Her rose-gold telephone rang and without a glance in our direction, she picked it up and answered it.
‘Yeah … Yeah … No, I can’t talk to you right now. I’m about to go on and I’ve got someone with me. No …’
But although she didn’t talk, she listened, holding the phone with her little finger pointing in the air.
I took in the rest of the dressing room while I waited for her, wondering what Hawthorne would make of it all. Somehow, I didn’t think he would find it too difficult to work out Sky Palmer’s background, her family history and everything she’d done in the last ten years, given the multiple clues scattered around.
There was barely a surface that wasn’t crowded out. She had been sent so many flowers she could have opened a shop – or perhaps a funeral parlour – including a huge bunch of roses that had been shoved into a single vase and were struggling to survive. Most of her good luck cards were expensive: handmade rather than mass-market. I’d already noticed Sky’s Gucci umbrella and Cartier watch. The luxury brand names continued with crystal flasks of perfume, hand cream in porcelain tubs, Fortnum & Mason biscuits and loose-leaf tea in fancy tins, liqueur chocolates, soap and scent diffusers, those weird stick things that poke out of a jar of oil, dispensing, to my mind, no scent at all. Three bottles of champagne and a bottle of gin had been lined up on one shelf and there were a dozen glasses that didn’t appear to have been washed.
None of this connected with what I knew of her. She had spent three years appearing as a barmaid in EastEnders, and during rehearsals she’d always spoken with an Estuary English accent, although dismissing us just now, she had been much more Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I thought I’d had a good understanding of everyone I’d met so far – Tirian, Jordan, Arthur and Olivia Throsby. But Sky was something else. A mystery within a mystery.
‘This is a fifteen-minute call for members of the Mindgame company. You have fifteen minutes to curtain up. Thank you.’
It was a disembodied voice that I presumed belonged to Pranav, the stage manager. It came over the intercom system and for the first time I noticed the speaker set high up in a corner of the room. Sky heard it. ‘I’ve gotta go! Bye!’ She disconnected the telephone and set it down, then turned to us. ‘I’m really sorry. I have to get ready.’
‘Come on, darling. I’ve seen the play. You’re not on for the first fifteen pages.’ When Hawthorne was annoyed, he often slipped into language that I would not have used myself. Perhaps he did it deliberately, to show he didn’t care. ‘We need to ask you a few questions about Harriet Throsby,’ he added.
‘I told you. I’ve got nothing to say. I hardly knew her.’
‘Did you know where she lived?’
‘Why are you even asking me that? Are you accusing me of something? Yes, I knew where she lived. We all did.’ She looked directly at me. ‘You showed me that article in the magazine.’
‘What?’
Once again, I felt the ground opening up beneath my feet. How many more ways could I be found guilty of this crime?
‘House & Garden. You showed it to me during the first week of rehearsals. There was a picture of her house. The article said she lived next to the canal … near a tunnel.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about!’ I exclaimed. ‘I never saw the magazine. I didn’t know her address …’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
I turned to Hawthorne for help. He glanced at me and shook his head a little sadly – but his attention was still fixed on Sky. ‘No one’s calling you anything,’ he said. He waited until she had calmed down. ‘Tell me what happened in the green room, when you all got together after the first performance.’
‘You mean … the party?’
‘I’m talking about the review.’
That shook her. ‘Yes. I wish I hadn’t mentioned it now. But Tirian snatched my phone before I could stop him and he showed it to everyone. I had no idea it was going to be so cruel,’ she added, defensively.
‘It certainly put a crimp in the evening,’ Hawthorne agreed.
‘But it didn’t have anything to do with Harriet being killed!’ Sky stared at Hawthorne. ‘Do you seriously think she was murdered because she didn’t like the play? That’s ridiculous. And I’m not going to be held responsible. If there was someone in the room who was crazy enough to kill her, they’d have killed her at the weekend when what she’d written was published in the newspaper, so telling everyone what she’d written wouldn’t have made any difference.’
Hawthorne wasn’t giving up. ‘We can’t be sure of that, Sky. It had been a long day. A lot of alcohol. A late night. Maybe you inadvertently triggered something. You saw what happened for yourself.’
Her phone pinged. She glanced at the screen and I could see that she wanted to pick it up and respond. She turned it face down.
‘Are you talking about Jordan?’ she asked. ‘Maybe you should be talking to him, not me. He’s the one with the temper. Fighting with Tirian. Him and his wife … always shouting at her down the phone. And what he did to me during rehearsals! Have you heard about that? You should have seen the bruises.’ She rubbed her arm, realising that she’d said too much. ‘But that thing with the knife was just stupid,’ she went on. ‘He wouldn’t kill anyone. He doesn’t have it in him. I quite like him, really. When he isn’t going on about his boring stagecraft or boasting about his career – American House of Horror and all the rest of it – he can be all right. He bought me flowers. And he wasn’t the only one who was upset that night. Harriet slagged Ewan off too and he was just as angry.’
‘He didn’t seem that upset to me,’ I remarked. I was still reeling from what she had said about the magazine. I thought back to the rehearsals in Dalston and the tech run-through here at the Vaudeville. I had absolutely no memory of handing her anything. ‘He made a joke about it. He didn’t seem to care about the review at all.’
‘You don’t know him,’ Sky said. ‘He never likes people to know what he’s thinking, but it’s all happening inside his head. He’s the complete opposite of Jordan.’
‘How well do you know Ewan Lloyd?’ Hawthorne cut in.
‘This is the second time I’ve worked with him. He’s OK. I did Macbeth with him in Yorkshire.’
‘What did you play?’
‘There were only six of us in the cast. I played Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff, Fleance, the Porter and all three witches.’
‘Was that a good experience?’
‘Not really. It never stopped raining and nobody came.’
‘This is your ten-minute call. Ten minutes to curtain up. Thank you.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t quite understand.’ Hawthorne spoke softly … always a dangerous sign. ‘Where exactly did you find the review?’
‘It was on my phone.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’ He looked at her sadly. ‘I’ve searched the internet and it’s not there. It’s not anywhere. And when you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense, does it. Why would Harriet Throsby have posted her review on social media if she was being paid by the Sunday Times? They’ve got a paywall. They wouldn’t want it leaking out. The only way you could have read what she’d written was if you’d had access to her computer.’ He paused. ‘Or knew someone who did.’
There was a pause. For the first time, Sky looked vulnerable.
‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘There was a website …’
‘What website?’
‘I didn’t look.’
Another pause. Hawthorne waited. Sky said nothing.