‘So how would you go about getting someone to prescribe it to you?’ I asked.
‘You couldn’t ask for it to be prescribed because it’s experimental and really expensive,’ said Matt. ‘Plus, you’d have to be suffering from cancer or heroin withdrawal. Oh, or Parkinson’s Disease – that’s another thing they sometimes use it for. You’d probably have to get picked for a medical trial. Here.’ Matt unfolded a sheet of paper tucked into his notebook. ‘I printed this off the Internet for you, Guv.’ Nathan took it from him.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We know that it’s pretty bloody difficult to get hold of, but someone did get hold of it, so now all we’ve got to do is find a cast or crew member who’s secretly receiving treatment for cancer, addiction, or Parkinson’s…’ Nathan looked thoughtful. ‘Off the top of your head, which would you say is more likely?’
‘Addiction,’ I said promptly. ‘You know what movie stars are like… But heroin’s a bit hardcore, innit? Celebs normally go for coke or weed.’
Nathan looked amused. ‘Do they?’
‘They do if you believe the tabloids…’
Nathan let DS Turner go and have a nose around the shoot. It might not have been terribly professional, but it wasn’t every day we got a film crew in this part of Cornwall, and Nathan, who had apparently been a real stickler for the rules when he’d first moved here, had now relaxed enough to occasionally let his junior officers have a bit of fun.
We wandered through the grounds of the house, watching the organised chaos of the movie business unfold around us.
‘Okay,’ said Nathan. ‘We know someone had the toxin, even if we don’t know yet how or where they got it. The next thing is, how did they administer it to Jeremy and the others? We know now it wasn’t the cupcakes, which really seemed like a good fit because we don’t know who made them and the toxin could have been added during baking.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘No. Was there a chance that it could have been added to the other dishes? The ones you made?’
I thought it over. ‘Well… maybe. Zack and Aiko carried all the food over from the food truck to his trailer, so…’ I didn’t want to admit to the possibility that it could have been either of them. Nathan smiled gently.
‘I don’t think it would be Zack. Why go to the trouble of buying poison that would make it look like you were the only one who could have done it? No. But Aiko?’
‘It can’t have been Aiko,’ I said firmly. ‘I mean, yeah, it could have been her, but why? She likes Zack, so she wouldn’t want to incriminate him—’
‘Unless she’s playing him.’
‘That’s true, I suppose. But why kill Jeremy? She can’t have known him before this shoot.’
‘Maybe Jeremy wasn’t the target?’ said Nathan. ‘Maybe she meant to kill her sister, or Faith…’
‘Maybe, if Zack told her what Faith had said…’ I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t believe that. In fact, I don’t even believe that Faith would say the things he says she did. I think he must have got it wrong.’
‘I think we need a chat with both of them,’ said Nathan.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As luck would have it, we got our interview with them almost by accident. Our wander had taken us full circle and we were nearly back at the food truck when we heard raised voices coming from Faith’s trailer close by. We glanced at each other and quickly headed up the steps.
The door was open, and inside Zack was glaring at Faith as Aiko tried to calm him down.
‘Don’t invite me in here like we're all friends,’ he spat at her. ‘Pretending to care, like some mother hen. Wanting to make sure Aiko’s well enough to be here!’ Aiko didn’t look well enough, to be fair, and his anger was making her look even more frail.
‘Zack!’ I cried out, as Nathan got between him and Faith.
‘You need to calm down, son,’ said Nathan.
‘It’s okay,’ said Faith, exasperated. ‘We need to get to the bottom of this. Come on, tell me. You obviously don’t like me, and I have no idea what it is I’m supposed to have done.’
Zack glared at her. ‘I heard you in your trailer, talking to someone. Telling them me and Kimi were only there to meet some diversity quota. Don’t deny it.’
Faith looked confused for a moment, then her face cleared. ‘Oh my God, you thought…? That wasn’t me, that was Jeremy.’
‘I heard you,’ said Zack defiantly.
‘Yes, I’m sure you did, because I was repeating what he’d said.’ She sat down, and a shaky Aiko followed suit. ‘You have to understand, Jeremy was a product of his generation, of his upbringing. He used to say he was proudly un-PC—’
‘That’s just code for ‘I’m a racist’,’ I said, and Faith nodded.
‘I know. Anyway, we shared the same agent, and he’d rung me to ask how the shoot was going, but he really wanted to check up on Jeremy. You know he’s got— He had this reputation as a bit of a hell-raiser. I told him what Jeremy had said to me about you two on the very first day of the shoot, when we were filming up in Scotland.’
Zack didn’t speak, but he looked upset, and I remembered the day of the dinner party when we’d watched them filming. The two men had seemed to get on very well that day, but now he was hearing that it had been an act. Or had it?
‘If you’d hung around or, better still, come in and talked to me,’ Faith continued, ‘you’d have heard me tell Howard that Jeremy had come to me a
