Darling Sweetheart (41 page)

She gave a weak smile and ventured, ‘I suppose the royalties no longer amount to much…’

He set down his glass and spread his hands. They were like a pair of giant white spiders. ‘I wouldn’t know!’ He smiled, but now it was a false smile that masked – she could tell – anger and bitterness. ‘I no longer get any! I haven’t received a penny in years! From my own films!’

‘But surely–’

‘It can hardly be news to you that I’ve been fighting your father’s estate since he died. Fighting for what’s mine! Is that why you’re here?’ He cocked his head. ‘With an offer?’

‘An offer? N-no…’

‘But if
they
didn’t send you…’

‘They?’

‘The solicitors, the ones handling your father’s estate! Babcock and whatever-you-call ’em! Scum!’ His eyes widened. ‘Vicious, lying scum! I’ve spent a fortune fighting for what’s rightfully mine, but they always find a way to string the case along, to tie everything up in knots! More money for them, you see, the longer it goes on!’

‘I know nothing about that, Mr Miller – I’ve never had anything to do with my father’s affairs. When he died, it was all such a mess – there was no will or anything. I just… walked away, I suppose.’

‘Did you now? Then what
do
you want?’ He wheezed. ‘You want to work with me? I’ve seen all your films; much better than anything your father and I ever made. Although not, I expect, nearly as lucrative.’

‘Um, nice of you to say so, but at the moment I’m busy with this–’

‘The Perfect Heresy!
Oh, I still read all the trade magazines.’ He indicated one of the many piles choking the room. ‘One doozy of a big-budget movie… and how’s that going for you?’

‘Err… fine.’

‘What’s Emerson like to work with? Bit of an ego, I’d imagine?’

‘He’s definitely… an interesting person.’

‘We all have an ego, don’t we? But that’s the thing about actors,’ now his smile turned malicious, ‘it’s your job to have so many!’ For one horrible second, she thought he knew about Froggy, but he waved at his posters. ‘David Palatine
is
Fanshawe and Grovel! But they were my characters too! I helped create them!’

‘My father hated them.’

‘Ah! “Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies!”’

‘Sorry?’

‘Freud, my child. The rest of the quote is, “unlike people, who always have to mix love and hate”. Your father was a very
difficult man to work with, but he loved those characters as much as he hated them.’

‘Is that why he kept making the films?’

‘No, that was for the money. When you spend a lot, you’ve got to make a lot. Believe me – I speak from long experience.’

‘Maybe that’s why you found him difficult to work with – because he knew he was selling out?’

‘And what, pray, is wrong with selling out? We all strive for success, and when it comes our way,’ his white spider hands clenched, ‘we seize it!’

‘Success killed my father!’

‘How so? He lived like a king for nearly thirty years!’

‘What happened in Tunisia?’ She felt herself close to tears. ‘Why did you let him fly his own plane all that way? Why didn’t you make him travel by airline, like everyone else?’

‘Believe me, if I could build a time machine,’ Miller’s face darkened, ‘and go back to December 2001, I would buy a gun, put it to your father’s head and force him to travel on a scheduled flight with me. His accident,’ now his black eyes bulged, ‘cost me three million dollars of my own money, plus whatever that film would have made. That was the beginning of the end for me. The beginning of what, I can assure you, has been a painful decline! You’re on your way up, young lady; let me tell you – it’s a lot less fun coming down. But to answer your question, did you ever, in your life, meet anyone who could tell David Palatine what to do? Because I couldn’t.’

‘He used to listen to me,’ she whispered, ‘when I was little.’

However, Miller was on a rant. ‘I suppose it was my fault – the whole thing, I mean, not the accident as such. I was very well-established before I met him; learned my trade on Ealing comedies, but I financed quite a lot of serious stuff, too. Actually, I didn’t think the first Fanshawe film would fly; it was just a punt between bigger projects. Do you know, your father only got the part because Peter Ustinov turned it down?’

‘I had heard that, yes…’

‘By giving him a chance, I made him a star. But by making him a star, I unleashed the monster. I’m a producer, so, almost by definition, I’m a bad person who’s done some good things. But fame drove David mad. He became a bad person who did bad things. But he also knew that no matter how badly he behaved, he couldn’t be replaced. He
was
Fanshawe and Grovel and the studios always wanted more. Every time we thought the franchise was exhausted, someone would offer us millions to revive it. For the first film, your father was so compliant and charming, so eager to please. But by the time we started the third, he was out of control. Always demanding more money, always behaving like a prima donna. We would build sets and he would demand that they were torn down again. He treated the rest of the cast with contempt; he would mimic them to their faces, to destroy their confidence. He’d steamroll them with his sheer talent, then become angry when they were nervous of him or if they faltered in any way. You know when you hear unknown actors praise a more established one for being so generous? Well, your father was the exact opposite – the least generous man who ever lived. He would argue with the director then retreat to whatever luxurious hotel we had him booked into and refuse to come out until whoever displeased him was fired. When I complained to him, he would sulk, not know his lines and carry on as if everyone else was at fault. Then, he’d disappear, and we’d find him in Rome, having a massage. Or in Ireland,’ Miller’s black eyes gleamed, ‘hiding in that big old mansion of his. Smart move – I heard he bought it for next to nothing. Artists in Ireland don’t pay tax and any fool can claim to be an artist, can’t they? What was the name of that grotty little village? Kill something?’

‘Kilnarush.’

‘Yes. You probably don’t remember – you were young at the time…’

Only then did the recollection strike her. ‘You came to Whin Abbey.’

‘Yes. I once stayed in your home for nearly a week, to persuade your father back to work. Me and Donald Pleasance, actually, he was there too. That would have been the early nineties, and your father hadn’t made a film in three years.’

‘That was you! It was you who took him away from me!’

‘Actually, my recollection is that your father rang me, then went all coy. The studios had given up on him, but when they heard he might be interested, they were as keen as always. Then I had to fly over and twist his arm, as if it was my idea to relaunch his career, not his. Do you know, on the last night of our visit, he got you out of bed and made you stand on a footstool in the drawing room, and you recited – I’ve never forgotten this, you were standing on this stool in your pyjamas, holding a cuddly toy – and you recited a chunk from
The Tempest.
What was it now? “If by your art…’”

‘“…my dearest father,”’ she took up, ‘“you have put the wild waters in this roar, allay them. The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, but that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek, dashes the fire out. Oh, I have suffered…’”

‘“…with those that I saw suffer!”’ he finished for her, laughing like a ruptured accordion.

‘Please. Tell me about Tunisia. Tell me what happened.’

Miller’s face turned grave again. ‘What can I possibly tell you that you don’t already know?’

‘Please…’

He sighed. ‘We were waiting for him – waiting to start
Fanswhawe, Grovel and the Mystery of the Vanishing Harem.
Oh, I see you make a face, but believe me, no one ever lost money underestimating the public taste and when a formula works, there’s always room for another revival!’

‘Please. Tunisia…’

‘We were in Tunis. Shooting was scheduled to start in the
Old Town but your father as usual didn’t want to arrive until the last possible minute. He said he had business to take care of in Nice, something about his boat; then he flew from there to Sicily…’

‘To Palermo.’

‘Yes. I spoke to him that very last night, on the telephone. Funny, the thing I remember most is what a good mood he was in. Very chipper, laughing, doing his funny voices – not at all morose. I hadn’t heard him like that in ages, especially after the arguments we’d had, trying to get him to sign up. The usual nightmare – how many millions he wanted for this, how many percentage points for that. He was a tough negotiator, but we were both Yids, we understood each other. We always came to an arrangement in the end, your father and I.’

‘But he was happy?’

‘He was ebullient. “Just a hop across the pond, Leon.” That’s what he said, when I asked him about the flight. It’s less than 250 miles, you know, much less than flying from Nice to Palermo and no problem for an experienced pilot. The weather was fine and he was due in at three in the afternoon, local time. He’d insisted I put him in the Residence – Tunisia’s finest hotel – and we’d booked dinner there for seven. I was on location, watching preparations for the next day, when, around about five, one of my assistants told that me his plane hadn’t landed. The driver had called her from the airport, wondering what to do. I told her to contact his hotel in Palermo, in case there had been a delay. But they said he’d checked out, so we rang Palermo airport. It took ages to get through to the control tower, but eventually we established that he had taken off at midday – everything normal, his plane fully fuelled, good conditions and all the rest. We explained that he hadn’t arrived, so they tried to raise him on the radio, but no luck. Then,’ and now Miller’s spider hands fidgeted on his knees, ‘we had that awful time, when you’re worried sick but you still want to believe that everything
is all right, that there’s a simple explanation. Everyone had a theory: his radio was broken, he’d had to divert back to Palermo, he’d accidentally flown to Algeria or Libya instead, although someone suggested that maybe he’d fallen foul of Libyan airspace. It was only slowly, reluctantly, that we started to accept that something bad might have happened – a mechanical failure, maybe. It took many hours to persuade the Tunisian authorities to actually do something. The Italians made an effort, but, by then, it was dark, so it wasn’t until the following morning that they finally found…’

‘Found what?’ Annalise felt nauseous – the heat, the revolting wine, the unbearable oppression of Miller’s hovel.

