Limelight by Graham Hurley

Author:Graham Hurley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448304561
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2020-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Lunch with Rosa next day comes as a relief. Back in London, I feel suddenly rooted again. Normal is taking a cab to our favourite eatery in Covent Garden. Normal is ordering a bottle of decent Chianti to go with the scallops to come. Normal is listening to my lovely agent listing the treats that lie in store if only I can lay hands on Pavel’s elusive final opus.

‘Charlie wants to mount a retrospective. He says he’s got the backing for it, but he needs just one last bullet for that gun of his.’

‘The missing file.’

‘In one, my lovely. Are you absolutely sure it’s gone?’

Charlie Halligan, as I’ve already explained to Evelyn, is the commissioning editor whose magic wand hovers over Pavel’s considerable body of work. He has a great deal of clout in the BBC Drama department and I need no convincing that he can deliver on this homage to one of his favourite writers. Just as long as I can somehow retrieve the bloody file.

‘So where is it? Exactly?’

This is a trickier question than you might think. Rosa can smell a lie at a thousand metres.

‘The police have seized it,’ I confess.

‘It’s that bloody good?’

‘Not the file. Pavel’s MacBook.’

‘Remarkable. Do dead men break the law? Is your Pavel even naughtier than we thought?’

My Pavel – I like that, a lot. Rosa always knew the way to my heart. I explain about meeting Christianne, about our brief friendship, about her sudden disappearance after onset MND, and about the police turning up to seize anything they could get their hands on.

‘And this included the MacBook?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Should I enquire what it was doing with this man of hers?’

‘He’s a computer nerd. I asked him to try and find the file.’

‘And?’

‘He says it self-destructed. Blew itself up.’

‘Golly.’ Rosa looks impressed. ‘Can files do that?’

‘Apparently so. The guy used to lift mines for a living. He’s good around explosives.’

‘Christ.’ Rosa is picking at her asparagus starter. ‘So do we believe him?’

I tell her I don’t know, can’t be certain, and Rosa spends the rest of the meal reviewing the hole that Pavel appears to have left in the BBC Drama department’s forward offerings. We both know that this is a wild overstatement, but Rosa never got rich by sticking to the truth and we part outside on the pavement with me promising to have one final go at laying hands on Pavel’s MacBook.

‘That might be very wise, my precious.’ She’s looking for a cab. ‘And who knows? The bloody file might turn out to be crap.’

Back home, I put a call through to Brett Atkinson, but he’s not picking up, so I leave a message. The lunch has been a delight, as have several glasses of Chianti. ‘It’s me,’ I announce playfully. ‘Your favourite suspect. Any chance of returning my stolen property?’

A second call finds Malo in his Audi. He’s returning to London after a weekend with H, his natural father, and he can’t wait to share the good news.

‘About what?’

‘I’ll tell you this evening.

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