He listened to Blythe berating Prunella for a while, interrupted to say film of Lily Neverless’ funeral was at that moment being devved up (developed), asked if there was anything special to be covered later on, was curtly told to sniff out his own muck, picked up a Celebrity Bulletin (which announced which particular international celebs would be in town that week, with flight arrival times and, if possible, where they would be staying), and beat a retreat.
He had his hearty breakfast/lunch – he hated the word ‘brunch’ – in a café nearby, then returned to the Suzuki which was parked half on the pavement in the narrow lane that ran alongside the newspaper offices. Peeling the parking ticket from the windscreen and tossing it into the rear of the Japanese jumped-up jeep, he went to Fix Features, a photo-agency in Hatton Garden with which he was also on a retainer. It was from here that his photographs were syndicated worldwide. He delivered three rolls of used film, helped a production editor mark transparencies of a movie mogul’s weekend-long party he had covered, collected new film, black-and-white and colour (for which he had to pay, although only at cost), then drove across the river to the Old Vic.
A dreary hour there, abetted by dreary canapés and wine, and not helped by actors and reviewers and publishing people all enthusing about the book which they were well aware would just about recoup the cost of the dreary canapés and wine and the dreary author’s advance in hardback sales. Creed took the odd snap of a Dame, a Knight, a couple of MBEs, old Thespians and theatre people (funny how none were keen to discuss Lily Neverless’ funeral, as if it would be unlucky to do so) but got nothing to excite a picture editor. Creed neglected to shoot the author, whom he’d never heard of anyway.
From there a trip across town to San Lorenzo’s where he sat in the bar nursing a whisky sour, cameras stashed away in the cloakroom. The Royal Di, everybody’s favourite princess (but never call her Di to her face), often lunched or dined there; but not today. Disappointingly, there were no VIPs present, no minor celebs, nor even any long-legged models or pampered pussies (rich men’s mistresses) to spend a little time with. Dismal, a goddamn dismal day. Maybe the night would bring more. (Oh Creed, if you only knew.)
He went home.
Home was in Hesper Mews, just off the Earl’s Court Road, a small, cobblestone street that looked like a cul-de-sac but which, in fact, wasn’t: it turned a corner at the far end, although you’d never know viewing it from the top. The mews branched off midway into what really was a cul-de-sac, and it was on the corner here that Creed’s house stood. It was a modest enough pit, but on the current market its value would have been astronomical. He’d bought the property eight years before when London prices were merely ridiculous and not insanely ridiculous. The ground floor was mainly garage, with a small office to the side. A short staircase led to the first floor – there was no basement – which provided living room, kitchen/diner, bedroom and bathroom, all small but, as any eager estate agent would enthuse, ‘compact and practical’. Rising from the kitchen was an iron spiral staircase painted an impractical white and giving access to a loft which Creed had boarded, decorated, and turned into a tiny drawing room. A sofa-bed and coffee table was the only furniture apart from two low bookshelves.
Next door to this was his darkroom where, time and inclination permitting, he developed his own film.
He parked the soft-top jeep in the garage, closed the up-and-over door from inside, and went through to the office. There were no messages on the answerphone and only junk mail on the hall carpet. Grin was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.
‘Caught any today?’ Creed asked the cat as he climbed.
The cat stared.
‘I told you – no mice, no meals.’
Grin refused to give way and its master was forced to step over her. He had no idea how old Grin was or where she had come from; the animal had sauntered into the garage one winter’s morning three years before and had decided to stay. She was a dirty grey-black, one of her ears was chewed away, and parts of her tail were fur-less. She wasn’t at all pleasing to look at, but she did appear to grin a lot, so life couldn’t have been all bad.
‘You gotta work for a living, same as the rest of us,’ Creed called over his shoulder as he dumped the camera bag and switched on the kettle. ‘I know they’re here, you know they’re here.’ He opened the larder cupboard. ‘I’ll even show you what one looks like.’ He crouched to pick up the trap. He waved the mouse, skull crushed by the trap’s spring-bar, tiny limbs akimbo in frozen surprise, at the cat who sauntered forward with haughty interest. She sniffed at the little corpse, and looked up at Creed.
