Showstopper

14

“Candida wasn’t hiding from us, then,” Diamond said. “Well done. I was confident you’d track her down.”

Ingeborg shrugged. “There was nothing clever about it. Some of the Bottle Yard studios crowd meet up at the Shield and Dagger at the end of the day. I joined them last night and got chatting.”

“Jean will be pleased. Have you told her?”

“Not yet. I thought you’d want to know first.”

“I’m thinking of taking her with me. Get her out of the madhouse for a bit.”

“She’ll enjoy that... I think.”

Jean Sharp was overawed when he asked. She’d not been on an assignment with the boss before.

“When I visit a female witness, I make a point of having a woman officer sitting beside me,” Diamond told her. “Ingeborg usually gets the job, but I thought you’d like to be in on this one. Did you bring your car today?” He knew she often drove an expensive Volvo belonging to her husband.

“Yes, guv.”

“You can be chauffeur as well, then.”

Her eyes registered something close to panic.

“Don’t worry. We’ll pay for the fuel.”

The cost of petrol wasn’t the problem. Diamond was known on the team to be a nervous passenger. Fortunately it wouldn’t be a long trip, just over ten miles, and, as he explained, he liked to be driven well within the speed limit.

“Do you know Saltford Marina?” he asked as they prepared to leave.

“Can’t say I do, guv.”

“Me neither. Never heard of it. The car will know where to go, I hope.”

She set the GPS. “It should do.”

“Then it will be up to you and me to find a narrowboat called Deck the Halls. Shouldn’t be difficult. The marina isn’t huge.” Wanting to appear more relaxed than he felt, he became chatty. “Deck the Halls. People choose strange names for boats. My guess is that the first owners were a Mr. and Mrs. Hall. You can drop your speed a little. We’re in no hurry.”

Jean Sharp dealt with her own nerves by saying little and concentrating on her driving, her knuckles white from her grip on the steering wheel. Diamond’s chat became a monologue.

“I used to think of Saltford as a boring stretch of the A4, but I’ve learned more about it over the years and now I know it was where Swift and Proud Productions had their office on some trading estate before they came to Bath. Did you see the road works sign? Temporary traffic lights. They seem to be slowing down. I don’t know if Candida has been living in the canal boat ever since. There could be kids. And a partner. It’s green. We can move again, but watch out for the idiot coming the other way. I’ve met them in my time. They think they can sneak through somehow and next thing they hit you head-on.”

Sharp got them to Saltford without screaming at him to shut up and they parked outside the Riverside Inn right next to the marina. “Good facilities,” Diamond said, meaning the pub, not the moorings or the marina buildings.

They found the gate, checked at the office and were told Deck the Halls had a long-term berth at one end.

The name was in large white letters on the prow of a long red boat. “And someone is at home,” Diamond said. The door at the front end stood open. “Better not cause alarm by stepping aboard.” The four windows along the side were at hip level. He tapped on the glass and immediately a toddler came out to the foredeck and looked up at them from under a mass of black curls. A confident kid considering his pants were round his ankles.

“Looks like we interrupted him,” Diamond said.

A voice from inside called out, “What are you doing, Bart? Get back on your potty.”

Bart didn’t seem to have heard. He continued to eye up the visitors.

“Better do as Mummy says,” Diamond tried to advise him.

A young woman of mixed race emerged, said, “For God’s sake,” grabbed the child and hoisted him inside. She reappeared a moment later and said, “If it’s religion or a survey, save your breath. I’m not interested.”

“It’s neither, ma’am,” Diamond said. “May we call you Candida?”

She glared. “How do you know my name?”

“Our job,” he said. “Avon and Somerset Police. Can we come aboard and speak in private?”

“I don’t have much choice, do I? Mind your heads when you come in.”

The inside seemed poorly lit until their eyes adjusted. A narrow cabin with two swivel armchairs and a TV. Shelving along the sides loaded with books, crockery and soft toys making the best use of the elongated living space. Hooks on the shelves holding cups and mugs.

“Why don’t you sit down?”

They trod carefully. The floor was strewn with toys. The end, against the bulkhead, was occupied by the child on his plastic throne, but not for long. As Diamond and Jean Sharp sat down, Bart stood up and said, “Finished.”

Candida mouthed a swearword and said she needed to deal with him. She carried him and his pot into the cabin behind. She called out, “Talk among yourselves. This won’t take long.”

In a low voice, Diamond asked DC Sharp, “Would you give up a good job in television for this?”

She said, “It’s hormonal, guv. The biology takes over.”

