‘We’ve tried the only contact number we have for him, but no joy. D’you know where we can find him?’
The dark Spanish eyes looked at me, a little curiously. ‘I haven’t a bleedin’ clue, mate,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I hardly know the guy. I’ve never worked with him before, and I’d never even heard of him, until he turned up on the production team up in Scotland.’
He stirred his pasta around on his plate, mixing the sauce through it. ‘What’s all this about, Oz?’ he asked, quietly.
‘Nothing,’ I said, with as much wide-eyed innocence as I could manage. ‘Like I said, we’re just Miles’ errand people.’
‘No I don’t mean this, I mean the whole thing. I saw Dawn on set yesterday afternoon; she looked as fit as a fiddle. Virus my bum. What’s up? Have she and Miles had an up-and-downer? I’ve worked with them before. I was there when they met in fact, on that project up in the Highlands a few years back. She’s nice, but she can be a fiery little thing from time to time.’
‘She’s the quiet one of the family, mate. She’s Prim’s sister.’
‘Of course,’ Jenny exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten that. It said that in the Mail on Sunday, too.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Dawn,’ said Primavera. ‘Or with her and Miles. She’s just found out that she’s pregnant. It’ll be a first for both of them, and Miles is over the moon. When she told him last night, he insisted that she was taking a week off. The virus thing was a cover story to keep the press at bay. That’s what’s really behind it all.’
Nice one, girl, I said to myself, as the sound man’s face split into a wide grin.
‘Ahhh,’ he exclaimed, as he swallowed hook, line and sinker, ‘I knew it was something big. I know how much a week’s delay costs. I’m part of it.’
‘Going back to the boy Queen,’ I ventured, a little later. ‘Do you think he might have picked up some extra work on the fly? We checked with his agency; they haven’t placed him anywhere.’
‘Like I said, mate,’ Pep replied. ‘I wouldn’t know. The guy never says much about himself. That’s unusual, for our world’s a bit of a co-operative. We exchange information all the time about projects coming up and stuff, and where there might be work going. He doesn’t. It’s as if he’s only interested in this one job and that’s it.’
‘Real mystery man, eh.’
‘That’s right. He’s a good enough sparks though. Used to all sorts; high voltage work and everything. He’s worked in the Middle East; he did tell me that, and out of Rotterdam, and Singapore.’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘Haven’t a clue about that either. You can’t tell from listening to him, that’s for sure. I thought he might have been Scottish like you, then I thought there might be some European in there.’
‘How did he get on the project if he’s such an unknown quantity?’
Pep finished off his linguini. ‘It was a last minute thing. Originally, it was Zoltan Szabo who was booked in for the job; I know ’cause he told me the week before. I work with Zoltan a lot of the time. But he had to pull out, and Stu was handy so the agency slotted him in.’
‘What happened to Zoltan?’ Prim asked.
The sound man frowned, his black brows forming a hairy ridge. ‘Bad, that was. There he was going home from the pub the very night before we was due to go up north to start work on the project, when. . Bang.’ The word sounded round the small room.
‘He was hit by a car; broke both his legs. And you know what? Bleedin’ driver didn’t even stop.’
Chapter 50
‘This much is certain,’ Miles Grayson growled. He seemed to have taken my advice; he was doing a damn fine job of focusing his anger. ‘I will never use that agency again, and I’ll do my best to see that no one else in this business does either.’
I had to agree with him. Zoltan Szabo had been knocked down and almost killed by a hit-and-run driver, and next day a new and previously unknown electrician had shown up out of the blue, ready and willing to take his place on the project.
No one had asked a thing about him, and no one had known a thing about him — other than that he was there and the agency was no longer in a hole.
‘Should we go to them tomorrow and ask to see the file they hold on Stu Queen?’ I asked.
It was Prim who answered. ‘No. They’d be bound to ask why we were so interested in him. We’d have to give them a hell of a strong cover story; they might get nervous and call their lawyers. They might get silly and call the press. The whole thing could blow wide open.’
She was right too.
I looked at Miles across the top of my glass, where an ice cube big enough to have been the centrepiece of another movie was fighting to submerge a slice of lemon. ‘So we don’t really know any more than we did before we spoke to Pep,’ I muttered. ‘That Stephen Donn posed as a film sparks to get on set and among us, that he’s a real bad bastard and that he has Dawn.’
‘We do,’ said Prim. ‘We know that he’s worked in other places as an electrician. Maybe he was Stu Queen there too.’
‘Maybe he has a criminal record as Stu Queen,’ Miles suggested.
‘If he has, Mike will find it,’ I countered. ‘But if he has so what? We know already that he’s a fucking criminal. No, we’re back where we were, sat on our hands.’
‘And the Goddamned phone hasn’t rung all day, other than once when Kiki Eldon called to tell me that the press have bought our story, without question.’
‘So maybe tomorrow, we’ll have mail,’ Prim mused.
I blinked. ‘Hold the phone,’ I exclaimed. ‘Maybe we’ve got it now. Dawn’s got an e-mail address. You and she talk that way all the time.’ Miles, who had been slumped, sat upright in his chair. ‘Could she access it from here?’ I asked him.
‘Sure, she has a lap-top.’ He was out of that chair in a second, running out of the room and up the big staircase. Less than a minute later he was back, clutching an Apple Mac Powerbook, with a modem cable flying behind it.
He crouched beside the telephone jack point and changed cables; Mr Mac was powering up already.
‘You do know her password?’ I asked.
‘Fuck!’
‘No, it’s unlikely to be that. But why don’t you try P-R-I-M, ’ Prim suggested. ‘They’re usually four letters, and my password is D-A-W-N, so you never know.’ Miles nodded, moved the cursor to the apple symbol in the top left-hand corner of the colour screen and opened the Internet software. A box, with a cursor flashing on an empty line, appeared on screen. We watched as he keyed in P-R-I-M.
An on-screen dialogue told us what was happening step by step as the modem dialled the Internet provider. After a few seconds, the connection was made, and a soft — and very well-known — voice told us that Dawn had mail.
‘What do I do now?’ asked Miles. ‘I don’t use this stuff.’
‘Gimme.’ He obeyed at once, and passed the lap-top across to Prim. She pulled down the e-mail section of the menu, gave two quick commands to retrieve the waiting messages, then, when the process was complete, broke the Internet connection.
There were three new messages in the off-line mailbox when Prim opened it. One was from ‘DPhil’ — SuperDave, I guessed — the second was from someone with an all-numeral Compuserve address, and the third was from ‘stuer@hotmail.com’.
‘That’s him,’ said Prim. ‘Funny guy. Stu Queen: S-T-U and then E-R, the Queen.’
‘You sure?’ asked Miles.
‘There’s a quick way to find out.’ She clicked on the small envelope symbol to open the document. The screen cleared then filled with a new window, containing a page of text. ‘It’s him,’ she cried out. ‘Look there. He sent it this afternoon.’
She fell silent as Miles and I perched on the couch on either side of her, leaning close so that we could clearly see the message on the flat LCD screen. We read it together.
It began politely: