Star Struck

by Val McDermid

  You had to be there.

  The crowd was baying for more. They got it. “The Power of

  As soon as we were out of the car park, she pulled off the wig with a noisy sigh. “What did you think?”

  “Anybody who seriously wanted to damage you could easily get close enough. Getting away might be harder,” I said, half my attention on negotiating a brutal one-way system that could commit us to Chorley or Preston or some other fate worse than death if I didn’t keep my wits about me.

  “No, not that,” Gloria said impatiently. “Never mind that. How was I? Did they love it?”

  It was gone midnight by the time I’d deposited Gloria behind bolted doors and locked gates and driven back through the empty impoverished streets of the city’s eastern fringes. Nothing much was moving except the litter in the wind. I felt a faint nagging throb in my sinuses, thanks to the assault of cigarette smoke, loud music and flashing lights I’d endured in the pub. I’d recently turned thirty; maybe some fundamental alteration had happened in my brain which meant my body could no longer tolerate all the things that spelled “a good night out” to the denizens of Blackburn’s latest fun pub. Perhaps there were hidden benefits in aging after all.

  I yawned as I turned out of the council estate into the enclave of private housing where I occasionally manage a full night’s sleep. Tonight wouldn’t be one; Gloria had to be at the studios by nine thirty, so she wanted me at her place by eight thirty. I’d gritted my teeth, thought about the hourly rate and smiled.

  I staggered up the path, slithering slightly on the frosted cobbles, already imagining the sensuous bliss of slipping under a winterweight feather-and-down duvet. As soon as I opened the door, the dream shattered. Even from the hallway I could see the glow of light from the conservatory. I could hear moody saxophone music and the mutter of voices. That they were in the conservatory rather

  My bag slid to the floor as my shoulders drooped. I walked through to the living room and took in the scene through the patio doors. Beer bottles, a plume of smoke from a joint, two male bodies sprawled across the wicker.

  Just what I’d always wanted at the end of a working day. A pair of criminals in the conservatory.

  Chapter 3

  VENUS SQUARES NEPTUNE

  This is a tense aspect that produces strain in affairs of the heart because she has a higher expectation of love and comradeship than her world provides. She has a strong determination to beat the odds stacked against her.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  It’s not every night you feel like you need a Visiting Order to enter your own conservatory. That night I definitely wanted reinforcements before I could face the music or the men. A quick trip to the kitchen and I was equipped with a sweating tumbler of ice-cold pepper-flavored Absolut topped up with pink grapefruit juice. I took a deep draught and headed for whatever Dennis and Richard had to throw at me.

  When I say the conservatory was full of criminals, I was only slightly exaggerating. Although Richard’s insistence on the need for marijuana before creativity can be achieved means he cheerfully breaks the law every day, he’s got no criminal convictions. Being a journalist, he doesn’t have any other kind either.

  Dennis is a different animal. He’s a career criminal but, paradoxically, I trust him more than almost anyone. I always know where I am with Dennis; his morality might not be constructed along traditional lines, but it’s more rigid than the law of gravity, and a hell of a lot more forgiving. He used to be a professional burglar; not the sort who breaks into people’s houses to steal the video and rummage through the lingerie, but the sort who relieves the very rich of some of their ill-gotten and well-insured gains. Some of his victims had so many expensive status symbols lying around that they didn’t even realize they’d been burgled. These

  I’ve known Dennis even longer than I’ve known Richard. He’s my Thai-boxing coach, and he taught me the basic principle of selfdefense for someone as little as I am—one crippling kick to the kneecap or the balls, then run like hell. It’s saved my life more than once, which is another good reason why Dennis will always be welcome in my house. Well, almost always.

  I leaned against the doorjamb and scowled. “I thought you didn’t do drugs,” I said mildly to Dennis.

