Showstopper

15

Even Peter Diamond would admit that Mary Wroxeter as a murder victim was a speculative theory. Clearly Jean Sharp wasn’t persuaded. He didn’t mind much. This was work in progress. It might come to nothing, but the possibility had to be explored.

The chilling new scenario was that three people from the show had been murdered. All his experience told him that if this was true, the killings must be linked. In serial murders, the first is the big one. The perpetrator crosses the red line and becomes a killer. When he or she has done the deed once, they feel less constrained about doing it again when new pressures come into play. The motive could be a matter of covering up for the first. Somebody became suspicious or saw something and had to be silenced. Was that how Mary Wroxeter sealed her fate?

In the privacy of his office, he put through a call to one of his pet hates, the sarcastic Bertram Sealy. There was no one else he could ask. All the other forensic pathologists he knew had retired or left the district.

“You?” Sealy said when Diamond announced himself. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. I thought you were one of the ghostbusters now. Do you wear a proton pack?”

Diamond was in no mood to trade insults. “Can we have a serious conversation? I need information.”

“Sorry, old boy. I’m a scientist. I know nothing about the dark arts.”

“Okay, you’ve had your fun. You shouldn’t believe everything they print in the papers.”

“It was on Instagram. The word is that you’re trying to arrest a hoodoo. Is that right? It’s not a good way to go. You’re going to meet some very strange people.”

“You’re not amusing me, Sealy.”

“No, but you crease me up. I never know what you’re going to do next, and it’s always hilarious. What do you want from me — the address of a good shrink?”

He controlled his anger. Graver issues were at stake than his self-respect. “I want some professional advice about death from alcoholism — and before you go off on another tangent, it’s nothing to do with me personally. Laugh if you want and get it out of your system. This is a case I’m investigating. You must have carried out scores of autopsies on drunks.”

“Hundreds. I had one this week. Liquor is present in a high percentage of unnatural deaths, forty per cent at a guess. I know straight away by the smell.” The man was becoming interested, as Diamond knew he would.

“As obvious as that?”

“It is to an old-stager like me. Some of the younger ones smear wintergreen oil or some such inside their masks to eliminate the odours of the dissecting room. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“Are you saying the smell tells you exactly what they drank? Beer, say, or wine?”

“I didn’t say that at all. All alcohol is ethanol by the time I get to sniff it, with a distinctly sweet smell. Death is the great leveller. Whatever they imbibed, be it homemade hooch or the finest champagne, it ends up in the bloodstream as ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol.”

“You can’t tell if it was vodka or gin?”

“Are you listening, or do I have to repeat everything? Like anything else we consume, the drink metabolises. The enzyme systems reduce it to its basic form. The liver deals with ninety-five per cent of it, reducing it to water and carbon dioxide. What’s left, the remaining five per cent, is excreted through the kidneys and lungs. If the drinker is still alive and tested with a breathalyser, the level of intoxication can be measured that way. If he ends up on my slab, I’ll send a blood sample to the lab, but my nose has already told me what I’m dealing with.”

Diamond had started getting lost when enzymes were mentioned, but he’d got the gist of Sealy’s explanation and now he made an attempt to sound informed. “BAC levels.”

“What do you know about them?” Sealy said.

“I know five hundred is about the maximum. The woman I’m interested in had a reading above four hundred.”

“She wouldn’t have survived.”

“She didn’t.”

“Anything above three hundred is likely to induce a coma. The figure you’re talking about is curtains. Asphyxiation generally.”

“This was cardiac arrest.”

Sealy made a sound like the hinges of a church door being opened. “Sudden cardiac death. Interesting. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a heart attack, but the outcome is the same. Prolonged alcoholism weakens the heart function and the ticker doesn’t get the oxygen it needs when it pumps. It’s more usual in middle-aged men than women. You said this woman was an alcoholic. What age?”

“Late forties.”

“Plausible enough if she’d been poisoning her system for years.”

“Can this kind of sudden death be induced by a massive extra intake of alcohol?”

“Binge-drinking?”

“You could call it that. Someone else wants to finish her off and makes sure she drinks more in a short time than she ever has before.”

“Homicide?” No response came from Sealy for several seconds. “There’s no way I could tell at autopsy. Alcohol in a very high dose could well precipitate a rhythm disorder. On the face of it, a sudden cardiac arrest is possible, but you’d have small chance of proving premeditation.”

