Poisoned Cherries

Chapter 31

As it turned out, we made it to the Assembly Rooms a couple of minutes ahead of Miles and Dawn. The whole cast was there, in a big upstairs room with a chandelier, apart from Liam Matthews, who had so few speaking scenes that he had cut a deal with Miles, allowing him to turn up for rehearsals only a day before he was due to shoot.

Those of us who were there were each given a copy of the shooting schedule by Gail Driver. It isn’t invariable that the first scene in a movie is the one that’s shot first, but that was convenient in this case and so that was how it would be done.

I had thought that we might launch straight into rehearsal, but Miles began by gathering us all round, as he had done the day before in my apartment. This time, he ran through the script himself from start to finish, describing each of the locations we would use, and giving us a picture of how he saw our work developing.

That took up most of the morning; we didn’t break for coffee until almost mid-day. I had just picked up a mug and a couple of biscuits when Rhona Waitrose tapped me on the shoulder. I took a quick look to see that she was respectable, then gave her a noncommittal, ‘Hello’.

‘Too bad about last night,’ she murmured.

‘Too right,’ I replied, maybe just a bit tersely. ‘My nuts may never be the same.’

Rhona winced. ‘Sorry about that.’ She paused. ‘That was Susie Gantry, wasn’t it; from Glasgow? She’s your girlfriend? ’ I nodded, twice. ‘I remember her, when her old man was king of the city, before he had his breakdown and got put away. She had guys swarming after her like wasps, but she never gave any of them as much as a sniff. None of them pushed it too hard, either. Her father had, shall we say, a certain reputation.’

‘He still has; but he’s not her father. Susie’s adopted.’

‘Lucky girl, then, falling heir to all that.’

‘Not at all; she works hard. She saved that business, after Jack’s trouble.’

‘Have we fucked it up between you two, me and that other girl? Who was she, anyway? The way it looked when I came in, you and she were getting ready to make the beast with two backs.’

‘She was an accident, waiting to happen; as it did happen, I was getting ready for nothing but pizza. How did you get the box, anyway?’

‘I saw the kid arrive, and I just asked him if it was for you, by any chance. I got lucky.’

‘You won’t say that if you ever meet Susie again. Since you asked, no, things are not bust between us.’

She whistled. ‘You are one smooth bastard,’ she said, a little too loudly for my liking, ‘if you managed to talk your way out of that.’ Mandy O’Farrell was on duty with the rest of the minder team. Rhona’s voice must have reached her, for she looked over her shoulder and smiled at me. I excused myself to my co-star and walked across to her. She was standing between Alan Graham and Mike Reilly, but she turned away from them as I approached.

‘I should thank you for last night,’ I said, quietly.

She looked at me, her smile even wider, her eyes. . very attractive blue eyes. . sparkling. ‘It’s all part of the service.’

‘How did you happen to turn up there, anyway?’

‘I was keeping an eye on Rhona. I saw her pull her trick with the pizza delivery boy; then I saw her unbutton her raincoat. That told me the whole story. I’d have left you to it, but that other girl turned up and followed her into the building without using a key. I watched her, and I saw her get into your lift.’

‘So, maybe I was planning a foursome?’

‘If you had been I’d have apologised and left,’ she chuckled. ‘But I knew who the second woman was. With Rhona having her goodies on display, and knowing what I know about her, I guessed there could be trouble, so I used my initiative.’

‘You seem to know a lot about us all.’

‘I did my research; that’s part of the job, too. Alison was a surprise, though.’

‘That one? Every day, another surprise.’

‘What’s her connection with my boss?’ Mandy asked.

‘That’s a long story. I’ll let him tell you.’

‘Is he trying to keep her out of the slammer or put her there?’

‘I’ll pass on that too.’

She looked as if she might have pressed me further, but right at that moment, Miles called us all back on parade.

In planning the project, he had decided that as much of the film as possible should be shot on location. That’s the way he usually works, and given the backdrops that Edinburgh offers it would have been a shame to do otherwise on this one. For a while he had harboured a wild hope that he would have been allowed to shoot in the real police HQ building, but not even he had the clout to pull that off. Instead, he had rented part of a rambling college building on the south side of the city, and an authentic office was being set up there.

Our first stop, though, was Advocates’ Close, which connects the High Street with Cockburn Street below, and which takes its name, I guess, from the fact that in old Edinburgh it was a favourite route of Scottish barristers on their way from their New Town homes to work in the Supreme Courts.

The book that we were filming opens there, with a headless body, right on page one. A little bloody, one might think, but the victim turns out to have been a lawyer, so that, as far as most people are concerned, made him fair game.

Ewan was scheduled to make his big entrance as Bob Skinner right at the start, with me hustling about as Andy Martin, and Dawn on hand as Dr Sarah Grace, the scene-of-crime examiner, who also happens to be Skinner’s piece on the side. The script called for a degree of horizontal contact between Ewan and Dawn; those scenes would be filmed on a specially built part of our leased college, and were marked on the schedule as ‘closed set’. That meant that only those with an absolute need to be there would get to see the producer/director’s wife in the scud. I noticed that Miles had ruled himself out from that part of the movie; the scenes were to be directed by Dawn herself.

However he was involved in our first scene, and that was the one he rehearsed hardest in the Assembly Rooms that morning, and afternoon. We had to use a bit of imagination to transport the chandelier to the gloomy Advocates’ Close, but he had brought along a prosthetic head, which we would use in the real thing, to give us a bit of added colour.

Eventually he was happy with the way we were playing the thing, especially with a scene in which Skinner delivers a dressing down to an over-enthusiastic young copper. The rest of the cast had been rehearsing their own opening lines and scenes in other parts of the room. Finally, he stood everyone down but us.

‘Come on,’ he said, to Ewan, Dawn and me, and to the supporting players. ‘Let’s take a run up there now, and look at the real thing. Do it today, and we can all have tomorrow off.’

With that incentive, all of us, and our minders, piled into two of the fleet of people-movers which he had hired. The city was really behind us, I guessed, when I saw that they had stickers that exempted them from the attentions of the Blue Meanies, Edinburgh’s detested traffic storm-troopers.

I had walked through Advocates’ Close many times before, in the years I’d lived in the capital, but I’d never really taken in the detail. As soon as we stepped into the entrance, I saw what the problems were going to be.

‘This is going to take a long time,’ said Miles. ‘We have to do this the old-fashioned way, with a single camera, because of the narrowness of the passage. That means that many of the lines are going to have to be lit and shot individually. You guys may have to shave twice on Sunday, just for continuity’s sake.’

‘Where will we do that?’ asked Ewan.

‘They’re going to close off Cockburn Street to all but essential traffic; we’ll park the production trailers down there.’

Miles spent another half-hour walking us through our parts, showing Ewan how he wanted him to make his entrance, showing me how he wanted me to crouch beside the headless dummy, and taking final decisions on placing the camera. By the end of it all, we were knackered; even Dawn was getting irritable, and that’s unusual. Miles got the message from her, if from nobody else. ‘Okay,’ he announced at last, ‘that’s it for today. I’ll see you all back here Sunday; six-thirty. Be sharp, be rested, be good.’