The Count of Eleven (38 page)

“With thirteen people, and you didn’t need to compose a single letter.”

She stared at him, and her hair band shifted as a ripple passed through her forehead. “I don’t hold with such things, dear. They’re superstition. If that’s all ‘

“If you believe in what you do you must believe in them. They work.”

Something froze her: his gaze, or his hands on her wrists, or the tone of his voice. “You must be able to sense if I’m telling the truth,” he said. “Am I trying to deceive you in any way?”

She seemed to have some difficulty in moving her lips. She belched suddenly, and her right hand twitched as if she wanted to cover her mouth. Eventually she whispered “No.”

“Have you kept the letter you received?”

“No,” she said in a small high pleading voice.

“If you were to get another, would you do as it says?”

Her voice was shrinking as though it was trying to hide. “Yes.”

“If you don’t I can’t see any future for you at all, just a blank. You’re certain?”

“I’ve said.”

Her tone was edging closer to resentment. Jack let go of her wrists but kept his eyes fixed on hers while he reached for the briefcase on the floor. He didn’t need to glance away in order to find her letter on top of the remaining wad. He slid the letter across the table and waited for her to look.

Her face tightened as she saw the envelope. When she raised her eyes he could see that she was disappointed and perhaps rebellious. She must feel tricked. “I told you I was worried for you, and I am,” the Count said. “Whatever you do, don’t go back on your word. I’ve seen the consequences, and you wouldn’t like them.”

He was willing her to believe him. She had almost used up her chance. He watched as she took hold of the envelope with both hands. “Don’t tear it,” he heard someone murmur under his tingling scalp.

When she stood up, pushing the envelope into the hip pocket of her dress, he covered his mouth to quieten a breath of relief. “Does this count as a reading?” he said, reaching past the clown’s head in his pocket for a sheaf of banknotes.

“You don’t owe me anything,” she said loudly and clearly, reasserting herself. She hurried to the curtains and shoved them open, brightening the jungle of the room. She waited until Jack preceded her into the hall and opened the door to the porch, where slivers of glass flared up like jagged flames to meet him. As soon as he stepped out of the porch she closed the door behind him. “I did see water,” she said.

He glanced back as she retreated into the house, slamming the inner door with one hand and crossing herself repeatedly with the other. He’d made such an impression on her, he thought, that she was unlikely to break her promise. He strode back to the car park, swinging his briefcase and feeling the blow lamp roll. A uniformed attendant with a book of parking tickets was making his morose way along the rank of vehicles which included Jack’s. “Enjoy your day,” Jack called to him, wreathing; him in fumes as the van pulled out of the rank.

Once he was past the outbreak of roundabouts the road brought him to yet another motorway. His route led past Warrington and Helsby, and the landscape seemed increasingly like a record of the Count’s adventures. Soon they would come to an end. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but until the end came he wouldn’t need to know.

He was almost forty minutes early for work. He parked by the library and strolled to a pub where he quenched his thirst with a pint of Wobbly Bob, then contented himself with another half and a ham roll. He ambled to the library, feeling amiably vague, and arrived at twelve minutes to one. As he emerged from the staff room Stella caught sight of him. “I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

“Why, was someone wanting me?”

“Yes,” she said, shifting a sweet which rattled against her back teeth. “Your wife wants you to call her. Something about where she used to work.”

The Count took most of Saturday afternoon to make a call he should already have made. The first time he heard the answering machine he replaced the receiver at once, and had to remind himself that the dressmaker might be waiting to hear a voice before she accepted the call. He dialled again, and said “Hello’ when the recording invited him to speak. “Hello? Hello?” There was no response, and a student was waiting at the reference library counter.

He fetched the last two weeks’ issues of three newspapers and carried them to a table as the student followed him, her metal crutches clicking. Once she was seated he phoned again. “Amy Conning. I’m not able to come to the phone just now. If you’d like to leave your name and number after this short tone I’ll get back to you,” she promised, and emitted a shrill beep.