“What if her usual drink, which was vodka, was doctored with alcohol in a higher concentration?”

“I object to that term, ‘doctored’ — a slur on my profession.”

“Happier with ‘corrupted’?”

“What are you suggesting the supposed murderer added to the drink — pure ethanol?”

“It’s available online for the price of a coffee and biscuits,” Diamond said.

“If it’s that cheap, it wouldn’t be pure.”

“More than ninety-five per cent alcohol as compared with vodka at about forty.”

“You are taking this seriously,” Sealy said. “My only observation is that I’ve never come across such a method of despatching a victim. Theoretically, it could be done. Excessive intake such as this would quickly overrun the body’s coping mechanism. I could tell from the state of the organs that the deceased was an alcoholic and the blood test would tell me she’d consumed a lethal amount.”

“What would be the result of drinking so much at once?”

“Take your pick of coma and asphyxiation or sudden cardiac arrest.”

“And the pathologist can’t tell if it was murder?”

“Of course not. That’s your job — and the best of British luck.”

Diamond put down the phone and returned to the incident room. John Leaman was using a marker on the whiteboard on the wall inside the door. To the left was a long list of more than fifty names.

“What are these — our suspects?” Diamond asked him. “You’re depressing me, John.”

“They’re the cast and crew from the two episodes being shot when Tudor and Nicol went missing,” Leaman said. “Quite a lot will be deleted for various reasons and we’ll get down to a hard core of people who could have been involved in both disappearances.”

“This is if we have one perpetrator?”

“Isn’t that what we’re working on?”

“It’s my assumption.” He exhaled audibly through soft vibrating lips. “I didn’t expect quite so many. You took them from the lists I collected from the production office?”

Leaman nodded.

“We can scrub some straight away. Daisy Summerfield is dead and Dan Burbage had the climbing accident.”

“I didn’t like to remove any of them without your permission, guv.”

Diamond looked for the names that interested him most. Greg Deans was there. Sabine, of course, and her stunt double, Ann Bugg. Candida, near the top of the list. Fergus Webster, the key grip. He borrowed the marker and drew a thick line linking Candida to Fergus. “These two are an item, I found out today.”

Leaman winced visibly as his pristine list was defaced.

“Unfortunately there are names to add,” Diamond told him. “Trixie Playfair, the original choice for the plum part. And Will Legat, the tramp who was stained with Jake Nicol’s blood. Do you want to write them in, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it if you don’t mind.” Leaman’s neat, small lettering was tidier than Diamond’s.

“You can add one more while you’re at it.”

“Who’s that?”

“She’s known as Chen and she’s Sabine’s sidekick, except you’d think twice about kicking her. A young woman capable of just about anything.” After the name was written in, Diamond said, “Do you want to put lines through the ones we just mentioned?”

“I’ll probably print a new list.”

“As you wish. Something else we could do with here is a schedule from the studio telling us where everyone is at any given time. It’s known as a call sheet. This week they’re filming at Milroy Court, out Trowbridge way, and that’s where I’m going next, but I don’t know who I’ll find there.”

He found everyone he needed. When he arrived, they were filming an exterior on the south-facing side of the house and a gathering of cast and crew was there to watch. An ancient wisteria with vines like petrified pythons grew up the side of the building attached to wires screwed into the structure. You could scarcely see the stonework, the plant was so abundant. Window spaces had been cut, but new shoots were already threatening to cover them over. The spring blooms had come and gone. There was a display of another kind.

One of the top windows was standing open and a naked man had climbed out and was clinging to the foliage. He looked young and fit, tanned and tattooed on the arms and legs, making his backside appear even more undressed than it was. A camera on the end of a jib was swinging about, getting close and then pulling back, controlled from the ground by someone who seemed to know what he was doing. Another camera on a dolly was at ground level and quite a collection of people stood nearby, some holding scripts.

Diamond joined a group standing out of shot observing the spectacle. Among them he had spotted one of his own, Paul Gilbert.

“What’s going on?”

“Hello, guv. It’s the bum shot.”

“I can see that.”

“There’s one in each episode, a kind of running joke the audience looks out for — half the audience, anyway. He’s supposed to be the handyman. The story goes that he’s having it away in bed with the daughter of the house when they are interrupted by Swift, who has come to crack the safe. This poor guy thinks he’s been caught in the act by one of the family and takes the only route out he can think of, which is the window. Luckily he’s able to hang on to the creepers.”

“He doesn’t look as if he can hold on much longer.”

