Chapter Four

Next day I was dog tired but still got up early and walked over to Bankside. I skimmed stones, lost myself for fifteen minutes trying to best my best score of a half-dozen hops. It was something I did when I worried, and I surely had plenty to think about. For one thing, Meaghan’s behaviour on the ride back from Oxford was deeply troubling and she hadn’t yet apologised for anything. She’d never laid into me so heavily before and I was trying hard to convince myself it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Ben and Rachel. But that didn’t explain why Meaghan had made it so personal in my direction.

I also had to decide what to do following Nesh’s slash attack on the Beemer. At first take, it seemed clear I should let the whole Hegley affair drop, especially now that I was spooked by the thought that the tall guy had followed us around the Cotswolds. I hadn’t shown Meaghan the card, of course, and I’d made an effort to rant about hooligans as I changed the wheel. She hadn’t mentioned it again.

I could go to the police, but I reckoned that was something Hegley wouldn’t have welcomed, and I felt peculiarly obliged to him after having written his obit. Plus, now that I’d watched Greene Land again, I was positively hooked on the film, its maker and the ongoing mystery of his ‘death’. I couldn’t bear to let it go. It was a crazy admission – I wasn’t a detective, for Christ’s sake, had no desire to be one either – and Nesh’s knife act surely demonstrated that he wasn’t playing around. I could well be in real danger. As could Meaghan. I knew it was foolish, but I decided I had to find Hegley and get an explanation. As well as learn more about the man who had made that haunting film.

*

I was in the café soaking up market snip-snap – a nil-one home defeat for Millwall, a penny-a-litre increase in the price of diesel – when Harry arrived. I was surprised. She was no early riser and she knew how much I valued this time of day. She must have something on her mind to dare trouble my time.

“Sorry, but I really, really need to talk to you, Bro.” She sat down, her eyes looking achingly red in a face totally washed-out without makeup. She wore a grey raincoat buttoned right up the neck and, on the whole, Harry looked disconcertingly unlike Harry.

“You’ve been at it again, haven’t you?” I knew she was going to tell me about the guy she’d been rosed and vanilla-ed for when I was last in her flat.

“This time it’s different.”

“You said last time was different. Perhaps, though, it was just dissimilar.”

Harry shook her head. “Please, Root.”

“Sorry.”

I stroked the back of her hand, the one that held tight onto a tissue. She gave me a smile so skinny it made me turn quite cold.

“How bad can things be?” I said. “I presume he didn’t run off with all your money … or your virginity.”

“Shut up.” She pulled her hand away. “Sean has admitted to seeing his ex.”

“Is that such a big deal?”

“He collects her dry cleaning once a week. Mows the lawn. Probably offers to worm the cat between heavy chores.”

I laughed.

“Not funny…well, only a bit.”

“So, he has a few domestic duties on his plate. Maybe it was in their pre-nup.”

“He’s still screwing her, Root.”

“What? He told you that?”

“First he said it was a lapse. Then he admitted to another. And another. It’s bloody serial. I can’t understand why he would want to even touch her now and again when he can have me any time he wants.” Harry sobbed into her hands.

I ordered her a coffee I knew she wasn’t going to touch but I felt much better simply doing something for her. I sat back, waited for the drink to appear, for Harry’s tears to end. There was a blast of male laughter from a table at the back of the room, an awful rasp of brakes from a market truck pulling up right outside the café, but it all washed over Harry.

The coffee turned up. I pushed it towards her and she picked up a spoon, began tapping the side of the cup.

“Drink up, Aitch,” I said.

“I knew I could rely on you.”

“The shoulder to cry on.”

“Must be quite saturated by now.”

“I’ve been well waterproofed.”

Harry stopped rapping the cup, looked past me. I turned around.

“You still have those dusters, Boss?” Al was standing at my back, striped tea towel hanging over his arm.

“I’m restoring them.”

“Give you a fiver.”

“What on earth would you want with a pair of old knuckle-dusters?”

“I’ve taken a real fancy. Go on, hand them over for a fiver, won’t you?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Might go up to seven-fifty. Ten at a push.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Al headed back to the kitchen.

“Did I hear him right?” Harry asked.

“I’m sure you did.”

“What on earth are you doing with knuckledusters?”

“Protection,” I said. “You never know who might be out to get you, Aitch.”

*

At home I found a note from Meaghan. All she’d scribbled was xsorryx but she’d underscored it with a wonderful musical curlicue. It was enough for me – there was something about her writing, its organic whirls and curls that always got to me in the finest way.