From nowhere, he felt a stab of grief. His beloved wife, Steph, had used almost the same words half a lifetime ago. She’d suffered miscarriages in her first unhappy marriage. Then she’d married him and got pregnant again, but with the same distressing result. Worse, she’d been informed by the doctors that a hysterectomy was essential. When she’d got over the operation, they’d thought about applying to adopt, but they were both in early middle age by then and it didn’t seem fair to the child. He wouldn’t have minded taking on a school-age child, but Steph had yearned for a baby to cuddle. The memory still had the power to hurt.

Candida returned carrying a large cushion which she dropped in front of them before sitting on it. “He’s in his cot, but he’s not going to like it for long. I’d stick him in a playpen, but there isn’t room in this floating matchbox. There isn’t room for shit. Correction: there has to be room, as I well know from emptying the chemical loo every morning. What’s this about?”

“Do you read the local paper?” Diamond asked her, realising as the words left his mouth that he sounded like a guest at the vicar’s tea party.

“What would I want with a paper?”

“The Bristol Post ran a couple of articles recently about the Swift series.”

“The jinx?”

“So you have seen it?”

“I’ve seen Twitter. Bollocks, isn’t it?”

This wasn’t shaping up as a tea party of any sort.

“I’ve got to agree with you, except the jinx may be in human form, someone with a grudge.”

“Why come to me, then? I left three years ago, before most of those things happened.”

“Not all of them. You were there at the start when Trixie Playfair dropped out.”

“Trixie?” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’d forgotten about her. That wasn’t bad for the show. It was the best thing that could have happened. Sabine took over and made the part her own. She’s a star now.”

“Then there was the fire in the engineers’ van.”

“Some idiot with a cigarette. No one was ever found out. I expect the guys covered for each other.”

“The accident to the stuntmen.”

“Accidents and stunt-people go hand-in-hand. That’s why they employ them, to save the stars from hurting themselves. Swift is an action show. You’re going to have injuries. Listen, I don’t have time to go through all the shit that happened.”

“Let’s talk about you, then. You became Mary Wroxeter’s assistant producer.”

“I was the obvious choice when Dave Tudor left the show. I was a PA at the time.”

He remembered asking Sabine what the initials stood for and being told it was a dogsbody job.

Candida gave it a far better spin. “Production assistant, helping the director and the producer in practical ways, like running errands, making notes at meetings and logging tapes. It’s a support role, one up from being a runner. There were two of us, Greg and me.”

“Greg Deans?”

“Yes, Greg was the new boy, just appointed, so he couldn’t step up. Mary was in a hole.”

“Tudor had gone missing for no apparent reason. Is that the inside story — the true one?”

She frowned. “What are you getting at?”

“Was there bad blood between him and Mary?”

The suggestion seemed to surprise her. “I never heard of any. Dave got on fine with everyone. He was Mary’s fixer. She would come up with some genius idea and Dave made it happen without causing ructions and bringing the crew out on strike. He was a people person. We only appreciated how good he was after he left.”

Bart’s voice piped up from the next cabin, calling for his mummy. She let out a sharp, short-tempered sigh.

“You’ve no clue as to why Dave Tudor quit?”

“If you find out, I’ll be fascinated to know the reason. It must have been something in his private life.”

“Which he kept to himself?”

She shot him a hostile look. “There’s no crime in that.”

Diamond let the remark pass, not without noting the force behind it. This young woman had come out fighting. He was used to people being cowed by a visit from the police. He’d come here to get her take on Mary Wroxeter, but it was becoming clear that a bigger prize was here to be won, a secret she was desperate to hide by being defiant. “We spoke to Sabine,” he said. “She said there was a theory that Tudor was from abroad, living here illegally under another name, and got word that the Home Office was on his case.”

She shook her head. “That old yarn doesn’t fit the facts. I was the one Mary sent to Dave’s flat in Kipling Avenue and it was like the Mary Celeste, everything lying about as if he’d gone out briefly and expected to return. Anyone moving out for good would have taken his reading glasses with him. His passport, for Christ’s sake. No, it doesn’t wash with me.”

Bart’s shouts were getting more insistent.

“Was he really a foreigner?”

“There was the trace of an accent, but I thought he was Welsh. Tudor is a Welsh name, isn’t it? He’d known Mary a long time. He first worked with her on a biopic she made about Paul Robeson and his links to Wales.”

“Robeson and the Welsh. Sabine told me about that, but I didn’t know Tudor was involved. You said his passport was still at the flat.”

