The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne and Horowitz Investigate #4)(7)

To be fair to him, he could be generous too. He was mortified by what had happened and when we came back the following Monday, he presented Sky with a bunch of flowers so huge that it filled two vases.

Sky Palmer herself was something of an enigma.

I’d seen her perform many times, but I can’t say I knew her particularly well, which was hardly surprising as she was in her mid-twenties – three decades younger than me. Outside the play, we had nothing in common. When I first met her I had been struck by her intense, dark eyes, her self-assurance and, most of all, by her luminous pink hair – which she’d had to wash out once she’d started playing the part. She’d also lost her nose stud and multicoloured fingernails. She didn’t smoke but during rehearsals she vaped, blowing out little clouds of steam that evaporated immediately, leaving a faint smell of menthol in the air. I’d been worried that the part of Nurse Plimpton might be difficult to cast. The way I’d written the character had been undeniably sexist … but then I’d deliberately based her on the sort of character who might have appeared in an old Hammer film. Sky didn’t seem to care. She never asked me questions. She did everything Ewan told her. It was hard to tell if she was enjoying herself or not.

This was mainly because, whenever she wasn’t working, she was plugged into her iPhone. It was the very latest model, the iPhone 8, in rose gold with a protective cover that sparkled with crystal glitter. She played games – Minecraft and Monument Valley – and she was forever checking her Twitter account. I never actually heard her speak to anybody, but she was endlessly texting, obviously in a relationship with someone. Her phone would ping in the middle of a scene and drive Ewan Lloyd to distraction. She would apologise sweetly even as she was firing off a reply. I had never seen anyone’s thumbs move so quickly.

Nothing about her quite connected. For example, the sweatshirts and leggings she liked to wear had come straight out of Sports Locker, but she also had a Cartier watch and her shoes were Jimmy Choo. She talked about popular culture – Star Wars and The Hunger Games – but I noticed her reading Franz Kafka. The playlist on her iPhone included Bj?rk and Madonna, but finding a piano in the rehearsal room, she sat down and played the first bars of a Bach prelude. I was quite sure there was something she wasn’t telling us.

That left Tirian Kirke, playing Mark Styler. He had come in late, replacing the actor who had decided that five months on the road was enough for him, and I’m afraid he was the only cast member I didn’t warm to … but then he and I had history.

A couple of years older than Sky, Tirian had made many appearances on TV, playing a junior case officer in Spooks, a police constable in Line of Duty and, for three seasons, a footman or some sort of under-butler in Downton Abbey. He wasn’t quite a household name, but he was well on his way to becoming one, so I had been very pleased when he was cast in a show I’d written called Injustice. This was a five-part legal drama starring James Purefoy, screened by ITV in 2011. It was also, coincidentally, the show where I first met Hawthorne. He was our technical adviser.

Tirian was going to play a young offender who falls foul of the prison system and eventually ends up taking his own life. It was a really good role. The character had four or five hefty scenes, plenty of screen time and a memorable death. He’d done a great audition and had been offered the part almost at once. He had accepted. The contract had been drawn up. But then, at the last minute, he had changed his mind. According to his agent, he had decided that the script wasn’t good enough, which hardly endeared him to me. The part was eventually played by Joe Cole, who did a brilliant job and went on to become a major star – but that didn’t change my feelings about Tirian. He’d wasted time and money. He’d let us down.

So I was nervous when Ewan told me that he had been cast as Mark Styler. Firstly, I was afraid that my earlier experience might repeat itself, but more to the point, Tirian came across as rather too pleased with himself to play the part, too self-conscious, with his carefully groomed hair, his designer clothes and the Ducati motorbike he drove to rehearsals. I had to remind myself that all of this had come with success and that he was, at heart, a very good actor and we were lucky to have him. The first time I saw him reading the part, he even looked exactly how I had imagined the character: slim and bony, with dark eyes and an unusual, angular face. He had a crooked nose and a lazy, roguish smile, far removed from the anodyne good looks of many young British actors. He was the sort of actor you couldn’t help noticing – and this was exactly what had happened. He had come to the attention of the Hollywood director Christopher Nolan, who had cast him in a big-budget production – Tenet – which was due to start shooting later in the year.

Tirian was going to be famous, which might be useful for the London production. Unfortunately, he knew he was going to be famous. This did not make him especially popular. He was actively disliked by Jordan Williams, who had got on much better with the actor he had replaced. Jordan frequently complained about Tirian not knowing his lines, upstaging him, refusing to give him eyelines, and Tirian would snap back, accusing the older actor of grandstanding. Sky stayed out of it, keeping herself to herself.

At any event, this was the team that moved into the Vaudeville Theatre in the first week of April. I didn’t go to the tech run-throughs or the dress rehearsals. There was nothing more for me to do by then and I was becoming increasingly nervous. It was strange. This was my ambition. This was what I had always wanted. As I arrived at the theatre for the first night with my wife, my sister and my two sons, I should have been more excited. There was my name in lights! (Well, not all of it. The ‘t’ in Anthony had fused.) But I wasn’t excited at all. I was feeling sick.