Come to Grief (28 page)

One of the Intramind drivers, in the unthinking way of his kind, had braked and parked at an angle to all the other vehicles. I walked across to where he still sat in his cab and asked him to straighten up his van.

“Who says so?” he demanded belligerently.

“I just work here,” I said, still in the brown overalls that, in spite of Willy Parrott’s instructions, I was not going to return. “I was sent out to ask you. Big artics have to get in here.” I pointed to the unloading bays.

The driver grunted, started his engine, straightened his vehicle, switched off and jumped down to the ground beside me.

“Will that do?” he asked sarcastically.

“You must have an exciting job,” I said enviously. “Do you see all those film stars?”

He sneered. “We make
advertising
films, mate. Sure, sometimes we get big names, but mostly they’re endorsing things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Sports gear, often. Shoes, golf clubs.”

“And horse cubes?”

He had time to waste while others unloaded equipment. He didn’t mind a bit of showing off.

He said, “They’ve got a lot of top jockeys lined up to endorse the horse nuts.”

“Have they?” I asked interestedly. “Why not trainers?”

“It’s the jockeys the public know by their faces. That’s what I’m told. I’m a football man myself.”

He didn‘t, I was grateful to observe, even begin to recognize my own face, that in years gone by had fairly often taken up space on the nation’s sports pages.

Someone in his team called him away and I walked off, sliding into my own car and making an uneventful exit through the tall unchecked outward gates. Odd, I thought, that the security-paranoid Owen Yorkshire didn’t have a gate bristling with electronic barriers and ominous name gatherers; and the only reason I could think of for such laxity was that he didn’t always want name takers to record everyone’s visits.

. Blind-eye country, I thought, like the private backstairs of the great before the India Cathcarts of the world floodlit the secretive comings and goings, and rewarded promiscuity with taint.

Perhaps Owen Yorkshire’s backstairs was the elevator to the fifth floor. Perhaps Mrs. Green Jumper and the bouncers in blue knew who to admit without searching.

Perhaps this, perhaps that. I’d seen the general layout and been near the power running the business, but basically I’d done little there but reconnoiter.

I stopped in a public car park, took off the brown overalls and decided to go to Manchester.

The journey was quite short, but it took me almost as long again to find Intramind Imaging (Manchester) Ltd., which, although in a back street, proved to be a much bigger outfit than I’d pictured; I shed the tracksuit top and the Liverpool accent and approached the reception desk in suit, tie and business aura.

“I’ve come from Topline Foods,” I said. “I’d like to talk to whoever is in charge of their account.”

Did I have an appointment?

No, it was a private matter.

If one pretended sufficient authority, I’d found, doors got opened, and so it was at Intramind Imaging. A Mr. Gross would see me. An electric door latch buzzed and I walked from the entrance lobby into an inner hallway, where cream paint had been used sparingly and there was no carpet underfoot. Ostentation was out.

Mr. Gross was “third door on the left.” Mr. Gross’s door had his name and a message on it: Nick Gross. What the F Do You Want?

Nick Gross looked me up and down. “Who the hell are
you?
You’re not Topline Foods top brass, and you’re over-dressed.”

He himself wore a black satin shirt, long hair and a gold earring. Forty-five disintegrating to fifty, I thought, and stuck in a time warp of departing youth. Forceful, though. Strong lines in his old-young face. Authority.

“You’re making advertising films for Topline,” I said.

“So what? And if you’re another of their whining accountants sent to beg for better terms, the answer is up yours, mate. It isn’t our fault you haven’t been able to use those films you spent millions on. They’re all brilliant stuff, the best. So you creep back to your Mr. Owen effing Yorkshire and tell him there’s no deal. Off you trot, then. If he wants his jockey series at the same price as before he has to send us a check every week.
Every week
or we yank the series, got it?”

I nodded.

Nick Gross said, “And tell him not to forget that in ads the magic is in the
cutting,
and the cutting comes last. No check, no cutting. No cutting, no magic. No magic, no message. No message, we might as well stop right now. Have you got it?”

