The Count of Eleven

by Ramsey Campbell

  Laura's mother looked stubborn, unwilling to be placated. "If that's the best the law can do..."

  "Forget the law. We don't need it," he said, so like a criminal that Laura giggled. For a moment he looked bemused, then he laughed, nudging Julia, widening his eyes and mouth until he resembled a clown. "That's it, Laura," he said. "We won't go far wrong if we can laugh."

  TWENTY

  When the doorbell rang on Monday morning Jack was alone in the house. It was Laura's first day back at school, and Julia was at work. As he shaved he gazed at himself in the bathroom mirror. This was the face of a man about to start a new job, and he thought it looked pretty impressive: alert, ready for anything. He was pleased to discover he'd forgotten none of the classification numbers which he would find on the spines of books. He played with them while the cool wet metal slid over his throat, and was surprised to realise that he couldn't think of even one that added up to either eleven or thirteen. Then the doorbell rang, and he dabbed shaving cream off the unshaven half of his face and went to see who was there.

  It couldn't be the police they had already visited the house, in the shape of Pether but the man on the front path had the look of some kind of official. He was gripping a clipboard under one arm and tapping his small even teeth with the blunt end of a pencil as he peered at the bedroom window. "Double glazing," Jack guessed aloud.

  The man took his time over lowering his gaze and then said "Mr. Orchard."

  "I was last time I looked," Jack said, and assumed he knew why the man seemed bothered by his face. "The chin? Just call me Two-Face. Safety in numbers, I always say."

  The man knocked on the clipboard with the pencil as though calling a meeting to order. "You put in an insurance claim."

  "For a bicycle, you mean. You wouldn't have found it up there."

  "I'm the adjuster," the man said, brandishing the clipboard.

  "Just a what?" Jack heard his old self say, but he was in control. "Come in. What shall I show you besides a leg? You'll excuse my informality. I'd have dressed if I'd known you were coming," he said.

  The loss adjuster halted as soon as he was over the threshold, and having scrutinised the hall-stand as though he was looking for evidence of an intruder in his own house, made a note on the topmost sheet on the clipboard. "I should like to start upstairs," he said, so curtly that Jack could only think he was concealing shyness.

  "Whatever turns you on."

  When the adjuster reached the upper floor he darted into the bathroom as if he needed to use it rather than examine it. He lifted a bath-towel and peered at the radiator, he slid back the mirrors to take stock of the cupboard, he noted the electric ventilator in the wall beside the window, he even craned over the bath. If he lifted the lid of the toilet, Jack thought, he was in for a surprise, since for the last few days Jack's morning productions called for several flushings to carry them away. Instead the adjuster stooped to the label of a perfume bottle which Laura had left by the sink, then he walked at Jack and opened the next door. That's my daughter's room," Jack said.

  Though he hadn't meant that as a prohibition, the adjuster's manner suggested that he was ignoring one. When he shook his head at the state of the bedroom clothes planning a mass escape from the chest of drawers, bottles and jewellery and souvenir ornaments and seashells strewn across the dressing-table as though left behind by a tide, books bunched in every conceivable position on the shelves Jack felt unexpectedly affectionate towards the chaos. He watched as the adjuster prowled, sounding a terse hum in his throat whenever he found something else to note on the clipboard. When the adjuster began to count Laura's tapes, waving his pencil above them, Jack said "Some of those belong to her friends."

  "And she's lent some of her own, no doubt."

  "Have you any children?"

  Jack was trying to be friendly, but the adjuster seemed to feel criticised. "I've thirteen years' experience in my job."

  "I should have known," Jack said as the adjuster opened the wardrobe and pushed hangers back and forth. If the man were to pull any drawers open, Jack looked forward to his struggles to replace all their contents. Perhaps the adjuster couldn't face the prospect, because he strode abruptly towards Jack as if to catch him out somehow. As soon as they were in the front bedroom Jack said "While you're occupied I may as well get dressed."

