Streaking (31 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

As soon as Canny heard from the ever-reliable Bentley that Alice Ellison was back in Cockayne again to visit her parents he walked down to the village and knocked on the door of the Proffitt house. This time, Mrs Proffitt didn't seem in the least surprised to see him.

“She's gone to see our Ellen at the fish shop,” she said.

“Of course,” Canny said, nodding his head. “I should have looked in on my way past, shouldn't I?”

Jack Ormondroyd was alone behind the counter, the shop having only just opened for the evening shift. He shouted for Ellen and Alice to come out as soon as he saw Canny walk in.

“Hello, Canny,” said Ellen. “Haddock and chips, is it? Bit early for you.”

“Actually,” Canny aid, “I was looking for Alice. There's something up at the house that I need her to take a look at.”

Ellen raised a quizzical eyebrow but Jack's face remained deliberately set. Alice also seemed surprised by the baldness of the declaration, and her expression was tinged by suspicion—as if she feared that he might be about to let something slip about her excursion to London.

“You want to hear the latest about the trial?” She said, although it must have sounded just as unlikely to her as it did to everybody else. The trial of her husband's murderers was still more than a month away, and there would be no news until it actually started.

“That too, of course,” he said, “and to find out how you are. I thought you might ring. I left a message on your answer-phone three or four days ago.”

“Sorry,” she said, as she ducked under the counter. “Been a bit distracted. I won't be long, El.”

Once they were out on the street, she said “Is this wise? Everyone will see us.”

“So what,” Canny said. “I won't say we've nothing to hide, but I don't see that hiding it commits us to avoid speaking to one another for the rest of our lives. We made promises, remember? I'd be there if you needed me, and you'd be there if I needed you.”

She seemed surprised by the implication. “Why?” she said. “What's happened to you? Nothing that our Ellen's heard about.”

“Nothing that your Ellen could have heard about,” Canny said. “But there's more to the world than passes for gossip in the local chippy.”

Alice looked swiftly from side to side, but they were already outside the village boundary, and there was no one within earshot. Now that the county was back on Greenwich Mean Time, evening came early; the dusk was already closing in on them

“Does this have owt to do with Lissa Lo?” Alice guessed, reverting just for a moment to a way of speaking she'd polished away during the last decade.

“Yes,” he said.

“She let you down?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Not gently?”

“No, not gently.”

“Right.” She thought about that for a few moments, and then said: “Some people might think you've got a fucking nerve, Canny Kilcannon, coming crying to me because some supermodel you've been mooning over has kicked you into touch. What am I supposed to be—the fucking consolation prize?”

“No,” he said. “It's not like that. As I said in the shop, there's something at the house that I need to show you.” He wasn't absolutely sure whether or not he was lying about the matter of her being the consolation prize, but they were both living in a world where he had never had a chance of establishing a fruitful relationship with Lissa Lo.

“What is it?”

“You'll see. But I did want to talk to you, and I was surprised when you didn't call back.
Doesn't run away, our Alice
—that's what Ellen said. You're the one person I can talk to with some slight show of honesty, and I needed that. You have come home, though—I'm grateful for that.”

Alice didn't bother to assert, angrily or otherwise, that her only reason for returning to Cockayne was to see her mother, father, sister and niece. “Well then,” she said, as they made their way along the Crede beneath a sky patched with cloud, “tell me about Lissa Lo—with some slight show of honesty.”

“She was here last week—but I don't think Ellen found out about it.”

“She didn't mention it—and she would have, if she'd known. What happened?”

“She had a slight fall on the Ridge. She wasn't hurt, but she was shaken up a bit. Martin would probably have judged that she had a flash—a slight nEurophysiological shock, due to a hereditary condition.”

“Whereas you think she had a premonition?”

“No. Nothing so simple. But it did change things. It changed all sorts of things. Her mother had to come and take her way. She'll be back at work in no time, I dare say. But it changed things.”

“So you keep saying. What is it you want, Canny? If it's a replay of that night of passion, I guess I owe you that...although it might have been more convenient if you'd come over to Leeds.”

“For something that you claimed was no big deal,” he observed, “I believe you're letting that prey on your mind a little.”

“No I'm not,” she lied.

“I wanted to tell you that you were right,” he said, as they arrived at the gate of Credesdale House.

“About what?”

“About everything. Everything you said about the Kilcannon lucky streak—about what I might take as evidence to convince me that it was real, including the flashes of apparent light in my brain. It was all true.”

“I know that. You gave it all away—a lousy performance, for a man with your reputation as a poker player.”

“But it wasn't the whole truth.”

“Well, I gathered you probably thought that too. And at the end of the day, why not? You're an earl, and you probably have assets worth several million pounds, including a mill that's moved with the times more cleverly than most, and a whole fucking village to play lord of the manor in. I can see why you might think that the Kilcannon luck is real. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it.”

“I nearly got shot the day I brought you back to Leeds from London,” he said. “I went to pay a million Euros ransom to the people who robbed me in Monte, but it was a trap—they wanted to kill me as well as taking the money. I walked out without a scratch, and most of the million was back in the bank first thing.”

“Ellen should
really
have heard about that,” was Alice's immediate response to this news. “She must be getting sloppy in her old age—either that or you're becoming a world-class secret-keeper. What ransom? Who were you supposed to be ransoming?”

“Stevie Larkin. Nobody knows about it, and we'd both appreciate it if you kept quiet about it. If they dig up the three bodies, they'll probably find little bits of my mobile phone embedded in one of them, along with several bullets. I didn't kill them, and Stevie could testify to that, but the people who did kill them don't appreciate publicity.”

“So what the fuck are you telling
me
for?” she demanded, as he let them into the house.

