The Count of Eleven (30 page)

Where the road through the fields forked he turned right beneath a gathering of foliage. The route would take him through the outskirts of Warrington, where two of his subjects lived. Depending on how well his visits went, he might have time to make a third before heading home.

Soon the road led him through villages Stockton Heath, Grappenhall half-submerged in suburbs. Grappenhall was where, to quote the directory precisely, Edw Byrne Cobbler worked and perhaps lived. Beyond a new estate a humpbacked bridge led the van onto a cobbled road, where Jack heard the briefcase jumping about behind him. The cobblestones gave out, and the road bridged a canal to a main road. He knew that the address wasn’t beside a canal, but it was more by instinct than by consciously recalling the map that he crossed into a side street which brought him to a major road. Among the blocks of long thin houses were occasional clusters of shops, and the cobbler’s was in the second clump he passed.

Jack drove to the next shops and parked outside a bookmaker’s, then took the briefcase out of the van and walked back half a mile. Around him everything was luminously defined: the milky drip about to fall from the pointed base of an ice-cream cone which a small boy beside the opaque window of the bookmaker’s was licking, the molten spillage of sunlight which slid over the window of each car that passed Jack, the tiny bright round eyes of a sparrow bathing in the dust of a yellowing front lawn. Everything was as clear as he himself was unnoticeable, even if there had been anyone on the pavement to see him.

The cobbler’s was beyond a restaurant that was closed until the evening and the frosted windows of a bank. There was no name above the cobbler’s, but surely there couldn’t be two such businesses on this road. Jack opened the door without glancing around him and stepped into the shop. It was a small room that smelled of leather, and a small leathery man was at work behind the counter piled with hanks of shoelaces and circular tins of polish. He was fitting a boot onto a last in the gloom among a copse of shoetrees and whistling through his teeth as though he would know the tune and rhythm once he heard them. “Give us a minute,” he grumbled, apparently speaking for the boot as well as for himself.

If the blinds on the door and the window were down, nobody would be able to see into the shop. Jack shifted the briefcase into his left hand and reaching his free hand over his left shoulder, coughed to cover the sound of the catch on the lock. The cobbler must have thought he was expressing impatience, because he hunched over the last to show he wasn’t to be hurried. Watching him, Jack thought his skull resembled a kind of last onto which his face had been tugged until the bald scalp fitted snugly, while the rest of the face grew looser and more wrinkled the closer it approached the chin. Eventually the cobbler gave the boot a grudging nod and stared over the sole as if Jack had prevented him from doing his best. “Got your paper?”

“It depends what ‘

“No goods without a receipt,” the cobbler said with relish.

“I knew that was what you meant. I’m not collecting.”

Jack barely hesitated, but the cobbler nodded hard at his briefcase. “Well, open it up if you’re opening and give us whatever you’ve got.”

Jack didn’t need reminding that he should be quick, but hasty was another matter. “You’re Edward Byrne?”

“I’m Byrne. Who wants to know?”

“Edward Byrne,” Jack repeated, suddenly wondering if the contraction in the directory could have denoted Edwin.

“Edward Byrne wants to know if Edward Byrne is Edward Byrne?” The cobbler had begun to slap his open palm with a metal shoehorn. “Shape up, son. Some of us have better things to do than talk tripe.”

“I was just making sure it was you I wrote to. Now I am ‘

Byrne struck the counter with the shoehorn. “Don’t want any. These are the laces I stock and that’s the polish. They’re what my customers want, and if they don’t they can bugger off.”

“I’m not a salesman, Mr. Byrne.”

“Are you anything at all besides a bloody nuisance?”

The clang of the shoehorn was still reverberating in Jack’s brain. It reminded him of the sound the tank of the blow lamp had made on coming into contact with Stephen Arrod’s head. “I’m just a man like you,” he said, taking hold of the lock of the briefcase.

“We’ve all got our jobs to do, right enough, those of us who don’t sit around all day whining about how no bugger will give us one.” The cobbler gave Jack what for Byrne might be a relatively sympathetic look. “I’ll wish you better luck wherever you’re off next, but that’s the best I can do.”

