The Count of Eleven (8 page)

Jack sprinted into the building in time to hear Lynne saying loudly to Julia “I wouldn’t let any husband of mine talk that way to me. It’s at least as much your money as his.” She gazed at Jack as though she hoped he’d overheard, but he didn’t care what she or the traffic warden thought of him so long as everything was right with him and Julia. It wasn’t until Julia looked up from rooting in her handbag that his confidence shook.

“I haven’t got my card. I don’t know where it can be. I know I put it in my bag on Saturday after I paid for the shopping.” She screwed up her face as if that would help her think, and he thought she was about to weep. Then a look of understanding emerged onto her face, and it was worse than weeping. “Those boys at the fire,” she said.

By Monday morning Laura was still blaming herself. “I saw those boys running away from the fire. I should have taken more notice of them, I should have seen what they looked like. If I’d told you, you could have told the police.”

“It’s no more your fault than your mother’s. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine, and we’re not going to let it matter, are we? I bet soon you’ll be thinking of it as a cautionary tale to tell your friends.”

“I hate those boys. I wish they’d been in the fire. How could they spend all our money like that?”

“It sounds as if they weren’t the ones who spent it. The lady at the hi-fi shop thinks it was a man about my age. The police think he uses the boys to lift credit cards for him and then spends all he can before the victims notice they’ve been robbed. Apparently we’re not the only case.”

“Why didn’t the shops see he wasn’t Mummy? I would have.”

“It’s my fault for only putting my initial on the card,” Julia said.

“Not a bit of it, Julia. Ten to one he sends a woman to use cards that have a woman’s name on them. These are people who know what they’re doing.”

“Nobody needs to buy all those things,” Laura cried.

“Five expensive cameras are pushing it, you mean. Especially when it was the same one from five different shops. Maybe our man is in consumer research.” She only bit her lip at that, and so he told her the truth. “According to the police they’re resold the same day to people who order them in advance.”

Laura clenched her fists and asked the question she must have been preparing all weekend. “How much of our money did they steal?”

“A lot more than we’re supposed to spend, and the stupidest part is that they won’t have made anything like that amount by selling what they bought. It’ll all go on heroin anyway, the police think.” He took hold of her fists and tried gently to open them. “Don’t worry, we aren’t ruined yet. That’s what the bank’s for.”

She gave him an unsteady smile. “To ruin us?”

“That’s more like it. Where would we be if we couldn’t laugh, eh? This may even have done us some good in the long run. I should be able to buy all the videos in the auction up the road a lot cheaper than I would have paid at the wholesalers, and it’s a better selection than the wholesalers had.”

“You’re sure the bank’s going to lend you the money?”

“If the manager hears what the lucky clown tells him he’s bound to,” Jack said, and waggled the grinning head on the ring at her. “Come to life now, princess, or you’ll be late for school.”

Julia made certain that she had her lunchbox and the books she needed, and waved to her from the front door, and returned to Jack. “You really think …”

“If the clown doesn’t work I’ll turn on the fatal Orchard charm. It worked on you, as I remember.”

“Seriously, Jack.”

“Seriously, we don’t have to be serious yet, do we? Time to be solemn when I’m in the bank manager’s lair, though he always seems to me to need some jollying.”

“I’m not nervous,” he told the bathroom mirror as he picked up his razor. “Bank managers are human like the rest of us. I’m not going to cut myself, ow. I’m not going to cut myself again.” He stayed upstairs until he’d dabbed away the last crimson bead so that Julia wouldn’t see, and was dressing in the bedroom when she called “Will you ring me at Luke’s to tell me how it went?”

“The moment I know.”

“Good luck,” she called, and the front door closed at once.

Her leaving so quickly made Jack feel as if he was going to be late for his appointment, whereas in fact he wasn’t due at the bank until half an hour after it opened. He walked himself to the kitchen, where he would have had time for a leisurely cup of coffee if he’d remembered to switch on the percolator. He strolled to the bank instead. Last night’s fish-and-chip papers chased one another around the benches by the bus stops outside Adventureland; a container ship appeared to be grounded among the mounds of the Crazy Golf course, but then it glided out into the bay as Jack turned along the side street which led to the bank.

