Creed (13 page)

‘Some of us have a bloody day job. What the fuck d’you want – and it’d better be good, son.’

‘You said the guy at Lily Neverless’ funeral looked like someone you know.’

‘
What?
I don’t believe it! You’re ringing at this time of . . . Joe, take a hike, will you?’

‘Come on, Fred, you’re awake now. It’s important.’

‘No it fucking isn’t, it isn’t important at all. We were wrong, it can’t be who we thought it was.’

‘Why? How d’you know?’

‘Because I took the trouble to search through our old files. Bloody hell, I wish I hadn’t bothered if this is what I get for my pains. He’s a dead ringer, all right, but the person Wally and I thought it was is long gone. He was hanged fifty-odd years ago.’

Click.

Creed felt shaky after he replaced the receiver, as if the news Squires had just imparted had some shocking significance. Which was ridiculous, of course. The man he’d photographed in the cemetery resembled someone who had been hanged over fifty-odd years ago. So what? He himself had a friend who was the spitting image of the Yorkshire Ripper. The deputy manager at his local Barclays could have doubled for Heinrich Himmler (their personalities were not dissimilar either). Everyone has his or her Doppelgänger, they say. And anyway, fifty years was a long time: a person would change considerably.

Creed shrugged. What the hell was he on about? There couldn’t possibly be any connection, unless . . . unless, of course, the crazyman was related to the hanged man. Now
that
might make an interesting angle. Then again, he, Creed, was a photographer, not a journalist: such stories weren’t really his department. Still, it was curious, no matter which way you hacked it. Why the obscene act over Lily Neverless’ remains – an act that had been almost like a ritual with its twice-around-the-grave routine? Weird, very, very weird.

Creed climbed the stairs and Grin joined him in the kitchen as he filled the kettle.

‘I hope you’ve been busy,’ said Creed grimly as the cat perched itself on the table and watched. ‘You’ve got a lot to make up for, pal.’ He leaned forward to show the cat the discoloration on his forehead.

The cat seemed pleased.

‘Okay, enough sarcasm. Go get mice.’ He swept Grin off the table with a firm hand, and the cat disappeared through the kitchen door with a flick of her tail.

Although tired, Creed was still on a slight high from that night’s main event. It’s a condition that goes with the job, usually when a ‘result’ has been achieved; entertainers and sportsmen have the same problem of bringing themselves down after a performance. Freddy Squires’ titbit was still bothering him, too.

Where had he put those shots of the loony? He glanced around the kitchen. No, he was sure he’d dropped the envelope on the coffee table in the lounge when he’d returned that afternoon.

But he didn’t find it there and nor was it anywhere else in the room. He checked the office downstairs and even searched the back of the jeep. He tried the two rooms at the top of the house. Not there. The envelope seemed to have vanished.

Creed descended the spiral staircase, both puzzled and agitated at the same time. The photographs couldn’t have just disappeared. And he was sure that he’d brought them back after leaving one with the picture editor. What was going on here?

He brewed tea and poured himself a stiff brandy as well. Sitting at the table he started rolling some cigarettes, dipping into his ‘shag’ tin and sprinkling tobacco on to the thin brown papers while he pondered. His fingers trembled as he worked, his thoughts far from the labour.

Somebody had got inside the house again. That was the only conclusion he could draw. He took a swallow of brandy, a sip of hot tea, then lit the first cigarette. But how? There were no signs of forced entry anywhere and he’d had to unlock both garage and office doors to get in a short while ago. It hit him with a jolt.

The girl, Cally.
He had left her alone in the sitting room when he’d gone to get some wine, then again a little later when the phone had rung. The photographs had been in an envelope on the coffee table in front of her while he was downstairs in the office taking the call – Fix Features had been on the line wanting to arrange a shoot three weeks ahead. He’d been there for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Cally hadn’t stayed long after that, much to his disappointment, but he himself had had to get over to Grosvenor House. Christ, she could have easily slipped the envelope into her bag. No, no, that couldn’t be right. Why the hell would
she
take them?

He drank too much brandy this time and closed his eyes as the liquid burned a path through his chest. What reason could she have for stealing them? It didn’t make sense. She was a stranger . . . she
was
. . . a . . . stranger. Exactly. What the hell did he know about her? And when he thought about it, her reason for getting to know him was just a mite flimsy. Sure, would-be celebs and starlets often used him to promote themselves, giving him advance information on where they were going to be at such-and-such a time, inviting him to parties and other social events in the hope that they would be featured in the next day’s Diary or even news columns, but her approach was perhaps the most blatant he’d ever experienced. And because she was a looker, because she’d stirred his dick, he’d been suckered. Who
was
she,
what
was she?

He puffed at the cigarette, more mystified than angry. The thinking seemed to be making his headache worse.

Tomorrow he’d call her, find out what she was playing at. But what if he were wrong? What if she really was only interested in promoting her boss, this Daniel what-was-his-name? Then he’d feel a jerk, that was all. And not for the first time in his life. But the question still begged: Who
had
taken the photographs and why? The person who’d broken in last night? Maybe he had got in again, maybe he’d found a spare front door key that time and used it tonight. It still didn’t explain why, though.

Know that feeling of being watched, of eyes boring into the back of your neck? It could be in a bar, on a train, or in a crowded room – you just sense someone’s thoughts and gaze are directed at you and you alone. Creed had that feeling right then.