“Tired, I expect. This is the third take of him hugging the tree. They want to get his position right.”

“What happens next?”

“That’s what I’m waiting to see.”

A track had been laid across the lawn, suggesting that the action wouldn’t end on the wisteria.

“Tell me who the people are.”

“The short one in the cap and white suit is George Spode, the director. The bearded guy beside him with the shades is Greg Deans.”

“The producer. I know him.”

“The bossy one wearing cans is the floor manager. I can’t tell you his name. The woman holding the script is the production assistant, Vicky.”

“Is Fergus there?”

“He’s the big fellow standing a bit to the right, near the dolly camera.”

“I want to meet him when this is done.”

The director seemed satisfied with the latest take. He cupped his hands and shouted something to the actor, who now started the tricky descent. Nobody was filming. They simply watched him go through the moves.

“I wouldn’t want to try that barefoot,” Diamond said.

“He’d look silly in shoes.”

“He doesn’t look clever without them.”

As soon as the young man was on the ground someone handed him a bathrobe while the director conferred with those around him, apparently deciding how the climb down could be improved. Creating an action scene was a painstaking process.

The actor was sent inside the house and appeared naked at the window again. Standing on the sill, he reached for the branches, swung across and trusted them to take his weight. This time he came down in a way that got more approval. But the sequence still hadn’t been filmed.

Diamond checked the time. He’d been here almost twenty minutes. The scene would take only a few seconds on screen.

The floor manager called for quiet and they went for a take. It didn’t satisfy the director. Without protest, the actor returned inside the house to repeat the whole manoeuvre.

“Action.”

In making the move from the window to the main vine, his foot slipped. Anxious gasps came from the watchers. For a moment he was hanging from outstretched arms. He squirmed, found a footing again and completed the descent.

“Is he a stuntman?” Diamond asked Gilbert.

“I was told he’s a jobbing actor brought in for the day. It’s only a small part.”

“I wouldn’t have said so.”

Gilbert grinned.

The film-makers seemed pleased by the stumble on the wisteria. They replayed it on the camera screen and decided another take wasn’t needed.

“Is that it? Can we see Fergus now?”

“You can try, guv. It looks like they’re taking a coffee break. Do you want me with you?”

“I do. He knows you already, but he hasn’t met me.”

They marched over the turf to where the big rigger was standing beside the track laid for another sequence. He was wearing a belt with tools attached to it like the bloodstained one Will Legat had acquired. One of the team had already fetched him a coffee.

“Watch out, lads,” he announced loudly to those around him. “It’s the stop and search squad.”

Diamond gave Fergus a sight of his ID. “This won’t take long. You know what we’re interested in.”

Fergus stabbed a finger in Gilbert’s direction. “I already opened my heart to PC Plod here.”

His cohorts grinned.

“Do you mind?” Diamond said to them. “I’d like a private conversation with Fergus.”

A tilt of the head from Fergus dismissed the team. He waited for them to move off and then said, “I told you all I know about the missing grip.”

“This isn’t just about Jake Nicol. You go back a long way with this show, don’t you? You were crewing with it from the start. I’ve seen your name on the call sheets. You must remember Dave Tudor, who was the assistant producer.”

“I’m a rigger. I can’t tell you jack shit about production people. I’m not on the Bottle Yard staff.”

“Don’t piss me about, Fergus. You talked to Tudor on a daily basis when he was with the show.”

“You think so?” He stalled, trying to come up with a smart answer. “He done all the talking.”

“He was with the show when it was launched and so were you.”

“He done his job and I done mine. I was just one of the lads then. I didn’t give orders.”

“You were going out with Candida Jones and she was a production assistant.”

He tensed. “Who told you that?”

“Never mind. You were closer to the production people than you want us to know. It’s no crime. I want straight answers now. What did you make of Tudor?”

The big man’s thoughts played across his face. A muscle rippled in his cheek. The mention of Candida had clearly caught him off guard. He couldn’t tell how much Diamond knew about the relationship. It made him willing, if not eager, to answer the question less close to home. “Tudor? He done his job like everyone else. Him and Mary went back a long way.”

“You mean professionally, not personally?”

“There was nothing like that. All I’m saying is he worked with her on other stuff.”

“The Robeson thing? Were you on that as well? Did you work with Mary Wroxeter before Swift was made?”

Each detail Diamond disclosed cut into Fergus’s defensive façade. The answer was written across his face before he made it with a shrug.