He turned away from the counter and threw out his arms to shoot back the cuffs of his shirt and jacket. As Jack quietly opened the briefcase he thought Byrne resembled a crucifixion viewed from behind. He was reaching into the briefcase when the cobbler swung round. “What did you write to me? When?”

A few weeks ago, to give you the chance to turn ill luck into good.”

Byrne exposed his teeth in something like a grin and tapped them several times with the shoehorn. “How was that?”

“Don’t you remember the letter?”

“I won’t forget it as long as I live, son. What I’m asking is why I was lucky.”

Jack felt a sigh of relief building up inside him. “I suppose because the letter must have worked for you if you did as it said.”

Byrne came to the counter and leaning on it, thrust his face at Jack. “What I’m asking you is why you singled me out when I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“Will it make a difference?”

Byrne raised his left hand and made a gesture of crushing an object between finger and thumb. “That much.”

Though Jack wasn’t conscious of tilting the briefcase, the blow lamp seemed to fit itself into his hand. “So I don’t need to ask what you did with the letter.”

“You’re quick, you are. If I blink I reckon I won’t see you going.”

Jack’s fist closed around the blow lamp He wanted to be fair, despite the exhilaration which had begun to make him feel elevated, viewing himself from above. “What did you do with it, Mr. Byrne?”

The cobbler shoved himself away from the counter so violently that the shoehorn fell off the edge with a resounding clang. “Wrote to thirteen other lucky buggers, what do you think?” he shouted. “Now if you’re satisfied, some of us have to work for a living.”

Jack let go of the blow lamp He felt abruptly deflated and in danger of being confronted by himself. If he went out now he would feel as though he’d left some task unfinished and then a thought struck him. “I don’t suppose you sell shoes as well as mend them.”

“There’s a few people never called back for,” Byrne allowed with some reluctance.

“That’s what I should be here for. I promised weeks ago to buy a chap a pair.”

“What size?”

“Mine would fit him. Nine.”

Byrne scowled and trudging to the back of the shop, began to rummage in the gloom. He was making so much noise that Jack didn’t bother to muffle the sound of releasing the lock. He had just released it when Byrne stalked forwards and dumped two stout black boots on the counter. “That’s the only pair of nines I’ve got.”

Jack was reminded of playing cards with the family. “You win,” Jack Awkward might have said now, or even “Beats my ace of spades.” Instead he asked “How much?”

“Call it a tenner,” Byrne said as if he would have accepted less to see Jack out of the shop.

“Sounds too good to be true.” One ten to buy nine twice -two sets of figures that each made eleven. Jack closed the briefcase and dug in his pocket for a ten-pound note, which Byrne received with little grace. “I’ve no bags,” Byrne said, morosely enjoying that triumph.

“You’ve given me all I need.” Tucking the boots under his arm, Jack went to the door. He grasped the latch and said “You really did mean

‘

But Byrne was at his last again, whistling louder and more haphazardly. Of course he’d spoken the truth about the letters, Jack assured himself, pulling the door open. He stepped out backwards, watching in case Byrne glanced up and let Jack see his eyes, but the cobbler seemed intent on his work. Jack shut the door and bumped into a policeman.

The policeman appeared not to notice him. He was talking into a receiver which emitted a hiss like an imperfectly doused fire before each response. As Jack walked around him, murmuring an apology, he headed for the bank, whether answering a call or on his own behalf wasn’t clear.

Jack walked to the van, hearing cars dusting the road, feeling satisfied with a job well done and ready for another. “I’m invisible when I have to be,” he told the clown on the key-ring as he started the engine. “Invisible and invincible, they’re the Count’s Is.”

He closed his eyes so as to visualise the map before moving off. The road would bring him to a bridge, beyond which he should turn left and follow a road alongside the canal. He did so, and drove steadily beside the water, keeping an eye out for a sign for Walter Foster, Waterways Bookseller. When the next road bridge brought an end to the houses, however, he had seen no shops at all.

Two vans which he presumed belonged to fishermen were parked in a lay by near the bridge. He left the van behind them and walked back. He was at the start of the house numbers, and number 155 would be several minutes’ walk away, which was all to the good. A hedge obscured his view of the canal from the pavement in front of the pairs of houses. He could hear water coursing gently, and birds fluttering in the hedge. Now and then a fishing-rod would rear up beyond it, or dip towards the canal as a hook plopped into the water.