  “You know I don’t,” he said. “Who’s been telling porkies about me? ”

  “Nobody. I was referring to the atmosphere in here,” I said, wafting my hand in front of my face as I crossed the room to give Dennis a kiss on a cheek so smooth he must have shaved before he came out for the evening. “Breathe and you’re stoned. Not to mention cutting your life expectancy by half.”

  “Nice to see you too, Brannigan,” my beloved said as I pushed the evening paper to one side and dropped on to the sofa next to him.

  “So what are you two boys plotting?”

  Dennis grinned like Wile E. Coyote. My heart sank. I was well past a convincing impersonation of the Road Runner. “Wanted to pick your brains,” he said.

  “And it couldn’t wait till morning?” I groaned.

  “I was passing.”

  Richard gave the sort of soft giggle that comes after the fifth bottle and the fourth joint. I know my man. “He was passing and he heard a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Bohemian Pilsner calling his name,” he spluttered.

  “Looking at the number of bottles, it looks more like a crate shouting its head off,” I muttered. The boys looked like they were set to make a night of it. There was only one way I was going to

  He gave me the wary look of a person who’s drunk enough to notice their other half isn’t giving them the hard time they deserve. “I could come back tomorrow,” he said.

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I said repressively. “Like the song says, tonight will be fine.”

  Dennis gave me a quick sideways look and reached for his cigarettes. “You never finished your law degree, did you?”

  I shook my head. It was a sore point with my mum and dad, who fancied being the parents of the first graduate in the family, but all it brought me was relief that business could never be so bad that I’d be tempted to set up shop as a lawyer. Two years of study had been enough to demonstrate there wasn’t a single area of legal practice that wouldn’t drive me barking within six months.

  “So you couldn’t charge me for legal advice,” Dennis concluded triumphantly.

  I raised my eyes to the heavens, where a few determined stars penetrated the sodium glow of the city sky. “No, Dennis, I couldn’t.” Then I gave him the hard stare. “But why would I want to? We’ve never sent each other bills before, have we? What exactly are you up to?”

  “You know I’d never ask you to help me out with anything criminal, don’t you?”

  “’Course you wouldn’t. You’re far too tight to waste your breath,” I said. Richard giggled again. I revised my estimate. Sixth bottle, fifth joint.

  Dennis leaned across to pick up his jacket from the nearby chair, revealing splendid muscles in his forearm and a Ralph Lauren label. It didn’t quite go with the jogging pants and the Manchester United away shirt. He pulled some papers out of the inside pocket then gave me a slightly apprehensive glance. Then he shrugged and said, “It’s not illegal. Not as such.”

  “Not even a little bit?” I asked. I didn’t bother trying to hide my incredulity. Dennis only takes offense when it’s intended.

  “This bit isn’t illegal,” he said firmly. “It’s a lease.”

  “A lease?”

  “For a shop.”

  “You’re taking out a lease on a shop? ” It was a bit like hearing Dracula had gone veggie.

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Only technically.”

  I knew better than to ask more. Sometimes ignorance is not only bliss but also healthy. “And you want me to cast an eye over it to see that you’re not being ripped off,” I said, holding a hand out for the papers.

  Curiously reluctant now, Dennis clutched the papers to his chest. �
�You do know about leases? I mean, it’s not one of the bits you missed out, is it?”

  It was, as it happened, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Besides, since I’d quit law school, I’d learned much more practical stuff about contracts and leases than I could ever have done if I’d stuck it out. “Gimme,” I said.

  “You don’t want to argue with that tone of voice,” Richard chipped in like the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Dennis screwed his face up like a man eating a piccalilli sandwich, but he handed over the papers.

  It looked like a bog standard lease to me. It was for a shop in the Arndale Center, the soulless shopping mall in the city center that the IRA tried to remove from the map back in ’96. As usual, they got it wrong. The Arndale, probably the ugliest building in central Manchester, remained more or less intact. Unfortunately, almost every other building within a quarter-mile radius took a hell of a hammering, especially the ones that were actually worth looking at. As a result, the whole city center ended up spending a couple of years looking like it had been wrapped by Christo in some bizarre pre-millennium celebration. Now it looked as if part of the mall that had been closed for structural repairs and renovation was opening up again and Dennis had got himself a piece of the action.