  The man twitched his shoulders twice and hastened to the wardrobe. Jack hung his dressing-gown on the door and lifting his penis in one hand, aimed it at the back of the adjuster's head, mouthing "Don't give us any trouble. This is loaded."

  If he had still been his old self he would undoubtedly have done that just in time for the man to see him in the dressing-table mirror. But the man seemed determined not even to glimpse him, performing such a dance around the room in order to keep his back to him that Jack felt like a puppet-master. He pulled on socks and underpants and trousers and a sweater before taking pity on him. "Just my feet are in their underwear now if you can bear to look."

  The adjuster glanced in the mirror as he rifled Julia's jewellery box, but all he said was "Your wife would be well advised not to leave this where it can be seen."

  "I expect she was thinking of you."

  The adjuster made a note on his clipped sheet and swung towards the door. "I don't know what you feel you'll gain from making my job harder."

  "I wasn't aware that I was."

  As Jack reached the stairs the shoe whose lace he hadn't yet tied flew off and delivered a kick to the man's scalp. At least, Jack saw that happening to his old self as he tied his shoelaces before hurrying down to the adjuster, who was tapping his pencil on the clipboard in a variety of rhythms. "Use the phone if you like," Jack said. "No need to resort to Morse."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just that you've no reason to be nervous of me that I know of."

  In the kitchen the adjuster opened all the cupboards and drawers, squinted into the oven, crouched to look into the freezer. "How old is this?" he asked, contemplating a clump of Lawson's sausages.

  Jack wasn't to be caught so easily. "Nearly six years old, the freezer."

  "Not that that's relevant," the adjuster said with what could have been suppressed triumph. "You're meant to be insured for the cost of a replacement."

  "Then we must be."

  "I rather fear I may have to report you aren't fully covered."

  Jack leaned against the kitchen door and rested one hand on a gas tap. "Why would you want to do that?"

  "It isn't a question of what I want, Mr. Orchard," the adjuster said brusquely, squatting to look under the sink.

  "Can't take the responsibility, eh? It isn't there, it's in the van," Jack said, only just aloud.

  The adjuster rose to his feet and glanced sharply at him. "I wouldn't play with that."

  "Nor would I," Jack said, holding onto the gas tap for several seconds before letting go.

  The adjuster ducked into the cupboard under the stairs and greeted the contents with a muffled sneeze. When he emerged, eyes watering, he looked more irritable than ever. He darted into the front room and continued to make notes, sniffing as if in disapproval of the computer, the armchairs, the table. He halted in front of the carton by the television. "How much are these worth?"

  "Not a lot. They're old black and whites. Keystone Kops, that sort of thing."

  In fact there were no Keystone films among the cassettes, but Jack saw the uniformed figures dashing back and forth, squirting one another and tripping over hoses as the victim they were supposed to extinguish performed a frantic dance. "I understand that the older the film," the adjuster said, "the harder it is to replace."

  "That depends. Anyway, you needn't let it bother you. Those aren't my cassettes. A friend lent them to me overnight to see if I wanted to buy any of them."

  They weren't insured. Jack hadn't increased the amount of the house insurance since he had taken over Fine Films, and previously Gavin had kept them at his own house overnight. Whatever happened now, the adjuster
wasn't going to leave until he accepted Jack's assurance about the cassettes. Jack thought that so clearly he wouldn't have been amazed to learn it had been overheard, and in a moment the adjuster raised his head from examining the carton and stared at him. "I'm afraid, Mr. Orchard—"

  Don't say it, don't be afraid, Jack thought, afraid for him. "Here's the owner now," he said.

  Andy Nation had just passed the house. Jack rapped on the window with the knuckles of both hands, but Andy was already on the far side of the road. Jack ran out onto the path, leaving doors open behind him. "Were you coming to see me, Andy?" he called.

  "Hello there, old pip. Should I be? Nothing wrong besides what those lunatics did to Laura, is there?"

  "Nothing at all. As a matter of fact, I've a man from the insurance company in the house now checking everything's insured before they stump up for a new bike. I was just wondering if you were here to pick up the videos you lent me."

