Come to Grief

Chapter 11

Nine o’clock Friday morning I drove into the town of Frodsham and asked for Topline Foods.

Not far from the river, I was told. Near the river; the Mersey.

The historic docks of Liverpool’s Mersey waterfront had long been silent, the armies of tall cranes dismantled, the warehouses converted or pulled down. Part of the city’s heart had stopped beating. There had been bypass surgery of sorts, but past muscle would never return. The city had a vast red-brick cathedral, but faith, as in much of Britain, had dimmed.

For years I’d been to Liverpool only to ride there on Aintree racecourse. The road I’d once lived in lay somewhere under a shopping mall. Liverpool was a place, but not home.

At Frodsham there was a ‘Mersey View’ vantage point with, away to the distant north, some still-working docks at Runcorn on the Manchester Ship Canal. One of those docks, I’d seen earlier, was occupied by Topline Foods. A ship lying alongside bearing the flag and insignia of Canada had been unloading Topline grain.

I’d stopped the car from where I could see the sweep of river with the seagulls swooping and the stiff breeze tautening flags at the horizontal. I stood in the cold open air, leaning on the car, smelling the salt and the mud and hearing the drone of traffic on the roads below.

Were these roots? I’d always loved wide skies, but it was the wide sky of Newmarket Heath that I thought of as home. When I’d been a boy there’d been no wide skies, only narrow streets, the walk to school, and rain. ‘John Sidney, wash your face. Give us a kiss.’

The day after my mother died I’d ridden my first winner, and that evening I’d got drunk for the first and only time until the arrest of Ellis Quint.

Soberly, realistically, in the Mersey wind I looked at the man I had become: a jumble of self-doubt, ability, fear and difficult pride. I had grown as I was from the inside out. Liverpool and Newmarket weren’t to blame.

Stirring and getting back into the car, I wondered where to find all those tungsten nerves I was supposed to have.

I didn’t know what I was getting into. I could still at that point retreat and leave the field to Ellis. I could — and I couldn’t. I would have myself to live with, if I did.

I’d better simply get on with it, I thought.

I drove down from the vantage point, located the Topline Foods factory and passed through its twelve-feet-high but hospitably open wire-mesh gates. There was a guard in a gatehouse who paid me no attention.

Inside there were many cars tidily parked in ranks. I added myself to the end of one row and decided on a clothing compromise of suit trousers, zipped-up tracksuit top, white shirt, no tie, ordinary shoes. I neatly combed my hair forward into a young-looking style and looked no threat to anybody.

The factory, built around three sides of the big central area, consisted of loading bays, a vast main building and a new-looking office block. Loading and unloading took place under cover, with articulated semi-trailers backing into the bays. In the one bay I could see into clearly, the cab section had been disconnected and removed; heavy sacks that looked as if they might contain grain were being unloaded from a long container by two large men who slung the sacks onto a moving conveyer belt of rollers.

The big building had a row of windows high up: there was no chance of looking in from outside.

I ambled across to the office building and shouldered open a heavy glass door that led into a large but mostly bare entrance hall, and found there the reason for the unguarded front gates. The security arrangements were all inside.

Behind a desk sat a purposeful-looking middle-aged woman in a green jumper. Flanking her were two men in navy blue security-guard suits with Topline Foods insignia on their breast pockets.

‘Name, please,’ said the green jumper. ‘State your business. All parcels, carriers and handbags must be left here at the desk.’

She had a distinct Liverpool accent. With the same inflection in my own voice, I told her that, as she could see, I had no bag, carrier or handbag with me.

She took the accent for granted and unsmilingly asked again for my name.

‘John Sidney.’

‘Business?’

‘Well,’ I said, as if perplexed by the reception I was getting, ‘I was asked to come here to see if you made some horse nuts.’ I paused. ‘Like,’ I lamely finished, dredging up the idiom.

‘Of course, we make horse nuts. It’s our business.’

‘Yes,’ I told her earnestly, ‘but this farmer, like, he asked me to come in, as I was passing this way, to see if it was you that made some horse nuts that someone had given him, that were very good for his young horse, like, but he was given them loose and not in a bag and all he has is a list of what’s in the nuts and he wanted to know if you made them, see?’ I half pulled a sheet of paper from an inside pocket and pushed it back.

She was bored by the rigmarole.

‘If I could just talk to someone,’ I pleaded. ‘See, I owe this farmer a favor and it wouldn’t take no more than a minute, if I could talk to someone. Because this farmer, he’ll be a big customer if these are the nuts he’s looking for.’

She gave in, lifted a telephone and repeated a shortened version of my improbable tale.

