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

‘He’s not very happy, is he?’ I said, sitting opposite him.

‘Nope. To be fair, he probably does feel bad about carrying on with the shoot so soon, but without the insurance payout he doesn’t have any other option.’ Nathan absentmindedly stroked Germaine’s head as she sat and gazed up at him adoringly. I supposed she was only copying what she’d seen me do…

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, gesturing around us. ‘Look. No one looks terribly upset, do they? I’m not saying they don’t care, but movie people just seem to be obsessed with the whole the-show-must-go-on thing.’

‘Maybe…’ Nathan mused. ‘Anyway, where are we at now?’

‘We know it was pufferfish toxin. But it wasn’t the pufferfish.’

‘So we know it wasn’t an accident, no matter how much Mancuso wishes it. We also know it wasn’t the cupcakes, because if it had been then Kimi would have been ill the other night.’

‘And dead now. Yeah. So we have to find what else everyone but Kimi and Faith ate.’ I shook my head. ‘Kimi ate everything but the chicken. Faith ate everything but the tofu. Which doesn’t help us much.’

‘Not really, no.’

‘The poison – the tetrodotoxin – how easy is it to get hold of?’ I asked. ‘You can’t nip into Boots and buy it, can you? Where would they have got it from?’

‘I’ve got DS Turner looking into that,’ said Nathan. ‘There can’t be many places you can get it from. I’m surprised you can get it at all. What about the victim? Any gossip about grudges against him, or overheard arguments? Anything that could be a motive?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve been chatting with a few people this morning while I’ve been serving them, and no one had a bad word to say about him. But then they might just not want to speak ill of the dead. Who knows?’

‘Okay. Your other theory – about the curse, all the daft pranks and accidents being window dressing for this one big ‘accident’ – maybe we should look into that,’ said Nathan. I nodded.

‘Yeah. I mean, we know that Zack messed up Faith’s door, and Aiko was the one who let Kimi’s dog out, but that still leaves the annoying little pranks like the generator being overloaded and the bulbs smashing, and of course the steps to the food truck being tampered with…’

‘I might be able to help you with that.’ We looked up and saw Lucy standing nearby with Gino, whose arm was in a sling.

‘Gino!’ I leapt up. ‘Why didn’t you say you were coming back?’

‘Thought I’d surprise you,’ he said, looking at me disapprovingly. ‘And I obviously have. There’s hardly any food out—’

Lucy shook her head, exasperated. ‘There’s loads; no one’s going to starve.’

‘What do you think you could help us with?’ asked Nathan. ‘Do you know who sabotaged the stairs and caused Gino to hurt himself?’

Gino and Lucy exchanged looks, then she nodded. ‘I think so…’

Lucy led us past the shoot’s shanty town of marquees and trailers to a quiet spot towards the back of the house. Here the set carpenters and painters were busy assembling props and bits of scenery. One of them, a heavy-set but good-looking man in his late twenties, was sanding down a fake sword like the one Zack had been carrying a few days previously.

He looked up and smiled at Lucy, but his smile faltered when he saw us and disappeared completely at the sight of Gino.

‘All right, Luce?’ he said cautiously, eyeing Gino with obvious dislike.

‘Not really, no,’ she said. ‘The steps at the back of the food truck… It’s just come to my attention that they were tampered with.’

‘Sawn through,’ Nathan added. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?’

‘No,’ he said, but his eyes betrayed him. He couldn’t stop himself casting a glance over towards the saw that lay propped up next to his tool box.

‘Really?’ Lucy folded her arms and stared at him. He shuffled around uncomfortably.

‘Of course not. I was right here, all the time.’

I sighed. ‘It’s quite romantic really, when you think about it,’ I said. Nathan looked at me, amazed.

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah! Fighting for the woman you love. Like something out of a movie.’ I looked at Lucy; I could see she'd caught on.

‘Like a romcom,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Falling for You or something.’ She snorted. ‘If a man did that for me – tried to get a rival out of the way…’

‘Hard to resist,’ she agreed.

The carpenter looked from me to Lucy to Nathan to Gino, like he was at a Wimbledon doubles match.

‘Well … but … all right,’ he admitted. ‘Yeah. I did it.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Nathan.

‘I sawed through the middle step so that when Gino stood on it, it would break.’ The carpenter looked down at his feet, mumbling, then looked up pleadingly at Lucy. ‘I only done it because you and him was flirting. I know what his type’s like, Luce. I weren’t losing you to someone like that.’

‘You did it because you love me, I suppose?’ asked Lucy.

‘Yeah, I did! I do! You know I do. I didn’t want to lose you.’

‘You idiot. You weren’t going to lose me. I wasn’t interested in Gino as anything other than a friend,’ she said, her expression softening slightly.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘In that case…’ The carpenter got down on one knee and smiled what he obviously thought was a winning smile. ‘Will you marry me, Lucy?’

Lucy smiled at him. ‘Will I marry you? After you got jealous and broke a man’s arm for me? When it could have been a lot worse than a broken arm?’

He smiled again. ‘Yeah.’

She snorted. ‘You’re a bloody psychopath. Of course I won’t marry you. And you’re fired.’

He stood up, surprised and angry. ‘What? But I— You can’t—’

‘Unless you want me to arrest you, I suggest you leave,’ said Nathan, inserting himself between the furious carpenter and Lucy, who was as cool as a cucumber. ‘On your bike, sunshine.’

The carpenter looked helplessly at Lucy, scowled