I nodded again.

“Then you scurry right back to Topline and tell them no check, no cutting. And that means no campaign. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Bugger off.”

I meekly removed myself but, seeing no urgent reason to leave altogether, I turned the wrong way out of his office and walked as if I belonged there down a passage between increasingly technical departments.

I came to an open door through which one could see a screen showing startlingly familiar pieces of an ad campaign currently collecting critical acclaim as well as phenomenally boosting sales. There were bursts of pictures as short as three seconds followed by longer intervals of black. Three seconds of fast action. Ten of black.

I stopped, watching, and a man walked into my sight and saw me standing there.

“Yes?” he said. “Do you want something?”

“Is that,” I said, nodding towards the screen, “one of the mountain bike ads?”

“It will be when I cut it together.”

“Marvelous,” I said. I took half a step unthreaten ingly over his threshold. “Can I watch you for a bit?”

“Who are you, exactly?”

“From Topline Foods. I came to see Nick Gross.”

“Ah.” There was a world of comprehension in the monosyllable: comprehension that I immediately aimed to transfer from his brain to mine.

He was younger than Nick Gross and not so mock-rock-star in dress. His certainty shouted from the zany speed of his three-second flashes and the wit crackling in their juxtaposition: he had no need for earrings.

I said, quoting the bike campaign’s slogan, “Every kid under fifty wants a mountain bike for Christmas.”

He fiddled with reels of film and said cheerfully, “There’ll be hell to pay if they don’t.”

“Did you work on the Topline ads?” I asked neutrally.

“No, thank Christ. A colleague did. Eight months of award-worthy brilliant work sitting idle in cans on the shelves. No prizes for us, and your top man’s shitting himself, isn’t he? All that cabbage spent and bugger all back. And all because some twisted little pipsqueak gets the star attraction arrested for something he didn’t do.”

I held my breath, but he had no flicker of an idea what the pipsqueak looked like. I said I’d better be going and he nodded vaguely without looking up from his problems.

I persevered past his domain until I came to two big doors, one saying Sound Stage Keep Out and one, opening outward with a push-bar, marked Backlot. I pushed that door half-open and saw outside in the open air a huge yellow crane dangling a red sports car by a rear axle. Film cameras and crews were busy around it. Work in progress.

I retreated. No one paid me any attention on the way out. This was not, after all, a bank vault, but a dream factory. No one could steal dreams.

The reception lobby, as I
hadn’t noticed
on my way in, bore posters around the walls of past and current purse-openers, all prestigious prize-winning campaigns. Ad campaigns, I’d heard, were now considered an OK step on the career ladder for both directors and actors. Sell cornflakes one day, play Hamlet the next. Intramind Imaging could speed you on your way.

I drove into the center of Manchester and anonymously booked into a spacious restful room in the Crown Plaza Hotel. Davis Tatum might have a fit over the expense but if necessary I would pay for it myself. I wanted a shower, room service and cosseting, and hang the price.

I phoned Tatum’s home number and got an answering machine. I asked him to call back to my mobile number and repeated it, and then sat in an armchair watching racing on television—flat racing at Ascot.

There was no sight of Ellis on the course. The commentator mentioned that his “ludicrous” trial was due to resume in three days’ time, on Monday. Sid Halley, he said, was sensibly keeping his head down as half Ellis’s fan club was baying for his blood.

This little tid-bit came from a commentator who’d called me a wizard and a force for good not long ago. Times changed: did they ever. There were smiling close-ups of Ellis’s face, and of mine, both helmetless but in racing colors, side by side. “They used to be the closest of friends,” said the commentator sadly. “Now they slash and gore each other like bulls.”

Sod him, I thought.

I also hoped that none of Mrs. Green Jumper, Marsha Rowse, Mrs. Dove, Willy Parrott, the Intramind van driver, Nick Gross and the film cutter had switched on to watch racing at Ascot. I didn’t think Owen Yorkshire’s sliding glance across my overalls would have left an imprint, but the others would remember me for a day or two. It was a familiar risk, sometimes lucky, sometimes not.