The building was on the corner where the street met Victoria Road. As Jack reached the entrance an old lady in an ancient raincoat held out a hand palm upwards to him. She’d had no luck at the bank, he thought, groping automatically in his pocket for change. He was placing a pound coin in her hand when he realised she wasn’t begging, only feeling for rain. “Just, er, just, just…” he tried to explain, and was through the doors. “That’s enough pratfalls for one day,” he told himself, so loudly that everyone in the small bank -three tellers and five members of the public stared at him.

As he strode to the enquiry window and pressed the bell-push everyone lost interest in him, apart from a girl of about ten, who looked familiar. A teller appeared from behind the scenes and came to the window. “Jack Orchard of Fine Films for Mr. Hardy,” Jack said.

The girl nudged her mother. Just as the manager approached the window, Jack recognised the girl. She’d returned Body Heat to Fine Films on the day of the fire, and what had he said to her about his bank manager? She opened her mouth as the manager unlocked the door beside the window, and Jack wanted to clap a hand over his own face even before she spoke. “He said that man’s deaf,” she said, it seemed at the top of her voice.

What timing, Jack thought. He had already been suppressing a nervous compulsion to crack jokes. It didn’t help that the manager had gained weight, at least from the waist down, since Jack had last seen him, a condition which made Mr. Hardy’s round balding thick-lipped head appear to have shrunk. Surely he’d missed the girl’s comment or at any rate its significance, because he ignored her as he opened the door of the interview room. “Step in,” he said heavily to Jack.

“Step in what?” I didn’t say that, Jack told himself, nor “I’ll watch my step’; he hadn’t yet spoken aloud. “I’m stepping,” he said.

That didn’t seem to go down especially well. When the manager had closed the door and lowered himself into the chair on the expensive side of the desk, on top of which a gilded pen and pencil standing in gilded sockets craned over a green blotter, he gazed at Jack for some time before speaking long enough for Jack to be unable not to reflect that sitting down had increased Mr. Hardy’s resemblance to one of those legless round-bottomed pot-bellied dolls which rolled upright whenever they were knocked down. When he sat forwards Jack almost expected him to bob upright immediately, sprung by his paunch. “So, Mr. Orchard,” the manager said.

“Well, yes.”

“Family well?”

“Fine.” Either Jack left it at that or he risked halting the conversation with a flood of anecdotes. Tine,” he repeated, and was resisting a temptation to add “Like the films’ when the manager said “So alone.”

“How do you mean? We’ve never been more together.” In the midst of this Jack realised what the manager had actually said, and tried to sound, with little apparent success, as though he were joking. “Another loan,” the manager amplified.

“Unfortunately. Or I should say fortunately, I hope.”

An expression too swift to be intelligible passed over Mr. Hardy’s face as he leafed through the Orchards’ file. “I assume you still intend to take up the mortgage that was offered.”

“When we’ve settled where we want to move to. Decided, I mean, not settled there.”

And the loan you used to buy out Mr. Edge is still outstanding.”

“I explained the situation, you remember. I used my redundancy money from the public library to set up business with him, and if you hadn’t lent me the money when he decided to get out, Fine Films might have been for the chop.”

“Right On Of New Brighton, as it was then.”

“So it was, poor thing. Not my idea, I assure you,” Jack said, and choked off a guffaw, having belatedly heard that the manager’s tone was approving. “Mine was Fine Films.”

“Not quite the successful concept you hoped it would be.”

“Maybe I should have stayed with my first notion and called it Cine Qua Non. Or maybe you’re right, maybe I was aiming too high. You might say it was lucky that Fine Films turned into Fire Films.”

When the manager’s demeanour made it plain that he wouldn’t say any such thing Jack succeeded in controlling himself. “Most of the titles that are coming up for auction on Wednesday are ones people keep asking me for. It would only be a temporary loan until the insurance stumps up. I just need to be able to write a cheque.”

He was praying that Mr. Hardy wouldn’t advise him to use his credit card. There was no need for the manager to know about the theft, since it was unlikely to prejudice him in Jack’s favour. “Excuse the redundancy. Of course all loans are temporary. It’s the entire stock of a video library that’s being auctioned.”

“Which might suggest that the video-hire industry has passed its peak.”

Jack clutched his wrist in order to refrain from slapping himself across the forehead. “I’d be crazy not to buy at the price the auctioneers are expecting. If the titles don’t move, which I know they will, I can sell them at a profit even you would approve of.”

