The Count of Eleven Read Free Page A

drink some night soon.”
    Both men stared awkwardly at the television for a few seconds, then Andy stepped out from behind the counter. “Better be toddling. Got to track down my tools.”
    Jack copied onto the Amstrad the details of a loan which Andy had painstakingly scrawled on the front of the wholesaler’s duplicated brochure. The member’s name and the title of the film were misspelled, but the number was accurate. “Safety in numbers,” Jack murmured, and went to the van. The handle of the blow lamp felt satisfyingly solid in his grasp as he carried the tool to the shop doorway. “Brighten my day,” he said to the blow lamp

TWO
    Once Julia had climbed the dormant escalator from the underground platform at Moorfields she seemed to have the business district of Liverpool almost to herself. Other than several cars parked outside a sex shop there was hardly a sign of life. A few pigeons wandered away from her as she crossed the square of Exchange Flags, where a black skeleton grinned out from beneath a monumental robe, and a frieze of birds stirred and then flapped up from above the pillars of the town hall. She strolled across Dale Street, enjoying the chance to concentrate on the upper storeys of the office buildings, where gargoyles nested among stone leaves while towers suggested that the roofs were dreaming of far lands and distant times. The wail of a fire engine rose from the dock road, sounding much closer to her because of the emptiness, and jarred her out of a reverie which had felt like pure contented anticipation. Time enough to daydream when she’d sorted out Luke’s problem, she thought, hurrying across Castle Street and down towards the river.
    His office was on a side street near the Slaughterhouse, a pub with sawdust on its bare floorboards. All the parking meters along the pavement by the office said EXCESS and PENALTY, except for the couple under the window, their heads having been tied up in yellow canvas bags. The gilded name of Rankin, Luke’s surname, glinted at her from the window as she rang the bell beside the heavy panelled bright red door.
    The immediate response was a cry from Luke, which sounded as though several vulgar words were stumbling over one another in their haste to leave his mouth. Shortly he peered through the Venetian blind on which a faint shadow of his gilded name lay, then he came to the door. She had never seen him not wearing a suit and tie, but now he wore a purple zippered cardigan which she thought must belong to his wife. Both his grey hair and his greying eyebrows looked as if he’d been raking them with his fingers. “Oh dear, Luke, what have you done?” she said.
    “Nothing too fatal, I hope,” he said with a pleading grin which pinched the wrinkled corners of his eyes. “I was on the computer for hours before I called you. I feel as if I’ve still got a green light jumping around my head.”
    “The curse of the cursor,” Julia recognised, and lifted the flap in the Reception counter. “Let’s see how bad things are.”
    The outer office contained six desks in ranks of three, facing away from the window. The five word processors were hooded, but the computer on Julia’s desk, which was nearest to the door of Luke’s room, was uncovered, and she saw a problem at once. “You left a disc in when you switched off the computer.”
    “I must have done that just now. Is it bad?”
    “So I’ve been told. Say a prayer,” Julia advised him half-seriously as she slipped the disc out of the drive and switched on the Apricot. The blank slate of the monitor turned green, and she held her breath until it displayed the specifications of the computer. She reinserted the disc as Luke drew up a chair next to hers. By the time the computer had finished chirping to itself over the disc and showed her the directory of contents, Luke was so restless that his chair was squeaking like a mouse.
    The disc contained a record of several years’ worth of investments