‘Have you spoken to Anton tonight?’ Kit asked, while Harry was distracted by one of Caro’s more outlandish stories about filming a Dahlia Lively episode in Egypt.

‘No. Why?’ Posy’s gaze darted to the far end of the table, where Anton sat beside Isobel.

‘He’s acting weird. Weirder than normal,’ he clarified, off her look. ‘He collared me before dinner, demanding to know where you were, and where you found that script page.’

Posy winced. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I had no idea. Because I don’t.’

Posy gazed at Anton again, deep in conversation with Ashok, and suddenly a thought occurred to her. Perhaps she’d got this wrong from the start. Perhaps the truth was much simpler than she’d imagined, and the drama and the theatrics were just that – a fiction designed to entertain, and to distract.

I keep coming back to the film. And the curse. What if that was what everything had been about, right from the beginning?

Anton got to his feet, heading for the door. Without thinking, Posy rose to follow him.

‘Where are you going?’ Kit asked.

‘Bathroom,’ she lied, again.

Kit’s gaze darted between her and the door Anton had just walked through. ‘Yeah, right.’ He didn’t try to stop her, though. And Rosalind’s raised eyebrows and Caro’s urgent hand signals weren’t going to, either.

It was time to find out what or who had really cursed the new Dahlia Lively movie.

Chapter Twelve

‘Sometimes, Johnnie, you just have to take the least bad option. Take a leap into the unknown, and trust someone – or cut someone out of your life. Even if it goes against everything you thought was true.’

Dahlia Lively in The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

By Lettice Davenport, 1940

‘Anton.’

The director stopped at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the bannister, then turned towards her. ‘Posy.’

In the darkness of the hallway, lit only by wall sconces that were little better than candles, his heavy brows cast a shadow over his eyes, but she could still see his lips curved in a semblance of a smile.

‘I wanted to talk with you. About the film.’

‘And how you got hold of that script page?’ Anton asked. ‘Libby swears blind she didn’t give it to you, and very few other people have seen it. So I must confess to being curious.’

‘It was pushed under my door this morning,’ she replied, honestly. ‘But it’s not the script I want to talk to you about. It’s the curse.’

He scoffed. ‘There is no curse.’

‘Of course there isn’t. Curses don’t exist.’ She watched him closely as she spoke her next words. ‘But marketing campaigns do. And so do sabotage campaigns. So which is it?’