Booked for Murder (17 page)

“You want to do it tonight?” Helen asked.

“How soon can you finish your lasagne?”

 

“I want to kill her,” Helen growled. On the TV screen in Stella's office, a slightly built woman was fellating one man while another entered her from the rear. It was the fifth of a couple of dozen video tapes they'd found in the bottom drawer of Stella's filing cabinet. They'd sampled brief sections of each, their disgust and anger mounting with every one. “I want to kill her with my bare hands,” Helen continued. She'd been delivering variations on the same theme ever since they'd turned their attentions from paperwork and computer files to the videos. “She's even used the sets from one of Watergaw's drama productions, the cheap bitch. Turn it off, Linds, I'm going to be sick if I watch any more of these.”

Lindsay pressed the “stop” button with an overwhelming sense of relief. “We probably should check the others, make sure they're all the same sort of thing.”

“You do it if you feel you have to. I'm going to get some mineral water from my office to try and take the taste away.” Helen walked out and Lindsay slotted the next film into the player. She wound it on a fair way, then hit the “play” button. The screen filled with a close-up of a woman masturbating. Behind her in the corridor she heard a set of footsteps. “Did you bring me some?” she asked.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Lindsay whirled round, dropping the remote control, and stared open-mouthed at Stella. She stood in the doorway, a tall man with cropped pepper and salt hair behind her. Stella advanced a step. “What the fuck are you doing in my office? You're a burglar!”

Regaining her composure, Lindsay shrugged. “So call the cops. Go on, give them a bell.” She pushed the phone towards Stella. “You must be Stella. And you, I presume, are Guy.”

Guy pushed past Stella and loomed above Lindsay, so close she could have identified the stone in his nose stud if she'd been interested. “And who the hell are you?”

From behind them all, Helen's voice came, cold as the ice that clinked in the jug she carried. “She's with me. She's a friend. It's a concept you won't be familiar with, Guy.”

He flinched at her tone as much as her words. “Whoever she is, she's got no business in here.”

“He's right,” Stella butted in, finding outrage from somewhere. “She's been going through my stuff. Look, there's papers everywhere. And she's been in my filing cabinet. Those tapes were locked in there. She's broken in!”

“No, she hasn't,” Helen said wearily. “Who do you think has the master keys to all the office furniture, dumbshit? You think I trust my staff not to lose the keys to their desks and storage cupboards? You've never had any idea, have you, Stella?” She managed to make the name sound like an obscenity.

“You're out of order, Helen,” Stella said. “You've got no right to be doing this. What's the matter with you? Don't you trust your business partners?”

“I don't trust pornographers,” Helen said. “You do something that exploitative on a routine basis and you forget where the lines get drawn in real life. I wouldn't trust you if your hands were nailed to the wall. Which frankly would be too good for you and I'd resent spending the money on redecoration afterwards. How dare you do what you've been doing?”

Stella looked at Guy, who was hiding his discomfort in the business of lighting a cigarette. “So what's the charge, Helen? Me and Guy like to watch porn? It's a criminal offence to keep a few horny films for our personal pleasure? I didn't realize you dykes were so puritanical.”

“This isn't about watching blue movies. It's about making them,” Helen said flatly.

Stella laughed. “What is she on?” she demanded. “Whatever it is, I
don't fucking want any. Helen, where do you get this strange idea that I've been making pornographic films?”

Helen looked as if she was on the point of realizing her ambition to kill Stella. “You were too tight, Stella. You were too keen on making a profit. You used the sets we built for
Home Movies
to make your scummy skin flicks. You didn't even attempt to disguise them.”

Stella's hands clenched into fists and Guy sucked in smoke like it was oxygen. Lindsay decided it was time she butted in to lower the temperature before Helen did something they'd both regret. “You film on site and do the editing in the suite here,” she said, her voice clinically matter of fact. “Then you take the edited film over to Media Masters and they make you video versions in US and UK formats. You take the samples to your outlet—
It's Personal
in Robb Street in Soho—and they place their order.”

“That's where I've seen you before,” Stella interrupted angrily. “You were in the shop. You've been following me!” Her voice climbed in volume and pitch as she made her accusation and she pushed Guy out of the way. “I'll have you, bitch. Fucking dyke. Just wait, I'll have you.”

“Will that be before you come out of the nick or after?” Lindsay asked sweetly.

Stella laughed in her face. “I'm not going to jail. That's not on the agenda. You can't hand me over to the cops, because this is all being done under your precious friend Helen's umbrella. I go down and I take my partners with me.”

“Wait a minute,” Guy said nervously.

“It's all right, Guy,” Stella said, reaching out and patting his arm as she would have done a dog. “I don't think Helen's friend wants to come and visit her in Holloway.”

“I don't think that will be necessary,” Lindsay said, relaxing as she played her trump card. “We didn't just look in the bottom drawer. We've been right through your filing cabinet and your computer files. Pretty stupid to use Blue as your password when you're making pornography, don't you think?”

Guy looked as if he wanted to be sick. His eyes were everywhere except on Helen and Stella. “Listen, I'm sure we can sort this out . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized no one cared what he thought.

“Shut up, Guy,” Helen said savagely. “Listen to some sense for a change.”

Stella cocked her head to one side and put her hands on her hips. “Okay, smartarse. Tell us what it is you think you know.”

Lindsay perched on the corner of the desk and spoke as dispassionately as she could manage. “We know all about Shooting Star Investments. We know that since it started with virtually no assets except an interest-free loan of £500,000 from an unspecified source, it has built into a considerable earner. In the space of a mere eight months, it has made profits of around £450,000 from the sale of video films produced by Shooting Star Investments.”

“There's nothing wrong with that,” Stella said, refusing to give an inch. “There isn't a court in the land that's going to penalize me for being a successful businesswoman. And there isn't a police force in the land that will prosecute Shooting Star for those videos. I'm not a fool. We might have sailed close to the wind, but none of the films we made is anything like hard core enough to interest the Vice Squad.”

“Who said anything about the Vice Squad?” Lindsay asked, a threatening edge slipping past her control and into her voice. “I'm talking about the Fraud Squad.”

For the first time, Stella's defiance took a dent. She looked momentarily uncertain, glancing at Guy, who was too busy lighting a fresh cigarette off the end of the previous one to notice. “You're full of shit,” she said, but her eyes told a different story to her words.

“I'm not the bullshitter in this room. As we say where I come from, Stell, the ball's on the slates. The party's over. I've read the paperwork.” Lindsay turned to a neat pile of papers behind her on the desk. As she went through them, she slapped each document down hard on the desk in front of Stella. “Exhibit number one. Helen's submission to the EU for funding for a three-part drama about asylum seekers. Exhibit number two. A letter from the EU revealing the application has been successful and enclosing a check for the cash. Exhibit number three. A forged letter purporting to be from the EU to Helen explaining her application has been unsuccessful in this round of funding awards but it will be reconsidered in the next bidding sequence when it stands a strong chance, and that she need not resubmit her application. Exhibit number four. A bank statement
showing the deposit of the identical sum of money in the account of Shooting Star two weeks after the date on the authentic EU letter.”

“A real shit's trick,” Helen said.

Stella closed her eyes and breathed heavily through her nose. “I'm really fucked off about this,” she said. “You have no idea how fucked off I am.”

“We were going to put the money back, Helen,” Guy said, moving a couple of steps closer to her and spreading his hands in a supplicatory gesture. “As soon as we'd generated enough profit, we were going to replace the money with another faked letter saying the money had come from a fresh allocation of funding. It's a license to print money, Helen. With the profits Shooting Star generates, we can make all the films we want about things that really matter. Like Stella said, it's not as if we're doing hard-core stuff. And if we weren't doing it someone else would be.”

