The Sentence Is Death

It was already ten past eleven. That’s the thing about film sets. There are great stretches of time when nobody seems to be doing anything, followed by brief bursts of highly concentrated activity when the actual filming takes place. But the clock is always ticking. Speaking personally, I find the stress almost unbearable. When Stuart said he had to be done by twelve o’clock, he meant twelve o’clock on the dot. There were two real policemen holding up the traffic at the far corner. They would want to leave. The owners of the houses had given us permission to shoot for an exact amount of time. The locations manager was there, looking worried. I was already wishing I hadn’t come.

The AD picked up his megaphone and barked out fresh orders. ‘First positions!’ Slowly, stubbornly, the passengers climbed back on board and the Routemaster reversed. The children were led to their positions. The horse was given a lump of sugar. Fortunately, the second rehearsal went a little better. The bus and the camera met at the corner exactly as planned. Sam stepped down and walked away. The horse set off exactly on cue although it did rather spoil things by veering off the road and mounting the pavement. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. Stuart and the cameraman muttered a few words, then decided they were ready. Jill was looking at her watch. It was now eleven thirty-five.

Because this was a big scene with so much production value involved, we had our own stills photographer there along with a couple of journalists who were planning to interview Honeysuckle and me. ITV had sent down two senior executives who were anxiously watching over the entire operation along with health and safety people and paramedics from the St John Ambulance. In addition, there was the usual army of sparks, gaffers, first, second and third assistant directors, make-up artists, prop masters . . . a whole crew of them standing there, waiting to see a sequence that we now had less than thirty minutes to shoot.

There were final checks, glitches, a silence that seemed to stretch interminably. My palms were sweating. But at last I heard the familiar litany that comes with every shot.

‘Sound?’

‘Sound rolling.’

‘Camera?’

‘Camera rolling. Speed . . .’

‘Scene twenty-seven. Take one.’

The snap of the clapperboard.

‘Action!’

The camera began to glide towards us. The bus rattled forward. The children played. Obediently, with a spring in its step, the horse set off, pulling the cart.

And then, out of nowhere, a vehicle appeared, a modern, twenty-first-century taxi. It wasn’t even a black cab, which might have been adjusted, along with the bus, using CGI. It had been painted white and yellow with an advertisement for some new app in bright red and the legend ‘GET £5 OFF YOUR NEXT RIDE’ across the front and back doors. Just to add to the merriment, the window was rolled down and the driver was playing Justin Timberlake at full blast on the radio. It stopped, right in the middle of the shot.

‘Cut!’

Stuart Orme was usually a pleasant, easy-going man. But his face was thunderous as he looked up from his monitor to see what had happened. It was impossible, of course. The police should have blocked off the traffic. We had our own people at each end of the street, keeping back pedestrians. There was no way any vehicle could have come through.

Already, I was feeling sick inside. I had a bad feeling about what was about to happen.

And I was right.

The door of the taxi opened and a man got out. He seemed completely unconcerned by the fact that he was surrounded by a large crowd of people, many of them in period dress. He had a sort of cheerful self-confidence that was actually quite cold-blooded, utterly focused on his own needs at the expense of everyone else’s. He was not tall or well built but he gave the impression that, by whatever means necessary, he would never lose a fight. His hair, somewhere between brown and grey, was cut very short, particularly around the ears. His eyes, a darker brown, gazed innocently out of a pale, slightly unhealthy face. This was not someone who spent a lot of time in the sun. He was dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt and a narrow tie, clothes that might have been deliberately chosen to say nothing about him. His shoes were brightly polished. As he moved forward, he was already searching for me and I had to ask myself – how had he even known I was here?

Before I could duck down behind the monitor, he found me.

‘Tony!’ he called out, amicably – and loudly enough for everyone on the set to hear.

Stuart turned to me, quite furious. ‘Do you know this man?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘His name is Daniel Hawthorne. He’s a detective.’

The camera crew was staring at me. The two women from ITV were muttering to each other in disbelief. Jill went over to them, trying to explain. Everyone in the street had frozen in their positions as if they had suddenly turned into one of those ‘Historical London’ postcards. Even the horse looked annoyed.