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, she needed - to kiss this man on the lips, and to hold him.
And then, remembering she had to say something, she said yes.
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 fiancée.
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 Charlie walked 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. "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?"