‘You think it’s funny?’ Creed prodded the cat’s nose with the dead mouse. ‘How about I chop it up and put it in your dinner bowl? Think you can go back to basics?’ He lifted the bar and shook the mouse into the pedal bin. ‘Maybe it’s time I invested in a dog.’
Grin jumped up on the table and sat on her haunches, watching Creed as he ran water over a mug in the sink, then shovelled in two large spoonfuls of instant. As he poured boiling water, the photographer told the cat, ‘One last chance. Tonight, when those little bastards come out to play, you go to work on ’em. You get a bounty on every stiff I find in the morning, okay?’
Grin grinned.
‘It’s your career, pal,’ Creed warned as he hoisted the camera bag and, with the coffee mug in the other hand, wound his way up the spiral staircase. Taking the still-loaded camera with him, he went through to the darkroom, switching on the light and closing the door. He checked the temperatures of the processing chemicals before turning off the light again. In total darkness, he opened the camera and lifted out the cassette of film.
Although there were still several unexposed frames left, Creed was curious about what he had shot that morning. Normally he would hand over all used film to either the newspaper or the agency, having extra prints made or taking spare colour transparencies for himself later, but now and again he devved up personally, usually when there was no rush or there was something in particular he wanted to keep for his own files. Besides, nobody would be using those last shots of the funeral, particularly if he explained exactly what the kneeling man had been up to at the graveside.
He forced off the cassette’s top and tipped out the roll of film; it felt slippery in his hand.
In the darkness he remembered those pale but piercing eyes staring back at him from the grave. Had they been pale? He hadn’t noticed at the time. Nor had he noticed the myriad tiny red veins that made the whites of his eyeballs look like bloodshot porcelain. How could he have seen that? The distance between them had been too great, even with the Nikon’s zoom lens. He was imagining, his mind had gone into overdrive. The bloody pervert had spooked him!
The film began to uncurl in his hand.
‘Shit,’ he muttered, fumbling in the dark to contain the roll. It slipped from his grasp like an oiled eel and he managed to control its escape only by cupping the whole film in both hands.
‘That shouldn’t have happened,’ he told himself unnecessarily. Films don’t unroll themselves. Wait, wait – it didn’t. It slipped over the edge, and its own weight did the rest.
He felt on the bench for scissors, clutching the untidy roll to his chest with one hand and hoping the emulsion hadn’t become too grimy. Feeling for, then clipping, the thinner feed end of the film, he coaxed it into a spiral with no further problem (even though its edges did feel peculiarly waxy), then placed it in a round tank. He capped the tank and poured in the chemical mix through a hole in the top. Only then did he turn on the light.
When he had inserted the agitator rod and given the spiral a couple of twirls, he set the timer-clock and sipped his coffee. His hand was shaking.
Loosen up, Creed, he silently admonished. Graveyards don’t usually have this effect on you.
Coffee slurped over the side of the mug when the darkroom’s wall-phone rang. He wiped a hand on his jeans before grabbing the receiver.
‘Bastard,’ a woman�
��s voice said at the other end.
‘This is he,’ Creed replied.
‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you?’ said the voice. ‘Or what you didn’t do, I should say.’
He sighed. ‘Tell me, Evelyn.’
‘You didn’t pick him up again. And you promised him faithfully this time, you shit.’
‘Oh, n . . . Evelyn, I’m sorry. Honest. It slipped my mind.’
‘You tell that to Samuel. He was looking forward to the car race – not that I wanted him to go. Cars smashing each other up is just the juvenile sort of thing you would encourage him to enjoy.’
‘Stock cars. They’re meant to smash each other up. Listen, is Sammy there – ’
‘He’s at school, where he’s supposed to be, you fool. And it’s Samuel.’
