Fear in the Sunlight Read Online Free PDF

owner of the car was a middle-aged man, tall but carrying too much weight around the waist and wearing a crumpled linen suit that made no attempt to hide the fact. ‘Just shows how wrong you can be, doesn’t it?’ She looked closer as the driver removed his hat. ‘Isn’t that Leyton Turnbull?’
    The man seemed vaguely familiar to Archie, but he would never have been able to summon up a name. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I’ll bow to your encyclopedic knowledge of matinee idols.’
    ‘Fallen idols,’ Josephine corrected him. ‘He’s never had much success since sound came in – the lisp was such a handicap. I’m surprised he can still afford a car like that.’
    ‘He must be back in favour if the Hitchcocks have invited him for the weekend.’
    ‘Just my luck,’ Josephine said despondently. ‘He’s probably in line for Alan Grant. Is there a police rank that doesn’t have an “s” in it?’ She sighed. ‘Have you actually seen the Hitchcocks yet?’
    ‘No, but I know they’re staying at the Watch House.’ He pointed to a small, single-storey building with a pantiled roof, perched on the cliff top just to the right of the Bell Tower. Two columns on the seaward side of the cottage cleverly transformed an otherwise undistinguished building into an attractive loggia, rather like an old Greek monastery – an impression that was enhanced by the series of steep walled steps and stone resting places that linked it to the terraces below. ‘You’ll know about it when they want to make their presence felt. He makes quite an entrance.’
    ‘Have you met him?’
    ‘Once or twice. The first time must have been about ten years ago when he was making The Lodger .’
    ‘Did he want your professional advice on killers with a grudge against blondes?’
    Archie laughed. ‘No, nothing like that. He came to the Yard to get permission to haul a body out of the Thames, but I’m afraid I had to refuse it.’ Josephine looked confused, so he explained. ‘He was desperate to do a shot of London at night, something you wouldn’t normally see, and he came up with the idea of dragging one of the victims out of the river against the backdrop of Charing Cross Bridge. He pestered us to let him do it – pulled every string he had and practically went to the Home Secretary. In the end, someone much higher than I was at the time let it be known that although the official answer was no, he wouldn’t be stopped if he tried it.’
    ‘I bet you were thrilled about that.’
    ‘For a bit, yes, but I had the last laugh.’
    Josephine looked curious. ‘Go on.’
    ‘The crew turned up with all the equipment: two huge vans stuck in the middle of Westminster Bridge, and God knows how many lights and cameras. They were there for hours, holding up the traffic, stopping and starting every time a tram went past, until eventually Hitchcock was satisfied that he’d got the effect he wanted.’
    ‘So what went wrong?’
    ‘The cameraman forgot to check the equipment. When they looked through the rushes, the scene simply wasn’t there.’
    ‘Is that really true, or just a showbiz legend?’ Josephine asked. ‘Not that it matters – it’s too good a story.’
    ‘It’s gossip, obviously, but that shot certainly isn’t in the finished film. I went to see it to make sure.’
    ‘You’d better watch yourself this weekend, then. Hitchcock probably thinks you sabotaged the whole venture.’
    ‘Oh, he doesn’t remember me,’ Archie said. ‘He came back a couple of years later to do some research for Blackmail and he didn’t mention it. But don’t be too intimidated when you finally meet him. He might be a genius, but he’s not infallible.’
    ‘Come to think of it, Marta always says he’d be lost without his wife,’ Josephine said. ‘I didn’t know this‚ but Alma Reville was senior to him when they first met. He was an errand boy at the studios, and she was already a cutter and producer’s assistant. He didn’t