His gimlet eyes pierced hers. ‘They found wreckage, off the coast.’

‘And…?’

‘And not much else.’

‘Tell me what they found.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Yes,’ she lied, ‘I do.’

‘I think Mr Miller is right,’ Proctor interrupted, ‘there are some things you’re probably better not–’

‘I want to know!’ she insisted.

‘Bits of tattered clothing,’ Miller spoke quietly, ‘floating in the water, with scraps of human flesh stuck to them. But nothing worth burying – whatever happened, it was quick, final and only the sea knows the rest.’

The three sat in silence. Suddenly, Miller’s doorbell rang and Brutus barked, making them jump.

‘Bloody yobs!’ Miller muttered, unfolding himself from his seat. ‘They have nothing better to do around here than pester us senior citizens… excuse me.’ Pushing Brutus back into the hallway, he closed the living-room door behind him. Annalise stared at the ceiling. Even that was grimy. Proctor reached out and squeezed her hand.

‘I think we should leave soon…’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘we should leave soon.’

He opened his mouth to say something else, but she never found out what, because the living-room door burst open and a man came charging through it; not Miller, but someone younger, heavier, with a beanie hat, bushy eyebrows and a golden earring in one ear. Proctor leapt up like a scalded cat, but the man’s crushing punch caught the side of his face and he went straight down again, falling into the electric fire with an almighty clatter. Annalise screamed. The man kicked Proctor in the stomach. She screamed again and another, older man rushed into the room, wearing a navy suit and glasses. He grabbed her arm and snapped a metal bracelet on her wrist. She tried to pull away but he stuck a needle into her and she squealed in pain and terror. The man attacking Proctor now sat on top of him but could barely keep him down. Proctor’s face was bleeding and he roared incoherent curses. The little man took the needle out of her arm and slapped her skin. She tried to bite his hand but her face felt numb and she missed. Proctor yelled at them to leave her alone, then something about Miller having a bastarding phone in his kitchen. The man on top of him took a syringe from his pocket and stuck it in his shoulder; Proctor swore a lot more but stopped writhing. Brutus barked hysterically. Annalise tried to speak but couldn’t. She saw red concentric circles. The little man holding her wrist said something like, ‘Calm down we’ve got them now’, then Miller came into the room, followed by Frost, who looked intently at her, then handed Miller an envelope. Her vision seemed to go bendy as Miller tore this open and counted banknotes onto his messy dining table with his white spider hands. She couldn’t focus. The concentric circles turned green, then she saw nothing more at all.

Donnie Driscoll was going to die soon. He had no idea how long he’d been locked in the lorry – it could have been days, or even weeks. All he knew for certain was that he was going to die soon. He had four empty water bottles, but the wait between each visit seemed so vast, he had no way of reckoning how often his captors had dropped them in. He didn’t count his sleeps; he slept so badly and so frequently that the twenty-four-hour cycle no longer meant anything. There was no sense of day or night; just the dark, his own reek, the dull pain in his face, his filthy mattress and nothing to look forward to except another bottle of water and more custard bloody creams. For a while, he had fantasised about blowing up the factory where they made custard creams, but he no longer had the energy to fantasise about anything. He felt diminished, weak; ready for the end. During the last supply drop, he had lain quiet and still, thinking he might fool his captor into checking on him. But whoever it was had merely thrown the water and biscuits through the hole as usual then departed again, utterly indifferent. For a few hours afterwards, flicking his lighter on and off, he had felt over every inch of his prison to see if he could find a hidden camera or microphone – anything to indicate that his torturers might be watching to see how far they could push him. When he found nothing, it struck him that whoever was doing this didn’t care, that the biscuits and water were just a cruel joke to prolong his agony – he was facing death by custard cream.