; that she had only saidyes when he had asked her to marry him because her mother would have wanted her to sayno ....

Fat Charlie had taken her out to the West End once. They'd gone to the theater. It was a birthday surprise for her, but there had been a mix-up on the tickets, which, it turned out, had actually been issued for the day before; the management were both understanding and extremely helpful, and they had managed to find Fat Charlie a seat behind a pillar in the stalls, while Rosie took a seat in the upper circle behind a violently giggly hen party from Norwich. It had not been a success, not as these things were counted.

This evening, though, this evening had been magic. Rosie had not had many perfect moments in her life, but whatever the total was, it had just gone up by one.

She loved how she felt when she was with him.

And once the dancing was done, after they had stumbled out into the night, giddy on movement and champagne, then Fat Charlie-and, she thought, why did she think of him as Fat Charlie anyway? for he wasn't the least bit fat-put his arm around her and said, "Now, you're coming back to my place," in a voice so deep and real it made her abdomen vibrate; and she said nothing about working the next day, nothing about there'd be time enough for that kind of thing when they were married, nothing at all, in fact, while all the time she thought about how much she didn't want the evening to end, and how very very much she wished-no, sheneeded -to kiss this man on the lips, and to hold him.

And then, remembering she had to say something, she saidyes.

In the cab back to his flat, her hands held his, and she leaned against him and stared at him as the light from passing cars and streetlamps illuminated his face.

"You have a pierced ear," she said. "Why didn't I ever notice before that you have a pierced ear?"

"Hey," he said with a smile, his voice a deep bass thrum, "how do you think it makes me feel, when you've never even noticed something like that, even when we've been together for, what is it now?"

"Eighteen months," said Rosie.

"For eighteen months," said her fiance.

She leaned against him, breathed him in. "I love the way you smell," she told him. "Are you wearing some kind of cologne?"

"That's just me," he told her.

"Well, you should bottle it."

She paid the taxi while he opened the front door. They went up the stairs together. When they got to the top of the stairs, he seemed to be heading along the corridor, toward the spare room at the back.

"You know," she said, "the bedroom's here, silly. Where are you going?"

"Nowhere. I knew that," he said. They went into Fat Charlie's bedroom. She closed the curtains. Then she just looked at him, and was happy.

"Well," she said, after a while, "aren't you going to try to kiss me?"

"I guess I am," he said, and he did. Time melted and stretched and curved. She might have kissed him for a moment, or for an hour, or for a lifetime. And then- "What was that?"

He said, "I didn't hear anything."

"It sounded like someone in pain."

"Cats fighting, maybe?"

"It sounded like a person."

"Could have been an urban fox. They can sound a lot like people."

She stood there with her head tipped to one side, listening intently. "It's stopped now," she said. "Hmm. You want to know the strangest thing?"

"Uh-huh," he said, his lips now nuzzling her neck. "Sure, tell me the strangest thing. But I've made it go away now. It won't bother you again."

"The strangest thing," said Rosie, "is that it sounded like you."

FAT CHARLIEWALKED THE STREETS, TRYING TO CLEAR HIS HEAD.The obvious course of action was to bang on his own front door until Spider came down and let him in, then to give Spider and Rosie a piece of his mind. That was obvious. Perfectly, utterly obvious.

He just needed to go back to his flat and explain the whole thing to Rosie, and shame Spider into leaving him alone. That was all he had to do. How hard could that be?

Harder than it ought to be, that was for certain. He was not quite sure why he had walked away from his flat. He was even less certain how to find his way back. Streets he knew, or thought he knew, seemed to have reconfigured themselves. He found himself walking down dead ends, exploring endless cul-de-sacs, stumbling through the tangles of late-night London residential streets.

Sometimes he saw the main road. There were traffic lights on it, and the lights of fast-food places. He knew that once he got onto the main road he would be able to find his way back to his house, but whenever he walked to the main road he would wind up somewhere else.

Fat Charlie's feet were starting to hurt. His stomach rumbled, violently. He was angry, and as he walked he became angrier and angrier.

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. "Number3 4. 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 at9 :30 A.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 thecosta-del-crime before we could sayprima 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 goingohbollocks 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.