Helen swallowed, her brow furrowing. “The most recent trip they did was for a series of Channel Four documentaries. We had this idea of going back with immigrants from the subcontinent to the villages they left thirty years ago. We wanted to see how the villages had changed, and we thought it would be interesting to do it through the eyes of the villagers who had stayed and those who had left. Thirty/Three, I called it. It was my idea, but I couldn’t fit the filming timetable in with other stuff I already had booked in. It’s always the same in this game, feast or famine. I’ve either got three projects all demanding my attention or else I’m running around like a headless chicken doing a rain dance, trying to raise funding from anywhere to make the next film.”

“So Guy and Stella had to make the films for Thirty/Three without you?”

“That’s right. Why d’you want to know? Are you on to something?”

“In a minute. Which country were they in?” Lindsay asked through a mouthful of cream cheese and sun-dried tomatoes.

“India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. We made one film in each of the three of them,” Helen explained. “We took three families back, original immigrants and their kids, so that we could compare and contrast the achievements and expectations of both groups, as well as the straightforward lifestyle stuff. It wasn’t a particularly cheap or easy set of films to make. It’s never simple when you’re juggling that many people with their own separate agendas, but they got some good stuff.”

“Were you involved in the project at all after the early stages?” Lindsay asked.

“Are you kidding? I was in the middle of making a six-half-hour drama series for children’s TV about racist bullying. I hardly had enough brain cells to spare for going to the toilet. I just told them to bugger off and come back with enough film for three forty-minute slots.”

“Perfect,” Lindsay breathed.

“Linds, I know I can be a bit slow sometimes, but I’m obviously missing something here. Why does it matter where Stella and Guy were filming and whether I was there or not?”

“Kickbacks,” Lindsay said.

Helen managed to look both worried and suspicious. “What about kickbacks?”

“You know and I know that to operate any kind of business in certain developing countries, you need to pay nearly as much in backhanders as you do in legitimate fees.”

“More sometimes,” Helen interrupted gloomily. “If I live to be a hundred, I will never ever film in Sierra Leone again. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with stitching up that pair of gobshites.”