Streaking (24 page)

Except, he reminded himself, that Alice was talking about illusions—about things that might be taken as evidence for unusual luck and insight, but weren't. He had more than that to sustain his belief. He had the kind of evidence that Henri Meurdon's perfectly objective and utterly dispassionate computer had thrown up. He knew, too, that Lissa Lo and he could see the same flashes, and feel the same after-effects—which meant that they
had
to be objectively real, not just randomly-generated phantoms of some nEurological disorder from which they both happened to be suffering.

“I lied about the purely theoretical bit,” Alice reported. “But at least you haven't broken any more of your stupid rules—although you might as well, now that most of the secret's out. If you were to tell me the whole story, you might do yourself some good—and you needn't worry about it going any further.”

Canny didn't reply immediately. He needed a little time to recover his composure. “Why do you want to know?” he asked, eventually, keeping his voice perfectly level, and even contriving a slight tone of levity.

“You mean am I just a nosey bitch, or do I have an agenda?”

“If you want to put it like that,” he agreed.

“Well,” she said, “I'm not sure you'd trust my answer, either way. I'm not sure you'd even trust me to be able to give an honest answer if I wanted to.”

“So I'm supposed to make my own guess—figuring, of course, that I'll be lucky.”

“If you want to put it like that,” she said.

“Now you're fishing for insults,” he told her. “You're inviting me to be cynical about your motives, for last night as well as today. You shouldn't do that, Alice. Fortunately, I'm not a cynic. I think you're doing this because you have my best interests at heart. I think you felt sorry for me, that day you saw me at Daddy's funeral, and were afflicted by a sudden rush of nostalgia for the old days. I think your own tragedy intensified that feeling of empathy considerably. I think you really do feel that I'm in some sort of danger, not so much from Lissa Lo as from myself—from my suddenly-increased conviction that the family rules really do matter, and that terrible things might happen if I don't start paying obsessive attention to them. Not that you think Lissa isn't dangerous, mind—but it's not just jealousy. You really do think that she might mess up my head, if I let her. You want to protect me from all of that.”

“Oh, fuck off, Canny,” Alice said, exasperatedly. “I'm not your fucking Mummy. I'm only interested in your body, and it's just a phase I'm going through—a wayward mood. I told you that.”

“You lied,” Canny said. “All the omens say so, and they're never wrong. Besides which, you always curse at least twice as hard when you're bluffing. It's what gamblers call a tell.”

She fell silent then, for a while.

“Funny thing, that,” she said. “Martin was the world's foremost expert on psychological plausibility—or damn near—and yet he was a lousy card player. You could have taken him to the cleaners any day of the week, with or without your lucky streak.”

“Understanding doesn't always give you control,” Canny said, “any more than control always gives you understanding.”

“Very neat,” she said. “That's your way of putting us in boxes, is it? Me, because I had Martin, understanding without control. Lissa Lo, because she didn't have you, control without understanding. So she's your ideal mate, and I'm a fucked-up floozy in mourning-dress.”

“It's not a competition, Alice,” he said. “You don't have that kind of agenda, remember? If you want to get me out of her clutches, it's purely for my own good. You're still grieving—just passing through the phases until you come into clear psychological waters again.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “It's all just theoretical discussion. So tell me, if you can set aside the mind-bending effects of your mild nEurological disorder—what other evidence might a person have, to convince him that he and his family were blessed with unnatural good luck? Purely hypothetically, of course.”

“It's all to do with patterns,” Canny told her, after a brief pause for thought. “We're preprogrammed to look for them, even where they can't exist—and we see them, even when we know they're an illusion. Suppose, for instance, that I were a casino manager with a computer that logs every bet my clients make and accumulates the data over time. How many clients do I have, do you think? Hundreds of thousands overall, but maybe only a few hundred regulars—let's say five hundred. How many of those would you expect to come out ahead on a fairly regular basis, given that they're always betting against the house percentage? It's nowhere near half, if you do the calculation, even though the house percentage on most games is only a few per cent—but it's not that tiny either. You could probably identify a dozen, maybe more. And would you then just shrug your shoulders and say:
well, that's probability for you
? Chance would predict that only a dozen would come out ahead on that sort of long-term basis, and here's a dozen guys, so that's the end of the story. No, you wouldn't. You'd start asking yourself, because you couldn't help yourself, why
these
guys, and not a dozen others? You'd start looking more closely, at the patterns innate in their betting habits, the patterns inherent in their attitudes of mind...
anything
that might give you a clue to the magic, even though you know full well that the magic isn't there, because magic doesn't exist. It's all in the patterns, Alice—the patterns we can't help but find, even when they're not really there. Except, of course, for the ones that are.”

