‘Lights and electricity. That’s it. Then we had to pay extra for the cameraman, the sound man, all the kit. Cameras. Mics. And then we went over one day. By an hour. Had to pay a surcharge of £250.’
Filming was an expensive business. Even more than Ella would have guessed.
‘And is that standard?’
‘No, that was cheap. Depends on the size of the studio you hire. How specialist is it? Depends whether you want sound and cameras. Whether you want to use their editing suite. Their editors. Licence to print money. Although you can get some great grants for video work. What are you thinking of doing? Have you told Patrick? Is it a solo project?’
Ella winced at Britta’s flurry of enthusiastic questions. ‘There’s no project. I went to the gallery.’ She sounded accusatory but Britta missed it.
‘What, in London? Why didn’t you call me? We could have met up for coffee.’
Ella swallowed. Her next words would be the equivalent of lighting a match and watching everything go up in flames but she couldn’t pretend everything was all right. Her hand stilled on Tess’s ear and the dog nudged her hand, giving it a swift lick. For a moment, she let the silence hang between them before saying, ‘You knew.’ The bald words dropped like stones down a well. One by one, impossible to take back.
‘Knew what?’ Britta’s tone changed, her voice immediately guarded. Ella didn’t have the energy to play games.
‘That Patrick was selling my pictures. You took it, didn’t you. Cuthbert in his Cavalier hat.’
Typical Britta; she didn’t miss a beat or try to excuse what she’d done. ‘He said he missed you and wanted a souvenir.’ Ella could imagine Britta’s insouciant, elegant shrug of her bony shoulders. Maybe she hadn’t known what Patrick was doing. Difficult to believe, although she desperately wanted to.
Britta’s next words robbed her of that hope.
‘He wanted to know what you were doing. He said he wouldn’t sell that one.’
‘Thatone.’ Ella swallowed, the hard knot pressing into her throat. Damn. She’d really wanted Britta to be innocent. To be asin the dark as she’d been. But the throwaway line confirmed that Britta knew full well that Patrick was selling Ella’s pictures.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tell you what? Does it matter that he sold them? I mean, no disrespect, but you’re selling the images anyway? What’s the difference? People buy them all the time in the books. Babes, you are very good at drawing. You’re good at everything, sculpting, modelling, painting. You’ve got it. Technically those pictures are brilliant.’
‘Shame you never said that before,’ snapped Ella.
‘Are you mad at me?’ Britta’s voice held a hint of amazed disbelief.
‘Too flipping right, I’m mad. I’m furious.’
‘Oh.’
That was all she had to say. Just ‘Oh’. That was it?
‘I have to go, Britta.’ She hastily ended the call. She just didn’t have the energy to explain to Britta how much it mattered or, more satisfyingly, any desire to do so.
Tess put a paw on Ella’s hip and her head nudged at Ella’s chin. The shift in weight made it hard for Ella to keep her balance. Tess’s head nudged her again. Silly dog. Managing to regain her balance, she ruffled Tess’s ears. ‘You agree with me, don’t you?’ Tess’s steady gaze immediately lifted her spirits. Britta had let her down. She’d told her how she felt and it was done.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Ella as she pulled the cake tins out of the oven when the timer went off. The last time she’d peered through the glass in the oven, the two sponges had risen rather well – in fact spectacularly well, like a pair of volcanoes. Since then they’d sunk and now each featured a definite dip in the top.
‘Hmm, if I cut the tops off and cover everything with icing, they could be ok. What do you think, Tess?’
Tess’s tongue was hanging out.
‘Stupid question. You’d eat both in one gulp, wouldn’t you?’
As the cakes cooled, she turned her thoughts back to Devon. She really wanted to do something for him for a change. With a sudden burst of energy, she sat down at the kitchen table and opened up a spreadsheet. She needed some more information. Thank God for the internet and Google. She scrolled through several websites, checking her facts.Making Pets Well With Marinawas produced by a company called Vet Magic Productions. With a little more digging, lo and behold, it turned out that Marina part-owned the film production company. That made things really murky. Ella picked up the phone again. Why was she doing this? Some forlorn hope of rescuing Devon from Marina? Making sure that he had a choice? She didn’t want him to be in the dark the same way that she had been for all this time.
By the end of the afternoon, after several calls including one to Bets to find out how long Devon and Marina had lived in the house and one to the registered offices of VM Productions, Ella had struck gold with a very chatty receptionist who’d been only too happy to tell her how long the programme had been running and the history of the show. It turned out that the first two series of the programme – which was now in its tenth series – had been filmed in a studio before they’d moved to the current location. And more recently they were doing the regular segment on the news magazine show on ITV.
With all the information she had, Ella set up a spreadsheet, typing in estimated figures. She was guessing, but even on the conservative side with the time period and number of series she created a compelling set of figures. In the last three years, eight ten-week series ofMaking Pets Well With Marinahad been filmed in the consulting rooms at Marina and Devon’s house. Eighty programmes equated to a lot of filming time. Accordingto Ella’s spreadsheet, that was an awful lot of studio fees that someone should have paid.
Ella snapped shut her laptop and nibbled at her fingernail. Marina had seemed so sincere and heartbroken the other day. Maybe she shouldn’t interfere . . .