“On a side table with letters, unpaid bills, an A — Z street atlas and some photos.”

“Did you look at it?”

Another fierce glance. “What kind of snitch do you take me for? I was there to find Dave, not nose into his private life.”

“What happened to his things after he disappeared?”

“No idea. You’d better ask his landlord.”

Bart had started screaming. Candida swore again, got up and went through to see to him.

Diamond asked DC Sharp, “Did we check with the landlord?”

“He died three years ago, guv. The house was sold and it’s a private dwelling now. If Tudor’s personal things had been kept that long, I expect the sellers disposed of them.”

He got up from the chair to look at the shelves opposite. Unlike Candida, he had no conscience about nosing through other people’s things. Prying came with the job.

There wasn’t much of interest except two unopened letters. She must have collected them from the marina office, where the postman would have delivered them. Both were addressed to a Mr. Fergus Webster, presumably her partner, the father of Bart. One was handwritten and the other had the return address printed on the front: Gripmasters, Hyde’s Lane, Cold Ashton, SN14.

Diamond’s brain did a rapid reboot. Fergus Webster’s name had come up when Paul Gilbert had reported on his visit to the film shoot at Pulteney Bridge.

“Hey-ho,” he said. “Something here we didn’t know.”

Jean Sharp got up to see. And at that precise moment, Candida returned with the child in her arms.

Diamond still had the letters in his hand.

Sharp had the quick wit to divert attention by stepping towards the mother and child. “Will he come to me?”

Bart turned his face away in fright and threw his arms around his mother’s neck. Candida gave a triumphant smile.

But the real triumph was Sharp’s. Diamond had managed to return the letters to the shelf without being noticed. He took up the conversation again. “It must be a trial bringing up a toddler in a houseboat.”

Candida gave him a withering look and turned to Sharp. “Is he for real?”

“He’s a bright kid,” Diamond carried on, unperturbed. “He wanted to know why these strangers were talking to his mother.”

“You think so? I call it slave-driving. He never lets up.”

“Is he used to visitors?”

“You’re the first I’ve seen all week. You lose all your friends when you live like this.”

“Don’t you get to know the other boat owners?”

“I’ve got sweet FA in common with them. They don’t have young families. They’re either senile or students.”

“But you keep up with your television friends, I expect.”

She gave a hollow laugh. “A card at Christmas if I’m lucky.”

“No more contact than that?”

“It’s a closed book since Bart arrived. My life now is all about baby food and soiled nappies.”

He pressed her, leading her gently into a trap. “So you’re cut off completely from all that goes on at Bottle Yard studios?”

“Haven’t I made that clear?”

“It will have moved on from when you were employed there. A new regime with different ways of working.”

“You tell me. I’ve no idea.”

“You were part of the Mary Wroxeter era. Was that tough, working for her?”

She was transparently pleased to be offered this escape route. “It was no picnic, but I found it inspiring. Kept me on my toes. There was always plenty to do. Like I said, I was in at the deep end, but I was chuffed to bits, working so closely with Mary.”

“There was no suggestion that the work was all too much for you?”

She rose to the bait again. “Who said that? Greg? He never liked me.”

“It’s me speculating,” Diamond said. “Everyone tells me she kept coming up with wonderful ideas that her assistants had the hard job of selling to the people who actually did the filming.”

“I knew that from the start. I didn’t mind. I loved every minute of it.”

“But you didn’t last long in the job.”

“Over a year.”

“You wanted to start a family. Is that right? It’s a bit of a cliché when politicians leave their jobs to say that they want to spend more time with their families. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Are you being sarcastic? I wasn’t kicked out. Mary wanted me to stay, but I was pregnant and I wanted kids, right?” She parked Bart on the floor without much tenderness and used her foot to shift one of the toys towards him. “I lost that baby at fifteen weeks, and I was upset and emotional, big time.” Her voice broke up as she remembered. “I needed counselling. You have no idea what it’s like.”

Diamond could have said something from personal experience, but he chose not to.

“I didn’t ask for my job back,” she went on. “I was in no state to work. It took longer than we expected before Bart came along. All I could think about was getting pregnant again.”

“I understand.” The mental pain still kicked in all these years after.

There was a pause. A long one. Neither seemed able to go on.

Jean Sharp cleared her throat and asked Diamond, “Mind if I ask a couple of questions about Mary Wroxeter, guv?”

He turned to look at her, so caught up in the exchange with Candida that he’d quite forgotten he’d asked Sharp to investigate the producer’s death from alcoholism. “Go ahead.”