“I thought we'd settled that. I can talk to you. You can talk to me. We don't worry about being insensitive. We just help one another along.”

“Where to?” was her counter to that. Her timing was accidental, but no less neat in consequence; they had just reached the library door. Canny opened it, and ushered her in. Then he opened the second door, and the third. He could tell that she was impressed by all three rooms.

“Cool,” she observed. “Very cozy—especially if you're a world-class secret-keeper.” Then she took note of the fact that there were two chairs in the inner sanctum, one on either side of the table. “Is that where Lissa Lo sat?” she demanded.

“Twice,” the confirmed, scrupulously. “The last time, she sat in my chair.” Having said that, he sat down in the chair at which he'd just pointed. She took the other, meekly enough.

Canny pointed to the open cupboard. “Those,” he said, “are the Kilcannon family diaries. They go all the way back to the mid-eighteenth century. They contain as complete a record as was then recoverable of the Kilcannon family legends, stretching all the way back to the Middle Ages. I asked Bentley to order me some dynamite today, by the way.”

The abrupt change of subject took her by surprise, as it had been intended to do. “Dynamite?” she echoed. “Why?”

“One of the things you'll find out when you read the diaries,” he said, “is that there are very explicit instructions about the necessity of preserving the Great Skull.”

She must have remembered, then, what she'd said about a couple of judiciously-placed sticks of dynamite—but that wasn't the theme she took up. “Am I going to read them?” she asked.

“You'll have to, won't you. if you're going to write a history of the Kilcannon streak?”

She stared at him, not knowing quite what to say. “What I suggested,” she reminded him, “was that I might write a history of Cockayne. The mill and the village—not the family.”

“True,” he said. “That would be an interesting book too. But it might not sell as well as a history of the Kilcannon luck, complete with a record of all its rituals and regulations. That wouldn't just appeal to historians, you see—it would find a public avid to try out all the formulas and spells, no matter how carefully you analyzed it in terms of the theory of psychological probability. You wouldn't just be writing a history of reckless superstition—you'd be laying the groundwork for a burgeoning industry.”

She paused for a moment before saying: “Isn't one of those regulations an instruction that the secrets should never be revealed to a living soul?”

“Of course—but the reading public won't mind that, and few of its members will be such connoisseurs of paradox as to realize that the fact that they're reading all about the magic is a cast-iron guarantee that it will never work again, if it ever did.”

“Why would you want me to write a book like that?” Alice asked. “I'd be grateful for the opportunity, I suppose—but I don't believe in the Kilcannon luck. You do, don't you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. Even now. I'll still believe in it when I've blasted the Great Skull to smithereens and broken most of the other rules in the books. It's the superstition I don't believe in. I want to banish that—to eliminate it from consideration, so that the luck can be free from all the paranoid crap that presently surrounds it. It's a bold move, I admit, but I'm in a reckless mood just now, and I don't think it's the kind of mood that might evaporate if I take a few more walks on the moors or a train to King's Cross. It would be a lot of work, mind. You'd have to spend a lot of time here. You might be able to get a flat in the village, of course, but if not you'd probably have to stay here at the house. It wouldn't be entirely your book, either—it would be a collaboration, a joint venture. Would you mind that?”

“I'd have to think about it,” Alice said, warily.

“Of course you would,” Canny said. “After all, people would be bound to talk, wouldn't they? You're a widow and I'm a single man. You know what the villagers are like, even without Ellen to egg them on. It would probably ruin your reputation, even if you did manage to get a flat. People would be keeping track of your comings and goings every day of the week, always speculating. We'd probably have to get married, eventually, just to save Jem and Madge's blushes.”

He would rather have been able to shocked her as profoundly as she'd one shocked him, but she was too wary for that—and the effect would, in any case, have been considerably ameliorated by the fact that she didn't have a mouthful of ham-and-mushroom pizza.

“If that's a proposal, you bastard,” she said, eventually, “it's the most dreadful one I ever heard. Even Martin had the grace to
ask
.”

“So will I, when the time comes,” Canny assured her. “I'm not making conditions, Alice. I'm just pointing out the logic of the situation. I want you to write this book. If the collaboration brings us closer together, that will be an added bonus. If you want to make conditions that will allow you to do it without getting too close, that's fine—but the diaries have to stay in the house. They're entailed. They have to be preserved here for my son, whether or not he's your son too. He'll have to make his own decisions about how to carry matters forward. You don't have to give me an answer until you're ready, of course—you can have all the time you need to reach a reasoned decision, not just about the book but everything.”

“You bastard,” she said, again. “Do you really think I want to be somebody's
second choice
?”

“I'd be yours,” he pointed out. “But no, I don't. And I don't think it's a relevant issue. It's not the right way to look at things, because it isn't true. London's preyed on my mind too—and not just because you made me choke on a pizza and then hit me right between the eyes with all that stuff about the Road to Damascus effect. I need you, Alice. I need you more than anything I've ever needed in my life.”

“You needed Lissa Lo.”

“No I didn't. I never thought I
needed
her, not for an instant. She and I had a lot in common, including some of the same privileges and delusions, but that didn't mean that we needed one another. Quite the reverse, in fact. It meant that we ought to have avoided one another. I see that now, and so does Lissa. What we both needed, and still need, is someone to balance out our outlandish convictions, someone to provide an anchor in the real world.”

“An anchor? You're sure you don't mean a millstone round your neck?”

“Jesus, Alice,” he complained. “You could let up a
little
bit. I just offered to let you write a book that you're probably better qualified to write than anyone else in your line of work, and suggested that if collaborating on it didn't prove too terrible an experience, we might want to take the relationship further.
Killing two birds with one ring
certainly isn't one of my expressions. And nothing I've said is anything like as indecent a proposal as the one you made me.”