“Hellou?” the Count said in a deep cultured unctuous voice. “Is there anyone there, hellou?” This met no more success than Jack’s voice had. After thirty seconds or so the tape beeped again and gave way to the dialling tone as a rotund man plodded over to Jack for help in discovering the origins of his surname, Sarney. By the time Jack had settled him with a pile of genealogical tomes the student wanted last month’s newspapers. As Jack sorted those she’d finished with, several headlines caught his attention HAS MERSEY BURNER KILLED AGAIN?;

HORRIFIC GARAGE MURDER; ROCK FERRY MURDER “MAY BE COPY CAT’ SAY POLICE

and seemed to be urging him not to waste time.

‘ after this short tone I’ll get back to you. Beeeep.”

“Allo, annyboddee? “Allo?” Bernard Onze’s trace of a

French accent earned no response either. Soon Stella came upstairs to staff the desk while Jack had his tea break, and when he returned there were queries waiting to be answered. Picking up the receiver when eventually he was left alone was so automatic he didn’t need to think of the number.

‘ back to you. Beeep.”

“Miss Conning? Mrs. Conning? I don’t suppose you’re there, by any chance?”

“It’s Ms Conning. Did you call before?”

She sounded ready to lecture him on the proper use of the answering machine. “Why, does my voice seem familiar?” he said.

“I really couldn’t say. Should it?” Without pausing she said “Did you want to make an appointment?”

“Please.”

“Who’s it for? I don’t dress men.”

“My daughter.”

“How old?”

“Twelve.”

“What do you want for her?”

“A fortune,” Jack might have said, but the Count used Jack’s voice to say “An outfit for the heat.”

“Bring her so I can look her over. When do you want?”

“How late do you see people?”

“My evenings are my own. I can measure her when she gets off school on Monday if that’s any use to you.”

“Would that be your last appointment?”

“Five o’clock would be.”

“That sounds ideal. We’ll look forward to dealing with you.”

“I don’t have your name and address.”

“Bernard Onze, 11 Counting Way.”

“Whereabouts is that?”

“On the new estate.”

“Five Monday, then. Please don’t be any later. Now you’ll have to excuse me while I boot my two-year-old out of the kitchen before she burns herself.”

“I wouldn’t want that to happen to her,” Jack said with a grin like the one he was fingering on the clown’s head, and held onto the phone until it replaced the dressmaker with emptiness. He hadn’t asked about the letter because he felt he didn’t need to ask: her whole attitude told him that she would have torn it up. “Looking forward, looking forward,” he murmured, and let go of the receiver and the clown’s head as a bell rang to announce that the library would close in ten minutes. The last reader left the building eleven minutes later, and Jack drove home.

When he unlocked the front door the house was silent. “Anyone?” he called.

Julia came out of the bathroom with a towel around her hair. “Where’s Laura?” Jack asked.

“Out on her bike. Probably on her way back from the library by now.”

“She’ll be fine.”

“I know.”

No doubt Julia was thinking of the self-defence class Laura had helped get started at the school, but she seemed preoccupied. Tensive,” Jack said.

“Don’t laugh, but I’m feeling sorry for Luke.”

“Well, sympathy comes cheap. And birds go it,” he added when she looked hurt. “I expect Rankin’s clients could use a bit of sympathy, not to mention the people like you he left out of a job.”

“I see all that. Now you’ll laugh, but I feel almost guilty after what he just did.”

“Guilty of what, for heaven’s sake?”

“I suppose about wishing the worst for him. I didn’t know he was going to take all the blame on himself.”

“He didn’t take it, it was already his.”

“Unless you think I should have noticed what he was playing at sooner.”

“I don’t think any such thing. I’ll tell you what I do think -he’s hoping the law will go easier on him for not dragging you into court.”

“Maybe,” she said as if Jack had disillusioned her.

“Don’t you dare blame yourself any more,” he said, hugging her until the towel down her back started to drip on the hall carpet. He hadn’t released her when Laura let herself into the house and greeted the sight of them with a wolf whistle. “Maybe I’m admitting to myself I was afraid we’d be stopped from going to Crete,” Julia murmured.

“What’s going to stop us?” Laura said, so anxiously that Jack began to wonder if anything could. He had weeks to finish what he had to do before they left long enough to wait for times when Julia wouldn’t question where he was. “Nothing,” he and Julia told Laura in chorus, making her laugh.

In the morning Julia suggested a picnic. “Shall we go to that place where we went on a train when I was little,” Laura said, ‘where the squirrel ran off with my sweet?”

Treshfield.”

“Sounds good to me,” Julia said.