“The curves,” she said. “The Poisson distribution. Fractals. The Fibonacci sequence. All the little miracles of mathematics—the magic of numbers.”

“Those too,” He admitted.

“And after everything you've said,” Alice challenged him, “you really do believe there's more?”

“I know there is,” he said. “I suppose I would say that, if I really were suffering from a mild nEurological disorder, one of whose definitive symptoms was an unjustifiable sense of conviction—but I'd still know. The question isn't whether I'm a fool to believe in the Kilcannon luck, Alice—the question is, how do I find out what's actually necessary to its maintenance, and what isn't, without testing it to destruction? That's the question that Daddy faced, when he wanted to marry against the rules; it's the question that every earl in the line has faced, as soon as his father died. It's pointless trying to convert me to your kind of skepticism, Alice, because the faith is incarnate in my flesh and blood, hardwired into my brain if not engraved in my DNA by the letters of sacred tetragrammaton. The point is to figure out what's really necessary and what's not—and which risks are worth taking, and which aren't. So far, I've risked more for you than I have for Lissa Lo, by the way, and I'm adding to that margin with every sentence I say to you.”

“Perhaps you should have dropped me at King's Cross, then,” she told him, soberly. “That would have been the safe way to play. Your confidence might not be dented yet, but we're only just past Milton Keynes. I may already be half way to delivering you from your pact with the devil You're a captive audience, after all. If I play my cards right, Helen of Troy won't get a look in—it'll be dear, sweet Marguerite all the way.”

“I think you're confusing the Goethe and Marlowe versions of
Faust
.”

“You think
I
'm confusing? Try listening to yourself some time.”

“I do,” Canny assured her. “And you're right—sometimes, I don't make a lot of sense.”

“I don't believe that there's anything supernatural about your good luck, Canny,” Alice said, flatly. “I don't think you have any rational grounds for believing in it either, no matter how much supposed evidence you've collected. I think that when you find yourself saying that you
know
something, when you also know that it's false, it's time to reappraise what you think the word
know
actually means.”

“I'd already gathered that you thought all that,” Canny told her. “Ellen's not the only Proffitt sister who isn't very big on subtlety, even if you're a little smarter than her. I must introduce you to Lo Chen some time—I'm sure that you and she could have a fascinating discussion about nEurological disorders, the practical implications of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the symbolism of yin and yang. But that kind of skepticism is no good to me, Alice—believe me, I've tried and tried, and I just can't get the thin end of the wedge into my head. If I'm mad, the problem isn't to find a cure, because there isn't one—not even the love of a good woman. The problem is to find the best way of living with my madness. Except that, to me it's not madness at all—it's pure magic. It's
luck
—the honest-to-goodness real thing that everybody wants and hardly anyone can have.”

After a long pause, she said: “I'm not a good woman, and it wasn't love...which is a stupid thing to say, given that this isn't about me at all, or even Lissa Lo. It's about you. I admit that. Do you suppose that Stevie Larkin sees flashes, too?”

“I doubt it,” Canny said. “It wouldn't be very convenient in the middle of a football game. It was bad enough when I used to turn out for the village cricket team. I was a lucky player, of course—most of my edges went straight through the slips for four and you'd never believe the number of times I was dropped on the boundary—but the problem was that I always looked it. I never looked as if I'd actually
earned
my runs. I was a clown. Stevie isn't. He's the real thing. He got to where he is because he can play, end of story.”

“And you envy him that?”

“Of course. It cuts both ways, though—when we used to bump into one another on the Riviera, and he had to ask me to translate for him, he always thought that he was the fraud and I was the real deal. He never suspected that I thought exactly the same. It all depends on your point of view. He thinks he's infinitely luckier than me, because chance not only gave him the ability to play football but a world in which playing football to that sort of standard is the nearest you can get to godhood without having to learn to play the guitar. To him, every match that passes without some bastard berserker of a central defender crashing into his ankle and taking it all away from him is another pat on the back from generous fate.”

