In the Still of the Night

‘Did you have much in your bag?’ Derek asked her.

White and shaken, she muttered, ‘My wallet, with all my money and credit cards.’

‘Oh, Annie, how could you be so stupid?’ Harriet took off the thick jacket she wore and wrapped it round her shoulders. ‘You need some hot, sweet tea; you’re in shock.’ She looked at one of her trainees, who ran off at once like a well-trained dog to fetch what his mistress wanted.

‘A couple of handbags got stolen from the caravans last year – remember?’ said Annie. ‘That’s why I always keep anything valuable with me now.’

Harriet grimaced. ‘Well, you’d better ring and cancel your cards at once, before he gets a chance to use them.’ She held out her mobile phone. ‘You know the number to ring?’

‘It’s in my diary,’ Annie ruefully said.

Seeing her expression, ‘Don’t tell me!’ groaned Harriet. ‘The diary’s in your handbag! You idiot.’ Then she stopped, staring across the market. Sean was walking back towards them. ‘Well, I’m damned. What a guy. He’s got it back.’

Breathing audibly, his face flushed, Sean reached them and held out the bag. ‘We almost got him …’ He leaned against a wall, his chest heaving. ‘God, I must be out of condition. I thought we’d lost him, there was no sign of him in the alley, then suddenly he came back towards us – it was a dead end, he was trapped. I was out in front of the others. When he saw I might catch up he threw the bag at me, put his foot down, swerved and took off again like a bat out of hell.’

‘Is your wallet still in the bag?’ Harriet asked.

Annie was already looking through the contents – car keys, diary, house keys, wallet, chequebook, credit cards and money all intact. Nothing was missing. She gave a sigh of relief.

‘It’s all here.’ Looking up she smiled at Sean. ‘Thank heavens for that. I owe you one, Sean. You were marvellous. As for being out of condition … I don’t know anyone else who could run fast enough to catch up with a guy on a motorbike.’

‘Buy me a drink after work,’ he coolly said.

She sensed a leap of tension close to her, felt Harriet staring and looked quickly at her, but Harriet’s face was calm and blank.

‘Of course; thanks,’ Annie slowly said, wondering if Harriet would mind. Some of the crew believed she and Sean had got something going, but they were very discreet about it. ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you, anyway,’ she added.

His brows lifted. ‘Complaints about my script?’

‘Not complaints, of course not. Your scripts are always brilliant.’

His mouth twisted; he had a sardonic cast of face which reflected his instinctive cynicism. ‘But …?’

Years in the fraud squad of the City of London police had taught Sean to distrust human beings and be wary of them. Annie had learnt to distrust people, too – all the same, she didn’t like the hardness in Sean Halifax, he was not an easy man to deal with. He didn’t suffer fools gladly; he made her feel uncomfortable, on edge.

‘I just wondered how far you’re going to go with the love story subplot,’ she said with a mixture of defensiveness and aggression. ‘I know the script committee decided to feed one in, but it’s taking up more time every week, eating into the real meat of the storylines, it’s changing the whole feel of my character.’

Sean looked at Harriet, his pale grey eyes ironic. ‘Don’t tell me, tell Harriet.’

‘Look, it works,’ Harriet said in a placatory tone. ‘The ratings are the only things the board of directors understands or cares about, and they keep going up. You may not be happy, either of you, but our chairman is! Billy is a simple soul.’

Annie snapped, ‘He doesn’t have to work with Mike Waterford! How would Billy like to have Mike pawing him and trying to get his hand up his skirt?’

Harriet burst out laughing. ‘What a picture! Billy doesn’t wear a skirt! But if he did, and it would put the ratings up, he’d let Mike Waterford put his hand anywhere he liked!’

Everyone within earshot was listening; they all knew Annie hated working

with Mike Waterford. She hadn’t hidden her dislike and contempt for the man, and whenever they worked together he set about getting his own back: sabotaging her work: the usual cheap tricks, moving behind her during her big scenes, reacting to lines in a way that threw her off balance. He couldn’t do that with Harriet’s eagle eye on him, of course – if she spotted any tricks like that, she’d take him apart, but when she wasn’t directing he took every chance he got to needle Annie.

He murmured jokes about her just out of earshot, mocked her slyly, gossiped about her, picked on any little mistake she made, made friends with anyone who didn’t like her, and on any production there were always people who were jealous or hostile to the star. If she had disliked the man once, she detested him now.

But she had to admit that Harriet had a genius for what made good TV and attracted media attention.

Mike’s performance had given a new bite to the series. He had an instinctive, arrogant masculinity with which Annie’s character clashed. They were natural opposites, the two ends of a magnetic compass.

‘Billy wants me to write in even more scenes of the two of you alone,’ Sean told her. ‘In fact, he wants me to go a lot further, and have some sex scenes, and I mean real sex, not just a kiss and a fade-out. He wants you both in bed!’

‘Over my dead body!’ Annie turned crimson with fury.