She inspected me from head to foot. ‘Couldn’t hurt a fly,’ she reported.

I kept the suitably feeble half-anxious smile in place.

She put down the receiver. ‘Miss Rowse will be down to help you. Raise your hands.’

‘Eh?’

‘Raise your hands… please.’

Surprised, I did as I was told. One of the security guards patted me all over in the classic way of their job, body and legs. He missed the false hand and the cracked bone. ‘Keys and mobile phone,’ he reported. ‘Clean.’

Green jumper wrote ‘John Sidney’ onto a clip-on identity card and I clipped it dutifully on.

‘Wait by the elevator,’ she said.

I waited.

The doors finally parted to reveal a teenage girl with wispy fair hair who said she was Miss Rowse. ‘Mr Sidney? This way, please.’

I stepped into the elevator with her and rode to the third floor.

She smiled with bright inexperienced encouragement and led me down a newly carpeted passage to an office conspicuously labeled Customer Relations on its open door.

‘Come in,’ Miss Rowse said proudly. ‘Please sit down.’

I sat in a Scandinavian-inspired chair of blonde wood with arms, simple lines, blue cushioning and considerable comfort.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t really understand your problem,’ Miss Rowse said trustingly. ‘If you’ll explain again, I can get the right person to talk to you.’

I looked around her pleasant office, which showed almost no sign of work in progress.

‘Have you been here long?’ I asked. (Guileless Liverpool accent, just like hers.) ‘Nice office. They must think a lot of you here.’

She was pleased, but still honest. ‘I’m new this week. I started on Monday — and you’re my second inquiry.’

No wonder, I thought, that she’d let me in.

I said, ‘Are all the offices as plush as this?’

‘Yes,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Mr Yorkshire, he likes things nice.’

‘Is he the boss?’

‘The chief executive officer.’ She nodded. The words sounded stiff and unfamiliar, as if she’d only newly learned them.

‘Nice to work for, is he?’ I suggested.

She confessed, ‘I haven’t met him yet. I know what he looks like, of course, but… I’m new here, like I said.’

I smiled sympathetically and asked what Owen Yorkshire looked like.

She was happy to tell me, ‘He’s ever so big. He’s got a big head and a lovely lot of hair, wavy like.’

‘Mustache?’ I suggested. ‘Beard?’

‘No,’ she giggled. ‘And he’s not old. Not a grand-dad. Everyone gets out of his way.’

Do they indeed, I thought.

She went on, ‘I mean, Mrs Dove, she’s my boss really, she’s the office manager, she says not to make him angry, whatever I do. She says just to do my job. She has a lovely office. It used to be Mr Yorkshire’s own, she says.’

Miss Rowse, shaped like a woman, chattered like a child.

‘Topline Foods must be doing all right to have rich new offices like these,’ I said admiringly.

‘They’ve got the TV cameras coming tomorrow to set up for Monday. They brought dozens of potted plants round this morning. Ever so keen on publicity, Mrs Dove says Mr Yorkshire is.’

‘The plants do make it nice and homey,’ I said. ‘Which TV company, do you know?’

She shook her head. ‘All the Liverpool big noises are coming to a huge reception on Monday. The TV cameras are going all over the factory. Of course, although they’re going to have all the machines running, they won’t really make any nuts on Monday. It will all be pretend.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Security. They have to be security mad, Mrs Dove says. Mr Yorkshire worries about people putting things in the feed, she says.’

‘What things?’

‘I don’t know. Nails and safety pins and such. Mrs Dove says all the searching at the entrance is Mr Yorkshire’s idea.’

‘Very sensible,’ I said.

An older and more cautious woman came into the office, revealing herself to be the fount of wisdom, Mrs Dove. Middle-aged and personally secure, I thought. Status, ability and experience all combining in priceless efficiency.

‘Can I help you?’ she said to me civilly, and to the girl, ‘Marsha dear, I thought we’d agreed you would always come to me for advice.’

‘Miss Rowse has been really helpful,’ I said. ‘She’s going to find someone to answer my question. Perhaps you could yourself?’

Mrs Dove (gray hair pinned high under a flat black bow, high heels, customer-relations neat satin shirt, cinched waist and black tights) listened with slowly glazing eyes to my expanding tale of the nutty farmer.

‘You need our Willy Parrott,’ she said when she could insert a comment. ‘Come with me.’

I waggled conspiratorial fingers at Marsha Rowse and followed Mrs Dove’s busy back view along the expensive passage with little partitioned but mostly empty offices on each side. She continued through a thick fire door at the end, to emerge on a gallery around an atrium in the main factory building, where the nuts came from.