“But you don't think so. You let him take the credit for his skill, while refusing to take any credit for your own.”

“Oh, I take the credit,” Canny assured her. “You have no idea how good I feel every time I collect the house percentage—or, if you do, it's a
theoretical
idea. I give myself credit—it's just that it's a different kind of credit from the kind that Stevie Larkin deserves.”

“I don't think so,” Alice declared.

“I know—but I have to make my own judgments and decisions, don't I? I have to figure things out for myself.”

After a pause, she said: “I really wish I could help, Canny. I really do think you need it.”

“You have helped,” he told her, sincerely. “You probably will again. Won't you?”

“Yes,” she said, unresentfully. “I suppose I will. But I ought to warn you that I won't give up. I'll never believe in the Kilcannon luck—not in the way that you do—and I'll never believe that it will work any better as a
folie à deux
.”

“That's okay,” he assured her. “That's the deal. You can insult me, curse me, call me mad. You can play court jester to your heart's content.”

“Bastard,” she said. “I'm serious.”

“I know,” he told her. So, in my own peculiar way, am I. Shall we stop for breakfast at the next services? I'm starving.”

“Me too,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Canny dropped Alice at the house in Leeds. “How do you feel?” he said, as she got out of the car.

“Better,” she assured him. “Much more relaxed than I did this time yesterday. Like a cow with bloat whose belly's just been punctured by the vet's giant hypodermic.”

“That's a truly repulsive analogy.”

“I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about going on at you so much—it was just more bloat, more hot air. I'm okay now. I'll see you back in Cockayne.”

“Sure,” he said. “Take care.”

“I always do, she assured him.

It only required a further twenty minutes to drive back to Cockayne. Bentley had the usual stack of telephone messages for him, and the mail that had accumulated over the previous few days was unusually prolific—a further effect of his father's death.

“I'm afraid some of it's urgent,” the butler said.

“I can see that,” Canny told him. “I'll do what I can before lunch. Will Mummy be in?”

“No, sir. Lady Credesdale is out until dinner.”

Canny took time out to shower and change his clothes before he started work on the mail, but that only took him twenty minutes. When he did sit down he set aside all the items that Bentley had opened and sorted for him, directing his immediate attention to one item that stood out from all the rest: a package marked with instructions CONFIDENTIAL—TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY and EXTREMELY URGENT.

This legend was handwritten with a marker pen. Bentley told him that it had been delivered earlier that morning by a courier service.

“You could have opened it,” Canny said.

“I could not,” the butler contradicted him, severely. “Even if the labeling is a mere publicity ploy, concealing some ludicrous commercial special offer, I am bound to take it seriously.

“Well,” Canny said, “if it's a bomb, I'm never going to forgive you for not taking the blast.” He tore open the package.

It wasn't a bomb. It was a mobile phone.

Canny's first thought was that Bentley had been right, and that it was some kind of promotional offer—an impression heightened rather than dispelled by the fact that there was nothing accompanying the handset but a single piece of paper containing a handwritten instruction to call a number that obviously belonged to another mobile phone.

Canny was inclined to drop the phone, the instruction and the packaging into the bin, but he hesitated. There was an electrical sensation in the air, and a certain fugitive darkness. He didn't know whether he was being warned to ring the number, or to avoid ringing it, and his conversation with Alice about nEurophysiological disorders was still all-too-fresh in his mind, but he still believed in the reality of the Kilcannon luck.

In the end, he thumbed the number into the keypad.

“Lord Credesdale,” said a male voice that contrived to be flat, businesslike and menacing at the same time. “We had hoped to hear from you sooner.” The voice was slightly accented, but Canny had no idea what kind of accent it was. He had to presume that it was Eastern European, but if he hadn't been pointed towards that conclusion in advance he wouldn't have been able to draw it with any confidence.

“I've just got back from London,” Canny said. “What do you want?”

“We want a million Euros, Lord Credesdale, by five o'clock this evening—and your silence, of course.”

Canny felt his body react to the words—or to the muted streak that came with them. The shock was dull, and only subtly nauseating, but he had no idea whether its half-hearted quality was a consequence of the diminution of his ability or the relatively low level of the danger with which he was faced.

“And what do I get in return?” Canny asked, trying to keep his voice level. His eyes, meanwhile, met Bentley's inquisitive gaze.

