A Sprinkle of Sabotage by Fiona Leitch (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

The three kisses at the end made me feel better and worse all at the same time. I typed back:

Later, alligator xxx

Ping! That was quick.

In a while, crocodile x

I showered and dressed quickly but with care, which I can neither confirm nor deny had anything to do with wanting to look nice for Nathan later. Daisy gave a yelp of excitement from the bedroom as I was making toast downstairs, and flew into the kitchen waving her phone; she’d got a text message too, and today was the day she’d be making her big screen debut. I hoped for all our sakes she wasn’t going to be a peasant like me, especially as her bestie Jade was in it as well. Jade’s mum Nancy was Cornish, born and bred, but her dad was Spanish, and both Jade and her little brother had ended up with a beautiful combination of blonde hair and an all-year-round Mediterranean tan skin tone. I could just imagine her being cast as some kind of ethereal pixie, while my beautiful but very Anglo-Saxon-looking daughter would be reduced to wearing a smaller version of the flipping itchy potato sack I’d had to contend with during my very brief acting career.

But for now, anything was possible, even being noticed by the director and given a few lines, and then being signed up on the spot by an agent, and then being cast in this generation’s version of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games or whatever. So Daisy fussed over her hair and put her favourite jeans on even though they were technically due for a wash (because of course they were the only thing that would come close to bridging the gap between her and stardom, so she couldn’t possibly wear her other pair), forced herself to eat some breakfast, and then danced about on her toes waiting for me to get a move on.

Would you believe it, Mum also had her big break today. I had to forcibly restrain her from getting a taxi back to her house to get her best outfit (the light-blue skirt suit she’d worn to my cousin Kevin’s wedding five years ago; it made her look like a cross between Mrs Doubtfire and the Queen Mum), and it was only when I told her about the chaotic communal dressing room where she’d have to leave her precious outfit during filming that she acquiesced and put her normal clothes on.

That meant there was no one to dog-sit Germaine today, so the whole family piled into the car and headed off to Polvarrow House.

The shoot was a hive of activity. The crew bustled around, hurriedly setting stuff up that had just as hurriedly been dismantled for safe storage the day before when it had looked like the shoot was over. If anyone was upset or even bothered about the death of Jeremy Mayhew, they were doing a bloody good job of hiding it. It felt a little bit tasteless to me, a little bit … unseemly, for want of a less Jane Austen-esque word. I knew the old saying that the show must go on, but really, must it? And so soon?

I delivered Daisy and Mum to the Wardrobe trailer and headed to the food truck. When I saw Mike Mancuso and Sam Pritchard in heated debate nearby, I went the long way round in an attempt to hear what they were talking about, but by the time I got close enough Pritchard had already stalked away. Mancuso saw me, so I gave him a businesslike nod, which he completely ignored. Fair enough.

I opened up the food truck, tethering Germaine to the steps on a long leash, and thought back over the conversation Nathan and I had had with the producer the day before. He’d been keen to get the case number so that he could claim on the production’s accident insurance, and I’d laughed at Nathan’s veiled warning about not claiming just yet; but despite the fact he’d only said that to wind Mancuso up, Nathan had turned out to be right. Mayhew’s death was looking like a deliberate act, not an accident or even misadventure, and knowing how hard most insurance companies will fight not to cough up any money on even the most genuine claim, I couldn’t believe they would pay out on a possible murder. Maybe that was why the shoot had started again? A production of this size must cost … well, I had no idea how much it cost to make a film, but you hear about Hollywood movies with budgets the size of a small country’s GDP, and with a cast and crew of this size, and with the hire of Polvarrow House, and all the equipment – even things like the horses and Gino’s food truck (and me) – they probably couldn’t afford to keep paying all those people for just sitting around and doing nothing.

I fired up the big catering urns so the cast and crew could at least have tea and coffee, then got some bacon cooking. Film crews love bacon baps, Gino had told me, and he was right. Once that was done I would take Germaine for a walk around the set to stop her getting bored and into mischief.

‘You’re back, then,’ said Lucy, the first AD. She was standing by the counter, waiting for the urns to heat up. ‘I thought maybe it was Gino. Sam seemed to think you were actually a copper, not a chef.’

‘Bit of both,’ I said, smiling. ‘I have to say I’m surprised to be back. I thought the shoot would be shut down for longer.’

Lucy smiled tightly. ‘Yeah, me too. It seems there’s little room for sentiment in filmmaking…’

‘A shoot like this must cost a lot to run,’ I said. ‘And these people still want paying, even when they’re not able to work.’

‘Yes,’ she