by Fiona Leitch
‘So there’s no way anyone could buy it here?’ said Nathan. ‘What about in the States, or in Japan?’ He looked at me, significantly; because of course Zack had previously lived in Japan, as had Aiko and Kimi.
Matt Turner shook his head. ‘Nah. You have to be a health professional to buy it. In the States you have to register with the CDC and follow all kinds of regulations. I couldn’t find anything like that in Japan, but I reckon it would be the same. They wouldn’t sell it to just anyone.’
‘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 week later and admitted he was wrong, and that you were an amazing young actor. I can’t say you cured him of being a racist, but he was trying.’
‘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 the food at the table, in front of everyone,’ said Nathan. ‘And I really don’t know how they could have done that.’
‘No…’ I said. Something was nagging at me. ‘We still don’t know what the toxin was in. But it seems to me that maybe no one was meant to die; they were all just meant to get sick—’
‘To make it look like another accident, something else caused by the curse,’ said Nathan. ‘Yes, that makes sense. But until we know how the toxin was consumed…’ He took out the sheet of paper Matt Turner had given him. ‘Tetrodotoxin comes in pill form, so the murderer would have had to crush it and sprinkle it onto the food.’
‘Which everyone would see, unless it was cooked into it, which we know it wasn’t.’ I groaned in frustration.
‘And if you crushed it up and put it in a drink, it would make it go cloudy and they’d notice that too,’ said Nathan. Cloudy, I thought, and something lurking in the recesses of my brain stood up and waved at me.
‘Not if the drink was already cloudy,’ I said. I grabbed his hand. ‘We need to go back and check on the crime scene.’
Nathan had called the Scene of Crime officers back to Zack’s trailer earlier that day, and they were there now taking samples of every single food item that was left – not that there was much. Jeremy’s plate had already been taken, but they now bagged up all of the crockery and the cutlery and chopsticks to test for any trace of tetrodotoxin.
Nathan nodded to the lead officer as we entered, and I made my way to the table.
‘These glasses,’ I said, pointing to the small sake cups that sat empty among the remains of the meal. ‘Were they all empty when you got here? I didn’t look before.’
The SOCO nodded. ‘Yes, there was no drink in any of them.’
‘Where’s the bottle?’ asked Nathan. The SOCO looked around, then at the list of evidence being bagged up.
‘We haven’t found one,’ he said. Nathan raised his eyebrows and looked at me.
‘The sake?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Aiko told me that Mike Mancuso had made a point of buying a bottle of sake, so they could toast their birthdays in proper Japanese style. Only, she wasn’t impressed because it was nigori sake, which is filtered differently. It’s less refined and, more to the point, cloudy.’
‘So you could slip a crushed-up pill into it and nobody would notice?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it sounds likely. Kimi wouldn’t have drunk it because it’s made of fermented rice and she has a rice allergy, and we both just heard Faith say she hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in years after her relationship with Jeremy.’
‘So that explains why they weren’t ill.’
‘One of the things that’s been niggling me,’ I said, ‘is why Mike Mancuso poured a glass of rice wine, with its extremely high alcohol content, to a recovering alcoholic who had signed a sobriety clause, presumably on Mike’s own insistence. I mean, he might just be an absolute git…’
‘He is,’ said Nathan firmly.
‘I won’t argue with you there,’ I said. ‘But think about it: he encouraged Jeremy to have a drink. Not only that, he allowed Zack to go ahead with serving the pufferfish, even though as far as everyone but Gino knew, it was risky. I know he said Gino had reassured him, but the fact is, if you’re serving something that’s toxic it’s always going to have the potential to be a disaster, innit? He didn’t know it wasn’t toxic.’
‘Okay…’ said Nathan, and I could see him working it out in his own mind. ‘So say the intention was just to make everyone sick. Why did Jeremy die?’
‘Because all the glasses were empty. Faith and Kimi definitely did not drink their sake. An alcoholic, about to fall off the wagon for the first time in a while, is not going to leave two glasses of rice wine undrunk. He probably finished them off for them.’
‘That makes sense… But Mancuso poured himself a drink. I know he claims he was sick as well, but he surely wouldn’t actually drink it, would he?’
‘No…’ I said, but then Nathan did a mini fist-pump.
‘I’ve got it! He spiked the bottle with tetrodotoxin from … somewhere, and
then poured everyone a glass.’ Nathan mimed picking up a glass. ‘‘A toast to the birthday girls!’ And then his phone goes off at some pre-arranged time – either he’s set an alarm to sound like a ringtone, or he’s genuinely got his daughter or whoever it was to call him, so he says, ‘Sorry, everyone, got to take this, start without me’, and goes outside—’
‘Still carrying his glass of sake—’
‘Which he tips out onto the grass while he’s on the phone, then goes back in looking like he’s drunk it, and then pretends to be ill overnight.’ Nathan looked at me. ‘You are bloody brilliant, Parker.’
I beamed at him. ‘Why thank you, DCI Withers.’
‘Ahem…’ We were interrupted by the SOCO, who we’d both completely forgotten about. ‘That’s a great theory, as long as we can get a trace off the glasses. It would be nice if you could find us the bottle…’
‘Guv! Guv!’ Matt Turner burst into the trailer like an overexcited puppy. He stopped, embarrassed, as he spotted the SOC team watching him.
‘Matt, what is it?’
‘I’ve been doing some poking around, talking to the crew, and you’ll never guess who has a teenage daughter who just came out of heroin rehab in a poncey Swiss drug clinic!’
‘Mike Mancuso,’ Nathan and I said together. Matt’s face fell and his whole body deflated – funnily enough, just like a pufferfish.
‘Yeah,’ he said. Nathan patted him on the back.
‘Nice work, Matt,’ he said. ‘You may have just stitched up the whole case.’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘We might know the who and the how, but we still don’t know the why.’ And then my phone pinged, and we knew that too.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Work on the shoot had all but stopped. Everyone who wasn’t on set had their mobile phone on them, and they’d all received an anonymous group message with a link to an internet news site and the words, ‘please share’, at the same time as I had.
