Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  “Why?” Alive snapped at her. “Because he’s a bloody lord?”

  “No,” Canny said. “Because my father died last week, and I think I understand how you might be feeling.”

  “You’ve no idea,” she retorted. “No idea at all.”

  “Why?” Canny countered. “Because Daddy was old and Martin wasn’t? Because Daddy was ill and Martin wasn’t? Because Daddy died peacefully in his sleep, and Martin didn’t? Or because I’m just a son and you’re a wife? Believe me, Alice, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. Dead is dead. Left alone is left alone. Feeling guilty is feeling guilty.”

  All three of his listeners seemed startled by that.

  “Why should I feel guilty?” Alice asked.

  “You shouldn’t,” Canny said, fearing that he would sound crass but plugging on anyway. “But you probably do. I don’t know exactly what about, but I dare say you’ve found something. Maybe it was you who parked the car in that particular spot, or didn’t stop him when he went out after the men who were breaking into it. Maybe you assured him that it would be okay to live here for a while until you found out whether it would be possible to move to Cockayne, when he expressed doubts. It doesn’t matter what—you’ll probably have found something you did or didn’t do that would have made things work out differently if you hadn’t or had done it. You shouldn’t stay here. You should come back to Cockayne with your mother. Ellen’s there, and Marie, and Jem. The police don’t need you to be here any more, do they?”

  He looked at P.C. Willis as he asked the last question.

  The policewoman shook her head.

  “It’s only twenty minutes away, in any case,” Canny said.

  “I can’t use the car,” Alice said. “It’s evidence in a murder inquiry. Mum came on the bus.”

  “I’ll drive you both,” Canny said. “Pack what you need, and I’ll drop you both at your Mum’s door. Then I’ll leave you alone. Your Mum will look after you. Ellen too.”

  Alice stared at him, uncomprehendingly. “I didn’t go to your father’s funeral to pay my respects,” she said, distantly. “All I wanted was to get you on our side so we could move back.”

  “Well, that certainly wasn’t what got Martin killed,” Canny said. “I don’t mind. What do you think she should do, P.C. Willis?”

  “I think she should stay with her mother for a few days,” the policewoman said, promptly. “It’s better than having her mother stay here. You won’t be able to keep the reporters and TV cameras from pestering you here. You might not even in Cockayne, but at least your mother’s house isn’t thirty meters away from a murder scene.”

  “We can make sure that the reporters keep a respectful distance in Cockayne,” Canny said, without specifying how. “It’s not running away, Alice. It’s just the sensible thing to do.”

  Alice threw up her hands. “Well, if the lord of the bloody manor says so,” she muttered, in a martyred tone. “I’ll go pack.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Mrs. Proffitt said, when Alice had left the room. “She’s upset.”

  “Understandably,” Canny said. “Any progress?” he asked P.C. Willis.

  “I can’t...,” the policewoman began, before Mrs. Proffitt cut her off.

  “If you mean have they caught the little bastards, no,” she said. “They will, though. They’ve got descriptions. They were off their own patch, you see. This isn’t Chapeltown—everybody round here hates Chapeltowners. There’ll be witnesses who’ll stand up in court. They’ll get caught—though what the courts will do I shudder to think. Slap on the wrist, I dare say. Probably sue Alice because they got blood on their crowbar.”

  Another thing that P.C. Willis couldn’t do was rise to that sort of bait, so Canny said: “It doesn’t really matter how long they go to jail for, Mrs. Proffitt. It won’t bring Martin back.”

  “Drug addicts,” Mrs. Proffitt said, as if she were spitting acid. “Murdering little bastards. Ought to be hanged.”