The voice that replied to that inquiry wasn't the same one. It was easily recognizable, in spite of its strained tone, as Stevie Larkin's.

“Canny? Is that you?”

“It's me,” Canny confirmed. “What is this, Stevie?” The question was necessary, even though he knew perfectly well what it was. He needed confirmation.

“I've been kidnapped, Canny. I was in the country for secret talks. I took an opportunity that came up to go home to see the family. They boxed the car in, shot out the rear window to show me they meant business. God only knows why they contacted you—I
told
them to ring my agent. I can get the money, Canny—but they insist that you have to raise it for me. I'm truly sorry.”

“It's okay, Stevie,” Canny said. “I understand why. It's me they're after, not you. They won't hurt you, if I do what they say. I'll get you out, Stevie—depend on that.”

“They say they'll do my knee, Canny,” Stevie told him, plaintively. “That's all—but it'd mean that I'd never play again. They know what it's worth to me. The club's insured, but that's not the point. Do you understand, Canny? If I have to pay a million Euros to keep my knee, I'll do it, no matter how hard it is to get the money together. I'm good for it, Canny. Just do as they say, and I'll see you right. Can
you
get the money?”

“I don't know, Stevie,” Canny said. “I hope so. I'll certainly try, as hard as I can.”

The other voice came back. “You can get the money, Lord Credesdale. Five o'clock. Ring back, and we'll give you further instructions. Don't involve the police. If anything goes wrong, Mr Larkin's career is over—and it won't end there. You do understand that, don't you, Lord Credesdale? This is business, not war—but you were the one who raised the stakes.” The accent was still indecipherable, but Canny couldn't believe that any member of the Uzbekistani mafia would be quite that polished. He was dealing with authentic Europeans, not displaced tartars, more likely Magyars or Czechs than Bulgars or Chechens—not that it mattered.

Canny didn't bother to complain that he wasn't the player who had raised the stakes, let alone the one who had started the game in the first place. He wasn't the one who was setting the rules, either—and he had no idea how far his luck could now be trusted, if at all. He was fairly certain, though, that the threat was serious. If he were callous enough to refuse to help Stevie out, they'd not only cripple the footballer but go after someone else until they struck the right nerve. They'd be ripping open a hornets' nest if they went after Lissa Lo's face, but they probably didn't even know about her. If Stevie's knee didn't do the trick, they'd turn their attention to the village.

“I'll try to get the money,” Canny said, as calmly as he could. “You don't have anything against Stevie—there's no need to hurt him. I'll try as hard as I can to get you what you want.”

“That's good,” the voice said, grimly. “If you deliver, and keep quiet, no one will get hurt. A million Euros in notes—Euros, sterling or US dollars are acceptable, but nothing else. Ring us as soon as you've got it together, not before. When we have it, Mr. Larkin will be released. It's a simple business transaction, nothing more.”

Canny had to figure that the kidnapper was almost certainly lying—he didn't need any kind of gift to work that out—but the game still had to be played out.

When Canny had put the phone down he still had to answer Bentley's inquisitorial stare, but that was the easy part. “Trouble,” He said. “Bad trouble. I need to raise a lot of money very quickly. Utmost discretion required. No police—and Mummy mustn't suspect a thing. You'll have to cover for me if anyone asks. I need you to do that, Bentley—but the less you actually know, the better. Okay?”

“Yes sir,” Bentley said, dutifully.

“Good,” Canny said. He picked up the mobile phone and put it into his left-hand jacket pocket—his own phone was in the right-hand pocket—before moving to the land-line and phoning Maurice Rawtenstall at the mill.

He didn't have time for diplomatic niceties. “It's Lord Credesdale, Maurice,” he said. “I need the slush fund—all of it. Pounds, dollars and Euros. I'll try to get to back to you within the week. No questions—and if anyone else asks, no answers.”

“Of course, Lord Credesdale,” was the answer he got, after a few seconds hesitation. “How would you like the money delivered?”

Canny made sure that his sigh of relief was inaudible. For a moment or two, the politeness and sheer matter-of-factness of Rawtenstall's reply seemed utterly bizarre—but he
was
Lord Credesdale now, and it probably wasn't the first time that a Lord Credesdale had telephoned the mill to demand a large sum of cash, with no questions asked.

“I'll collect it in an hour or so,” Canny said. “How much is there?”

“I don't know the exact sum,” Rawtenstall said. “About a hundred and fifty thousand.”

