He pursed his lips. ‘The house was trashed first.’
We digested it in silence.
‘You’re sure?’ I asked finally.
Gill said, ‘Judging from the comparatively small amount of swelling and the rate of bleeding, Dorothea hadn’t been in that state very long before her friend Betty found her. I came at once when Betty phoned me. I wasn’t much longer than five minutes on the way. Betty might be lucky that she didn’t arrive here ten minutes sooner.’ He sighed. ‘It isn’t our problem, I’m glad to say. We can leave it to the police.’
‘Yes.’
He looked at his watch and said it had been a long day, and I agreed with that too. When he told the police he was leaving, they decided to take his fingerprints. They took mine also, and Betty’s: for elimination, they said. They wrote brief statements from Betty and me, and we told them Paul’s fingerprints would be everywhere, like our own.
Betty’s husband came to collect her with wide consoling arms, and at length I drove back to Bedford Lodge and downed a medicinal large one with Moncrieff.
Summoned by Ed on my say-so, all available crews, technicians, wardrobe people and actors (except Nash) gathered in the stable yard at dawn on Sunday morning.
I mounted a wooden chair to address them and, in the fresh ever-moving East Anglian air, wondered how Shakespeare could have expected Henry V’s words before Agincourt to be heard by any but the nearest knights, given the clinking noises of armour on horseback and the absence of microphones.
I at least had a megaphone, equipment perhaps over-familiar to my audience.
‘I expect,’ I said loudly, when movement in the company had diminished to restless impatience, ‘that most of you have by now read yesterday’s ”Hot from the Stars” column in the Daily Drumbeat.’
I reaped stares, nods, and a good many sardonic smiles. No overt sneers. Something, at least.
‘As you can guess,’ I went on, ‘the column badly disturbed our parent company in Hollywood. Fortunately our producer assured them that you are all doing a very good job here. Some of you may like it, some may not, but Hollywood has confirmed that I continue to direct. Nash Rourke has told them he is in favour of this. In consequence, nothing has changed. Whether or not you agree with the Drumbeat’s assessment of my character, if you want to continue to be employed on this enterprise, you will please make a private commitment to give this film your best shot. For all our sakes, the creation of a well-made, visually exciting commercial motion picture should take priority over any personal feelings. I want you to be able in the future to say with satisfaction that you worked on this film. So it’s back to business as usual, which means will the lads now saddle the horses and everyone else continue with the schedule that Ed has distributed. OK? Good.’
I lowered the megaphone, stepped off the chair and turned my back to the company to join Moncrieff, who had been standing behind me in support.
‘Socked it to them,’ he approved with irony. ‘We could make a film of making this film.’
‘Or a book,’ I said.
Our female star, Silva Shawn, loped across the stable yard to join us. As usual, when not dressed in character, she wore flapping dark voluminous layers of clothes reaching to her ankles, with black Doc Marten boots below and a charcoal hat above, a hat that looked like a soft collapsed topper sitting on her eyebrows. She walked with long strides and arrived at most meetings with her shapely chin thrust forward in the body language of belittle-me-if-you-dare.
O’Hara had strongly warned me not to pay her any compliment she could possibly construe as sexual harassment, which I found difficult to comply with, as the adjectives which sprang first and naturally to my mind, apart from delicious, were divine, bewitching and ultra-desirable: but ‘Never call her darling,’ O’Hara had instructed.
‘Why did you pick her if she’s so touchy?’ I’d asked him, and he had said succinctly, ‘She can act.’
To date her acting in the film had chiefly consisted of the notably explicit bedroom scenes with Nash (punctuated by No, no, no, moans from Howard) that we had captured the previous week. We had in fact faithfully adhered to Howard’s script in the matter of words: what infuriated him was that I had ignored his intention to have Nash and Silva deliver their lines fully clothed. He had set their restrained show of