  “I understand how you feel,” Canny said, and left it at that. He didn’t, though. His own feelings were far less straightforward. He had had not the slightest inkling that the tragedy was about to occur, but that wouldn’t have been surprising even if his gift had been at its fullest strength. Even so, he couldn’t help wondering whether Martin Ellison’s death had had something to do with him—if it had been spun off somehow from the climactic flash of disruption that had accompanied his roulette win. There wasn’t the slightest reason for thinking that there could be any connection, however tortuous its logic might be, but that didn’t prevent him from wondering. As he had pointed out to Alice, even ordinary people tended to feel guilty when bad things happened around them; people who were supposed to be masters of their own destiny were bound to have an even more exaggerated sense of their own agency. Even if the event had not been connected in any way with the unfolding consequences of that moment in Monte Carlo, there remained the question of whether Canny could have prevented the murder, if only he had cared enough to receive a presentiment of its possibility.

  When Alice reappeared clutching an overnight bag P.C. Willis asked Canny where he was parked, and volunteered to walk them to the car.

  “It’s good of you to do this, sir,” the policewoman murmured, as they moved out into the street and stood to one side while Alice locked up behind them.

  “It’s no trouble,” Canny said. “I’ve known the family for a long time—I grew up with the three sisters. Do you want to come with us?”

  “No,” the policewoman said. “I’ll come out as soon as we have some news—I know where Cockayne is. I’ve been through it.” She repeated this to Alice as Alice was getting into the Citroen’s front passenger seat. Canny held the door while Mrs. Proffitt clambered into the back.

  As they set off, Alice said: “Ellen put you up to this, didn’t she? She asked you to come and get me—just to show off that she could.”

  “Ellen just told me what had happened,” Canny assured her. “She doesn’t even know I’m here. She didn’t think to ask, and she didn’t have to. I told you the truth back there. I do know something of what you must be feeling.”

  “Why should you feel guilty about your Dad dying?” she retorted. “He had cancer.”

  “I shouldn’t,” Canny agreed. “I shouldn’t feel guilty about Martin’s death, either—but I even feel guilty about that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was mugged a few days ago myself. The mugger surprised me in my hotel room. He had a gun. I just stood there, helpless. There was nothing I could do. He took my money, and he left. He could have shot me, but he didn’t. He probably would have, if I’d moved, and he might have anyway, because he was nervous. It was just my good luck that he didn’t. I could have been killed, but I wasn’t. Martin was. It wasn’t his fault—on another day, he’d have blocked the first blow and taken the crowbar off the kid. He didn’t do anything wrong. It was just bad luck. It could easily have been the other way around—I could have been shot, and he could have grabbed the crowbar and chased the kids away. I feel guilty because I was lucky and he wasn’t, and I know just as well as you do how ridiculous that is—but it’s no more ridiculous than you feeling guilty because he’s dead and you’re alive, and that’s what I mean when I say that I understand.”

  “You patronizing bastard,” Alice said, contemptuously—although Canny felt that he’d been more insensitive than patronizing.

  “Alice!” Madge Proffitt complained.

  Canny paid no heed to the interruption at all. “You see,” he went on, “I can’t help thinking—or feeling, at any rate—that there might be some kind of weird cosmic balance in which every bit of good luck I have is balanced out by somebody else’s bad luck—in this case, Martin’s. I’m a lucky Kilcannon, after all. I expect to have good luck—and if the universe can do me favors, it seems to stand to reason that it can do other people bad turns, and probably does, by way of compensation. It makes no sense at a
ll, in terms of the calculus of probability, but psychological probability is a very different ball game—as Martin knew very well.”

  “Very clever,” Alice said, bitterly. “You’re telling me that Martin would understand how I feel better than I do, just like you do. Well, maybe he would—and maybe you do too, having lost your Dad so recently. Doesn’t alter anything, does it? At least there’s no possibility that the little savage who smashed his head in was his long-lost son, so you don’t have to start lecturing me about the fucking Oedipus Effect, do you?”

  “Alice!” Mrs. Proffitt complained again, her voice more agonized than before.

  Canny drove north through Roundhay instead of picking up the A64, intending to go through Scholes and Barwick-in-Elmet rather than taking the main road. It seemed more fitting, somehow, to take the quieter route.

