I'll sort it out,said Fat Charlie.I'll fix it.

Just like you fixed the rest of your life, I suppose?Spider grinned, without mirth.

I'm sorry.

No. I'm sorry.Spider sighed.So look, have you got a plan?

A plan?

I'll take that as a no. Just do whatever you have to do. Get me out of here.

Are you in Hell?

I don't know where I am. If it's anywhere, this is the Hell of Birds. You have to get me out.

How?

You're Dad's son, aren't you? You'remybrother. Come up with something. Just get me out of here.

Fat Charlie woke, shivering. The flight attendant brought him coffee, and he drank it gratefully. He was awake now, and he had no desire to go back to sleep, so he read the Caribbeair Magazine and learned many useful things about Saint Andrews.

He learned that Saint Andrews is not the smallest of the Caribbean Islands, but it tends to be one of the ones that people forget about when they make lists. It was discovered by the Spanish around1500 , an uninhabited volcanic hill teeming with animal life, not to mention a multiplicity of plants. It was said that anything that you planted in Saint Andrews would grow.

It belonged to the Spanish, and then to British, then to the Dutch, then to the British again, and then, for a short while after it was made independent in1962 , it belonged to Major F. E. Garrett, who took over the government, broke off diplomatic relations with all other countries except Albania and the Congo, and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett's fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island's sole hospital. Since then, Saint Andrews had been ruled by a beneficent and elected local government and was everybody's friend.

It had miles of sandy beaches and an extremely small rainforest in the center of the island; it had bananas and sugarcane, a banking system that encouraged foreign investment and offshore corporate banking, and no extradition treaties with anybody at all, except possibly the Congo and Albania.

If Saint Andrews was known for anything, it was for its cuisine: the inhabitants claimed to have been jerking chickens before the Jamaicans, currying goats before the Trinidadians, frying flying fish before the Bajans.

There were two towns on Saint Andrews: Williamstown, on the southeast side of the island, and Newcastle, on the north. There were street markets in which anything that grew on the island could be bought, and several supermarkets, in which the same foodstuffs could be bought for twice the price. One day Saint Andrews would get a real international airport.

It was a matter of opinion whether the deep harbor of Williamstown was a good thing or not. It was indisputable that the deep harbor brought the cruise ships, though, floating islands filled with people, who were changing the economy and nature of Saint Andrews as they were changing the economy of many Caribbean islands. At high season there would be up to half a dozen cruise ships in Williamstown Bay, and thousands of people waiting to disembark, to stretch their legs, to buy things. And the people of Saint Andrews grumbled, but they welcomed the visitors ashore, they sold them things, they fed them until they could eat no more and then they sent them back to their ships....

The Caribbeair plane landed with a bump that made Fat Charlie drop his magazine. He put it back into the seat pocket in front of him, walked down the steps and across the tarmac.

It was late afternoon.

Fat Charlie took a taxi from the airport to his hotel. During the taxi ride, he learned a number of things that had not been mentioned in the Caribbeair magazine. For example, he learned that music, real music, proper music, was country and western music. On Saint Andrews, even the rastas knew it. Johnny Cash? He was a god. Willie Nelson? A demigod.

He learned that there was no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews. The taxi driver himself had seen no reason ever to leave Saint Andrews, and he had given it much thought. The island had a cave, and a mountain, and a rainforest. Hotels? It had twenty. Restaurants? Several dozen. It contained a city, three towns, and a scattering of villages. Food? Everything grew here. Oranges. Bananas. Nutmegs. It even, the taxi driver said, had limes.

Fat Charlie said "No!" at this, mostly in order to feel like he was taking part in the conversation, but the driver appeared to take it as a challenge to his honesty. He slammed on the taxi's brakes, sending the car slewing over to the side of the road, got out of the car, reached over a fence, pulled something from a tree and walked back to the car.

"Look at this!" he said. "Nobody ever tell you that I is a liar. What it is?"

"A lime?" said Fat Charlie.

"Exactly."

The taxi driver lurched the car back into the road. He told Fat Charlie that the Dolphin was an excellent hotel. Did Fat Charlie have family on the island? Did he know anyone here?

"Actually," said Fat Charlie, "I'm here looking for someone. For a woman."

The taxi driver thought this was a splendid idea, since Saint Andrews was a perfect place to come if you were looking for a woman. This was, he elaborated, because the women of Saint Andrews were curvier than the women of Jamaica, and less likely to give you grief and heartbreak than the Trinis. In addition, they were more beautiful than the women of Dominica, and they were better cooks than you would find anywhere on Earth. If Fat Charlie was looking for a woman, he had come to the right place.

"It's not just any woman. It's a specific woman," said Fat Charlie.

The taxi driver told Fat Charlie that this was his lucky day, for the taxi driver prided himself on knowing everyone on the island. If you spend your life somewhere, he said, you can do that. He was willing to bet that Fat Charlie did not know by sight all the people in England, and Fat Charlie admitted that this was in fact the case.

"She's a friend of the family," said Fat Charlie. "Her name is Mrs. Higgler. Callyanne Higgler. You heard of her?"

