Free Creed by James Herbert Page A

door. Hope your headache soon goes away.’
    ‘It’s going already. Talk later, okay?’
    ‘Sure . . .’
    The phone was back on the hook without catching her goodbye. Creed was smiling again. The buzz was on.
    He drove straight to the Dispatch , grabbing a copy of that morning’s edition from the reception desk as he passed, opening it up as much as he could with elbows pressed to his sides in the crowded lift.
    There it was, page five. He pushed against his fellow travellers on either side, making room to open the newspaper wider. Big picture, across five columns. A wide view of the burial scene, an attempt to show how beloved(?) and respected old Lily Neverless had been, the mourners spread across the page in various shades of grey. The caption mentioned many of the bigger names, but not one of the faces was recognizable. Creed scanned the blurs, looking for one person in particular, even though it would be impossible to discern him.
    The lift doors opened and he was flushed out along with most of the other passengers. He paused in the corridor to give the dot-image closer scrutiny. Impossible . . . impossible to tell . . . unless . . . could that be the guy, behind everyone else, beneath the tree there? It was pointless squinting: the picture was never going to sharpen. But it could just . . . be . . . him . . . right there at the back. Some of the other shots would be more promising.
    Creed headed for the newspaper’s photographic department. Once there he knocked on the darkroom door and a voice on the other side said, ‘Half a sec.’
    He placed his camera bag on a chair and nodded to a staff photographer, Wally Cole, who was sitting at a bench nursing an oversized mug of coffee. The staffy, a veteran, who’d been with the newspaper long enough to consider Creed a young upstart, gave him a grudging nod in return and went back to studying that day’s racing form. He wheezed a cough before dragging on an untipped cigarette. ‘Fuckin’ cripples,’ he said to himself as his rheumy eyes ran down the list of horses. For consolation he tipped a little more Scotch from a dulled chrome hip-flask into the coffee.
    Creed ignored him and went to the darkroom door again. ‘Come on, Denny, I—’
    The door opened before he could finish and a youth in his early twenties grinned at him as he pushed by carrying three sets of freshly developed negatives. He clipped them in a drier and closed the metal door. His close-cropped hair made him look as if he were prematurely balding.
    ‘Can you let me have the stuff I gave you yesterday?’ Creed asked him.
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘The funeral.’ He showed him the photograph in the newspaper.
    ‘Oh yeah.’ Denny indicated a shelf with his thumb. ‘Somewhere in that lot. Hasn’t been filed away yet.’
    Creed delved into the semi-transparent envelopes, quickly reading the magic-markered inscriptions. He soon found the one he was looking for.
    ‘Got no time to devvy anything up for you, Joe,’ Denny quickly told him, heading over-briskly towards the darkroom to emphasize the point.
    ‘Do it myself.’
    ‘Sure, but can you do it later? We’re flat out in there.’
    ‘Couple of minutes, that’s all I need.’ He added, ‘It’s important.’
    ‘Aren’t they all.’
    ‘All of ’em and none of ’em,’ grumbled the staffy, sipping on the whiskied coffee.
    ‘Think of it as a career decision,’ Creed said to the youth.
    ‘You call this a career? Okay, two minutes. We’re really fucked in there, Joe.’
    ‘Bless you, my son.’ Creed slipped into the darkroom.
    Ten minutes later he was out again, closing the door on the moaning that came from inside. Clutching three wet blowups in his hand, camera bag over his shoulder, he strode down the corridor to the newsroom.
    A voice stopped him on the way to the picture editor’s desk.
    ‘What have you got on today?’
    He turned to see Blythe, the skinhead diarist (to be fair, Blythe had an abundance of silver hair,