Classic Calls the Shots Read Online Free PDF

definitely didn’t want to know what kind of love scene would follow. ‘Show me how you change character.’ I’d keep the seductress Louise for later – if and when.
    She took me at my word. She shut her eyes and the face became expressionless and immobile. Then it began slowly to alter and when the eyes flew open again the woman before me was a stranger, full of contradictions, doubts, determination, malicious, vulnerable, and with the face of a Delilah. Then she relaxed and Louise was back with me.
    â€˜Did you see?’ she asked doubtfully.
    â€˜I prefer Louise to Julia.’
    â€˜Thank you, Jack.’ Then she kissed my cheek.
    It had been meant lightly, but something had happened between us. From her look of sudden bewilderment she too realized that and wasn’t sure she liked it. My move. I took her hand, and she smiled.
    â€˜Is there a Mrs Colby?’ she asked.
    â€˜An ex of twenty years standing. Is there a Mr Shaw?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    I knew life couldn’t be this kind to me.
    â€˜Two in fact,’ she continued. ‘My father and my brother.’
    â€˜They’re
wonderful
people,’ I said fervently.
    â€˜You’ll like them.’
    This studio wasn’t Number One, it was Cloud Nine.
    â€˜The tour,’ she added pointedly, and I promptly leapt off my cloud and returned to business mode. Studio Three was vast. It was here that the Jubilee Ball was to be shot, and if someone had told me that there were a thousand people working on this set I’d have believed them. The crew was here in force, with generators, lamps, candles, cameras, moving platforms, Steadicams, and audio equipment, plus a construction team setting up the ballroom. There was accompanying noise, with shouts, cries and general hum so loud that it assaulted the ears. It was like being faced with the merry old land of Oz, watching people busily rigging lights, adjusting camera angles and polishing the floor. And Bill Wade was the wizard in charge of the lot.
    â€˜Crew time,’ Louise told me, ‘uncontaminated by cast or extras. We’re not shooting here until tomorrow.’
    â€˜Are there many extras?’
    â€˜You bet, though they’re often called background now. Roger’s rubber-stamped a hundred and fifty for two days’ work. Costume’s been stretched to produce enough dress jackets and evening gowns for that number. Let alone the tiaras.’
    â€˜Would there be lists of both cast and background for the days when the incidents occurred?’
    â€˜Sure to be. Ask Casting.’
    â€˜Er . . .?’ I tried to place this but failed.
    â€˜Their room’s in the production building, first floor somewhere.’
    â€˜Great.’ I could see that trying to approach the case by eliminating them one by one was likely to be a non-starter. I had to plough on, however, if the answer to the Auburn theft lay within the studios. It seemed Kafkaesque; I would be plunging through a never-ending fog towards some indication of where that beautiful object now was. In a scrapyard? No one could be so crass as to destroy it. A thing of beauty was a joy for ever, Keats said, and he would have drooled over the glories of the 1935 Auburn. Those amazingly elegant pontoon fenders, that breathtaking boattail, that gleaming cream paint . . .
    â€˜Let’s have that coffee,’ Louise suggested. ‘I’ll grab a sandwich too, and then I’ll have to disappear. And you can get your cast lists. Did someone give you a security pass?’
    â€˜Someone did.’ Reception had unbent sufficiently to hand me one with her own fair hand.
    The canteen was plush and huge, so plush that I wondered how the hospitality suite could better it. I suppose the canteen needed to be on a grand scale with that number of cast and crew to be fed and watered all day long. It was nearly lunchtime, and it was reasonably full. There were plenty of crew here, plus some