The old sot outside spat on the windscreen and, to show that he honestly hadn’t aimed at the photographer’s face, he rubbed furiously at the spittle with his grubby rag. ‘Sparkly clean in a jif, sor, don’t you worry about that.’
Creed lit up, inhaled smoke, removed flakes of tobacco from his lower lip, and stepped down from the jeep.
‘Will I look after it f’yer, sor?’ The ancient watery eyes showed happiness at the prospect. One hand still held the rag to the windscreen, while the other was free to accept any coin proffered.
‘I told you to piss off,’ said Creed, this time not as friendly.
The tramp snorted and spat a very off-colour missile at the car next to the jeep. The blob of runny phlegm did nothing for the shiny red bodywork.
‘On the other hand,’ said Creed, digging for a silver piece, ‘have a nice day.’
He gave the tenpence to the square’s permanent but unofficial parking attendant, dropping it from a height of an inch or so above the vagrant’s outstretched hand rather than make actual contact. Creed turned away to feed the meter.
‘It’s a saint, y’are,’ the old man proclaimed, even though his natural good humour had been slightly dented. A finger touched his forelock in salute and Creed wasn’t entirely oblivious to the irony contained therein.
It was a fine day – cold, true enough, but the sun was shining and there wasn’t an umbrella in sight – and Creed gulped deep draughts of air as he made his way around the square, heading towards Carlisle and then Dean Street. Soho was never seedy at this time of day, only somewhat dishevelled. It was rarely too busy, either; that came with the lunchtime rush and continued through the afternoon and evening until night-time when it took on a distinctly different ‘other’ life.
Once in Dean Street, Creed began scrutinizing street numbers, walking towards Old Compton, certain the place he was searching for would be in that direction. He passed restaurants, pubs, film companies and offices as well as piles of rubbish and cardboard boxes dumped in doorways and gutters. He came to a halt when he reached what appeared to be a rather exclusive shop, its huge plate-glass window and door framed by deep olive-green wood, with terracotta tiles rising to knee level below the window. On display was a very large Regency doll’s-house painted white, its interior lit by tiny chandeliers and wall lights; furniture and furnishings could be glimpsed through the windows, and he saw there were tiny, costumed figures lounging in chairs or standing around, one ballgowned young lady seated at a miniature grand piano. Belowstairs there was even a rotund cook and a lean scullery-maid.
If Creed hadn’t had other matters on his mind, he would have taken a snap of the whole thing. (Our boy always carried a camera on him outside the house, even if he was only putting out the trash can, for you never knew when a great, or at least important, or at least reasonable, shot would present itself. Missed opportunities from earlier days when he’d known no better still came back to haunt him. If he didn’t have his camera bag with him, then a Nikon was always hung around his neck or, like today, stuffed inside one of the voluminous pockets of his combat jacket.)
Beyond the shop window was a receptionist’s desk, all dark leather and chrome, and a receptionist, all dusky-skinned and fine-boned. She was at that moment speaking into a red slimline phone that matched her glossy lipstick perfectly, and unaware – or, if not, pretending to be – of the scruffily dressed window-shopper. Averting his attention, Creed read the stylized gold script discreetly positioned at the bottom left-hand corner of the window: Page Lidtrap.
‘Lidtrap,’ Creed reminded himself. He said it again: ‘Lidtrap.’
Tossing what was left of the cigarette into the gutter, he pushed open the glass door and crossed the grey carpet to the desk. The girl still refused to notice him. Downcast though he felt, Creed managed to relish her dark beauty while he waited for her to finish with the phone. Her hair, naturally uncrinkled, was tightly pulled back over her scalp to rise up on top of her head like a braided hard-on. He speculated on how the effect was achieved until he saw she was watching him watching her.
She bade goodbye to the thin phone and set it in its cradle. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice was as good and as dark as her looks.
‘I’d like to see Cally McNally.’
Large, exquisite brown eyes stared at him. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Cally McNally.’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No. Cally. She works here.’
‘I think you must have the wrong company.’