The taxi driver was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he said that, no, he hadn't ever heard of her. The taxi pulled up in front of the Dolphin Hotel, and Fat Charlie paid him.

Fat Charlie went inside. There was a young woman on reception. He showed her his passport and the reservation number. He put the lime down on the reservation desk.

"Do you have any luggage?"

"No," said Fat Charlie, apologetically.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. Just this lime."

He filled out several forms, and she gave him a key and directions to his room.

Fat Charlie was in the bath when a knock came on the door. He wrapped a towel around his midriff. It was the bellman. "You left your lime in reception," he said, and handed it to Fat Charlie.

"Thanks," said Fat Charlie. He went back to his bath. Afterward, he went to bed, and dreamed uncomfortable dreams.

IN HIS HOUSEON THE CLIFF TOP, GRAHAME COATS WAS ALSOhaving the strangest dreams, dark and unwelcome, if not actually unpleasant. He could not remember them properly when he woke, but he would open his eyes the next morning with a vague impression that he had spent the night stalking smaller creatures through the long grass, despatching them with a blow of his paw, rending their bodies with his teeth.

In his dreams, his teeth were weapons of destruction.

He woke from the dreams feeling disturbed, with the day slightly charged.

And, each morning, a new day would begin and here, only a week away from his old life, Grahame Coats was already experiencing the frustration of the fugitive. He had a swimming pool, true, and cocoa trees, and grapefruit and nutmeg trees; he had a full wine cellar and an empty meat cellar and media center. He had satellite television, a large DVD collection, not to mention art, thousands of dollars' worth of art, all over the walls. He had a cook, who came in each day and cooked his meals, a housekeeper and a groundskeeper (a married couple who came in for a few hours each day). The food was excellent, the climate was-if you liked warm, sunny days-perfect, and none of these things made Grahame Coats as happy as he felt was his due.

He had not shaved since leaving England, which had not yet endowed him with a beard, merely given him a thin covering of the kind of facial hair that makes men look shifty. His eyes sat in panda-dark sockets, and the bags beneath his eyes were so dark as to appear to be bruises.

He swam in the pool once each day, in the morning, but otherwise avoided the sun; he had not, he told himself, amassed an ill-gotten fortune to lose it to skin cancer. Or to anything else at all.

He thought about London too much. In London, each of his favorite restaurants had a maitre d' who called him by name and ensured he left happy. In London there were people who owed him favors, and there was never any difficulty in getting first-night tickets, and for that matter in London there were theaters to have first nights in. He had always thought he would make a fine exile; he was starting to suspect that he had been wrong.

Needing someone to blame, he came to the conclusion that the entire affair was Maeve Livingstone's fault. She had led him on. She had attempted to rob him. She was a vixen, a minx, and a hussy. She had deserved everything she had coming to her. She had gotten off easily. Should he be interviewed on television, he could already hear the bruised innocence in his voice as he explained that he had been defending his property and his honor from a dangerous madwoman. Frankly, it was some kind of miracle that he'd made it out of that office alive....

And he hadliked being Grahame Coats. He was now, as always while he was on the island, Basil Finnegan, and it irked him. He didn't feel like a Basil. His Basilhood had been hard-won-the original Basil had died as an infant, and had a birth-date close to Grahame's own. One copy of the birth certificate, along with a letter from an imaginary clergyman, later, and Grahame possessed a passport and an identity. He had kept the identity alive-Basil had a solid credit history, Basil traveled to exotic places, Basil had bought a luxury house on Saint Andrews without ever seeing it. But in Grahame's mind, Basil had been working for him, and now the servant had become the master. Basil Finnegan had eaten him alive.

"If I stay here," said Grahame Coats. "I shall go mad."

"What you say?" asked the housekeeper, duster in hand, leaning in at the bedroom door.

"Nothing," said Grahame Coats.

"Sound like you say if you stay in you go mad. You ought to go for a walk. Walking good for you."

Grahame Coats did not go for walks; he had people to do that for him. But, he thought, perhaps Basil Finnegan went for walks. He put on a broad-brimmed hat and exchanged his sandals for walking shoes. He took his cell phone, instructed the groundskeeper to come and get him when he called, and set out from the house on the cliff edge, heading toward the nearest town.

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

So it was that Grahame Coats walked into a small cafe on the road to Williamstown, in order to purchase a soft drink and to have somewhere to sit while he called his gardener to tell him that he should come and pick him up.

He ordered a Fanta and sat down at a table. The place was practically empty: two women, one young, one older, sat in the far corner, drinking coffee and writing postcards.

Grahame Coats gazed out, across the road at the beach. It was paradise, he thought. And it might behoove him to get more deeply involved with local politics-perhaps as a sponsor of the arts. He had already made several substantial donations to the island's police force, and it might even become necessary to make sure that....

A voice from behind him, thrilled and tentative, said, "Mister Coats?" and his heart lurched. The younger of the women sat down beside him. She had the warmest smile.

"Fancy running into you here," she said. "You on your holidays too?"

