Her face colored. "That would be a figure of speech," she said. "I didn't do it. I wasn't sorry when he died, though, far from it. I'd scrambled to find the money in the early days. He put up some, but not much. He wasn't for spending his own money, you see. I mortgaged my house because I believed in the jerk. Then when we finally started to get somewhere, he moves onwards and upwards. I still have to pay the director and the cameraman, even if they're losers."
"Why do you keep hiring them," I said, "if they are such a problem for you?"
"Fire them? Are you kidding? Believe me, I'm not in a position to do that as both of them very well know. We are all complicit, aren't we? We're irrevocably joined, tarnished by the myth of Jasper Robinson, an illusion we prostituted ourselves to create. It doesn't matter anyway. The point is that now that Jasper's dead, the project is dead, too. Too bad, because this was some of our best work."
"This may sound like an awful thing to say," I said. "But is it not possible there would be more interest in this documentary now that he's dead?"
Perhaps in reply, Kent went searching about for a minute, and then she pulled out a cassette and inserted it in a VCR. "Here, be my guest. Have a look," she said. "It's a bit rough still, but you'll get the general idea. I'll even cue it up for you. It will never make it to air. Just press this button when you're done, and if you don't mind, make sure the door is locked when you go." With that, rather mysteriously, she was gone. I pressed PLAY.
Kent Clarke had not been entirely forthcoming about the videocassette she'd shown me. This was not a documentary. This was revenge. What appeared on the screen was not Rapa Nui: The Mystery Solved, not by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it was the expose of a con man, one of the most vicious hatchet jobs I'd ever seen. And it was artfully done. It could have been used in a film studies program to show what could be achieved with several hours of footage and some careful editing.
For starters, there was the interview with Cassandra de Santiago, who came across as a complete flake, emoting about Lemuria and visitors from outer space. Jasper was shown talking and smiling to her, and the way it was put together, it somehow implied he agreed with her outlandish theories, that she was one of the people he consulted. The scene with Gordon Fairweather at the quarry was edited in such a way that Gordon did not come across as an aggressive, to say nothing of arrogant, academic, but rather as someone who knew enough about the subject to be able to call what Jasper had to say horse manure.
During Jasper's presentation the evening he died, his grand finale, I suppose you could call it, although swan song might be more accurate, Rory was shown shaking his head in despair as Jasper spoke. Rory's name and his credentials appeared on the screen as he did so. When Jasper quoted Rory and Gordon, rather than show Jasper, the camera had caught the two academics. Again their qualifications appeared on the screen. Jasper looked like a complete idiot.
The one straightforward interview, and the only one you could really call reasonable, was one that featured Rory. His opinion was that the rongorongo tablet needed more study, but that if it proved to be authentic, then this was a find of great significance.
"So what do you think?" a voice behind me said, and I jumped. Mike Sheppard was leaning against the door jamb.
"It's, um, interesting," I said.
"By which you mean vicious, libelous, what else?" he said. "Vindictive?"
"Pretty much," I said.
"You know what they say about a woman scorned," he said.
"Hell hath no fury?"
"Exactly," he said.
"Did you do this?" I said. "Edit it, I mean?"
"I did the actual work, I suppose," he replied. "With considerable direction from the producer, shall we say. I knew what she wanted, and I worked at it until it did just that."
"That must have taken some doing," I said. "You are very creative. I think there's a job for you teaching film editing."
He laughed. "It's just a matter of going over and over it, looking for the spots where one can cut. Choosing the angles. Once we knew what Kent wanted, I was able to direct Daniel's camera accordingly."
"Did you think it was fair?"
"It doesn't matter what I think," he said. "Kent pays the bills."
"So what now?" I asked. "Are you and Daniel out of work?"
"Temporarily," Mike said. "Kent's been very good about seeing we get paid for our time to this point, I'll say that for her. But there's lots of film work in New Zealand and Australia these days, so we'll be fine. I may actually try my hand at something different after this."
"So what do you think about the San Pedro tablet?" I said. "Is it real?"
"Haven't the foggiest," he said. "Not my area of expertise. J. R. must have gone to a lot of trouble to fake it if he did."
"That's what I was thinking," I said. "He'd have to hide it and then find it and look surprised. Kent said she was there and thought it was the real thing at the time."
"Ah, yes," he said. "Kent Clarke Films was on hand for the great event."
"Were you?"
"I was. What can I say? We're in this canyon in the middle of nowhere. The sun is blasting down on us. The air is a trifle thin. We're having trouble with filters to get the light right. But Jasper has found this mummy, a nasty little bundle that was once a person, and there's what I think is a stick of old wood with it, but Jasper is panting over it, and we have to capture the moment as it were."
"But was the tablet tested or anything?"
"I really don't know. Jasper said the mummy was."
"Surely that's not the same thing. You can't say two objects are the same age just because you found them together. You might assume they were the same age, but you wouldn't know for sure."
"I really can't recall if Jasper said anything about that. You could ask Daniel, next time you see him. He may recall."
"So Daniel was there, too?"
"The Kent Clarke Films team in its entirety was there, yes."
"Anybody else from this group here that was on site when the tablet was found?"
"I believe what's his name, Albert, was there," he said. "And that unpleasant woman who looks like Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie."
"Edwina Rasmussen," I said. I had to smile. "But not Dave Maddox?"
"Not Dave, no. Not when I was there, anyway."
"Kent thinks now that the tablet might be a fake," I said. "Or maybe not from Chile."
"She would, wouldn't she?" Mike said.
There was a lot to chew on, which might explain why I couldn't sleep that night. There was something really bothering me. For one thing, I knew the minute I went to sleep that Rob would be there telling me I was missing something really obvious. I did not recall Rob ever being that annoying in real life, which was just as well, because if he had been I would no longer be with him. In my dreams, however, he was persistent as can be.
What bothered me more than anything, though, was the thought that no matter how unwittingly, I had played some part in Seth's decision to kill himself. Rob had told me once that people would be much less likely to try hanging themselves if they knew that, unlike official hangings where the victim's neck is broken, those who step off chairs endure a slow death by strangulation, sometimes taking as long as half an hour to die. If Seth had stepped off the edge of the bathtub as I suspected he had, he could easily have swung himself back if he changed his mind, but he hadn't. It was a horrible thought.