Today she’d set aside to interview Freeman again. This time in the flesh.
She had already warned him to expect a visit. So she and Mike met at Leek Police Station nice and early. They’d have to battle through the Potteries traffic to reach the M6 but then would take the Toll motorway, avoiding the M6 congestion around Birmingham and the M40. They made good time, arriving at central London in just three and a half hours, using a satnav to find their way to Sargasso Mansions. James Freeman, ex-producer of Butterfield Farm, had obviously made plenty of money. Sargasso Mansions proved to be an imposing block of 1930s apartments, eight storeys high, with bay windows all the way up. Entrance was via a radio link. Joanna eyed Korpanski, pressed the button and grinned. ‘Well, here we go, Mike.’
Korpanski grinned back, his fingers crossed as Freeman’s voice responded crisply to Joanna’s introduction and the door was released. Inside the hallway was equally luxurious, polished black marble floor, panelled walls, a gleaming central round mahogany table on which stood a vase of lilies, two lifts doors facing – the expensive ambience furthered by the scent of the flowers and lavender wax polish.
They took the lift to the seventh floor.
Even in the flesh Freeman was still a very distinguished-looking man. Tall and thin, with a large, aquiline nose, thick white hair and shaggy eyebrows. He peered at them both, hostile eyes blazing bright blue, and scowled. ‘Don’t know what on earth you can possibly want with me,’ he grumbled as he led them indoors, ushering them into a room elegant in pale green and chinoiserie. They sat on some flimsy-looking armchairs upholstered in gold and suddenly Joanna didn’t quite know where to start, not even in which decade. So she chose what she thought would initially be neutral ground, to him at least. He wouldn’t know what she knew. ‘The original set of Butterfield,’ she said. ‘The real farm you used as a backdrop.’
He was instantly dismissive. ‘Most of it was shot in a studio,’ he said grumpily.
Joanna glanced at Korpanski. It was the response they’d anticipated. But she smothered her irritation. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I mean the farm you used for the backdrop of your outside shots.’
The eyebrows drew together and Joanna mused that those same shaggy eyebrows may well have been the warning signs to the cast that the day’s takes had not gone well.
‘It was in Worcestershire,’ Freeman finally said reluctantly, ‘not too far from the main studio which was BBC Birmingham, later Pebble Mill.’
‘I know,’ Joanna said quietly. ‘I’ve been there.’
Freeman looked up. ‘Then why …?’
Joanna shrugged, anxious to give no more away than she had to. She could play the game of secrets too. ‘It was burnt down, wasn’t it?’
Freeman nodded. ‘I believe so,’ he said.
‘Deliberately?’
Freeman shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ He sounded uninterested.
‘Do you know who burnt it down?’
‘I believe no one was ever charged.’
Joanna nodded. She’d checked the police records. It was down as an unsolved arson.
‘Do you know when?’
Freeman was getting irritated. ‘Is there a point to these questions?’
‘Just answer me, please.’
‘Must have been after nineteen seventy-two,’ he answered grumpily, ‘when the series folded.’
‘Do you know why it was burnt down?’
The question provoked a long, angry sigh. ‘No bloody idea,’ he said testily.
‘Who owns it?’
‘The farmer.’
Joanna shook her head, ‘No he doesn’t, does he, Mr Freeman?’ And she laid a piece of paper in front of him.
Freeman hardly bothered to read it. He knew its contents.
‘Why did you buy it?’
Freeman’s face altered, became softer, almost sweet. He gave an abstracted smile. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Sentiment, I suppose.’
‘You don’t strike me as a sentimental man.’
He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Well it was my most successful series, Inspector.’
‘But you have done other work since.’
‘Nothing that ran for twelve years.’
‘Do you visit the site often?’
Freeman shook his head. ‘I haven’t been there in years,’ he said reflectively. ‘Not for years and years.’ Then added: ‘I hardly leave London these days.’
Joanna gave Korpanski a nod and he continued, ‘When did you last see Timony?’
Joanna smiled a jam-for-tea bland grimace and let her sergeant continue. Korpanski’s style of questioning was different from hers. Confrontational, blunt, straight to the jugular. And sometimes this approach earned results.
‘Again. Years ago,’ Freeman said, his eyes meeting Joanna’s with a touch of regret, as though he would far rather have her proceed with the questions than the aggressive sergeant.
‘Did you keep in touch by telephone or email?’
‘A bit of both. But not for years, Sergeant.’
Something wary and deceitful sneaked into the older man’s manner.
Korpanski blundered on. ‘Did you know she was writing her memoirs, Mr Freeman?’
‘She may have said something about it that she might, in the future, one day, perhaps. Lots of people say that and never do it. As I say, I haven’t spoken to her for – now let me see – it must be three years. She invited me to revisit the past and have a holiday at the recreated Butterfield Farm. She told me that from the outside it was practically indistinguishable from the original set. I was tempted, I must confess. But I didn’t go.’ He made a poor attempt at humour. ‘I wasn’t that tempted.’
Somehow his attempt at offhandedness didn’t quite come off but his charm shone through like old gold.
Joanna took over. ‘Did the fact that she might pen her memoirs worry you?’
Freeman didn’t answer straight away but looked thoughtful. Eventually he said carefully, ‘It would depend what she might have put in them.’
‘Such as,’ she prompted casually.
‘I don’t know.’
The evasion was as obvious as the fact that Freeman wasn’t going to make it easy for them. So Joanna decided to change tack, partly to put him off the scent. She changed her manner to conspiratorial, pretending they were on the same side. ‘Tell me about Diana Tong,’ she said, in a sweet, matey tone. ‘Why did she stay with Timony all these years?’
Freeman gave a dry, unpleasant laugh. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ he said, practically jeering at her naivety. ‘She’s in love with her. Diana’s a closet lesbian.’