The street door behind him opened and a tall girl with long blonde hair and short skirt that exaggerated legs whose length hardly needed exaggeration entered carrying a portfolio tucked under one arm.
‘Take a seat, Mandy, be with you in a moment,’ the receptionist said, before returning her glacial gaze to Creed.
‘She really is here,’ he insisted. ‘McNally – assistant to Mildrip.’
‘Mildrip?’
He looked desperately at the window. ‘Uh, Libprat.’
‘Mr Lidtrap? Sorry, you’re mistaken. We have no Cally – McNally? – here.’ Her voice was polite, but her eyes were telling him to get lost.
‘Let me talk to Lidtrap.’
‘I’m sorry, but unless you have an appointment . . .’
‘It really is important.’
The girl wasn’t impressed by the Rourke smile, but then Creed really was well below par that day. ‘Mr Lidtrap is extremely busy at the moment . . .’ Again she left the sentence open-ended as though the refusal was implicit in the trailing space.
‘Two minutes of his time, that’s all it’ll take.’ In desperation, Creed produced his Press card and held it up like an arrest warrant. She seemed even less impressed by that than by his smile. But at that point someone came through from a room at the far end of the reception area.
‘Harry, is Daniel in his office?’ the girl asked, looking around Creed as a bearded man strode by.
Harry stopped at the street door, one hand resting on its diagonal bar. He winked at the waiting model before replying. ‘He’s upstairs in editing.’ He regarded Creed who, as mentioned, was not looking his best, with less enthusiasm than he had the waiting girl. ‘Can I help?’
‘You were at Hamiltons the other evening,’ Creed said. ‘There was a girl with you called Cally.’
Harry shook his head. ‘Don’t remember her. Have a word with Daniel.’ With that he swung open the door and called back to the receptionist before stepping outside: ‘Meeting at Vickers, Suzi, then lunch, back around four.’
Suzi made a note in a book lying open on her leather desk, then shrugged at Creed. She pointed her pen at a stairway in the corner. ‘Keep going to the top. Editing room is on your left. I’ll let Mr Lidtrap know you’re on your way.’
Like many of the buildings along Dean Street, the Page Lidtrap production house was long, narrow and high. By the time Creed reached the top floor he was very short of breath and his thighs were complaining. The man, the too-handsome one with ‘natural’ curls he’d seen with Cally at the gallery, poked his head around a door on the landing. His manner was brusque.
‘I can give you half a minute,’ he grumbled before disappearing back inside the room.
‘Thanks a lot,’ muttered Creed, making it to the last step with some effort. He followed Lidtrap into the cutting room.
A bench worktop interrupted a lower editing table at one end. Above the benches and desk were film racks loaded with silver cans, all of which were labelled in heavy pentel. Any open wall space was filled with film posters, and a small coffee machine burped and gurgled in a far corner; a pic-sync, splicers, spools and reels used up most of the available space on the worktops themselves. Lidtrap, a slim, yellow-haired Adonis in loose white denim shirt and tight faded blue jeans, was leaning over the desk’s raised viewing screen and murmuring to an editor seated at a typist’s chair next to him. Film whirred through the machine until the director said crisply, ‘Right there.’ Only when satisfied did h
e straighten and turn towards Creed enquiringly.
The photographer leaned against the doorjamb, catching his breath.
‘Yes?’ Lidtrap wasn’t one to hide his impatience.
‘I need . . .’ a breath ‘. . . I need to speak to Cally.’
Lidtrap looked at him as though Creed were insane. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘The girl who was with you at the awards the other evening. She told me she worked for you.’
‘Really? In what capacity?’
‘Your assistant?’
Lidtrap gave a cold smile. ‘Someone’s been having you on. We don’t have anyone here by that name.’
‘But she was with you, you were talking to her.’
The other man frowned in thought. ‘Yes . . . yes, I do remember a rather attractive girl introducing herself to us that night. Tall, slim, blondish hair?’
Creed nodded and reached into his pocket for a cigarette.
‘Not in here, man,’ Lidtrap admonished when Creed put the thin brown weed in his mouth.
