‘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.’