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caricature of a film executive. Obviously efficient to the fingertips (which were stained bright yellow – he rolls his own cigarettes, and while he’s smoking one he’s starting to roll the next – the most restless fingers I’ve ever seen).
    ‘Well, old man,’ he said, ‘anything particular you want to see, or shall we tour the whole dump?’
    I indicated a preference for the whole dump. In my innocence. It seemed to take hours and hours and hours. Callaghan prattled technicalities without cessation all the time, till my mind was like a piece of post office blotting paper. I only hope my beard concealed the absolute incomprehension of my mind. They’ll find ‘camera angles’ and ‘montage’ (whatever that is) written on my heart when I’m dead. Callaghan is certainly nothing if not thorough. What little receptive power I started with was soon exhausted after half an hour of being tripped up by electric cable, blinded by arc lights, and mown down by bustling operatives. Incidentally, the language in this place would make a bargee or a sergeant major sound like a representative of the Purity League. All the time, I was looking out for Lena Lawson, and finding it more and more difficult to mention her name in an innocent, conversational manner.
    However, Callaghan gave me an opening when we stopped to have a bit of lunch. We talked about detective novels and the impossibility of making films out of the best ones. He had read two of mine but was completely incurious about their author; I’d expected to have to stave off some awkward questions. Callaghan, however, was only interested in technique (which, typically, he pronounces ‘technic’). Holt had told him, of course, that I was on the lookout for the setting and detail of a new thriller. After a bit he asked how I’d happened to light on British Regal for my investigations. I saw my opportunity and said that the last English film I’d seen was one of theirs,
Housemaid’s Knees
.
    ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘I should have thought you’d run a mile from any company which produced that sort of tripe.’
    ‘Where’s your
esprit de corps?
’ I said.
    ‘Damn it all – underclothes and stockbrokers’ humour? Why it isn’t even tolerable cinema.’
    ‘That girl – what’s her name? – Lawson. She wasn’t bad, I thought. Plenty of go.’
    ‘Oh, Weinberg’s building her up,’ Callaghan said somberly. ‘From the legs upwards, you know. Up and up and up. She’s all right as a peg to hang lingerie on. Thinks herself a second Harlow, of course. They all do.’
    ‘Temperamental?’
    ‘No, just dumb.’
    ‘I thought all these film stars were perpetually going into tantrums,’ I said, casting – I flatter myself – a very delicate fly indeed.
    ‘You’re telling me? Oh yes, la Lawson used to throw her weight about all right. But she’s sobered down a hell of a lot lately. Quite subdued and biddable.’
    ‘How’s that?’
    ‘Dunno. Maybe Love has come into her life. She had a sort of breakdown – when was it? – last January. Held up the film we were making for nearly a fortnight. Believe me, old man, when the leading lady gets to sitting about in corners, just weeping quietly away to herself, it’s a menace.’
    ‘Bad as that, was it?’ I said, trying to keep my voice normal. January. ‘A sort of breakdown.’ Another piece of circumstantial evidence! Callaghan stared at me, with that febrile glitter in his eyes which makes him look like a minor prophet working up to some outsize piece of denunciation, but in actual fact – I should think – is just part of the stock-in-trade of the high tension, 100 per cent efficiency fiend.
    He said, ‘I’ll say it was. Gave us all the jim-jams. Weinberg told her to take a week off in the end. She’s got over it now, of course.’
    ‘Is she here today?’
    ‘No. Out on location. Thinking of making a pass at her, old man?’ Callaghan leered at me amiably. I told him that my intentions were