  "I'm on my way to fetch a drill from where I left it and then I'm off back to a job. There won't be any problem, will there? Let me have a word with him."

  He opened the gate and strode into the house before Jack had a chance to say more. As Jack followed him into the front room Andy was already saying "How do, Mr. Policy. Treating his kid to a new bike, are you? She deserves one after all she's been through, kids bigger than her beating her up and turning her Christmas present into scrap."

  Andy-'

  "Sorry, old pip. Got carried away for a moment. There they are. Those are my videos."

  The adjuster stared hard at him. "You lent them to Mr. Orchard yesterday, I understand."

  That's what I did."

  "Rather a lot of films for anyone to watch in one evening."

  Jack opened his mouth, but Andy was too quick for him. "He was just seeing if there were any he could use to cheer his kid up. That's what she needs, I can tell you. Any of them take her fancy, Jack?"

  "One or two."

  "Don't be shy. It's not as if they're worth much. Nobody wants black and white these days," Andy said to the adjuster. "You wouldn't buy a colour licence if you were colour-blind."

  "You deal in videocassettes, do you, Mr...."

  "I'm into everything. I've a job waiting now if you'll excuse me. See you, Jack. Pleasure meeting you, Mr. Policy, if I've been some help."

  He left as swiftly as he'd entered. The sound of himself and the adjuster being shut in by the front door made Jack feel purposeful and strong. "Have you reached your conclusion?" he said.

  The adjuster was leafing through the pages on the clipboard. He let them drop and slid the pencil between the board and the clip. "It may be possible for me to recommend payment of your claim."

  "When should I expect to hear? It isn't me who's impatient, it's my daughter. You are when you're twelve."

  The adjuster sounded a last brief hum in his throat. "I shall be making my report within the next few days."

  Jack opened the door and released him. The scene with Andy couldn't have gone better if it had been rehearsed. He felt surrounded by good luck. He wasn't waking much in the nights any more, and when he did it was only astonishment that was waiting for him in the dark, astonishment at himself and what he'd done to ensure the family's good fortune. He finished shaving and put on a coat and made sure the house was secure, and climbed into the van.

  He would be early for work. As he drove along the promenade, the marine horizon put him in mind of the start of an endless voyage. Turning onto the motorway felt like following that promise. He sped for twenty minutes beside fields planted with a few token animals, then he drove down the Ellesmere Port ramp.

  It brought him to fire and water. A ship canal began to imitate the river and then refused to follow its meanderings; metal chimneys tipped with fires that looked Olympic towered above the meeting of the waters. "That's what the world needs," Jack said, and after a moment thought what he meant: "Balance." He drove over a bridge which carried lamps across water, through several sets of flashing amber lights, and into the library car park.

  The library appeared to be intended to recall the thirties, though the inlet of a drainpipe was dated 1961. It was a squarish two-storey brick building, fronted by a bay one storey too tall for the revolving door it housed, and attached at the back by a stubby passage to an octagonal extension of concrete and glass. As he passed through the barrel of doors he felt that he was returning to somewhere he had never really left. If you ventured as far as you could, he thought, you would end up where you started from.

  He had to grin. The place was staffed by people alongside whom he might have worked during his library career two—humorous young women, a bespectacled man of thirty or so with a permanent wry expression, a branch librarian twenty-ish years older and well on the way to baldness, which made his chubby solemn face seem to be reverting to babyhood. When he shook hands his grip felt like a handful of dough. "Let me show you where your coat goes," he said, "and then please feel free until one."

  "I'll be getting to know the lie of the land."

  The revolving doors had ushered Jack into a video library, beyond which the passage that connected the two sections of the building led to books, as though the whole represented his recent career. The library had eleven sides if you counted those linked by the passage as one, and he would be starting work at the hour of thirteen. "It fits," he said under his breath.

