Star Struck

by Val McDermid

  “Have there been many of them?”

  “This is the third. Plus the one that went to Sandra. That were about the sins of the mother. To be honest, the first couple I just binned. I thought they were somebody at the wind-up.” Suddenly, Gloria looked away. She fumbled another cigarette from the packet and this time, the hand that lit it shook.

  “Something happened to change your mind?”

  “My car tires were slashed. All four of them. Inside the NPTV compound. And there was a note stuck under the windscreen wipers. ‘Next time your wardrobe? Or you?’ And before you ask, I

  “That’s serious business,” I said. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be talking to the police?” I hated to lose a potential client, but it would have verged on criminal negligence not to point out that this might be one for Officer Dibble.

  Gloria fiddled with her cigarette. “I told the management about it. And John Turpin, he’s the Administration and Production Coordinator, he persuaded me not to go to the cops.”

  “Why not? I’d have thought the management would have been desperate to make sure nothing happened to their stars.”

  Gloria’s lip curled in a cynical sneer. “It were nowt to do with my safety and everything to do with bad publicity. Plus, who’d want to come and work at NPTV if they found out the security was so crap that somebody could walk into the company compound and get away with that? Anyway, Turpin promised me an internal inquiry, so I decided to go along with him.”

  “But now you’re here.” It’s observational skills like this that got me where I am today.

  She flashed a quick up-and-under glance at me, an appraisal that contained more than a hint of fear held under tight control. “You’re going to think I’m daft.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t see you as the daft type, Gloria.” Well, it was only a white lie. Daft enough to spend the equivalent of a week’s payroll for Brannigan & Co on a matching outfit, but probably not daft when it came to a realistic assessment of personal danger. Mind you, neither was Ronald Reagan and look what happened to him.

  “You know Dorothea Dawson?” Gloria asked, eyeing me out of the corner of her eye.

  “‘The Seer to the Stars’?” I asked incredulously. “The one who does the horoscopes in TV Viewer? The one who’s always on the telly? ‘A horse born under the sign of Aries will win the Derby’?” I intoned in a cheap impersonation of Dorothea Dawson’s sepulchral groan.

  “Don’t mock,” she cautioned me, wagging a finger. “She’s a brilliant clairvoyant, you know. Dorothea comes into the studios

  I bet she had. Gifts from all the stars of Northerners. “And Dorothea said something about these letters?”

  “I took this letter in with me to my last consultation with her. I asked her what she could sense from it. She does that as well as the straight clairvoyance. She’s done it for me before now, and she’s never been wrong.” In spite of her acting skills, anxiety was surfacing in Gloria’s voice.

  “And what did she say?”

  Gloria drew so hard on her cigarette that I could hear the burning tobacco crackle. As she exhaled she said, “She held the envelope and shivered. She said the letter meant death. Dorothea said death was in the room with us.”

  Chapter 2

  SUN TRINE MOON

  Creative thinking resolves difficult circumstances; she will tackle difficulties with bold resolution. The subject feels at home wherever she is, but can be blind to the real extent of problems. She will not always notice if her marriage is falling apart; she doesn’t always nip problems in the bud.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  Anybody gullible enough to fall for the doom and gloom dished out by professional con merchants like astrologers certainly wasn’t going to have a problem with my expense sheets. Money for old rope, I reckoned. By Gloria’s own admission, hate mail was as much part of the routine in her line of work as travelling everywhere with stacks of postcard-sized photographs to autograph for the punters. OK, the tire slashing was definitely more serious, but that might be unconnected to the letters, an isolated act of vindictiveness. It was only because the Seer to the Stars had thrown a wobbler that this poison pen outbreak had been blown up to life-threatening proportions. “Does she often sense impending death when she does predictions for people?” I asked, trying not to snigger.

  Gloria shook her head vigorously. “I’ve never heard of anybody else getting a prediction like that.”

  “And have you told other people in the cast about it?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing you go on about.”