The photographer removed the cigarette and tucked it back out of sight.
‘I can’t remember the girl mentioning her name, but I believe she worked for one or other of the big agencies. She kept mentioning a big film project that was coming up, otherwise I wouldn’t have wasted time with her.’
No, I bet you wouldn’t, thought Creed. ‘She told me she worked for you.’
Lidtrap looked perplexed. ‘I can’t understand why. What’s this all about, er . . .’
‘Creed.’
‘Creed, yes. I’ve seen you around, haven’t I? A photographer of sorts, aren’t you? Yes, you photographed me at Hamiltons.’ The sneer was in his tone rather than his expression.
‘She gave me a list of your engagements for this week.’ He rummaged in another pocket for the slip of paper Cally had left him. ‘You’re shooting a commercial at a zoo this week, right?’
‘A zoo?’ Lidtrap reached for the folded schedule, a mixture of incredulity and amusement on his face.
‘With chimps.’
‘With chimps.’ Said flatly, this. ‘Somebody really has been pulling your plonker, old chum.’ He frowned at the list. ‘Dear God, I’d have to be some kind of wunderkind to get through this lot in a week.’
‘I thought you were busy,’ Creed offered limply.
‘Busy, but not masochistic.’
‘It’s got your company name and address at the top.’
‘Typed, not printed. Anyone could make this up.’
Creed was beginning to feel foolish. ‘But she was with you at the gallery.’
‘She spent some time talking to me and my partner, I’ll grant you that. But that doesn’t mean she’s one of us.’ Although his eyes remained on Creed, Lidtrap half turned away. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got better things to do than answer questions about people I don’t even know.’
Creed nudged himself off the doorjamb and began the long climb down.
His mood didn’t lighten when he got back to the jeep to find a spiderweb crack in the passenger side of the windscreen. Somebody had either thrown a stone or smacked the glass with something small and hard. As he drove off, he caught sight of the old lag shaking a fist at him from one of the square’s offshoots, but Creed had neither the energy nor inclination to give chase.
‘Where the bloody hell have you been all morning?’ was the welcome he received from Freddy Squires at the Dispatch offices.
‘Fred, this character you thought—’
‘And as for phoning me in the middle of the – Christ, what’s happened to you?’
‘Uh?’
‘You look like the lost weekend. What the hell’ve you been up to?’
‘Bad night.’
‘You and me both. It took me ages to get back to sleep again after your bloody call. You ever do that to me again, Joe, you’ll be in such deep shit you’ll have hearing problems. Understood?’
Creed dumped his camera bag on the floor and dragged over a spare chair. ‘Freddy, tell me about this guy who was hanged.’
The picture editor reached for his pipe and matches, then appraised the photographer. He shook his head as if in sadness before lighting up. ‘The state of you . . .’
‘Freddy . . .’
Squires sucked the pipe until he had a burn, then contemplated Creed again. ‘Why the interest?’
Creed sighed. ‘I think . . . I might . . . it’s possible I’ve got something . . . well, something weird going.’
‘So tell me.’
YOU WILL NOT SPEAK OF IT
The words were there, brightly lit on the screen wall at the back of his forehead, typed in caps, differing only from the note in that these were white on black.
‘Not just yet,’ Creed replied. ‘You got a cigarette, Tony?’ he said to a reporter at a nearby desk.
‘You’re kidding.’ The reporter carried on typing, pausing briefly to flick ash from the cigarette he was smoking into an ashtray.
Creed fumbled for one of his own, the badly rolled brown paper only just together, tobacco flakes littering his lap.
‘You might well have something weird going, my old son,’ Squires was saying, ‘but I’ve got something a bit more current than ancient look-alikes. That’s why I’ve been trying to get hold of you this morning.’
Creed barely showed interest. The end of his cigarette flared when he lit it.
‘Remember the Pamella Bordes scandal at the House of Commons some time back,’ the picture editor went on. ‘The, er, “exotic” lady employed as a certain Tory MP’s researcher. She was given a special pass so she could come and go as she pleased, even had a Division Bell in her own bedchamber?’ Squires smiled at the memory. ‘Then they discovered who some of her alleged “clients” were – and some of their political connections.’