That would be pounds, Canny knew. He had a further fifty thousand in his own safe. Given that a million Euros was currently equivalent to seven hundred thousand pounds, that would leave him with a further half million sterling to raise.

He phoned the first of the three Leeds banks with which the family had accounts and asked to talk to the senior manager. “This is Lord Credesdale,” he said, again. “We met last week. I need to raise a considerable sum in cash by five o'clock this afternoon. Sterling, dollars and Euros are all acceptable. How much can you let me have?”

The manager didn't bother to query his use of the term “considerable sum”, or quibble about practicalities. “I can probably let you have a hundred thousand immediately,” the manager said. “I ought to be able to raise a quarter of a million by five, although it might be a close-run thing.”

“Would that involve obtaining cash from other banks in the city?” Canny wanted to know.

“Yes it would.”

“I'll have to go to Lloyd's and HSBC myself. If you can obtain cash from other parts of your own organization, that would be more convenient. I know there's no time to transfer notes from London or Birmingham, but Manchester's not so far away.”

“I might be able to raise two hundred thousand without troubling the other institutions you mention,” the manager said. “I might, however, have to draw on other sources to which they would have recourse in their turn, reducing their own capacity to help you. How much do you need?”

“Too much. Start raising what you can. I'll get on to them directly, and I'll come back to you if it looks as if there might not be enough. This has to be handled with the utmost discretion, though.”

“Of course, sir. Will you be collecting the money in person?”

“Yes. I'll be in touch.”

By the time Canny had made two further phone calls, the entire half million had been promised. He was astonished, and slightly appalled, by how easy it had been.

“I always thought the title was so much meaningless gibberish,” he said to Bentley. “This is the twenty-first century, for Heaven's sake.”

“Yours is a name that commands a great deal of authority, sir,” Bentley told him. “The country is doubtless replete with aristocrats whose credit rating is derisory, but the Earls of Credesdale have a reputation that stretches back further than anyone can remember—and their dealings, though always profitable in the long run, haven't always been orthodox.”

It wasn't just Henri Meurdon who had a powerful computer and a healthy measure of curiosity, Canny realized. He was, indeed, living in the twenty-first century. Seven hundred thousand pounds wasn't that big a deal, and he wasn't short of collateral—but the real point at issue was that all four of the men he'd called had heard abundant rumors of the Kilcannon luck, and had the means to investigate its arithmetic. One thing they didn't know, of course, was that his luck was supposed to be at a low ebb just now—but he didn't know himself how crucial the rules, or how reliable the superstitious fears, might really be.

“They all think I'm putting it into some crooked deal, don't they?” Canny said. “They think it's all slush fund.”

“I'm sure they don't know what to think,” Bentley told him. “But they know better than to make difficulties. They have confidence in you, sir—as have I.”

“Even though you know it's simple blackmail?”

“Simple, sir?” the butler replied, cocking an eyebrow. “I turned a conscientiously deaf ear to everything you said, of course—and the exact nature of your relationship with Mr. Larkin is none of my business—but I can't quite believe that it's
simple
. If I were permitted to speculate, I'd hazard a guess that this has something to do with the other sum of money you recently lost, and I'd feel obliged to ask whether you might be in danger of losing more than mere money.”

“They already had to fall back on Plan B,” Canny said. “Obviously, that was just a stopgap. The rap on the knuckles they got from the Union Corse didn't put them off—quite the reverse, in fact. But things will work out. Maybe matters have taken a slight turn for the worse, but they'll improve. They always do, don't they? I'm a Credesdale, after all. One of Fortune's favorites.”

“Luck sometimes runs out, sir,” Bentley said, baldly—not because he knew anything about the rules, but because he was no more immune to the seductions of proverbial wisdom than anyone else.

“Yes it does,” Canny agreed. “Even the longest lucky streak in the world has to run out eventually, no matter how carefully you consult the oracles or how often you pass along the road to Damascus. But you can't live your life with that expectation, can you? You have to play the cards as they're dealt, the best way you can. And there's a certain comfort in knowing that the world has so many people in it who are willing to hand over every currency note they have because you, your father, and your grandfather before you, have never let them down.”

“It might have been exactly that knowledge,” the butler pointed out, “that attracted the wrong kind of people—people, that is, who are selective in paying attention to the many aspects of your family's reputation.”