  Not unless you liked being laughed at, I reckoned. On the other hand, it might mean that the death prediction was one of Dorothea Dawson’s regular routines for putting the frighteners on her clients and making them more dependent on her. Especially the older ones. Let’s face it, there can’t be that many public figures Gloria’s age who go through more than a couple of months without knowing

  The news seemed to cheer her up. “Right then, we’d better be off,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and gathering her mac around her shoulders.

  “We’d better be off?” I echoed.

  She glanced at her watch, a chunky gold item with chips of diamond that glittered like a broken windscreen in a streetlight. “Depends where you live, I suppose. Only, if I’m opening a theme pub in Blackburn at eight and we’ve both got to get changed and grab a bite to eat, we’ll be cutting it a bit fine if we don’t get a move on.”

  “A theme pub in Blackburn,” I said faintly.

  “That’s right, chuck. I’m under contract to the brewery. It’s straightforward enough. I turn up, tell a few jokes, sing a couple of songs to backing tapes, sign a couple of hundred autographs and off.” As she spoke, she was setting her hat at a rakish angle and replacing her sunglasses. As she made for the door, I dived behind the desk and swept my palmtop computer and my moby into my shoulder bag. I only caught up with her because she’d stopped to sign a glossy color photograph of herself disguised as Brenda Barrowclough for Shelley.

  Something terrible had happened to the toughest office manager in Manchester. Imagine Cruella De Vil transformed into one of those cuddly Dalmatian puppies, only more so. It was like watching Ben Nevis grovel. “And could you sign one, ‘for Ted’?” she begged. I wished I had closed-circuit TV cameras covering the office. A video of this would keep Shelley off my back for months.

  “No problem, there you go,” Gloria said, signing the card with a flourish. “You right, Kate?”

  I grabbed my coat and shrugged into it as I followed Gloria into

  “This sign says, ‘Employees of DVS Systems only. Unauthorized users will be clamped,’” she pointed out.

  “It’s all right,” I said in a tone that I hoped would end the conversation. I didn’t want to explain to Gloria that I’d got so fed up with the desperate state of car parking in my part of town that I’d checked out which office car parks were seldom full. I’d used the macro lens on the camera to take a photograph of a DVS Systems parking pass through somebody else’s windscreen and made myself a passable forgery. I’d been parking on their lot for six months with no trouble, but it wasn’t something I was exactly proud of. Besides, it never does to let the clients know about the little sins. It only makes them nervous.

  Gloria stopped expectantly next to a very large black saloon with tinted windows. I shook my head and she pulled a rueful smile. I pointed the remote at my dark blue Rover and it cheeped its usual greeting at me. “Sorry it’s not a limo,” I said to Gloria as we piled in. “I need to be invisible most of the time.” I didn’t feel the need to mention that the engine under the bonnet was very different from the unit the manufacturer had installed. I had enough horsepower under my bonnet to stage my own rodeo. If anybody was stalking Gloria, I could blow them off inside the first five miles.

  I drove home, which took less than five minutes even in early rush-hour traffic. I love living so close to the cit
y center, but the area’s become more dodgy in the last year. I’d have moved if I hadn’t had to commit every spare penny to the business. I’d been the junior partner in Mortensen & Brannigan, and when Bill Mortensen had decided to sell up and move to Australia, I’d thought my career prospects were in the toilet. I couldn’t afford to buy him out but I was damned if some stranger was going to end up with the lion’s share of a business I’d worked so hard to build. It had taken a lot of creative thinking and a shedload of debt to get Brannigan & Co off the ground. Now I had a sleeping partner in the

  Besides, the domestic arrangements were perfect. My lover Richard, a freelance rock journalist, owned the bungalow next door to mine, linked by a long conservatory that ran along the back of both properties. We had all the advantages of living together and none of the disadvantages. I didn’t have to put up with his mess or his music-business cronies; he didn’t have to deal with my girls’ nights in or my addiction to very long baths.

