The Sentence Is Death

The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery #2) by Anthony Horowitz

Dedication

In memory of Peter Clayton,

20th June 1963 – 18th June 2018.

The best of friend

1 Scene Twenty-Seven

Usually, I enjoy visiting film sets. I love the excitement of seeing so many professional people working together – at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds – to create a vision that will have begun perhaps nine or ten months ago inside my head. I love being part of it all.

But this time it was different. I’d overslept and left home in a hurry. I couldn’t find my phone. I had the beginnings of a headache. Even as I got out of the car on that damp October morning, I knew that I’d made a mistake and that all in all I would have been better off staying in bed.

It was a big day. We were shooting one of the opening scenes in the seventh series of Foyle’s War – the first appearance of Sam Stewart, Foyle’s driver. Played by Honeysuckle Weeks, she had become a stalwart of the series and she was one of my favourite actors. When I wrote lines for her, I could always hear her saying them. The new season would find her married, out of the police force, working now for a nuclear scientist. I had decided to give her a big entrance and I wanted to be there to show my support.

This is what I had written.

27. EXT. LONDON STREET (1947) DAY.

SAM gets off a bus, carrying shopping. She has just had bad news and she pauses for a moment, thinking of the implications. She is surprised to see ADAM waiting for her.

SAM

Adam! What are you doing here?

ADAM

Waiting for you.

They kiss.

ADAM (CONT’D)

Let me take that.

He takes her shopping and together they begin to walk home.

On paper, it may not look like much but I had known all along that it would be a major headache. My wife, Jill Green, was the producer and those two words – LONDON STREET – would have been enough to make her groan. Shooting in London is always a horrible business, prohibitively expensive and fraught with difficulties. It often seems that the entire city is deliberately doing everything in its power to stop the cameras turning. Planes will fly overhead. Pneumatic drills and car alarms will burst into angry life. Police cars and ambulances will race past with their sirens blaring. No matter how many signs you’ve put up warning people you’re going to be there, someone will have forgotten to move their car or, worse still, will have left it there on purpose in the hope of being paid. There’s a natural assumption that TV and film producers have deep pockets but sadly this is far from true. Tom Cruise may be able to shut down Blackfriars Bridge or half of Piccadilly without a second thought, but that’s not the case for most British television, where even a short scene like the one I’d written can be almost impossible to achieve.

Leaving the car, I found myself entering a time warp. This was 1947. The production had managed to get hold of two streets of Victorian houses and had worked hard to turn them into a perfect reproduction of post-war London. Aerials and satellite dishes had been covered with ivy or plastic roof tiles. Modern doors and windows had disappeared behind frames that would have been measured and constructed weeks before. Street signs and lamp posts had been camouflaged and yellow lines covered with sackloads of the powder known as Fuller’s earth. We had brought in our own props: a bright red telephone box, a bus stop and enough debris to simulate the sort of bomb damage that would have been familiar to Londoners years after the war. Ignore the people in Puffa jackets, the lights, the dollies and the endlessly snaking cables and it was indistinguishable from the real thing.

There was a whole crowd of people standing around me, waiting patiently for filming to begin. Along with the crew there were about thirty background artists all in costume with period haircuts. I examined the action vehicles, which were being manoeuvred into position by the second assistant director. They included an Austin Princess, a Morgan 4/4, a horse and cart and, the hero of the scene, an AEC Regent II double-decker bus from which Sam Stewart would emerge. Honeysuckle was standing with her screen husband across the road and, seeing me, she raised a hand. But she didn’t smile. That was when I knew things weren’t going well.