Tony.’
Simon introduced himself and Tony opened the car door and got out, tossing his cigarette aside.
‘I really want to talk to you about the last time you drove Amanda Delany,’ Simon said as they fetched tea and sat down in the catering tent.
‘Yeah, right – be the night before she was murdered. I wasn’t her usual driver, I drove her ’cos they broke early so her own driver was doin’ another job – not moonlightin’, nothin’ like that – he was just drivin’ another actor from the cast.’ Tony sipped his drink at the Formica-topped table. ‘So I done the job for him. She wasn’t due to break until around three-thirty in the morning, but the director finished her scenes early.’
‘So you weren’t expecting to drive her home?’
‘No, I just told you. She had her own driver – well, she thought he was her own but the company hires all of us. It’s a star thing, you know. They insist on their own car and driver.’
Tony was in his mid-thirties, quite handsome with bright blue eyes. A combover job of his fine blond hair showed he was not happy with the balding process. He was well-dressed in a grey suit with a pristine white shirt and green tie.
‘Tell me about the night you drove Amanda home,’ Simon asked.
Tony shrugged. He had little to say. She’d appeared very tired and told him not to get out when they reached her mews.
‘I watched her go in – you know, for safety – and then I backed out of the mews and returned to the set. That was the last time I saw her.’
In the costume trailer Anna was talking to Joanna Villiers, a pleasant, rosy-faced woman who had shown her the heavy costumes and corset worn by Amanda. She explained how difficult it had been drawing in the corset and how hard Amanda had found the weight of the hooped skirt to handle.
‘She was such a tiny, thin thing. We got her waist down to nineteen inches in the corset.’
‘Had Amanda said anything about being worried or frightened by anyone?’ Anna asked.
‘She told us about a disturbed night she’d had, waking up, hearing someone screaming; said it was terrifying – sounded as if someone was being tortured. That was the night before . . .’
Amanda Delany’s ‘personal’ driver, Harry James, turned out to be Tony’s elder brother, handsome like him but with a thick head of snow-white hair. He was very outspoken and showed no sign of distress regarding Amanda’s murder. He told Simon that he had never really liked her, as she could be a ‘right bitch’. He was eager to explain the relationship between the star and driver, how very often, due to the actors screwing around, they made life difficult for the driver whose sole job was to get them to the set on time.
‘By screwing around, Mr James, do you mean that in a literal sense?’
‘Listen, if they don’t get into the car, we wait. We’ve always got about half an hour to sit kicking our heels until they show, but sometimes it’s a lot longer than that. You ring their doorbell, you call them on the phone, they gotta be on set and it’s down to us to make sure they get there. It’s not always easy though. One actor, I hadda go round the clubs to find him and pour him into the car, and Amanda could be a right pain in the arse too.’
‘I’m really only interested in the last time you went to collect her for work – if you saw anything, heard anything suspicious.’
‘No, nothing. I drove up to her mews, on time, rang the doorbell and waited a good while, and then panic set in as she didn’t come out. I called her landline, her mobile and got no answer, and then I called the set as I was getting really concerned.’
Simon asked if he had ever, during the filming, taken Amanda elsewhere, to someone else’s home, or if he knew whether she was seeing anyone from the film unit.
‘No, not on this film.’
‘You’ve worked with Amanda before?’
‘Yes, although I wouldn’t call it working with her exactly. I was a unit driver on