A Sprinkle of Sabotage by Fiona Leitch (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

have to put up with my cooking for another few days.’ Or the rest of the shoot, I thought; a broken elbow would take some time to heal.

‘Bugger,’ said Zack.

‘Oh, come on, my curry wasn’t that bad,’ I said, affronted. He laughed, a big booming laugh that made me smile along with it.

‘Ha! Nah, I dint mean that,’ he said. His accent was pure South London, and I wondered if he’d grown up around the area I’d worked in. Coppers hadn’t always been very popular round there – in some cases with good reason. Maybe I wouldn’t mention that I’d been in the Met. ‘Nah, Gino was going to help me with something.’ I raised an eyebrow. With what? ‘I’m meant to be holding a dinner party tomorrow…’ He saw the look of surprise on my face and laughed again. ‘Yeah, I know, it’s not something I do a lot of, cooking fancy stuff, but it’s Kimi and Aiko’s birthday tomorrow and I wanted to do something special for them. Gino said he’d ordered the ingredients for me and he was going to help me out.’ He looked at me. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy it? I’ll pay you. I was going to pay Gino.’

I wasn’t sure I fancied being around movie stars after hours if I could help it. Zack was nice enough, and I loved that laugh of his, but Kimi seemed like a right diva, and if the rest of his co-stars were there… Well, I’d gone right off Faith after that business with Tony (not that I was jealous or saw her as competition or anything), and Jeremy Mayhew, who I’d admittedly only seen outside her trailer, had so far done nothing to dispel my image of him as a sexist old drunk.

Zack saw the expression of doubt on my face but he was clearly desperate because he said, ‘Please? It’ll only be two, three hours work max, and I’ll pay you two hundred quid.’

Two hundred? That just happened to be the price of the photography software I wanted to get Daisy for her birthday…

I smiled at him. ‘It would be my pleasure.’

Chapter Eight

So the next morning I found myself at Polvarrow House at 7 a.m., making breakfast for the crew and for Daisy. Mum had spent a rare night in her own house the night before, so Daisy had been forced to come with me. I planned to feed her and let her have a nosey around the set (like mother, like daughter) before packing her off to school in a taxi.

She was slightly disappointed.

‘Where’s all the actors?’ she said, as she sat at a picnic table picking at a bacon butty. The other tables were quiet – just some crew members wandering over to grab a sandwich before going off to set up lights and props. Nearby, serious-looking men strode around doing technical-looking things with screwdrivers and duct tape, while behind them David Morgan, the owner of the house, strode through the courtyard. I thought at first that he was just watching the comings and goings, but he looked angry, and he was clearly looking out for someone amongst the crew. He did not look like the excited, smiley-faced man who had welcomed us to the casting session the other Saturday.

‘Mum?’ Daisy sighed. ‘I said, where are the actors? I thought I might bump into … some of them.’

I grinned. ‘I think Zack likes to have a lie-in. You’ll have to come back after school.’

‘Can I?’ She looked at me, excited, and I nodded.

‘I’ll still be here, working. You could go back to Nana’s, of course, if you’d rather do that…’

‘No!’ Daisy said immediately, and then she laughed. ‘I mean, no offence to Nana, but…’

‘I’ll get the taxi to pick you up after school,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to help Zack with this dinner-party thing, so you’ll definitely get to meet him.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Daisy. ‘Jade is going to spew when she finds out.’

Just then the taxi driver – Magda Trevarrow, who was married to my old school friend Rob, from the garage – arrived to whisk Daisy off to school. I kissed my beautiful daughter goodbye and smiled to myself as I heard her chattering to Magda about coming back later to meet Zack Smith. Magda looked bemused and I got the impression that she’d never heard of him. I also got the impression that by the time she dropped Daisy off she’d know all there was to know about him.

I cleared away Daisy’s plate and looked up as I heard voices. Three crew members were chatting over mugs of tea.

‘I told you, this shoot is cursed,’ said one. He was wearing a baseball cap and a worried expression. The other two laughed but he shook his head angrily. ‘I mean it! I set up those three tungstens yesterday for the kitchen scene and left them there overnight, and when I went to test them this morning every single one had blown.’

‘Bulbs blow all the time,’ said one of his companions dismissively, a heavy-set man with a pockmarked face, the legacy of a teenage acne problem. Baseball Cap shook his head.

‘Not overnight when they’re not even turned on,’ he said. ‘They were all new bulbs. Apart from about twenty minutes yesterday when I was setting up, they were unused. All shattered.’

‘That’s the problem with tungstens,’ said Pockmarks, knowledgeably. ‘They’re good if you’re going for natural light but they get too hot and BANG! You’re left in the dark and your cast is covered in glass. Happened on the Live and Let Spy shoot. Right in the middle of a torture scene, the bulb blows and there’s Tom Hardy jumping out of his skin and nearly hitting his head on the ceiling. Power surge.’ His companion nodded wisely, but Baseball Cap shook his head again.

‘No, you’re not listening.’ He sounded exasperated, probably by his colleague’s blatant name-dropping, I thought. ‘They didn’t blow when I turned them on. I didn’t need to