‘For fuck’s sake, he’s only ten years old. Look, I had an assignment yesterday; I couldn’t cancel it.’
‘That’s your story. There was a time when I’d’ve believed it. More likely your son was the last thing on your mind. How is your sex life these days, Joe – still bedding dogs?’
Not like the one I used to, Creed thought. ‘Will you tell him I’m sorry, Evelyn?’ he asked his ex-wife. ‘I’ll make it up to him next weekend.’
‘You don’t get him next weekend. Every fortnight, that’s it. And that’s too much. My God, I could have told the court some things about you . . .’
‘You did, Evelyn. Get Sam to ring me when he gets home, will you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re still a princess.’ A Jewish princess who should never have married a goy.
‘Fuck you, too.’
‘Rather than you,’ he muttered.
‘What?’
‘I said okay, I’ll phone him.’
‘He’s not talking to you.’
‘An apology could be tricky, then.’
‘That’s your problem.’
‘Always a delight to talk, Evelyn.’
The phone went dead.
Creed agitated the developer a little more briskly than necessary, cursing himself for having forgotten the day of access to his son – it would give the little shit more excuse for sulks. The truth was that he had covered an all-day Sunday party at the mansion home of a computer tycoon, a deadly drab businessman who bought (as opposed to brought) some semblance of glamour into his otherwise uninteresting life with lavish parties to which he invited the A division of the glitzies. Paparazzi and gossip columnists were natural appendages to such celebrations, for the computer genius wanted the world to know he was a fun-loving guy as well as being mega-brained. The beautiful people, who thrived on freebies, disguised the fact that they thought him a boring, supercilious drip without difficulty, and the rest of the world really wasn’t that interested. Nevertheless, his jollies filled a few column inches and the photographs used up a bit more space, so the mutual parasitism more or less evened out. Not much of a reason for missing a day out with your son, Creed reflected, but better than reluctance alone.
When the timer belled, he emptied the tank and poured in the stop, repeating the process with the fix. He made a couple of phone calls from the darkroom, then washed and squeegeed the negative strip, leaving it in the drying cabinet while he went through his engagement book on the sofa in the next room.
He yawned more than once, not just because of the list of events ahead of him that week, but because of that morning’s early rise. Creed liked to think of himself as a night creature.
Within minutes the night creature had dozed off.
Someone was leaning on him. Someone was pinning him to the sofa.
He could smell their horribly foul breath. He could feel their warmth.
In his sleep he was afraid; in his rising consciousness he was terrified. But that something, that huge weight on his chest, didn’t want him to open his eyes, wanted him blind and defenceless.
Creed struggled, not with the weight, but with his own will. He had to open his eyes. He had to confront whatever held him there. His eyelids felt like lead slabs.
Breathing was not easy. The rise of his chest was inhibited by the weight. The weight wanted to crush him.
Had to fight it. Had to leave the sleep. Had to wake. Had to open his eyes, had to . . .
His eyes stuttered open.
‘Get outa here!’
Creed twisted and heaved at the same time and Grin skidded across the room, her claws digging into the single rug which travelled along with it over the polished boards.
Creed sat up and threw a cushion after the cat. Grin yowled and headed for the staircase.
‘Judas Christ!’ the photographer yelled after her. ‘You coulda given me a heart attack!’
He massaged his chest, encouraging the beating to continue, loud though it was. It took a full two minutes for his nerves to settle.
‘Oh . . .’ He looked at his wristwatch, remembering the negs in the drier. He’d been out for twenty minutes at least.
Creed tottered to the darkroom and whisked the glossy strip from the cabinet. ‘Dry as a grasshopper’s tit,’ he mumbled to himself, yawning at the same time. No harm done though.
After cutting the negs into six strips and marking them with a rapidograph, he closed the door and switched on the amber light. Yawning again, he laid them on bromide paper, pressing them flat with a glass plate. He exposed them for five seconds without bothering to do a test strip (he rarely did), then put the bromide through the developer dishes.