Rising from the ground, level almost to the gallery, were huge mixing vats, all with paddles circulating, activated from machinery stretching down from above. The sounds were an amalgam of whir, rattle and slurp: the air bore fine particles of cereal dust and it looked like a brewery, I thought. It smelled rather the same also, but without the fermentation.

Mrs Dove passed me thankfully on to a man in brown overalls who inspected my dark clothes and asked if I wanted to be covered in fall-out.

‘Not particularly.’

He raised patient eyebrows and gestured to me to follow him, which I did, to find myself on an iron staircase descending one floor, along another gallery and ending in a much-used battered little cubby-hole of an office, with a sliding glass door that he closed behind us.

I commented on the contrast from the office building.

‘Fancy fiddle-faddle,’ he said. ‘That’s for the cameras. This is where the work is done.’

‘I can see that,’ I told him admiringly. ‘Now, lad,’ he said, looking me up and down, unimpressed, ‘what is it you want?’

He wasn’t going to be taken in very far by the farmer twaddle. I explained in a shorter version and produced the folded paper bearing the analysis of the nuts from Combe Bassett and the Land-Rover, and asked if it was a Topline formula.

He read the list that by then I knew by heart.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘From a farmer, like I told you.’

‘This list isn’t complete,’ he said.

‘No… but is it enough?’

‘It doesn’t give per centages. I can’t possibly match it to any of our products.’ He folded the paper and gave it back. ‘Your cubes might be our supplement feed for horses out at grass. Do you know anything about horses?’

‘A little.’

‘Then, the more oats you give them, the more energy they expend. Racehorses need more oats. I can’t tell you for sure if these cubes were for racehorses in training unless I know the proportion of oats.’

‘They weren’t racehorses in training.’

‘Then your farmer friend couldn’t do better than our Sweetfield mix. They do contain everything on your list.’

‘Are other people’s cubes much different?’

‘There aren’t very many manufacturers. We’re perhaps fourth on the league table but after this advertisement campaign we expect that to zoom up. The new management aims for the top.’

‘But… um… do you have enough space?’

‘Capacity?’

I nodded.

He smiled. ‘Owen Yorkshire has plans. He talks to us man to man.’ His face and voice were full of approval. ‘He’s brought the old place back to life.’

I said inoffensively, ‘Mrs Dove seems in awe of his anger.’

Willy Parrott laughed and gave me a male chauvinist-type wink. ‘He has a flaming temper, has our Owen Yorkshire. And the more a man for that.’

I looked vaguely at some charts taped to a wall. ‘Where does he come from?’ I asked.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ Willy told me cheerfully. ‘He knows bugger all about nutrition. He’s a salesman, and that’s what we needed. We have a couple of nerds in white coats working on what we put in all the vats.’

He was scornful of scientists as well as women. I turned back from the wall charts and thanked him for his time. Very interesting job, I told him. Obviously he ran the department that mattered most.

He took the compliment as his due and saved me the trouble of asking by offering to let me tag along with him while he went to his next task, which was to check a new shipment of wheat. I accepted with an enthusiasm that pleased him. A man good at his job often enjoyed an audience, and so did Willy Parrott.

He gave me a set of over-large brown overalls and told me to clip the identity card on the outside, like his own.

‘Security is vital,’ he said to me. ‘Owen’s stepped it all up. He lectures us on not letting strangers near the mixing vats. I can’t let you any nearer than this. Our competitors wouldn’t be above adding foreign substances that would put us out of business.’

‘D’you mean it?’ I said, looking avid.

‘You have to be specially careful with horse feed,’ he assured me, sliding open his door when I was ready. ‘You can’t mix cattle feed in the same vats, for instance. You can put things in cattle feed that are prohibited for racehorses. You can get traces of prohibited substances in the horse cubes just by using the same equipment, even if you think you’ve cleaned everything thoroughly.’

There had been a famous example in racing of a trainer getting into trouble by unknowingly giving his runners contaminated nuts.

‘Fancy,’ I said.

I thought I might have overdone the impressed look I gave him, but he accepted it easily.

‘We do nothing else except horse cubes here,’ Willy said. ‘Owen says when we expand we’ll do cattle feed and chicken pellets and all sorts of other muck, but I’ll be staying here, Owen says, in charge of the equine branch.’

‘A top job,’ I said with admiration.

He nodded. ‘The best.’

We walked along the gallery and came to another fire-door, which he lugged open.

‘All these internal doors are locked at night now, and there’s a watchman with a dog. Very thorough, is Owen.’ He looked back to make sure I was following, then stopped at a place from which we could see bags marked with red maple leaves traveling upward on an endless belt of bag-sized ledges, only to be tumbled off the top and be manhandled by two smoothly swinging muscular workers.