It sounded better than that to Jack, because it was only a couple of miles from Amy Conning’s house. He could leave the family sunning themselves while he drove past the dressmaker’s or perhaps even took care of her, but he rejected the notion at once: it brought the Count and his tasks too close to the family. “It’d be teeming with people on a day like this,” he said. “Let’s just drive until we find somewhere we like.”

They ended up at the edge of a copse on a hillside in Cheshire. Fields were laid out like samples of green on the slopes below. While the Orchards ate cheese and Julia’s home-made bread and shared a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, two magpies flew out of a hedge, spreading their ebony tails, and strutted about to pick at the hillside. A hawk which looked high as the sun hovered overhead against a flawlessly blue sky. Jack watched it until it sailed beyond the trees, then he turned his attention to the grass on which he was lying and which contained treasures the magpies had overlooked, beetles so small that their glinting colours were invisible from more than a few inches away. He was watching them clamber about the maze of grass when Julia touched his shoulder to draw his gaze where Laura was looking.

A fox was observing the Orchards from the copse. Its gleaming eyes were darker than the deepest shadow under the trees. Jack could see its whiskers twitching, its sides breathing beneath the glossy auburn pelt. It stood with its left front paw upraised, regarding the family as if challenging them to make the first move. They managed to remain absolutely still until it turned and darted away through the copse with a wave of its bristling tail.

“I’ll always remember today,” Laura whispered.

“So will I,” Julia said.

“We all will, “said Jack.

Certainly the Count did so on Monday afternoon as he drove out of Liverpool to the dressmaker’s. If he hadn’t decided against taking this route yesterday, they wouldn’t have seen the fox on the hill. The dock lands of Seaforth gave way to the villas of Crosby, beyond which a pair of stone lions on the gate posts of Ince Blundell guarded the start of the Southport road. Jack stayed in the fast lane of the dual carriage way until he came in sight of the Formby turn-off.

As he signalled before moving into the left-hand lane a Citroen cut in front of him without signalling. BACK OFF -BABY ON BOARD, said a sticker on the rear window, and there was indeed a toddler in the back seat with a dummy in her mouth. The driver stuck one hand out of the window as if she was turning right and swung left at the roundabout, releasing the stub of a cigarette which showered red-hot sparks across Jack’s windscreen. “No thanks, I don’t smoke,” he said.

He felt as though he was tailing the Citroen. The toddler hoisted herself up on the back of the seat and pressed as much of her face as the dummy would permit against the rear window, above a sticker which said GOD MADE MEN BECAUSE VIBRATORS DON’T MOW THE LAWN. If the car had to stop dead, Jack thought, the toddler would fly between the front seats and through the windscreen. He couldn’t help feeling relieved at the sight of the left turn ahead, which would lead him away from the spectacle of the Citroen and its passenger. But the car turned left there before he did.

On both sides of the straight road narrow gardens separated by hedges led to paired houses. Amy Conning’s house would be about halfway along. Jack kept an eye on the numbers and tried not to watch the toddler, who was attempting to prise open a can of Coca-Cola with a screwdriver. Then the Citroen’s brake lights flickered, the car began to slow, and Jack found himself willing the driver to be Amy Conning.

A climbing frame and a swing were visible above a hedge just ahead. They must be either in the dressmaker’s front garden or in her neighbour’s. The Citroen veered towards the middle of the road and slowed abruptly, and the point of the screwdriver slid off the can. Can and screwdriver banged against the rear window as the car swung into Amy Conning’s drive’ and Jack coasted by, grinning a grin which felt like a cut as wide as his face.

He turned left into the next road, which would lead him back to the dual carriage way and parked the van. Two-seater planes from a nearby airfield buzzed overhead like huge slow flies, and he could hear distant shots from a rifle range. As he walked back to the dressmaker’s he saw the toddler swing into the air above the hedge. “Say goodbye,” he murmured.

The driver was unloading groceries from the boot of the Citroen. She wore a white T-shirt and baggy denim shorts, and presumably shoes when she was driving. She had pouchy cheeks and artificially silvered close-cropped hair, and her face was pale except for her prominent lips, whose aggressively red lipstick gave them a pouting appearance. She lifted the last carrier bag out of the boot and pushed the swing higher, and saw Jack at the gate. “Yes?”