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.”