Creed had already nodded, extra details unnecessary for him to remember the scandal.
‘Well we’ve dug up a new one. Male this time, no more than a kid. And this time it’s the Opposition who’s embarrassed. A Labour MP is involved.’
Creed still couldn’t summon up the interest. ‘Nothing exceptional about that,’ he remarked. And there wasn’t. Quite a few of the so-called parliamentary researchers were nothing more than individual member’s girlfriends or boyfriends, taken on to the public payroll supposedly to supply their employers with facts and figures concerning anything from the price of rivets in Solihull to the USSR’s capital expenditure on agricultural machinery for any given year. True enough, this particular type of research assistant (the majority are genuine – well, a good many are) usually does just enough to legitimize their existence in the halls of power, enough that is for their masters not to be overly embarrassed by their presence. See, the problem in the House is that politicians by their very self-seeking and self-gratifying natures (there are one or two exceptions, of course) have always been vulnerable to scandal, so the domino factor is invariably a risk when an individual member’s misconduct has been exposed: knock down one and others will surely topple. And beware those who do jump up and down with pious outrage over such allegations against their colleagues, for a politician’s hypocrisy knows no bounds (never – never – underestimate a politician’s hypocrisy). So endeth the lesson.
‘Nothing unusual, anyway,’ Squires had replied to Creed’s comment. ‘This one, though, this laddie, was moonlighting as a rent-boy. And one of his more illustrious clients just happens to be . . .’ At this point the picture editor mentioned the name of a prominent Irish stage actor whose staunch support of the IRA was well-known in government circles, but little known to the public. Call him O’Leary for want of a better – or real – name.
‘They never learn, do they?’ It was the best Creed could offer. Then: ‘You don’t need me for this. You can use a staffy.’
‘We already have. But O’Leary’s gone to ground and I think you’re the man to flush him out.’
‘Ahh, c’mon, Fred. That’s investigati
ve journalism – it’s not my line.’
‘It’s digging the pictorial dirt, and you’re one of the best at that. If I wanted something on my wife and her lover – should she ever be so lucky – you’re the man I’d employ to get the photo evidence.’
‘Thanks, I’m flattered. What exactly d’you expect me to do?’
‘Check out the haunts, the gay bars – you know ’em all. One of the actor and the rent-boy together could earn you a lot of extra shekels, you know.’
‘Even they wouldn’t be stupid enough to be seen together now. There isn’t a hope in hell.’
‘Joe, for a paparazzo you’re in a privileged position. This newspaper retains you for a lot of dough and for it, we sometimes expect you to excel. Quit giving me a hard time and go excel. Oh, and something that might help a little . . .’ He dipped into a desk drawer and produced a folded sheet of paper. Leaning forward, he handed it to Creed.
Creed looked back at him questioningly.
‘An address,’ said Squires. ‘Take it.’
Creed took it. ‘The hanged man, Freddy. Who was he?’
Squires had already lifted the phone, his mind occupied with other things. ‘Nicholas Mallik,’ he said as he dialled. ‘The Beast of Belgravia. I think that’s how they described him. Hanged in the late ’thirties. Look him up in files. George? Freddy here. What’s the update on the Khashoggi story? I’ve got a beautiful picture here that requires some words . . .’
Creed had checked the address and was rising to his feet when he spotted one of Antony Blythe’s hackettes coming towards him bearing a champagne bottle. Prunella was wearing a Sloaneish green jumper, shirt-blouse collar folded over the neck, a long, check skirt, and dark stockings with sensible brown walking brogues. She was pretty in a pallid and lank-haired sort of way, although her small tight mouth tended to make her look more prim than she actually was.
‘Present from the prick,’ she said, straight-arming the bottle to him as if it were some kind of award.
‘The deal was for Krug, not Moët,’ said Creed, nevertheless tucking the piece of paper away and accepting the bottle.