“I expect you watch the show.”
“Hardly ever. I soon got tired of it. When Mary died, all the originality died with her.”
“Do you keep up with any of the others?”
She flared up again. “What’s this about? Are you trying to suggest I had something to do with all the jinx stuff?”
Diamond was there to ask questions, not answer them. “Did you make friends with any of the cast or crew?”
“I wasn’t there long enough to know anyone properly. And now I really do have to go. I’ve got another class in under an hour and I won’t get a lunch break.”
Before they left he insisted on calling at the office again. Sheelagh, the school secretary with the enquiring mind, greeted them like old friends. “You found her? How did it go?”
“We got all we needed,” he told her, which wasn’t quite true. In his job, you never got all you needed. “How does madam fit in here?” A mischievous question that made Ingeborg look away in embarrassment.
“She doesn’t even try. She’s got her own private hideaway in that gorgeous studio. Nice if you can get it. Did you see her changing room?”
“We weren’t invited in. We spoke in the dance area.”
“Typical. Hardly anyone has seen inside. She’s got it all on tap. Coffee-maker, fridge, washing machine, TV and sofa-bed, would you believe? It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s booze as well.”
“So, Sheelagh, what does she get up to?”
“That’s anyone’s guess.”
“Are there men on the staff?”
“Not enough.” She laughed. “No, I’m joking. To be fair, I don’t think there’s anything like that. She lives with a guy we’ve seen a couple of times when he came to pick her up because the weather was really bad and she couldn’t cycle home. They seem to hit it off. But she doesn’t mix with the rest of us and people can easily take that personally.”
“Is she popular with the students?”
“They don’t mind her. She puts in the work with them. Did you get what you came for?”
“You asked me that already.” He wasn’t interested in fuelling the school gossip machine. He was ready to leave.
12
He would have preferred taking the ride back to Concorde House as Ingeborg’s passenger and hearing her thoughts, but that would have left his own car standing on the Chimneys drive. Life was never tidy for Peter Diamond.
Most of the team were at their desks when he arrived, so he presided over a “catch-up session,” as he called it, insisting they came from behind their screens and sat in a circle at the far end of the room like kids in school. So be it. Nothing was more annoying than fingers working phones and keyboards while he wanted attention. “Between us, we’ve covered quite a bit of the so-called jinx story. What’s your verdict? Does it stack up?”
They were slow to respond. He suspected some were distracted by his new look. They’d have to learn to live with it.
“Too soon to say,” John Leaman said eventually. He was uncomfortable with unproved opinions.
“John’s right,” Ingeborg said. “None of us have got the full picture.”
Diamond had been thinking about the full picture more than he was ready to admit. “For me, it comes down to this: it makes a good newspaper story if you believe in bad luck, and even if you don’t, other people’s troubles make interesting reading. Many, if not most, of the incidents seem to have been accidents or acts of God. Stuff happens, as that American statesman famously said about the Iraq war.”
“He was talking about the looting of the museum in Baghdad, not the war,” Leaman said.
“Doesn’t matter, John. The phrase stuck.”
“And papers always print the bad news,” Keith Halliwell said. “Good news stories don’t interest people.”
“Which is why a jinx makes good reading,” Diamond said. “This morning Inge and I met the woman originally chosen for the plum part of Caitlin Swift, the one who took fright and pulled out. I’m satisfied she wasn’t under orders from anyone else. She insists she acted alone. Her quitting was a setback for the show, so it ticks the jinx box, but I don’t think we need to dig deeper. She’s given up TV work now.”
“Is she bitter about it?” Keith Halliwell asked.
“Bitter with herself, but she doesn’t blame anyone on the show. Am I right, Inge?”
Ingeborg said, “That’s how I saw it, guv.”
“She was treated kindly by the producer, Mary Wroxeter, and there was some kind of settlement. They filled the gap with another actor they’d auditioned before who happened to be Sabine San Sebastian. The show became a hit and Trixie Playfair was soon forgotten.”
“No actor wants that,” Halliwell said.
“I just told you she stopped being an actor. She’s a schoolteacher now. It’s a new way of life.” Concern crept up Diamond’s spine as he spoke the words. He’d soon be out of a job himself.
Halliwell didn’t want to leave it. “She must have hated what happened.”
“Of course. It was a personal failure, but she’s put that behind her, as you do. I don’t see her wanting to make trouble for the show.”
“I’m only saying she almost certainly carries the scars. You can never tell how big a hurt it is.” Halliwell carried scars of his own that no one but Diamond knew about.
“True, Keith, but it happened years ago. The Post must have been hard-pressed to dust that off and use it.” Before Halliwell could say more, Diamond continued without pause, “The next thing to go wrong was the fire in the van while they were filming the pilot episode. It could well have been started deliberately. Some expensive sound equipment was lost and one of the engineers got burnt trying to rescue items.”
“Arson?” John Leaman said.
“Arson can’t be ruled out.”
“Fire investigators usually discover how fires start.”
“Yes, and the insurance company produced a report that I’ve seen. The seat of the fire was literally a seat in the van — the passenger seat. There’s a lot of waiting about at a TV shoot and several sound engineers used the cab between takes. They all denied smoking, but a cigarette butt was given as the likeliest cause.”
“Accidental, then,” Leaman said, more for his own satisfaction than anyone else’s.
“What did the insurers say?” Paul Gilbert asked.
“They agreed it wasn’t deliberate.”
“Did they pay up?”
“They found a clause in the policy obliging the company to take reasonable precautions. Allowing people to smoke in the front seats was held to be unreasonable. After months of arguing, some kind of payment was made, but it didn’t cover the legal costs, let alone the costs of the fire. Was this the jinx? You can just about argue that it was.”
“The guy who was burnt,” Gilbert said. “Was he one of the smokers?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“If he thought he caused the fire, he may have risked his life to keep the damage to a minimum.”
“Speculation,” Ingeborg said.
“It’s all speculation until we nail someone.”
Diamond knew the tensions in the team and didn’t want anyone feeling inhibited from speaking, but the fire investigation had been thorough and he couldn’t see any value in probing more. He moved on. “Next up, two stuntmen were injured during the first season. They were in a rooftop chase and they both fell and broke limbs. I haven’t looked into this one, but I suspect it was a genuine accident.”
Paul Gilbert felt his voice needed to be heard. He was still the IO. “Swift is a high-action show and there are going to be accidents to stunt people. This was serious, so I guess it got reported in the media, but I doubt if it was down to sabotage.”
Leaman said, “You can’t say. None of us can say.” He could always be relied on to expose loose reasoning.