“I was told Mary was forever changing her mind. Must have been a pain for the crewmen like you.”

“Fair comment.”

“And Dave Tudor did his best to smooth the way and stopped you all from downing tools and coming out on strike?”

Fergus tried to grin and it was more of a grimace.

“Or murdering her?”

Now he turned ashen. He wasn’t ready for a low punch like that.

“Joke,” Diamond said. “We all know Mary died from the drink.” He’d noted Fergus’s alarmed reaction and it was enough for now. “Everyone seemed to like Tudor. What do you think happened to him?”

A shrug. “He moved on, that’s all.”

“Really? You make it sound as if he’s still alive. He wasn’t heard of again. All his experience was in television. If he’d got a job with another company one of you would have picked up the news on the grapevine.”

“You reckon?”

“He didn’t pack up and go. His stuff was still in his flat.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Get away. Your girlfriend knows. Candida was sent up to Kipling Avenue to look for him. Or did she volunteer?”

Fergus’s eyes made tiny, troubled movements.

“Was she upset when she came back?”

No answer.

Diamond knew when he’d touched a raw nerve. “You were jealous of Tudor, this charming guy everyone liked. He and Candida were too close for your liking. Was he seeing her outside work?”

He chose not to answer.

“Or is that only what you suspected?”

Fergus clenched his fists and the serpent tattoos rippled. Baiting him was a dangerous game, but Diamond wasn’t stopping now.

“When Tudor disappeared from the scene, you wouldn’t have shed any tears. The field was clear for you to move in with Candida, or were you two already an item?”

This triggered a response from Fergus. A strong one. “Are you stitching me up?” He slung his coffee cup aside, swayed back, braced himself and made a grab for Diamond’s shirt front.

Before Diamond could react, a hand grasped Fergus’s wrist and gripped it. Paul Gilbert had stepped between them. He wasn’t allowing his boss to be headbutted. “Don’t even think about it.” He wasn’t built on the same scale as the rigger, but he was strong and fiercely loyal. He leaned towards Fergus and the pressure forced the big man to take a step back, a step that defused a dangerous confrontation.

Gilbert had saved both men from an outcome they would have regretted. You don’t get away with assaulting a police officer. And this wasn’t the time or place to make an arrest.

Fergus seemed to come to his senses. He jerked his arm free of Gilbert’s hold and muttered something about his rights.

“What’s going on here?”

Greg Deans must have been watching. He’d moved fast across the lawn, leaving the director and his team staring after him.

“Nothing serious,” Diamond told Deans. “Fergus and me catching up on a few things, that’s all.”

“What about? Nobody told us you were coming.” Here, in front of his actors and crew, the short, red-bearded man with the carrying voice was every inch the boss.

Cool as outer space, Diamond produced an answer. “Didn’t your office get the message?”

This piece of hokum disarmed Deans. He frowned and shook his head.

“A communications cock-up, obviously,” Diamond said. “Your people or mine, who’s to say?” Far from shaken by the dust-up with Fergus, he was energised and ready for more. “Now that you’re here, Mr. Deans, do you have a few minutes to spare?”

“It’s not convenient.”

“You’d better make it convenient, then. You’re the senior man here, aren’t you?”

Senior as Deans was, he didn’t have the authority to stand in the way of a police investigation. “Keep it short, then. We’re on a tight schedule.” He turned to Fergus. “Get your team ready to start scene seventeen as soon as I join you, please.”

Fergus didn’t need more encouragement. A convict on the run wouldn’t have moved off any faster.

“About Dave Tudor’s disappearance,” Diamond said to Deans. “When we spoke in your office, I didn’t appreciate how new you were to the show at the time he went missing. You couldn’t have known him.”

“I didn’t know anyone. I’d just started.”

“So you wouldn’t have understood what the fuss was about?”

“There wasn’t much at first. Candida filled in for him. After a few days Mary got worried and sent Candida to check the flat.” He stopped. “I’m sure I told you this.”

Diamond shook his head. “Her name didn’t come up when we spoke.”

“That’s understandable, pet. No one has seen her for years.”

The “pet” rankled, but blandishments like that were built into the persona Deans had developed to deal with everyone. There was no point in objecting, so Diamond stayed on track. “You will have seen her the evening before Mary died. She joined you in the Shield and Dagger.”