  Richard’s car, a hot pink Volkswagen Beetle convertible, was in its slot, which, at this time of day, probably meant he was home. There might be other showbiz journos with him, so I played safe and asked Gloria to wait in the car. I was back inside ten minutes, wearing a bottle green crushed velvet cocktail dress under a dark navy dupion silk matador jacket. OTT for Blackburn, I know, but there hadn’t been a lot of choice. If I didn’t get to the dry cleaner soon, I’d be going to work in my dressing gown.

  Gloria lived in Saddleworth, the expensively rural cluster of villages that hugs the edges of the Yorkshire moors on the eastern fringe of Greater Manchester. The hills are still green and rolling there, but on the skyline the dark humps of the moors lower unpleasantly, even on the sunniest of days. This is the wilderness that ate up the bodies of the child victims of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. I can never drive through this brooding landscape without remembering the Moors Murders. Living on the doorstep would give me nightmares. It didn’t seem to bother Gloria. But why would it? It didn’t impinge either on her or on Brenda Barrowclough, and the half-hour drive out to Saddleworth was long enough for me to realize these were the only criteria that mattered to her. I’d heard it said that actors are like children in their unconscious self-absorption. Now I was seeing the proof.

  In the December dark, Saddleworth looked like a Christmas card, early fairy lights twinkling against a light dusting of snow. I wished I’d listened to the weather forecast; the roads out here can be closed by drifts when there hasn’t been so much as a flake

  I edged forward slowly, completely gobsmacked. I appeared to have driven into the set of a BBC period drama. I was in a large cobbled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by handsome twostory buildings in weatherworn gritstone. Even my untrained eye can spot early Industrial Revolution, and this was a prime example. “Wow,” I said.

  “It were built as offices for the mill,” Gloria said, pointing me towards a pair of double doors in the long left-hand side of the square. “Leave the car in front of my garage for now. Then the mill became a cat food factory. Sound familiar?”

  “The factory where you used to work?”

  “Got it in one.” She opened the car door and I followed her across the courtyard. The door she stopped at was solid oak, the lock a sensible mortise. As we went in, a burglar alarm klaxoned its warning. While Gloria turned it off, I walked across the wide room that ran the whole depth of the building. Through the tall window, I could see light glinting off water. The house backed on to the canal. Suddenly life looked better. This house was about as impregnable as they come. Unless Gloria’s letter writer had the Venetian skill of climbing a ladder from a boat, I was going to be able to sleep in my own bed at night rather than across the threshold of Gloria’s bedroom.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Especially when your living room used to be the cashier’s office where you picked up your wages every week smelling of offal,” Gloria said ironically.

  I turned back to look round the room. Wall uplighters gave a soft glow to burnished beams and the exposed stone of the three outer walls. The furnishings looked like a job lot from John Lewis, all pastel-figured damask and mahogany. The pictures on the wall

  “Thank God,” she said with feeling, opening a walk-in cupboard and hanging up her coat.

  “Anyone else have keys?”

  “Only my daughter.” Gloria emerged and pointed to a door in the far wall. “The kitchen’s through there. There’s a freezer full of ready meals. Do you want to grab a couple and stick them in the microwave while I’m getting changed?” Without waiting for an answer, she started up the open-plan staircase that climbed to the upper floor.

  The kitchen was almost as big as the living room. One end was laid out as a dining area, with a long refectory table and a collection of unmatched antique farm kitchen chairs complete with patchwork cushions. The other end was an efficiently arranged working kitchen, dominated by an enormous freestanding fridgefreezer. The freezer was stacked from top to bottom with meals from Marks and Spencer. Maybe country living could be tolerable after all, I thought. All you needed to get through the winter was a big enough freezer and an endless supply of computer games. I chose a couple of pasta dishes and followed the instructions on the pack. By the time they were thawed and reheated, Gloria was back, dressed for action in a shocking-pink swirl of sequins. All it needed was the Brenda Barrowclough beehive to define camp kitsch better than any drag queen could have.