Mr. Hardy raised his head and gazed at him, and Jack’s lips twitched. He wasn’t going to be able to keep mum for much longer. “Here’s another nice mess I’ve got myself into, I know.” He was opening his mouth, and trying to think of something less disastrous to say, when the manager said “I suppose we’ll have to give you the chance, but I personally very much hope that this time you’re sure what you’re doing.”

“How can you doubt Honest Jack Orchard?” Jack almost said, and “Trust me and my friend in my pocket.” He contained himself while Mr. Hardy passed him forms to sign, but as soon as he was out of the bank he released a whoop and capered about in the entrance. He walked home grinning, now and then clapping his hands. Most of the people he met returned his grin, except for a woman in a hat pinned purple turban, who flinched back. “Mad but harmless,” Jack assured her.

He phoned the news to Julia, and waited impatiently for Laura to come home so that he could tell her. Because the bank was lending the Orchards more than he could imagine paying at the auction, he felt that it would be safe to celebrate that failing to do so would be to distrust their luck. They dined at Chaplin’s in Birkenhead, where the comedian mimed in photographs on all the walls. Later Jack and Julia made love more slowly and thoroughly than they had for months.

When he wakened in the morning his cold had departed, leaving a metallic taste. He lay for a while, hearing Laura and then Julia go out, and wondered luxuriously how to spend the day. The brass clap of the letter-slot roused him. A solitary letter had fallen on the doormat. “There you are. You took your time,” he said as he picked it up. He wriggled a finger beneath the flap, tore open the envelope, unfolded the letter. He read it twice, hardly noticing that he’d slumped against the wall. “No, no,” he began to mutter, his voice rising and growing fiercer. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“No, no, no, no,” Jack repeated, and ran out of breath. He squared his shoulders, chafing them against the new plaster, and pushed himself out of his slump. The contents of the letter must be a mistake which he had all day to rectify. He switched on the percolator and phoned the number on the letterhead. The phone rang monotonously until a female robot intervened, briskly intoning “Sorry, there is no reply. Sorry, there is no reply …” Jack returned to the percolator and concentrated on pouring coffee, adding milk, sipping the liquid whose effects seemed to head straight for his nerves. He re dialled the number and leafed through his address book while the phone continued ringing, distant and yet close like a sound heard during fever, until it provoked the robot again. Eventually he found the number he was looking for, on a business card at the back of the book, waiting to be copied in. He killed the robot and dialled, swallowed a mouthful of coffee which set his nerves buzzing, sat on the stairs as the cord brought the pedestal of the telephone blundering across the carpet, and then a voice panted “Edge Enterprises. Bringing the future into your home. Maddy speaking.”

“This is Jack Orchard.”

“Width?”

“Eh?” Jack ehed.

“Have to run,” she said and sucked in an audible breath, by the end of which he’d deduced that she had said “With?” and “Had to run.”

“Jack Orchard. Gavin Edge’s ex-partner. Is Gavin there?”

“He just called in from the car that he’ll be about an hour.”

“He’s outside now, you mean? Can you give him a shout and say that it’s Jack?”

“On the phone. Called in on the phone,” she said as though she suspected Jack of making fun of her.

“Can you get him back? Can I?”

“He just called to say he’d be out of the car.”

Jack’s sense of the conversation seemed to be drifting out of reach. “If you could ask him to give me a bell as soon as he comes in.”

“I’ll do my best to have him get back to you. Does he have your number?”

“It’s urgent. The problem, not the number. I’m sure we can sort it out between us,” Jack said, and gave her the number. “I’ll be here waiting,” he said, and phoned the number on the letterhead.

It was engaged. “Boot, boot, boot,” the phone announced hollowly, or perhaps it was saying “Dupe, dupe, dupe.” He imagined victims of disasters queuing to report their ill luck, hundreds of them trying to contact the insurance company. He held on, hoping that the engaged tone might give way to the sound of the phone bell, but it was the robot voice which ousted it after five minutes, proclaiming, “Sorry, there is no reply.” He gulped coffee and tried again, and this time the phone rang: “Droop, droop,” it said. He felt as if he was trying to play a game of changing one word into another, a letter at a time. He reached into his trousers pocket and closed his hand around the clown’s head, willing it not to be time for the robot voice to cut him off. “Brute, brute,” the phone reiterated, and fell silent. “Don’t tell me there’s no reply, you silly bitch,” he yelled.