With the full light on, he examined the resulting contact sheet. There was the kneeling figure, its back to the camera. And a white blob that was the man’s turned head – nothing clearer than that. Why the fascination? Why such interest in this loony? Instinct, he answered himself. Years of sniffing and catching the scent. There was something more to this and he was curious to find out what.
He placed the neg in the enlarger’s frame carrier, laying down another sheet of bromide under the masking frame below. Normally after focusing he would have used a card to shield parts of the film paper from the light, progressively moving it across the surface in a striped pattern of varying exposures; this time, however, he went for a straight twenty-second exposure.
Something was wrong with the negative image, but he couldn’t figure out what.
Killing the enlarger light, he lifted the frame and slid the photographic paper into the developer tray. Within a few seconds shapes began to form.
Gently rocking the tray to create a smooth back-and-forth current, he waited for the emerging greys and blacks to make sense.
The crazy appeared as if gliding from a mist – the soles of his shoes aimed at the camera, his raincoat, with creases in the material picked out in fine detail, the slight twist of his torso. Around him the grass, static and hued orange by the darkroom’s light, headstones and trees in the distance. The man’s shoulders, arms stretched forward out of sight. His head, turned, a three-quarter profile, peering towards the hidden lens, the lines, the swirls, ingrained in his features, appearing as though meticulously drawn with a fine nib.
Creed’s mouth slowly opened as he stared down at the face.
He remembered the eyes. So clear, so penetrating. So . . . fucking scary.
But not present here.
He bent forward, distrusting his own sight. Where the man’s eyes should have been, there was only blackness.
Just two black smudges. That quickly spread and joined together. Rushing now to obscure the whole ravaged face.
4
Well weren’t they the trendiest of trendies, the yuppiest of yuppies? The men in unstructured suits, hair gleamed back, some with tiny tight pigtails, shirt collars buttoned, not many with ties. The women, mainly in black, skirts generally as short and thigh-hugging as the legs would bear, or wearing floppy trousers that a hippo would be comfortable in. The conversation buzz was low-key, cool, and ego-bristling.
Creed descended the steps into the frothy pool of advertising piranhas, scanning the faces for anyone snap-wort
hy, a Saatchi or two, a Tim Bell, any personality who transcended the junk-sell world to the real one, someone whose status or troubled personal life might be of interest to the punters. A tall, pale-faced teenager with gel-spiked hair gawked at Creed’s camera and went stiff, his eyes wide and expectant behind small round glasses. The photographer pushed by without acknowledging the youth’s jerky nod. The kid, whose clothes were as ill-fitting but not as expensive as those worn by the pros he rubbed shoulders with, was no doubt a student up for one of the Gold Awards that Benson & Hedges doled out every year to the advertising industry to show it was into commercial aestheticism as much as lung cancer. Creed almost felt the boy’s hopes take a dive as the camera passed him by.
The photographer lifted a white wine from a travelling tray and continued through the scrum until he reached an empty corner (corners aren’t the place for advertising folk) where he dumped his bag on the floor. Sipping the wine, Nikon standing proud over his navel like a stubby and misplaced phallus, Creed examined the crowd in more detail. He spotted George Melly in his usual chalk-striped double-breasted and Fedora and prayed the old jazzman was there to hand out prizes and not to sing – the day had been too long for such a climax. There were a few other familiar faces, but not one that merited a single frame of black-and-white, let alone colour. Across the gallery two raised television screens ran a looped tape of nominated commercials, illustrations and photographic stills. They all looked pretty classy to Creed; pretty expensive, too, apart from the student stuff. But how many would really sell the goods they advertised? And who gave a shit anyway? Big budgets and grand locations seemed to be the order of the day; the copywriter or art director’s next agency was the important thing, not the product. Even the clients who paid for it all didn’t seem to mind helping the creative teams’ career moves (but then, it was all tax-deductible, wasn’t it?).
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