Creed (16 page)

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 he 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 investigative 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.