  “I’m not lecturing you, Alice,” he said, feeling that he ought to try to keep the conversation going in spite of the difficulties. “I’m telling you the simple truth. I’ve always felt guilty about the Kilcannon luck. You grew up in Cockayne, so you know all the stories, the whole rich stock of local legends. You can’t tell me you that never heard anyone say that our good luck must be someone else’s bad—with an exemplary tale to back up the claim. Don’t tell me you never heard anyone say that the family have a pact with the devil.”

  “I never believed it,” Alice said, contemptuously.

  “Always told the kids that sort of stuff was rubbish,” Madge Proffitt chipped in. “Never tolerated that sort of talk in our house, me or Jem. Ellen won’t have it neither.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Mrs Proffitt,” Canny said. “The point I’m trying to make is that people say those things to express their feelings about the unfair way that good luck and bad luck are distributed within the world. The fact that they aren’t true doesn’t stop them affecting the way I feel—the way I’ve always felt, since I was a kid. Ellen understood that, I think—a little. You were telling the truth, weren’t you, Alice, when you said she’d never say a word against me, and always defended me if someone else did?”

  “Aye,” said Alice. “Just like you were telling the truth when you said she showed you her knickers when you were at the primary.”

  It was Canny’s turn to murmur “Alice!” as there was an audible intake of breath in the back seat.

  “Oh, sorry Mum,” Alice said. After a moment’s pause, she added: “You too, Canny. Got carried away. Stupid.”

  “It’s okay,” Canny said. “My fault.”

  “No, it’s not,” Alice said, after a slight pause. “It was good of you to come, Canny, even if Ellen did send you. She’d have come herself, if Jack hadn’t been playing cricket and she was down to make the teas. If it had been Sunday and all she’d have had to miss was church there’d have been no stopping her—but Jack’s cricket is a different matter. Lucky you didn’t say yes when he offered you a game, or you’d have been stuck there too. Take a braver man than you to cry off after he’d picked you ahead of someone who can actually play.”

  “It’s Jack we’re talking about,” Canny reminded her. “He’d have been only too pleased to call up the twelfth man in my place. He only invited me out of respect for tradition. Anyway, I was never that bad. My batting average was in the twenties. I was the best snicker in the village. Ask your Ellen.”

  The sheer bizarrerie of the last remark teased a wry smile out of Alice’s repentant expression.

  “We’ll probably have won the match by now,” Canny told her, glad to have found a topic that didn’t annoy or hurt her. “The other lot weren’t making much of a score. Frank Langsgill demolished their batting, although he blotted his scorebook later by dropping a sitter. They probably didn’t get a hundred—and we certainly won’t have needed to bat all the way down to number eleven to knock those off.”

  It was at that point, incongruously enough, that Alice finally broke down and began weeping. Maybe, Canny thought, Jack Ormondroyd had offered Martin a game too. Maybe Martin had been a good player, and had been looking forward to joining the team if and when the Ellisons were able to move to Cockayne—or maybe he was as useless as Canny was, and had had to make his apologies. It seemed more likely, though, that Alice had simply run out of annoyance and resentment, and had nothing left with which to shield her pent-up grief. The car crossed the A64, heading into Scholes.

  “I brought his book,” Alice said, eventually, between sobs. “It’s in the bag.”

  “What book?” Canny said.

  “His new book. His book on superstition. I thought you might want to look at it, being interested and all. It’s only a rough draft, mind, and not finished.”

  “Ah,” Canny said. “That wasn’t necessary, Alice. But thanks for the thought.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think,” she said. “I just did it. You wouldn’t be here, though, if it weren’t for the books, would you? You never gave Lydia’s Ken a second glance—but as soon as you found out who Martin was, you were promising to get us a house—and I thought how lucky we were. How absolutely fucking lucky.”

  Madge Proffitt sighed audibly, but made no other protest regarding her daughter’s bad language.

  What Alice had said was true enough, Canny knew. If it had been Lydia’s Ken who’d been murdered, he wouldn’t have driven to Manchester. It was because Martin Ellison had been Martin Ellison that he had felt compelled to respond to the news of his death and his widow’s distress—and Alice had packed Martin’s latest, unfinished book in recognition of that fact, even without thinking.