When the racing ended I phoned Intramind Imaging and asked a few general questions that I hadn’t thought of in my brief career on the spot as a Topline Foods employee.

Were advertising campaigns originally recorded on film or on disks or on tape, I wanted to know, and could the public buy copies. I was answered helpfully: Intramind usually used film, especially for high-budget location-based ads. and no, the public could
not
buy copies. The finished film would eventually be transferred onto broadcast-quality videotape, known as Betacam. These tapes then belonged to the clients, who paid television companies for airtime. Intramind did not act as an agent.

“Thanks very much,” I said politely, grateful always for knowledge.

Davis Tatum phoned soon after.

“Sid,” he said, “where are you?”

“Manchester, city of rain.”

It was sunny that day.

“Er ... ,” Davis said. “Any progress?”

“Some,” I said.

“And, er ...” He hesitated again. “Did you read India Cathcart this morning?”

“She didn’t write that she’d seen us at Le Meridien,” I said.

“No. She took your excellent advice. But as to the rest ...
^!
”

I said, “Kevin Mills phoned especially to tell me that she didn’t write the rest. He did it himself. Policy. Pressure from above. Same old thing.”

“But wicked.”

“He apologized. Big advance.”

“You take it so lightly,” Davis said.

I didn’t disillusion him. I said, “Tomorrow evening—would you be able to go to Archie Kirk’s house?”

“I should think so, if it’s important. What time?”

“Could you arrange that with him? About six o‘clock, I should think. I’ll arrive there sometime myself. Don’t know when.”

With a touch of complaint he said, “It sounds a bit vague.”

I thought I’d better not tell him that with burglary, times tended to be approximate.

I phoned
The Pump,
asking for India Cathcart. Silly me.

Number one, she was never in the office on Fridays. Number two,
The Pump
never gave private numbers to unknown callers.

“Tell her Sid Halley would like to talk to her,” I said, and gave the switchboard operator my mobile number, asking him to repeat it so I could make sure he had written it down right.

No promises, he said.

I sat for a good while thinking about what I’d seen and learned, and planning what I would do the next day. Such plans got altered by events as often as not, but I’d found that no plan at all invited nil results. If all else failed, try Plan B. Plan B, in my battle strategy, was to escape with skin intact. Plan B had let me down a couple of times, but disasters were like falls in racing; you never thought they’d happen until you were nose down to the turf.

I had some food sent up and thought some more, and at ten-fifteen my mobile buzzed.

“Sid?” India said nervously.

“Hello.”

“Don’t say anything! I’ll cry if you say anything.” After a pause she said, “Sid! Are you there?”

“Yes. But I don’t want you to cry so I’m not saying anything.”

“Oh, God.” It was half a choke, half a laugh. “How can you be so ... so
civilized?”

“With enormous difficulty,” I said. “Are you busy on Sunday evening? Your restaurant or mine?”

She said disbelievingly, “Are you asking me out to dinner?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s not a proposal of marriage. And no knife through the ribs. Just food.”

“How can you
laugh?”

“Why are you called India?” I asked.

“I was conceived there. What has that got to do with anything?”

“I just wondered,” I said.

“Are you
drunk?”

“Unfortunately not. I’m sitting soberly in an armchair contemplating the state of the universe, which is C minus, or thereabouts.”

“Where? I mean, where is the armchair?”

“On the floor,” I said.

“You don’t trust me!”

“No,” I sighed, “I don’t. But I do want to have dinner with you.”

“Sid,” she was almost pleading, “be sensible.”

Rotten advice, I’d always thought. But then if I’d been sensible I would have two hands and fewer scars, and I reckoned one had to be
born
sensible, which didn’t seem to have happened in my case.

I said, “Your proprietor—Lord Tilepit—have you met him?”

“Yes.” She sounded a bit bewildered. “He comes to the office party at Christmas. He shakes everyone’s hand.”

“What’s he like?”