  “Amazing,” I said faintly, scooping chicken and pasta into bowls.

  “Bloody awful, you mean,” Gloria said, sitting down in a flounce of candyfloss. “But the punters are paying for Brenda, not me.” She attacked her pasta like an extra from Oliver Twist. She finished while I was barely halfway through. “Right,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ll be five minutes putting on me slap and the wig. The dishwasher’s under the sink.”

  With anyone else, I’d have started to resent being ordered around. But I was beginning to get the hang of Gloria. She wasn’t

  The drive to Blackburn was the last sane part of the evening. Gloria handed me a faxed set of directions then demanded that I didn’t mither her with problems so she could get her head straight. I loaded an appropriate CD into the car stereo and drove to the ambient chill of Dreamfish while she reclined her seat and closed her eyes. I pulled up outside the pub three-quarters of an hour later, ten minutes before she was due to sparkle. She opened her eyes, groaned softly and said, “It’s a bit repetitive, that music. Have you got no Frank Sinatra?” I tried to disguise my sense of impending doom. I failed. Gloria roared with raucous laughter and said, “I were only winding you up. I can’t bloody stand Sinatra. Typical man, I did it my own bloody-minded way. This modern stuff’s much better.”

  I left Gloria in the car while I did a brief reconnaissance of the venue. I had this vague notion of trying to spot any suspicious characters. I had more chance of hitting the Sahara on a wet Wednesday. Inside the pub, it was mayhem on a leash. Lads with bad haircuts and football shirts jostled giggling groups of girls dressed in what the high-street chain stores had persuaded them was fashion. Mostly they looked like they’d had a collision with their mothers’ cast-offs from the seventies. I couldn’t think of another reason for wearing Crimplene. The Lightning Seeds were revealing that football was coming home at a volume that made my fillings hurt. Provincial didn’t begin to describe it. It was so different from the city-center scene I began to wonder if we could have slipped through a black hole and ended up in the Andromeda galaxy. What a waste of a good frock.

  The special opening night offer of two drinks for the price of one had already scored a clutch of casualties and the rest of the partygoers looked like they were hellbent on the same fate. I ducked

  She paused on the threshold, took a swift look round the room and said, “You’ve obviously led a very sheltered life.” As she spoke, someone spotted her. The cry rippled across the room and within seconds the youth of Blackburn were cheeri
ng and bellowing a ragged chorus of the theme song from Northerners. And then we were plunged into the throbbing embrace of the crowd.

  I gave up trying to keep Gloria from the assassin’s knife after about twenty seconds when I realized that if I came between her and her public, I was the more likely candidate for a stiletto in the ribs. I wriggled backwards through the crowd and found a vantage point on the raised dais where the DJ was looking as cool as any man can who works for the local building society during the day. I was scanning the crowd automatically, looking for behavior that didn’t fit in. Easier said than done, given the level of drunken revelry around me. But from what I could see of the people crammed into the Frog and Scrannage, the natives were definitely friendly, at least as far as Gloria/Brenda was concerned.

  I watched my client, impressed with her energy and her professionalism. She crossed the room slower than a stoned three-toed sloth, with a word and an autograph for everyone who managed to squeeze alongside. She didn’t even seem to be sweating, the only cool person in the biggest sauna in the North West. When she finally made it to the dais, there was no shortage of hands to help her up. She turned momentarily and swiftly handed the DJ a cassette tape. “Any time you like, chuck. Just let it run.”

  The lad slotted it into his music deck and the opening bars of the Northerners theme crashed out over the PA, the audience swaying along. The music faded down and Gloria went straight into what was clearly a well-polished routine. Half a dozen jokes with a local spin, a clutch of anecdotes about her fellow cast members then, right on cue, the music swelled up under her and she belted out a segued medley of “I Will Survive,” “No More Tears,” “Roll With It,” and “No Regrets.”