Deans raised a finger as if his memory was working again. “You’re right. We’d finished filming an entire episode and Candida turned up out of the blue. I don’t think I spoke to her apart from a hello darling and a quick peck when she came in. I feel sure I told you about that evening.”

“You did, but we didn’t go into who else was there.”

“The usual suspects.” He grinned and added, “As they say. The Shield is our favourite watering place.”

“Crew as well as actors?”

“Decidedly. There’s no discrimination.”

“Fergus?”

“Sure to have been. He likes his drink and Mary was buying. She was always generous.”

“Who else? Sabine?”

“All the cast for sure. Even dear old Daisy Summerfield, bless her. They didn’t all stay late. In fact, Mary herself left about nine.”

“Well tanked?”

Deans flapped his hand in dissent. “I told you before, sweetie. She’d had a few vodkas, that’s all, but she bought an extra bottle at the bar and took it with her. I guess she drank it all at home. Solitary drinking. Isn’t that the saddest thing?”

“She was definitely alone, then?”

“Not when she left the pub. Candida offered to drive her home — which was only a short walk away — but Candie was on soft drinks and we learned later that she was pregnant and being extra careful.”

“Yes, she told me herself she didn’t go inside the house. So if Mary got through that entire bottle, how many shots was that? Twenty? It depends on the size of the glass, I suppose.”

Deans nodded. “Dylan Thomas’s famous last words come to mind: ‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s a record.’”

“Did Candida feel responsible for Mary, offering to take her home?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just a vague theory. She didn’t announce her pregnancy in the pub that evening, did she? She told me she shared the good news with Mary in the car.”

“I can understand that. I expect she wanted her old boss to know first. She’d been Mary’s AP for over a year after Tudor left, so they were close.”

“That would explain it, then.”

“So,” Deans brought his hands together in front of his chest, “what’s your theory, officer?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I can guess. You think Mary was so thrilled to hear about the baby that she went home and sank the rest of the vodka in one session. It seems as good an explanation as any, thinking back.”

Diamond gave the slight nod that said his mind had been there already.

Deans sighed and said with genuine pathos in his voice, “Candie had quit the job when she first got pregnant a couple of years before, but she miscarried not long after, poor love. Conceiving another baby must have made her very excited. She kept it from the rest of us because she wanted to share her feelings with Mary first. We never heard who the father was.”

And Diamond wasn’t going to break that confidence, even though the father had tried to headbutt him. How interesting that none of the company knew of the relationship. Fergus kept his private life well concealed. Maybe it was about his macho image. It was hard to imagine the hard man sharing baby pictures with his workmates. “Are you a family man, Greg?”

Deans gave Diamond a sharp look. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“The sympathetic way you talked about the miscarriage made me think you must be in a relationship.”

He looked down at his watch. “Time’s up, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t you want me to know?”

“Know what?”

“About your home life.”

Deans gave Diamond a stare that could have cut through granite. “That’s not for debate.”

“I’m not interested in debate. Are you married?”

“You have no right—” he started to say.

“Sorry, but I do. It’s my duty to ask questions. You’re going to say it’s your right to remain silent and you’re entitled to do so if you choose, in which case I can get the answer to my question by having you followed, which I’m entitled to do, but I’d find that excessive and so would you.”

He’d seen this obduracy coming. Deans had built a wall around himself. Somewhere behind the theatre-speak, the call sheets, the production schedule and the budget was a real man.

Diamond was determined to break through the wall. “It was a personal question,” he said, switching to a more reasonable tone. “Fair play, I’ll tell you about my own situation. It’s no big deal. I married quite late and sadly it didn’t last all that long because my wife was murdered. I lived the life of a widowed man for a long time after and now I’ve moved in with somebody else.”

In the silence that followed, a series of tiny muscle movements on Deans’s features showed he was in two minds. He scratched his beard, pressed his mouth more firmly shut for a few seconds and then gave in to the moral pressure. “I have a partner, but she has no connection with television, if that’s what you’re thinking. Natalie is disabled. She’s a potter. We first met before I worked in television and before she got this wretched multiple sclerosis. I was a man with a van who did delivery jobs, and she took me on. I drove around the district delivering her products. We became friendly, it got serious and she invited me to live with her. She still works, but we don’t know how much longer she can keep going. When I get home, I help her load the kiln and there’s no shop talk about Swift or anything else I’ve done in the day. I leave it all behind me. And no, I don’t have children.”

“Neither do I,” Diamond said with a sigh so slight it would have passed unnoticed. “Neither do I.”