save my peace of mind they hadn’t liked to say it aloud.
‘No film is worth dying for,’ O’Hara said.
‘The film has stirred up mud that’s been lying quiet for twenty-six years,’ I said. ‘That’s what’s happened. No point in regretting it. So now we have the choice of either pulling the plug on the film and retiring in disarray – and where is my future if I do that? – or… er… sifting through the mud for the facts.’
‘But,’ Robbie said doubtfully, ‘could you really find any? I mean, when it all happened, when it was fresh, the police got nowhere.’
‘The police are ordinary people,’ I said. ‘Not infallible supermen. If we try, and get nowhere also, then so be it.’
‘But how do you start?’
‘Like I said, we look for someone who knows about knives.’
It had been growing dark while we spoke. As Robbie crossed to flip the light switch, we heard the front door open and close, and footsteps coming heavily along the passage towards us.
It was Paul who appeared in the kitchen doorway: Paul annoyed, Paul suspicious, Paul’s attention latching with furious astonishment onto my face. The indecisiveness of our last meeting had vanished. The bluster was back.
‘And what do you think you’re doing here?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve told you to stay away, you’re not wanted.’
‘I told Dorothea I would tidy up a bit.’
‘I will tidy the house. I don’t want you here. And as for you, Dr Gill, your services aren’t needed. Clear out, all of you.’
It was O’Hara’s first encounter with Paul Pannier; always a learning experience.
‘And where did you get a key from?’ he demanded aggrievedly. ‘Or did you break in?’ He looked at O’Hara directly for the first time and said, ‘Who the hell are you? I want you all out of here av once.’
I said neutrally, ‘It’s your mother’s house and I’m here with her permission.’
Paul wasn’t listening. Paul’s gaze had fallen on the table, and he was staring at the knife.
There was barely a smear of blood on it as it had been more or less wiped clean by its outward passage through many layers of polystyrene and cloth, so it seemed to be the knife itself, not its use, that was rendering Paul temporarily speechless.
He raised his eyes to meet my gaze, and there was no disguising his shock. His eyes looked as dark as his pudgy features were pale. His mouth had opened. He found nothing at all to say but turned on one foot and stamped away out of the kitchen down the hall and out through the front door, leaving it open behind him.
‘Who was he? O’Hara asked. ‘And what was that all about?’
‘His mother,’ Robbie explained, ‘was savagely cut with a knife in this house last Saturday. He may think that somehow we’ve found the weapon.’
‘And have you?’ O’Hara turned to me. ‘What was it you were trying to tell me yesterday? But this isn’t the knife you found on the Heath, is it?’
‘No.’
He frowned. ‘I don’t understand any of it.’
That made two of us; but somewhere there had to be an explanation. Nothing happened without cause.
I asked Robbie Gill, who was tidying and closing his medical case, ‘Do you know anyone called Bill Robinson who mends motorbikes?’
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Not a hundred per cent. Do you?’
‘Bill Robinson who mends motorbikes? No.’
‘You know the town. Who would know?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘He may have,’ I explained briefly, ‘what this house was torn apart for.’
‘And that’s all you’re telling me?’
I nodded.
Robbie pulled the telephone towards him, consulted a notebook from his pocket, and pressed some numbers. He was passed on, relay by relay, to four more numbers but eventually pushed the phone away in satisfaction and told me, ‘Bill Robinson works for Wrigley’s garage, and lives somewhere in Exning Road. He tinkers with Harley Davidsons for a hobby.’
‘Great,’ I said.
‘But,’ O’Hara objected, ‘What has any of this to do with our film?’
‘Knives,’ I said, ‘and Valentine Clark knew Jackson Wells.’
‘Good luck with the mud,’ Robbie said.
The mogul proved to be a hard-nosed thin businessman in his forties with no desire even to look at the growing reels of printed film. He didn’t like movies, he said. He despised film actors. He thought directors should be held in financial handcuffs. Venture capital was his field, he said, with every risk underwritten. Wrong field, I thought.
He had demanded in advance to have an accounting for every cent disbursed or committed since the first day of principal photography, with the result that