He’d taken another gulp of brandy and the glass was just leaving his lips, about two inches away, when his hand froze. For a moment he felt numbed. Smoke from the cigarette held in his other hand drifted up in a lazy stream creating a thin mist before him. It took a long time for him to turn and look towards the window.

Some of the brandy sprayed from his mouth, while the rest somehow lodged in his throat. He wheezed, coughed, did a half-retch. The chair he was sitting on flew backwards as he jumped up; he gripped the edges of the table to steady himself.

He didn’t want to look round at the window again, he didn’t want to see the terrible, cadaverous face that had been watching him from outside, but he forced himself to, because he knew it was beyond logic, that there really couldn’t be anyone out there, for the kitchen was above the garage and office, and nobody could look through the window at that height, and if they had a ladder he would have heard it scraping the wall or bumping the window-sill, so there couldn’t possibly be anyone out there, couldn’t possibly . . .

He
forced
himself to look again.

And there wasn’t anybody there at all. No thin and pitted, skull-like face, no glaring eyeballs set in the dark sunken sockets watching him. No one there at all.

He was suddenly aware that his feet were becoming wet and warm. His cup had been knocked over and spilt tea was trickling from the table in a steady stream. Quickly he righted the cup, then grabbed a dishcloth to mop up the spreading brown liquid. Only when that was done – and reluctantly at that – did he venture over to the window.

The cobblestone street below was empty, as you might expect at that time of night/morning. Plenty of shadows, though, plenty of places to hide. But no way could someone reach this floor. No way . . .

His headache had shifted, no longer pressuring his temples and the area just above the bridge of his nose; instead it seemed to be occupying a space high at the back of his head. Creed touched himself there, fingers probing his hair as though attempting to move the pain around. It wouldn’t budge. Delayed concussion? Was that the problem? Maybe he should have had a doctor examine him after all. Could concussion cause hallucinations? He had no idea.

He returned to the table and finished the last of the brandy. The face he’d seen –
imagined
he’d seen – at the window belonged to last night’s intruder, Mr Nosferatu. He shivered. A vampire could crawl up walls, couldn’t it?

Now basically – and you may already have gathered this – Creed was a down-to-earth non-believing feet-on-the-ground world-weary practising cynic. His firmest belief was that he, himself, existed, and he accepted that only because it required no act of faith on his part. He could sense, he could feel, he could see, he could hear, he could taste. He could even think. All this was irrefutable. As for anything else, then he really wasn’t that interested in the question, let alone the philosophy behind it. Was reality no more than an illusion of the mind? Was existence nothing more than an elaborate dream? Did an individual exist only because others perceived he or she to
be
? Creed really didn’t give a shit.
I fornicate, therefore I am
, was his credo. So, because his imagination had grown lazy with regard to such intangibles, it was obvious to him that the crack on the head that morning was playing silly buggers with his brain.

And maybe he was right.

Taking the half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray, he made the short trip down the hall to the bathroom. There he opened the medicine cabinet and reached in for a carton of paracetamols. He swallowed four, washing them down with water from the cold tap. The visage that stared back at him from the bathroom mirror was not encouraging. The eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, the skin was almost sallow in complexion, and the bruise on the forehead was a mushy kind of purple. He stuck out his tongue and at least that looked healthy enough.

Creed unzipped his fly and stood over the toilet, cigarette back where it belonged, drooping from the corner of his mouth. He watched the flow of urine, not with interest, merely to make sure it hit the target. Water in the bowl bubbled under the fall.

His hand touched the wall by his side to steady himself, for he had felt his body sway. He blinked, then felt his body move again. Christ, he’d be pissing on the floor at this rate. He steadied himself mentally this time and exerted muscle pressure to vacate his bladder more speedily.

Movement again, but this time he realised it wasn’t him. This time it had come from the toilet itself. The porcelain sides where the water lapped had seemed to move inwards for a fraction of a second. ‘Boy, you’re in trouble,’ Creed muttered to himself. He needed to lie down, to crawl into his pit and pull the cover over his head so that he could sleep this thing off. Oh Christ, there it goes again. The toilet bowl was moving, as though the sides themselves were flexing, contracting –
breathing
. The flow from his bladder was easing, becoming a trickle, and Creed tried to help it along. A spurt, nearly done. Thank—

Oh God, that wasn’t right. Something more was happening down there. The sides at the water’s edge appeared to be breaking out. The cigarette fell from his lips into the well with a plop and a fizz as the shiny-smooth rectangle beneath him shaped itself into a loose jagged oval. It flexed once more, became even more of an oval, its jagged edges forming into what . . . looked . . . like . . . oh shit . . .
teeth
. . .

He was looking down into a porcelain mouth!

Creed felt himself go weak at the knees.

But he jerked upright in absolute shock and stepped back when that tooth-edged, pissed-on mouth suddenly shot from the bottom of the toilet, glazed sides stretching as though elastic, and gnashed at the air where he had been standing a split-second before.

He screamed as water mixed with his own urine drenched him, and he fell backwards. The mouth reared over him on its long dripping neck, the snapping of its porcelain teeth loud and sharp in the tiled confines of the bathroom, before it abruptly disappeared back to where it belonged.

In a flurry of kicking legs, Creed pushed himself to the far end of the bathroom (which wasn’t very far at all) and lay there gawking and trembling, not comprehending what had happened, yet believing it implicitly. His clothing was soaked and his penis had shrivelled (understandably) into insignificance somewhere inside his trousers.