She rotated her chair to face Candida. “Mary drank heavily, didn’t she?”

“Not during the day.”

“We heard it was the drink that killed her.”

“That’s what they said.”

“Don’t you believe it?”

“I drove her back from the pub the evening she died.”

Sharp wasn’t going to let that pass by. “What were you doing there? I thought you’d left the show.”

“I had something important I wanted to tell Mary. I was pregnant again. I knew she would be in the pub with the others, so I joined them. There were some new faces, but most of them remembered me. I didn’t drink with them. I was on tonic water. I’m not daft. I just wanted to tell Mary my good news.”

“Who else was there that night?”

“Dan, Daisy, Greg, Sabine and some others I didn’t know. It was some kind of wrap, so they were there in numbers.”

“And you say you drove Mary home?”

“Quite early, about nine. I still had my own car in those days. She’d had no more than usual when she was with friends, three or four vodkas. She was pretty well sober. Alcoholics can drink a lot before it shows.”

“She bought a bottle of vodka to take home, didn’t she?”

“You know a lot about it.”

“I’m trying to learn as much as I can. Did you go in with her when you got to the house?”

“No. She invited me, but I didn’t. I knew it would be a late night if I did. I’d told her my news in the car. She gave me a hug and said how happy she was for me and told me to take care. Then she put her key in the door — straight in the keyhole, no problem — and let herself in. I never saw her again. Next day she was found dead.”

Sharp turned to Diamond and nodded. She had got all she wanted.

He took up the questioning again. “And you have no curiosity about what goes on now? A closed book, you said?”

Candida swallowed hard.

Casually, he asked the killer question. “Is Fergus Webster your partner?”

She stared back, ashen-faced.

“And did you and Fergus meet while you were both working on the Swift show? He’s one of the riggers, isn’t he — the key grip? He’s still there. One of my team met him only the other day.”

She made a poor attempt to wriggle free. “It’s the twenty-first century. I can live with whoever I want.”

“Fine,” Diamond said. “But why did you tell me you’re cut off completely from all that goes on at Bottle Yard and your only contact is through Christmas cards when you’re living with a guy who works on the show and knows everything that happens? You get a daily update over your evening meal.”

“We have more important things to talk about than tittle-tattle from his work.”

“I’m not on about the tittle-tattle. He will have told you the big things that went wrong, like Mary dying and the accident to Dan Burbage.”

“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”

“You do, Candida. You want us to believe you have no knowledge of what goes on, but you have a line into the show and you follow every twist and turn.”

She was still in denial. “I haven’t been near Bottle Yard since Bart was born and that’s the truth. I don’t even watch the show on TV.”

“Because it can’t compare with the show you and Mary produced. You resent the success it has, still doing well in the ratings.”

“I’m allowed an opinion,” she said. “It’s crap now.”

“So you do watch it.”

She looked away at Jean Sharp and slid her eyes upwards as if to ask if her tiresome boss was always like this.

He said, “I don’t blame you for thinking it’s gone downhill. Most drama series do when new people take over. Even I know that, and I don’t watch anything much. I’m trying to tell what motivates you. You obviously feel strongly. I can imagine how tough it is being stuck in a boat like this for years on end with a small child and remembering the important job you had in television. I can understand you feeling resentful of the people still at work there earning good salaries, Fergus included.”

Her mouth tightened. “Leave him out of this.”

The look that came with those five words said everything Diamond needed to know. This was not a happy family.

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered. He has no part in what you did, right? You’re getting back at him as well as the show?”

“I said lay off.”

“It’s not a crime to talk to the press as long as what you tell them is true. You’re the whistleblower who told the Post about the jinx, aren’t you?”

She thought about her response for a couple of seconds and said, “You make me feel like the class sneak.”

It was as good as a yes. He felt the surge of elation that comes with a breakthrough. “Why did you do it?”

“For devilment.”

The response rang true. He waited for her to expand on it.

“I’m stuck here, day in, day out and that lot are still milking Mary’s success two years after she died.”

“You’re jealous of them?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“And it’s a way of getting back at Fergus?”

A faint smile.

“You heard about the things that were going wrong and you guessed the local press would run the story? I hope you got paid.”

She shook her head. “They don’t know who I am. I called them on an old mobile we’ve never used.”

“Suggesting the show is jinxed?”

The smile returned and was wider.

“Did you use the word ‘jinx’?”

A nod. “I wanted them to know what I was on about.”

“All they had to do was check your facts and see how they hung together.”