Helen's upper lip twitched in contempt. “Any minute now you'll be telling me you were only obeying orders. How can you think I'd ever want to make a film with you again? Less than six weeks ago, we were sitting in my office trying to put together a proposal for a film about the evils of sex tourism. Where's your brain gone, Guy?”

“Helen, don't get worked up . . .”

“Don't get worked up!” she yelled. “Don't get worked up?”

“He's right,” Stella said with an exasperated sigh. “Look, Helen, you get your EU money, you get to make your films, everything goes on exactly like it did before. There's no reason why not.”

Helen stared at Stella, for once in her life beyond speech. Lindsay jumped in. “I don't think that's going to be possible, Stella. I don't think Helen would feel comfortable with that.”

“I don't want to be in the same hemisphere as you, never mind the same company,” Helen snarled. “I'm leaving this partnership and I'm taking my grant money with me and I'm going to set up my own company that is totally vermin free, even if I have to get Rentokil to vet every member of staff.”

“That's not what we want, Helen,” Stella said calmly. “Your expertise and your street cred is really important to the company. If you were that dispensable, don't you think we'd have dumped you ages ago? If you go, you go without a penny. The legal battles to dissolve
the partnership against our wishes will take years and every penny you've got.”

It was Lindsay's turn to look thunderstruck. “I don't think you appreciate the position you're in,” she said incredulously. “We've got you bang to rights. All we have to do to end your career is to call the Fraud Squad and show how you expropriated the money to start Shooting Star with no intention of paying it back.”

Suddenly, Stella jumped forward and grabbed the documents off the desk. Lindsay snatched at them, but Stella danced across to the corner behind Guy, waving the papers. “No evidence, no case,” she said, grinning crazily. She grabbed Guy's lighter, spun the wheel and let the flame dance along the bottom of the pages. The papers caught and yellow flames started to lick their way up the paper.

With a scream of rage, Helen threw the jug of water she was still carrying across the room at Stella. She raised one arm to fend it off and the jug tipped, then tumbled, cascading down Stella and the papers. The flames died, leaving the papers charred and sodden. Stella laughed. “You don't stop me that easily,” she said, grasping the soggy paper and tearing it into irregular pieces. “Get the vids, Guy.”

Showing more
savoir faire
than he'd managed so far, Guy swept the videos off the desk into the wastepaper bin, which he clutched to his chest. Helen leapt at him, clawing his arms with her nails, but he clung on grimly to his burden. Lindsay stepped up behind Helen and grabbed her, pulling her back.

“Leave it, Helen,” she said.

“But they're destroying the evidence,” she said, her voice teetering on the edge of a sob.

“And we can't stop them. Two on two, nobody with a weapon, it's just going to degenerate into a rammy. She's determined to destroy it, we're not going to stop her, and the cops aren't going to get here in time. Come on, Helen, don't give her the satisfaction.”

All the fight suddenly went from Helen and she subsided into Lindsay's arms. “Sensible move,” Stella said approvingly. “By morning, there won't be anything left to tie us to the blue films or to the missing grant. In fact, if you do call in the cops, the only thing they'll be able to investigate is the misappropriation of the EU grant. And let's face it, Helen, the person who could rip that money off easier
than anyone else is the person it was intended for. All you had to do was tell me and Guy that the EU had blown you out, and you could have pocketed the readies no trouble. But for me to do that . . . Well, it'd be complicated, wouldn't it?”

“Let's get out of here, Helen,” Lindsay said, steering Helen towards the door. Somehow they made it out of the building without giving way to the fury that bubbled inside them both. Out in the car park, Helen turned back and stared up at the lighted skylight above Stella's office.

“I can't believe we were so stupid,” she said bitterly. “We let them get away with it.”

“We were scuppered as soon as they found us in there,” Lindsay said, furiously kicking the tire of Stella's Fiat. “You'd only ever have nailed her with the element of surprise on your side.”