  From a staircase carpeted in rubber he saw narrow terraced streets beyond a bus station where the shelters appeared to be roofed with blue Lego and the buses were so various that the terminus resembled a transport museum. The upper floor of the octagon contained the reference library beneath a ceiling panelled like a sauna's. He smelled the dry heat from the screen of the microfilm reader just inside the entrance as he headed for the newspapers, which were scattered over several tables barely wide enough to accommodate two people. Each table was divided by a wooden bar about two inches high -not, Jack thought, unlike tables in a prison visiting-room. As he sat down, having collected all the papers that weren't being read, he felt as though someone should be sitting on the far side of the table to balance him: perhaps Jack Awkward, his old self. He tapped the pack of giant floppy playing-cards that were newspapers into line against the table top and began to leaf through them.

  He found nothing that concerned him in any of the national newspapers. Even the Merseyside papers weren't making as much of the story as they had last week. According to the Liverpool Daily Post the hunt for the killer was continuing, and police were working on the assumption that it must have been someone with a grudge against the victim, which seemed fair enough to Jack. If the papers closest to home were also closest to the truth about the investigation, however, he had to laugh. Between them the Wirral newspapers depicted Jeremy Alston as a pillar of the community, mourned by his many friends who were appalled by his death and by the manner of it, loved by his pupils and his employees at the riding school. If the papers and presumably the police could be so wrong about the victim, Jack felt confident that the police would have no luck in their search.

  HESWALL STILL REELING AFTER STABLES MURDER... POLICE HUNT BLOWTORCH KILLER... Entire village in state of shock... Village locks its doors as soon as night begins to fall... "Nobody walks on the murder road alone," Jack murmured. "After dark nothing is heard there but the whinny of a lonely horse." There seemed no point in being dishonest about the way the parade of clichés and inaccuracies affected him. As for the metamorphosis of Alston, perhaps you couldn't have a monster without first representing the victim as sympathetic. Perhaps, Jack thought, he'd at last given the public what they wanted without his realising he had. As for himself, he felt as if his new poised personality was settling into him.

  You could adjust to anything. His encounter with Jeremy Alston and its aftermath seemed as unreal now as the newspaper reports. He remembered everything as though he'd watched it on a screen even his panic as he'd driven away down the deserted coast road, his mind feeling seared and trapped betwee
n an urge to drive until the engine ran dry and a yearning to speak to Julia. Underlying both and growing had been a wild astonishment. There was more to him than anyone had suspected, including himself.

  He'd done what he had to for the family. It had taken him days to accept that it had worked, days where the minutes had sometimes felt like hours of lying awake in darkness, but now that he was convinced, he thought it would be wholly unreasonable for the family's good luck to be ruined by his being tracked down by the police. He stood up and distributed the newspapers among the tables and went downstairs to start his new career. What he owed the world now was a good day's work.

  TWENTY-ONE

  On the night of the presentation at the International Experience Laura spent twenty minutes making up her face and then washed off the make-up. The more she put on, the more it looked as though her face was something to hide. The bruises had mostly faded except for marks which could almost have been traces of face-paint around her eye. She brushed her hair, which didn't take long since she'd had nearly all of it cut off so that nobody else could use it against her. She adjusted the straps of her party dress and craned over her bare shoulders to see in the mirror that no bruises were visible on them; then she disentangled a denim jacket from the pile of clothes at the end of the bed and slinging it over her shoulder with a finger hooked through the tag, went to find her parents.

  They were in the front room, her father turning the pages of a library book by someone called Thorne Smith, her mother pretending to read the local paper. Both of them smiled at Laura, though her mother's smile seemed to conceal a momentary distress of the kind she'd attempted to hide when Laura had come home with her hair cropped. "Do you think you'll be all right like that?" her mother said.

  "Nobody's going to be surprised how I look, Mummy, since it was in the paper."

  It was there on the page her mother had folded open: VICTIM OF PROMENADE ASSAULT WINS HOLIDAY. "I didn't mean that," her mother said, perhaps too readily. "Are you sure you'll be warm enough later?"