"Something like that." He had no idea who this woman was.

"You remember me, don't you? Rosie Noah. I used to go out with Fat, with Charlie Nancy. Yes?"

"Hello. Rosie. Yes, of course."

"I'm on a cruise, with my mum. She's still writing postcards home."

Grahame Coats glanced back over his shoulder to the back of the little cafe, and something resembling a South American mummy in a floral dress glared back at him.

"Honestly," continued Rosie, "I'm not really a cruise sort of person. Ten days of going from island to island. It's nice to see a familiar face, isn't it?"

"Absatively," said Grahame Coats. "Should I take it that you and our Charles are no longer, well, an item?"

"Yes," she said. "I suppose you should. I mean, we're not."

Grahame Coats smiled sympathetically on the outside. He picked up his Fanta and walked with Rosie to the table in the corner. Rosie's mother radiated ill-will just as an old iron radiator can radiate chill into a room, but Grahame Coats was perfectly charming and entirely helpful, and he agreed with her on every point. It was indeed appalling what the cruise companies thought they could get away with these days; it was disgusting how sloppy the administration of the cruise ship had been allowed to get; it was shocking how little there was to do in the islands; and it was, in every respect, outrageous what passengers were expected to put up with: ten days without a bathtub, with only the tiniest of shower facilities. Shocking.

Rosie's mother told him about the several quite impressive enmities she had managed to cultivate with certain American passengers whose main crime, as Grahame Coats understood it, was to overload their plates in the buffet line of theSqueak Attack, and to sunbathe in the spot by the aft deck pool that Rosie's mother had decided, on the first day out, was undisputedly hers.

Grahame Coats nodded, and made sympathetic noises as the vitriol dripped over him,tch ing and agreeing and clucking until Rosie's mother was prepared to overlook her dislike both of strangers and people connected in some way to Fat Charlie, and she talked, and she talked, and she talked. Grahame Coats was barely listening. Grahame Coats pondered.

It would be unfortunate, Grahame Coats was thinking, if someone was to return to London at this precise point in time and inform the authorities that Grahame Coats had been encountered in Saint Andrews. It was inevitable that he would be noticed one day, but still, the inevitable could, perhaps, be postponed.

"Let me," said Grahame Coats, "suggest a solution to at least one of your problems. A little way up the road I have a holiday house. Rather a nice house I like to think. And if there's one thing I have a surplus of, it's baths. Would you care to come back and indulge yourselves?"

"No, thanks," said Rosie. Had she agreed, it is to be expected that her mother would have pointed out that they were due back at the Williamstown Port for pickup later that afternoon, and would then have chided Rosie for accepting such invitations from virtual strangers. But Rosie said no.

"That is extremely kind of you," said Rosie's mother. "We would be delighted."

The gardener pulled up outside soon after in a black Mercedes, and Grahame Coats opened the back door for Rosie and her mother. He assured them he would absatively have them back in the harbor well before the last boat back to their ship.

"Where to, Mister Finnegan?" asked the gardener.

"Home," he said.

"Mister Finnegan?" asked Rosie.

"It's an old family name," said Grahame Coats, and he was sure it was. Somebody's family anyway. He closed the back door and went around to the front.

MAEVE LIVINGTONEWAS LOST. IT HAD STARTED OUT SOwell:she had wanted to be at home, in Pontefract, and there was a shimmer and a tremendous wind, and in one ectoplasmic gusting, she was home. She wandered around the house for one last time, then went out into the autumn day. She wanted to see her sister in Rye, and before she could think, there she was in the garden at Rye, watching her sister walking her springer spaniel.

It had seemed so easy.

That was the point she had decided that she wanted to see Grahame Coats, and that was where it had all gone wrong. She was, momentarily, back in the office in the Aldwych, and then in an empty house in Purley, which she remembered from a small dinner party Grahame Coats had hosted a decade back, and then....

Then she was lost. And everywhere she tried to go only made matters worse.

She had no idea where she was now. It seemed to be some kind of garden.

A brief downpour of rain drenched the place and left her untouched. Now the ground was steaming, and she knew she wasn't in England. It was starting to get dark.

She sat down on the ground, and she started to sniffle.

Honestly,she told herself.Maeve Livingstone. Pull yourself together. But the sniffling just got worse.

"You want a tissue?" asked someone.

Maeve looked up. An elderly gentleman with a green hat and a pencil-thin moustache was offering her a tissue.

She nodded. Then she said, "It's probably not any use, though. I won't be able to touch it."

He smiled sympathetically and passed her the tissue. It didn't fall through her fingers, so she blew her nose with it and dabbed at her eyes. "Thank you. Sorry about that. It all got a bit much."

"It happens," said the man. He looked her up and down, appraisingly. "What are you? A duppy?"

"No," she said. "I don't think so...what's a duppy?"

"A ghost," he said. With his pencil moustache, he reminded her of Cab Calloway, perhaps, or Don Ameche, one of those stars who aged but never stopped being stars. Whoever the old man was, he was still a star.

"Oh. Right. Yes, I'm one of them. Um. You?"