I spent the rest of the morning working through a number of ideas on the laptop, some for the programme and others for Tabard’s new website. I’d used some of the driving time at the weekend to mull the online offer, and had now decided to take it up, go the hotdog-media route. Minona’s sheer meanness, along with her moves to proscribe the show’s content, had clinched it and I was now determined to disturb the dust with her somehow. I read through my existing freelance contract, decided that producing audio clips for download wasn’t broadcasting as described in the non-competitive clause. I was sure the studio wouldn’t bother pursuing it legally, cheapskates that they were. I fired off an e-mail to Tabard, he sent over an agreement quick as fire, and I added my electronic signature, then shipped it back.

I was given a sharp deadline to work to with three items due for recording in a couple of weeks’ time. The good thing was that I was overflowing with material for the programme, so the surplus could go into the Net venture. I had banks of research to lean on and the scripts never took a great deal of time once I got into the subject flow.

I turned to En Root, spent a couple of hours developing London cinematic themes. Just before I completed what had been a satisfying and productive session, I checked my mail, found at last that I’d got a response to the call-for-info about Hegley on my blog. The upshot of a rather meandering message was that the writer was claiming to be an actor who’d worked on a number of the director’s films and wanted to meet up as soon as possible.

Could I do as soon as today?

*

That afternoon I got on the bus, stepped off at the last stop in Denmark Hill for a rendezvous with Theresa Noble. I rarely travelled that far out of central London and needed to consult the A-to-Z a few times to find the tiny pinch of a street she lived in among the slapdash spread of the King’s Hospital campus. Finally I was able to slap the knocker of a drab two-storey Edwardian. I waited a couple of minutes before trying again.

The door opened.

“You’re Root,” Theresa Noble said. She presented her hand in a way that was obvious she meant it to be kissed. She was dressed to the hilt, wore a black evening gown that folded down her body in no-nonsense second-skin fashion. The hemline gave way to diamond-net stockings that turned around her calves and into three-inch heels. She was Les Lea.

I gave her hand a peck, stood back, admired the woman framed beautifully in the doorway. Les Lea must have been sixty or so by now but had seemingly been preserved in Greene Land mode – it was as if Hegley’s impeccable lighting had the ability to stretch over the decades to Denmark Hill and give his leading lady some kind of eternal cinematic youth. And, totally impossibly, she was bathed in the most remarkable monochrome aura.

“Come in.”

I heard her voice but didn’t see her say the words. I was caught firmly in her lights and trailed after her down the hallway in thrall to the pure she of Les Lea.

The living room pulled me back to reality. It was lit by a single overhead lamp, its bulb casting too many watts for comfort, and ugly, hard shadows splayed from every object in its line of fire. One wall was glutted with framed photographs that were either overposed portraits of Theresa Noble, or shots of her in the arms of numerous grinning showbiz bods playing to the lens. I spotted one of her with Hegley in which he was kissing her on the forehead in a fatherly sort of way.

Theresa Noble pointed to the two-seater sofa. “Sit,” she said.

I sat.

She handed me a tumbler chinking with ice cubes. “Take it,” she said.

I took.

She splashed heady doses of whisky into our glasses. “I don’t usually at this hour,” she said.

“Don’t stand on ceremony for me.” I was relieved to hear myself speak, knew the Les Lea spell had been broken.

“Oh, I shan’t.”

Theresa sat herself close to me on the sofa and smiled.

I took a sip of my drink, winced. I’d never acquired the taste for Scotch.

“I’m writing a biography of Philip Hegley,” I said. “Anything you can tell me will be a great help.”

“I was his utter favourite.” Theresa Noble cradled her glass. “Philip and I really understood one another.”

“You were lovers.”

“My, you’re not slow in coming forward.” She knocked back her drink.

“Tell me if I’m being intrusive.”

“Ask me anything you like. I have no secrets when it comes to that man.”

I put my glass to one side, pulled a notebook and pen from my jacket pocket.

“He and I were together on the very first day of our first shoot,” she said. “We couldn’t resist one another. We didn’t try.” She caressed her knee with a palm. “I was his muse.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Oh, Root. A man won’t tell you the things he feels. It takes the right woman to intuit them.”

“And you were that woman for Philip Hegley?”

“The only. One and one made a wonderful two. The perfect pair.”

“But you were never a proper couple, were you? I mean, you never married or anything?” I knew that Hegley had lived with his long-standing wife until she died five years ago.

“Let’s not get caught up in the detail. We can leave the minutiae to others.”

“Are you saying that Philip was the love of your life?”

She placed a hand on my arm. “You’re a highly perceptive fellow, Root. How young are you?”

“My clock’s ticked to exactly thirty.”

“Just as mine had when we made Greene Land. A magnificent film. Philip knew it would be his chef d’oeuvre.”

“Shame he’s not around to enjoy the acclaim.”

Theresa Noble smiled. “Oh Root. And here was me beginning to think you must know our secret.”