‘Oh,’ said Zack, looking even more upset now. He plopped down on the seat next to Aiko, who reached out to hold his hand firmly.
‘I think he was trying to clean up his act in his old age,’ said Faith. ‘He still had a long way to go, but he’d signed a sobriety clause for this film and he was actually sticking to it.’
‘Sobriety clause?’ I asked.
‘He was a heavy drinker – a recovering alcoholic really,’ said Faith. ‘One of the many reasons our relationship ended, and why I won’t even touch a drop these days. If an actor has an addiction problem, a lot of production companies will get them to sign a contract saying they’ll stay clean for the duration of the shoot, but often it doesn’t really mean anything; it just means they’ll hide the fact that they’re wasted. But Jeremy really wasn’t drinking. The only thing he’d drunk, as far as I know, was the sake that Mike Mancuso brought to the dinner party, and that was only because Mike poured everyone a glass so we could toast the birthday girls.’ She looked wistful. ‘He was trying. He wasn’t a bad person deep down, he just had his demons.’
An addiction problem, I thought. Jeremy had been addicted to alcohol.
‘Was Jeremy getting any treatment for his addiction, do you know?’ I asked. Nathan looked at me sharply, and I knew he’d realised what I was thinking.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Faith.
‘There’s medication you can get, isn’t there?’ persisted Nathan. ‘To stop you getting the shakes, to stop you craving alcohol? He wasn’t on anything like that?’
‘Oh God no, he wasn’t that bad,’ said Faith. ‘He wouldn’t shake or get ill if he didn’t drink. He drank because he wanted to, not because he had to.’ She looked from Nathan to me. ‘Is that what you think happened? You think he died of an overdose of some kind of medication?’
‘But Zack and I got ill as well, and the others,’ pointed out Aiko. ‘So surely it was some kind of food poisoning?’
‘You said the lab had found pufferfish toxin, just not in the pufferfish,’ said Zack. All three of them looked at us, confused, demanding answers. Nathan spoke slowly, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, it was tetrodotoxin – pufferfish toxin,’ he confirmed. ‘But it wasn’t in the pufferfish you prepared, Zack. We’re not sure how it was administered, but it must have been in something you all consumed—’
‘Hang on,’ said Faith, her face paling. ‘‘Administered’? You mean it was put in the food on purpose? I thought— I thought poor Jeremy had died of food poisoning, or some kind of allergy, but what you’re suggesting is that it was deliberate.’
‘Murder,’ said Zack, turning to me. ‘That’s what I thought you meant, when you told me about the toxin. Someone murdered him, didn’t they?’
Faith gave a sudden jerk and we all looked at her. She swallowed hard.
‘Sorry, muscle spasm. Dodgy back.’ She made a big show of getting up and stretching, her back to us. All the better to compose herself before she shows us her face again, I thought, because her expression had been that of someone who had just had a very nasty surprise or revelation…
‘Are you okay, Ms McKenzie?’ Nathan inquired politely. She nodded fervently as she turned back to us, a big smile on her face.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Shocked, of course. Poor Jeremy.’ She gave a dramatic sigh and then looked at her watch. ‘I’m so sorry, DCI Withers, Jodie, but I’m due back on set in ten minutes and I have to go through my lines again. You’ll let me know if there’s any more news on the investigation, though?’
Someone’s very keen to get rid of us, I thought. I wonder why…?
Nathan smiled. ‘Of course. And please, don’t worry yourselves about this. We are getting closer to finding the murderer, and they won’t act again, not with myself and my uniformed officers around.’ I had to hide a smile at that, because the only uniformed officer around at the moment was Sergeant Adams, and I couldn’t imagine him scaring anyone.
We left Faith, Zack, and Aiko in the trailer.
‘Back on set in ten minutes my ar—’ I began.
‘Are you suggesting our National Treasure in there is hiding something?’ asked Nathan. ‘Because I’d be amazed if she isn’t.’
‘She certainly knows something,’ I said. He nodded.
‘Oh yes, the whole muscle spasm thing… It’s like something suddenly occurred to her, and it was such a shock it actually made her jump.’
‘You think she knows who did it?’
‘Oh God, yes, don’t you?’
I nodded, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘Yes…’
Nathan stopped and looked at me with a grin on his face.
‘Here we go with another ‘yes, but’, don’t we?’
I laughed. ‘Yes. I mean, I think you’re right, but I think the fact it clearly hadn’t occurred to her before means that the murderer’s motive for killing Jeremy isn’t going to be that obvious. It’s not to her, anyway.’
‘So it’s less surprise at the thought they could kill someone, more at the thought that they’d kill Jeremy?’ Nathan looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Yes, you could be right there. So what does that mean?’
‘Maybe Jeremy wasn’t the intended victim. Maybe they meant to kill someone else. Or maybe they didn’t mean to kill anyone.’ Nathan looked at me in surprise.
‘Go on…’
‘Everyone got sick, didn’t they? Or everyone who ate whatever it was that had the toxin in. There’s no way the murderer could have known who would eat what. I was assuming that it had to be someone at the dinner, someone who could make sure that Jeremy ate the right cupcake or whatever, the one with the lethal dose in it, but how could they do that without it looking weird?’
‘Plus, it wasn’t the cupcakes, so they would probably have to slip the toxin into
