I nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m afraid so. Did you see the video?’
‘Ooh, the one on here?’ She took her mobile phone out. Up to now it had always annoyed me the way she held it suspiciously in her hand like it was about to explode, but now I welcomed her ineptitude with anything more technical than the kettle (honestly, nothing to do with her age, she just always had problems with anything that had an on-off switch). She opened the message and her finger hovered over the link. ‘Should I click on this?’
‘NO!!’ we all cried, and she looked mildly surprised.
‘Okay then, I won’t,’ she said. ‘So what’s going on? Why is the shoot cancelled?’
Nathan and I exchanged glances. This was likely to take some time.
Mike Mancuso was a powerful man, and powerful men are used to getting what they want, especially in the movie industry. One of the things he wanted was – how to say this nicely – favours of the more sordid variety (that’s how my mum would probably have put it, had she been discussing it with her friends at the OAPs’ coffee morning, probably in a loud stage whisper to show how shocked she was). And he usually got them, too, because most of the people he pursued were desperate enough to agree to almost anything.
This particular young man had agreed, reluctantly, but had regretted it immediately. I wondered how many other young men (and women) had been through the same thing, having been convinced by a sexual predator like Mancuso that this was how things worked in the film industry. From what Faith had told me before, it had almost been par for the course in the early days of her career, but that hardly made it okay.
The hidden camera had caught the whole thing, but when it came down to it, even with the video as evidence, what could they do? There was nothing illegal on that video – apart from the white powder, but for all we could prove it could have been icing sugar, or talcum powder. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Mancuso hadn’t physically forced the victim to do anything. It was coercion rather than assault, something which ethically was clearly wrong, but legally considered a ‘grey area’. The police, said Faith, did not have a good track record in such cases, and to my eternal shame, Nathan and I both had to admit she was right.
But she was an actor, and she still wanted a career, so she couldn’t do anything openly. She’d sent Mancuso a copy anonymously and told him that his days were numbered if he didn’t do the right thing and come clean. He’d immediately assumed that the unknown blackmailer had wanted money.
He’d begun to put funds aside from the production budget, not just to pay off the blackmailer but also as a little nest egg for himself if it did all come out and he suddenly found himself without a career. Not that he really needed that hundred grand (although, when the production accountant went through the figures later they would discover it was more like two hundred and fifty thousand pounds that were unaccounted for), but he had thought it was best to be prepared.
Only the production manager had begun to ask questions. Bills were due, and suddenly there wasn’t enough money to pay them. The budget was blown and they hadn’t even finished shooting. It would all come out. The investors would want their money back, and it was no longer there.
The series of ‘accidents’ and talk of the curse had been a godsend. If Mancuso could arrange one big accident that would stop filming for a few weeks, maybe even a month, then the accident insurance would pay out, the creditors would be satisfied, and it would give him enough money to pay off the blackmailer once and for all – or time to find them (and do what to them he did not divulge to Nathan, but it couldn’t have been good). And with his teenage daughter coming to stay with him in sleepy Cornwall after being released from rehab, along with her medication, the final part of his plan – the tetrodotoxin – had fallen into place. It had felt like fate, lending him a hand. He’d been so sure of the brilliance of his scheme, and so convinced that no one would ever suspect it was anything other than pufferfish poisoning, that he’d carelessly tossed the sake bottle into the dumpster outside his office.
No one was supposed to die. It was sheer bad luck that Jeremy, the recovering alcoholic who had only fallen off the wagon because of Mancuso himself, had drunk more than he was meant to and ruined the plan.
‘Well, I don’t think much of him,’ said Mum sniffily as Nathan and I finished the sorry tale, and we couldn’t disagree with that, either.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was too cold really to be out in the garden at this time of night, but I’d got used to finishing the day sitting on the wall and staring out at the ocean, and I missed it when I couldn’t. It was too cold to sit on the stone wall, though, so I leant on it and looked out across the sheep field onto which my house backed. I could smell the sea beyond the field (and the sheep as well, to be honest), but it was too dark to see anything other than the odd ripple of the waves in the distance as the moonlight glinted off the sea. The stars were bright overhead. It felt desolate somehow, but still romantic. I felt like I was on the cover of some romance novel, a lone woman staring bravely out to sea – an image that was spoilt slightly by the gastric explosions emanating from a nearby huddle of my woolly neighbours. Surely