“Right.”

“And did you make a second call saying it was now a police investigation?”

“Yes.”

“You heard that from Fergus?”

“Everyone knows.”

“Everyone who works on the show, I grant you. Has it made you feel better, getting it out to the world?”

She picked her word with care. “Marginally.”

“Does Fergus know you’re the source?”

A gasp. “God, no. Does he have to?”

He didn’t answer that.

Back in Jean Sharp’s car, he thanked her for covering for him by getting Candida’s attention at a critical moment. “I would have been caught with the letters in my hand.”

“You’d have thought of something to say, guv.”

“I don’t know what.”

She started up and drove out of the car park. “Anyway, recognising his name on the envelope was a game-changer.”

“Bit of luck, if I’m honest,” he said, not really meaning it. Privately, he thought his sleuthing had been worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

“You made your luck by getting up to look at the things on the shelf,” she said.

“Nosiness.”

“Professionalism.”

He laughed. “If ever I need a reference, I know who to ask. And I also want to thank you for chipping in with your questions about Mary Wroxeter. Nicely timed.”

“It seemed like a pause in the questioning.”

“I lost concentration, thrown by something she said.”

Sharp seemed worried about losing concentration herself, unready for this debrief while she was driving.

“What did you think of her answers?” he pressed her.

“They rang true, I thought.”

“You don’t think she had any part in Dave Tudor’s disappearance?”

She frowned, but whether this was in disbelief or irritation wasn’t clear. “Do you?”

“She’s the only person we’ve met with an obvious motive for doing away with him.”

Sharp’s eyes stood out as if she’d seen a charging rhino on the road ahead. “Killing him, you mean? Candida?”

“She has to be a suspect. She took over his job. She gave the impression she was shoehorned into it, but she knew Mary would turn to her if Tudor left. It was a big step-up in her career and she idolised Mary.”

“Now you explain, I can see it.”

“Watch your speed. It’s supposed to be thirty along here, not thirty-two.”

Her hands opened and then closed on the steering wheel.

“If she did murder him,” Diamond went on, “it raises other questions.”

“Like how she did it?”

“That’s not so important at this stage.”

“What she did with the body, then?”

“She told us she had a car. She could have driven it to the marina after dark. I was looking before we came away and there are possibilities. You could submerge a body there out of sight under a jetty. Even if it surfaced you wouldn’t see it.”

“Is it worth making a search?”

“We’d need more evidence. She may provide it if she thinks we’re on her case.”

Sharp drove in silence for a while, but she must have been thinking about what he’d said. “If you’re right, she was incredibly cool under questioning.”

“Yes,” he said. “When she told us Tudor’s flat was like the Mary Celeste, she didn’t help her own cause. She could easily have said it looked as if he’d packed his things and cleared off.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“She’s a class act if she’s a killer. And if she’s that good, she could have murdered Mary as well.”

The steering wobbled.

He tensed. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry, guv. You keep surprising me.”

“We can pull over if you want.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Didn’t the possibility of murder cross your mind when she admitted she was the last person to see Mary alive? She was almost challenging us to put her in the frame.”

“I missed that entirely. Why would she do that?”

“Because someone else was sure to mention it when we interviewed the others. I can see a cyclist up ahead. Give him a wide berth.”

Sharp was tight-lipped until they had passed the cyclist.

“I can’t think why she would want to murder Mary. She had nothing but praise for her.”

“The same goes for everyone in the show as far as I can tell. It’s our job to question anything that can’t be proved. We’ve only got Candida’s word that she didn’t go inside the house with Mary.”

“And do what? Encourage Mary to drink herself to death?”

“An alcoholic doesn’t need encouragement. We know the blood alcohol count was lethal. What was the phrase the pathologist used?”

“About being on a real bender?”

“Right. Why did she drink so much that particular night? Was Candida egging her on?”

“That’s theoretically possible, I suppose.” She used the words grudgingly, out of respect. It was clear that Diamond’s latest outrageous theory was way ahead of anything she was willing to believe.

“She’d just told Mary she was pregnant,” he said. “What’s an alcoholic’s response going to be — ‘I’ll drink to that’?”

Sharp didn’t respond for a while.

They reached the turn at Keynsham before either of them spoke again, and it was Diamond. “You want to know why she did it?”

“Try me, guv.”

“She’s an angry woman, stuck at home. She couldn’t hack it when she saw her old boss working happily with other people.”

“That’s a new one,” Sharp said without enthusiasm. “I hadn’t thought of that.”