They stared at him; he stared back at them.
More birds came.
It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or sing. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.
"Go away," said Fat Charlie.
As one bird, they didn't. Instead, they spoke. They said his name.
Fat Charlie went over to the door in the corner. He banged on it. He said, "Excuse me," a few times, and then he started shouting, "Help!"
A clunk. The door was opened, and a heavy-lidded member of Her Majesty's constabulary said, "This had better be good."
Fat Charlie pointed upward. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The constabular mouth dropped open peculiarly wide, and it hung there slackly. Fat Charlie's mother would have told the man to shut his mouth or something would fly into it.
The mesh sagged under the weight of thousands of birds. Tiny avian eyes stared down, unblinkingly.
"Christ on a bike," said the policeman, and he ushered Fat Charlie back into the cellblock without saying another word.
Maeve Livingstone was in pain. She was sprawled on the floor. She woke, and her hair and face were wet and warm, and then she slept, and when next she woke her hair and face were sticky and cold. She dreamed and woke and dreamed again, woke enough to be conscious of the hurt at the back of her head, and then, because it was easier to sleep, and because when she slept it did not hurt, she allowed sleep to embrace her like a comfortable blanket.
In her dreams she was walking through a television studio, looking for Morris. Occasionally she would catch glimpses of him on the monitors. He always looked concerned. She tried to find her way out, but all ways led her back to the studio floor.
"I'm so cold," she thought, and knew that she was awake once more. The pain, though, had subsided. All things considered, thought Maeve, she felt pretty good.
There was something she was upset about, but she was not entirely sure what it was. Perhaps it had been another part of her dream.
It was dark, wherever she was. She seemed to be in some kind of broom closet, and she put out her arms to avoid bumping into anything in the darkness. She took a few nervous steps with her arms outstretched and her eyes closed, then she opened her eyes. Now she was in a room she knew. It was an office.
Grahame Coats's office.
She remembered then. The just-awake grogginess was still there - she wasn't yet thinking clearly, knew she wouldn't be properly all there until she had had her morning cup of coffee - but still, it came to her: Grahame Coats's perfidiousness, his treachery, his criminality, his-
Why, she thought, he assaulted me. He hit me. And then she thought, The police. I should call the police.
She reached down for the phone on the table and picked it up, or tried to, but the phone seemed very heavy, or slippery, or both, and she was unable to grasp it properly. It felt wrong for her fingers.
I must be weaker than I thought, Maeve decided. I had better ask them to send a doctor as well.
In the pocket of her jacket was a small silver phone which played "Greensleeves" when it rang. She was relieved to find the phone still here, and that she had no problems at all in holding it. She dialed the emergency services. As she waited for someone to answer she wondered why they still called it dialing when there weren't dials on telephones, not since she was much younger, and then after the phones with dials came the trim-phones with buttons on them and a particularly annoying ring. She had, as a teenager, had a boyfriend who could and continually did imitate the breep of a trimphone, an ability that was, Maeve decided, looking back, his only real achievement. She wondered what had happened to him. She wondered how a man who could imitate a trimphone coped in a world in which telephones could and did sound like anything-
"We apologize for the delay in placing your call," said a mechanical voice. "Please hold the line."
Meave felt oddly calm, as if nothing bad could ever happen to her again.
A man's voice came on the line. "Hello?" it said. It sounded extremely efficient.
"I need the police," said Maeve.
"You do not need the police," said the voice. "All crimes will be dealt with by the appropriate and inevitable authorities."
"You know," said Maeve, "I think I may have dialed the wrong number."
"Likewise," said the voice, "all numbers are, ultimately, correct. They are simply numbers and cannot thus be right or wrong."
"That's all very well for you to say," said Maeve. "But I do need to speak to the police. I may also need an ambulance. And I have obviously called a wrong number." She ended the call. Perhaps, she thought, 999 didn't work from a cell phone. She pulled up her onscreen address book and called her sister's number. The phone rang once, and a familiar voice said. "Let me clarify: I am not saying that you dialed a wrong number on purpose. What I trust that I am saying is that all numbers are by their nature correct. Well, except for Pi, of course. I can't be doing with Pi. Gives me a headache just thinking about it, going on and on and on and on and on-"
Maeve pressed the red button and ended the call. She dialed her bank manager.
The voice that answered said, "But here am I, wittering on about the correctness of numbers, and you're undoubtedly thinking that there's a time and a place for everything-"
Click. Called her best friend.
"-and right now what we should be discussing is your ultimate disposition. I'm afraid traffic is extremely heavy this afternoon, so if you wouldn't mind waiting where you are for a little while, you will be collected-" It was a reassuring voice, the voice of a radio vicar in the process of telling you his thought for the day.
If Maeve had not felt so placid, she would have panicked then. Instead, she pondered. Seeing that her phone had been - what would they call it, hacked? - then she would simply have to go down to the street and find a police officer and make a formal complaint. Nothing happened when Maeve pressed the button for the lift, so she walked down the stairs, thinking that there was probably never a police officer about when you wanted one anyway, they were always zooming about in those cars, the ones that went neenorneenor. The police, Maeve thought, should be strolling around in pairs telling people the time or waiting at the bottom of drainpipes as burglars with bags of swag over their shoulder make their descent-
At the very bottom of the stairs, in the hallway, were two police officers, a man and a woman. They were out of uniform, but they were police all right. There was no mistaking them. The man was stout and red-faced, the woman was small and dark and might, in other circumstances, have been extremely pretty. "We know she came this far," the woman was saying. "The receptionist remembered her coming in, just before lunchtime. When she got back from lunch, they'd both gone."