By the time Jack came in sight of the address on the letter, the canal opposite seemed to be clear of fishermen, and nobody was to be seen in any of the front rooms. He went swiftly up the drive beyond a wooden gate which someone had left open, and rang the doorbell.

A garage concealed him from the ground floor of the next pair of houses, even when he stepped back a few feet to scrutinise the house. Both of its front windows, upstairs and down, had their curtains drawn. He pressed the brass button again, longer this time, but the ringing was the only sound within.

His sense of being let down had returned, stronger than it had been in the cobbler’s. Could he have mistaken the address? He squatted by the briefcase on the doorstep and leafed through the envelopes. Assuming that he hadn’t copied it wrongly, the number was correct. He clutched the briefcase shut and rose to his feet, and was staring at the house as though that might conjure up its owner when a voice said “Who are you after?”

Taken off guard, Jack had to resist the impulse to hide his face with the briefcase. “If you’re after books,” the voice said from the canal path, ‘you’re out of luck.”

“Is Mr. Foster away?”

“He’s here.”

It wasn’t the same voice. Whereas the previous speaker’s accent had been plummy and cultured, this man sounded proud to hail from Lancashire. Jack could do nothing if the bookseller wasn’t alone, but a retreat at this point would look suspicious. He crossed the road and craned over the hedge that bordered the canal.

There was only one person on the towpath, a shirt-sleeved man sitting on a canvas stool. He’d turned to peer through the hedge, a flat tin in one hand, the hook at the end of his line in the other. He wore half-moon spectacles low on his nose, making his already lofty forehead seem even higher. “Walter Foster?” Jack said.

“You’ve found me out.”

“I thought you were with someone.”

“Just my little wriggling friends.” Foster held up the tin of bait. “This is how I answer the phone,” he said in the cultured voice, then let the accent drop. “Buying or selling?” he said as though either would be a trial.

“Not precisely either.”

Foster squinted at the label on the tin. “Are we waiting for you to be precise?”

“Let me come down and talk to you,” Jack said, and strode two hundred yards or so along the hedge to the nearest gap. All the way sunlight showed him empty front rooms, and once he stepped through the hedge he was out of sight from the road and the houses. As he walked along the dusty unkempt path, Foster shuffled round on the stool to meet him. “Fancy some lunch?”

“That’s very kind,” Jack said, then saw that Foster was offering him the tin, in which fat white grubs were squirming. “I’m saving myself, thanks,” Jack said.

“Strong stomach, eh? There’s a few I’ve shown the wrigglers who’ve lost their bread and dripping in the canal. One way of keeping the fish fed. They’ll gobble anything, just like some folk.” Foster jerked his head to fling back a dangling lock of grey hair. “Much time for books?” he said as if the relevance was obvious.

“I’m a librarian.”

“Then I imagine you’d say we’re in the same business.” Foster pinched a grub between finger and thumb and raised it to his face, opening his mouth in a loose grin, and Jack thought he intended to hold the bait between his teeth while he closed the tin. Instead he placed the open tin on his lap and holding the grub above it, took what seemed to Jack an unnecessarily long time to pierce its body with the fish-hook. “I like them to know what’s in store for them,” he explained, closing the tin and dropping it into the hamper beside him, and shied the hook into the middle of the canal. “So are you in uniform today?” he said.

“I’m not here as a librarian.”

“I don’t need to put my voice on, then.” Foster pushed his hair back with one hand like an actor. “You weren’t thinking you could have a free read of my stock.”

“I’m sure nobody could.”

“I didn’t get where I am by not knowing what things are worth,” Foster said, and having propped his fishing-rod on its stand, raised his face to Jack. “So what’s the secret? Have I had a clue yet?”

He was asking why Jack was there. “I wrote to you a few weeks ago,” Jack said, feeling as though he was playing the same scene with yet another actor.

“Sending me money?”

“Not directly.”

“An order?”

“More of a request.”

“Go on. You’ve got me drooling. I’m agog.”

A car swept by beyond the hedge, and Jack reminded himself that he couldn’t be seen. “I sent you a copy of a letter that worked for me. It said ‘