“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?”