‘I expect you saw those two security men in the entrance hall?’ Willy Parrott said, the question of security not yet exhausted.

‘They frisked me.’ I grinned. ‘Going a bit far, I thought.’

‘They’re Owen’s private bodyguards,’ Willy Parrott said with a mixture of awe and approval. ‘They’re real hard men from Liverpool. Owen says he needs them in case the competitors try to get rid of him the old-fashioned way.’

I frowned disbelievingly. ‘Competitors don’t kill people.’

‘Owen says he’s taking no risks because he definitely is trying to put other firms out of business, if you look at it that way.’

‘So you think he’s right to need bodyguards?’

Willy Parrott turned to face me and said, ‘It’s not the world I was brought up in, lad. But we have to live in this new one, Owen says.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You won’t get far with that attitude, lad.’ He pointed to the rising bags. ‘That’s this year’s wheat straight from the prairie. Only the best is good enough, Owen says, in trade wars.’

He led the way down some nearby concrete stairs and through another heavy door, and I realized we were on ground level, just off the central atrium. With a smile of satisfaction he pushed through one more door and we found ourselves amid the vast mixing vats, pygmies surrounded by giants.

He enjoyed my expression.

‘Awesome,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to go back upstairs to get out,’ he said. ‘There’s a door out to the yard just down here.’

I thanked him for his advice about the nuts for the farmer, and for showing me around. I’d been with him for half an hour and couldn’t reasonably stretch it further, but while I was in mid-sentence he looked over my shoulder and his face changed completely from man-in-charge to subservient subject.

I turned to see what had caused this transformation and found it not to be a Royal Person but a large man in white overalls accompanied by several anxious blue-clad attendants who were practically walking backwards.

‘Morning, Willy,’ said the man in white. ‘Everything going well?’

‘Yes, Owen. Fine.’

‘Good. Has the Canadian wheat come up from the docks?’

‘They’re unloading it now, Owen.’

‘Good. We should have a talk about future plans. Come up to my new office at four this afternoon. You know where it is? Top floor, turn right from the lift, like my old office.’

‘Yes, Owen.’

‘Good.’

The eyes of the businessman glanced my way briefly and incuriously, and passed on. I was wearing brown overalls and an identity card, after all, and looked like an employee. Not an employee of much worth, either, with my over-big overalls wrinkling around my ankles and drooping down my arms to the fingers. Willy didn’t attempt to explain my presence, for which I was grateful. Willy was almost on his knees in reverence.

Owen Yorkshire was, without doubt, impressive. Easily over six feet tall, he was simply large, but not fat. There was a lot of heavy muscle in the shoulders, and a trim, sturdy belly. Luxuriant closely waving hair spilled over his collar, with the beginnings of gray in the lacquered wings sweeping back from above his ears. It was a hairstyle that in its way made as emphatic a statement as Jonathan’s. Owen Yorkshire intended not only to rule but to be remembered.

His accent was not quite Liverpool and not at all London, but powerful and positive. His voice was unmistakably an instrument of dominance. One could imagine that his rages might in fact shake the building. One could have sympathy with his yes-men.

Willy said ‘Yes, Owen,’ several more times.

The man-to-man relationship that Willy Parrott prized so much extended, I thought, not much further than the use of first names. True, Owen Yorkshire’s manner to Willy was of the ‘we’re all in this together’ type of management technique, and seemed to be drawing the best out of a good man; but I could imagine the boss also finding ways of getting rid of his Willy Parrott, if it pleased him, with sad shrugs and ‘you know how it is these days, we no longer need a production manager just for horse-cubes; your job is computerized and phased out. Severance pay? Of course. See my secretary. No hard feelings.’

I hoped it wouldn’t happen to Willy.

Owen Yorkshire and his satellites swept onwards. Willy Parrott looked after him with pride tinged very faintly with anxiety.

‘Do you work tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Is the factory open on Saturdays?’

He reluctantly removed his gaze from the Yorkshire back view and began to think I’d been there too long.

‘We’re opening on Saturdays from next week,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow they’re making more advertising films. There will be cameras all over the place, and on Monday, too. We won’t get anything useful done until Tuesday.’ He was full of disapproval, but he would repress all that, it was clear, for man-to-man Owen. ‘Off you go then, lad. Go back to the entrance and leave the overalls and identity tag there.’

I thanked him again and this time went out into the central yard, which since my own arrival had become clogged with vans and truckloads of television and advertising people. The television contingent were from Liverpool. The advertisement makers, according to the identification on their vans, were from Intramind Imaging (Manchester) Ltd.

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 unthreateningly 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 tit-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.