  “Martin was a wise man, Alice,” he said. “I found a lot to admire in his work. I’m sure that we would have been friends. It’s a terrible waste of a fine mind. Is there anything more I can do, when we get back?” The car was heading for Aberford now, and the Roman Ridge. They would be within sight of Credesdale very soon.

  “No,” said Alice. “I phoned his mother. She’ll let his brother and sister know. They all live down south—Gloucester and Somerset. Didn’t see much of them after we moved to Canterbury, but I suppose they’ll want to bury him down there. If we can bury him at all, with him being murdered. Holds thing up, I dare say—especially if they don’t catch them right away. That policewoman seemed confident, though. Impulsive crime, you see—not planned. They were seen. Just a matter of time. Nothing to do but wait.”

  “Well if you need anything,” Canny said. “Mrs. Proffitt?”

  “We’ll let you know, Lord Credesdale,” Madge Proffitt said, mechanically. “Thanks.”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “Thanks. Sorry about what I said before. Not you I was angry at, really. Stupid.”

  “It’s fine,” Canny said. “You can insult me any time—it just bounces off. You must remember that, even though it’s been a while.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “Mistake, though—only used to make me try harder.”

  “Well, you’ll have to try a lot harder now,” he assured her. “The skin’s got even thicker over the years. Takes a lot to get under it nowadays. You need someone to take it out on, you know where I am. Better me, maybe, than Ellen or your Mum.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Alice said, although her voice was devoid of gratitude. “Very kind of you, I’m sure. You must be busy, though, having just inherited the Mill. Not as if you’d spent a lot of time there recently, so I hear.”

  “There’s a lot to catch up on,” Canny admitted. “Here and in London. But the offer stands. Shall I drop you at home or the chippy?”

  “Seven Berridge Street,” Mrs. Proffitt was quick to say, although she must have known that Canny knew where she lived. “Thank you very much, Lord Credesdale.”

  “But next time,” Alice said, as the car drew to a halt in Berridge Street and she opened the passenger door, “bring the Bentley, will you?”

  “It’s not a real Bentley,” Canny told her. “They’ve been fake ever since Rolls Royce took them over, and now that the Germans have taken over Rolls Royce....”

  She
didn’t want to play, even though she’d started it. Her face had became haggard and drawn again, “Thanks for the lift, Canny,” she said, as mechanically as her mother, before she slammed the door.

  “You’re welcome,” Canny said, inaudibly, before backing up and driving home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  On the following morning, not long after breakfast, Canny and his mother were reading the Sunday Times in the living-room when Bentley told him that Alice Ellison was asking to see him.

  “Show her in,” Canny said.

  His mother offered Alice her condolences and conventional assurances of support, which Alice accepted gratefully—but when Alice said “I’ve brought you the book, Canny,” Lady Credesdale took the hint and left the room.

  It was on the tip of Canny’s tongue to say “What book?” but then he remembered.

  “You didn’t...,” he began—but Alice was already thrusting the typescript at him.

  “The bit about you is just a set of notes,” Alice said. “Martin hadn’t really had a chance to get started on it.”

  Canny felt a sudden thrill of alarm, and looked at the typescript more attentively. The head sheet bore the title The Legendry of Luck. He scanned the contents page, then began riffling through it. There were only a hundred pages of actual text, but there were a further thirty pages of printed notes, all of them heavily annotated in blue ink. He found the page to which Alice had referred without much difficulty—it was headed “Kilcannon family”—and ran his eyes swiftly over it. He still had sufficient presence of mind to say “Sit down, please” and Alice eased herself down on to the sofa, perching on the edge as if she wanted to be ready for a quick getaway if Canny turned nasty.

  Canny resumed his own chair, and replaced the page relating to the Kilcannons in the stack of A4 pages. He noted that the chapter of which they were to have been a part already had a title. All the chapter-titles on the contents page were taken from popular expressions; there was one on “Lady Luck”, one called “Fortune Favours Fools”, one on “Lucky Numbers”, and even one on “Lucky Streaks”. The chapter which was to have featured the Kilcannons was, however, “The Luck of the Devil”.