It gave Joanna the perfect cue. ‘But Timony wasn’t, was she?’
Freeman sidestepped the question as neatly as a Chinese gymnast. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘All those husbands.’
‘I mean, before all those husbands.’
Freeman stilled and something thick and dark wrapped itself around him.
‘Before she was married,’ Joanna said, locking her eyes to his. ‘Before she was sixteen.’
Freeman stared very deeply into her, trying to corkscrew out what exactly she knew.
Joanna pressed on. ‘Diana was married once, wasn’t she?’
It earned her a disdainful glare. ‘Briefly. It didn’t last. She was soon back, dancing around Timony like a lapdog.’
‘So she was, wasn’t she?’ Joanna agreed.
The quiet between the three of them intensified until it was a poisonous, sulphurous cloud full of accusation and finger pointing which clung to the atmosphere. Joanna let it settle for a moment before parrying again, approaching now from another angle. She knew exactly what she was doing, circling Freeman like a vigilant vulture, preparing to move in for the kill so she could peck his flesh. ‘Timony had some time off the set in nineteen sixty-six, didn’t she?’
Her casual tone didn’t fool Freeman for a second. He eyed her warily and didn’t offer any answer so Joanna produced her sequitur. ‘Why?’
He didn’t even think about it. ‘She needed a break.’
Joanna was still in terrier mode and rapped the question out again. ‘Why?’
‘The assault upset her terribly.’ Freeman appeared to open up. ‘She couldn’t adjust to the fact that her fans could be anything but adoring – even if Dariel was mad. Poor girl. She was exhausted and terrified that it would happen again.’ He decided he needed to embellish the story and “confide” in the police officers. ‘At one point we wondered whether she would ever return to Butterfield.’
Joanna gave Mike a swift nod. Now. Now. The time had come. ‘Let me correct you, Mr Freeman,’ she said sweetly. ‘When you say “exhausted” you mean she was pregnant, don’t you?’
For a moment Freeman looked stunned rather than surprised. Then he gave a brief, jerky nod.
‘She was thirteen years old when she became pregnant,’ Joanna said. ‘Who was having underage sex with her?’
And as Freeman didn’t answer but stared out of the window at the London skyline, as though he longed to escape and dance away across the rooftops, like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, Joanna pressed on. ‘Shall I put it another way, Mr Freeman. Who was the father of her child?’
The producer’s face changed again, to become bleak. ‘We didn’t know,’ he said. ‘No one knew.’
It wasn’t the answer either of them had expected or hoped for. Joanna gave Mike a quick, worried glance. Was this to be the end of the road?
‘Do I understand that you are saying that you didn’t know who was seducing a thirteen-year-old? A thirteen-year-old, may I remind you, Mr Freeman, who was in your care.’ Freeman hesitated and Joanna realized that the real truth was even more grotesque. She proceeded slowly along splinters of glass, her voice low. ‘Are you trying to tell me that there’s more than one possibility?’
By her side Joanna felt Korpanski twitch. He almost needed restraining, as would any man who has a daughter.
‘Who?’
Freeman’s shoulders seemed to shrink then. He morphed into his age, now looking a troubled old man easily in his eighties. ‘She was precocious,’ he said defensively.
Was he actually trying to defend the person or persons who were her abusers?
‘I guess that’s true of a lot of young actresses,’ Joanna said coldly. Korpanski simply cleared his throat with a harsh and disapproving scrape.
Freeman appeared to get the message, realized that more was expected of him. ‘I always thought Hadleigh.’ His eyes flickered from Joanna to Mike. ‘He played Sean Butterfield,’ he explained.
Joanna leaned forward to give her words more weight. ‘But you have no proof, Mr Freeman.’
He looked uneasy at that.
‘What about …’ The pause was deliberate, ‘Gerald, the man Timony married? Surely he would have been more likely?’
Surprisingly Freeman shook his head. ‘You may find it hard to believe,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think the child was Portmann’s. I think he would have told me,’ he finished weakly.
‘Oh?’
For the first time since they’d arrived Freeman smiled with genuine warmth and they had the sense that he had been fond of his leading man. ‘Gerald was a sentimental old fellow,’ he said. ‘Old fashioned in the extreme. He would have owned up to the child if it had been his.’
‘You know that we’re in a position to check who was having sex with Timony?’
‘What?’ The news startled Freeman out of what little composure he’d had.
Joanna tilted forward in her chair. ‘Did you never wonder what happened to the baby?’
The shutters came down. Slam. Freeman folded his arms tightly. ‘She came back without it,’ he said. ‘That’s all I knew. That’s all I needed to know. She came back to work and there was no longer a problem.’
Joanna was astonished. ‘You didn’t wonder what had happened to it?’
‘Not my concern.’
‘So whose concern was it?’ Joanna asked silkily.
Freeman appeared surprised at her ignorance. ‘Diana’s, of course.’
Then Freeman appeared to shrink back into his chair. ‘Diana’s, of course,’ he said again quietly.
Joanna gave Korpanski a quick glance. What was Freeman saying? Mike gave her a vague shrug.
‘There …’
‘Go on, Mr Freeman.’
‘I never thought it would come back to haunt me,’ he confessed.
Joanna waited.
‘I thought I would be dead before …’
He couldn’t find the words. Joanna decided to press again, ‘Why did you buy Butterfield?’
‘I told you – sentiment.’
Joanna shook her head slowly. ‘And as I told you, you don’t strike me as a sentimental sort of man, Mr Freeman.’
He gave a sad smile. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘all of us are.’
‘But there was a reason, wasn’t there? You had to buy it, didn’t you?’
Slowly, very slowly, James Freeman nodded his aristocratic head.