  There was nothing controversial in the document, as far as I could see. If anything, it was skewed in favor of the lessee, one John Thompson, since it gave him the first three months at half rent as a supposed inducement. I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t Dennis’s name on the lease. He’s a man who can barely bring

  What I couldn’t understand was what he was up to. Somehow, I couldn’t get my head round the idea of Dennis as the natural heir of Marks and Spencer. Karl Marx, maybe, except that they’d have had radically different views of what constituted an appropriate redistribution of wealth. I folded the lease along its creases and said, “Looks fine to me.”

  Dennis virtually snatched it out of my hand and shoved it back in his pocket, looking far too shifty for a villain as experienced as him. “Thanks, love. I just wanted to be sure everything’s there that should be. That it looks right.”

  I recognized the key word right away. Us detectives, we never sleep. “Looks right?” I demanded. “Why? Who else is going to be giving it the once-over?”

  Dennis tried to look innocent. I’ve seen hunter-killer submarines give it a better shot. “Just the usual, you know? The leccy board, the water board. They need to see the lease before they’ll connect you to the utilities.”

  “What’s going on, Dennis? What’s really going on?”

  Richard pushed himself more or less upright and draped an arm over my shoulders. “You might as well tell her, Den. You know what they say—it’s better having her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.”

  I let him get away with the anatomical impossibility and settled for a savage grin. “He’s not wrong,” I said.

  Dennis sighed and lit a cigarette. “All right. But I meant it when I said it’s not criminal.”

  I cast my eyes upwards and shook my head. “Dennis O’Brien, you know and I know that ‘not criminal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘legal.’”

  “Too deep for me,” Richard complained, reaching for another bottle of beer.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said firmly.

  “You know how I hate waste,” Dennis began. I nodded cautiously. “There’s nothing more offensive to a man like me than premises

  “Shop-squatting,” I said flatly.

  “What?” Richard asked vaguely. “You going to live in a shop, Den? What happened to the house? Debbie thrown you out, has she?”

  “He’s not going to be living in the shop, dope-head,” I said sarcastically.

  “You keep smoking that draw, you’re going to have a mental age of three soon,” Dennis added sententiously. “Of course I’m not going to be living in the shop. I’m going to be selling things in the shop.”

  “Take me through it,” I said. Dennis’s latest idea was only new to him; he was far from the first in Manchester to give it a try. I remembered reading something in the Evening Chronicle about shop-squatting, but as usual with newspaper articles, it had told me none of the things I really wanted to know.

  “You want to know how it works?”

  Silly question to ask a woman whose first watch lasted only as long as it took me to work out how to get the back off. “Was Georgie Best?”

  “First off, you identify your premises. Find some empty shops and give the agents a ring. What you’re looking for is one where the agent says they’re not taking any offers because it’s already let as from a couple of months ahead.”

  “What?” Richard mumbled.

  Dennis and I shared the conspiratorial grin of those who are several drinks behind the mentally defective. “That way, you know it’s going to stay empty for long enough for you to get in and out and do the business in between,” he explained patiently.

  “Next thing you do is you get somebody to draw you up a moody contract. One that looks like you’ve bought a short-term lease in good faith, cash on the nail. All you gotta do then is get into the shop and Bob’s your uncle. Get the leccy and the water turned on, fill the place with crap, everything under a pound, which you can afford to do because you’ve got no overheads. And the

  “What about criminal damage?” I asked. “You have to bust the locks to get in.”

  Dennis winked. “If you pick the locks, you’ve not done any damage. And if you fit some new locks to give extra security, where’s the damage in that?”

  “Doesn’t the landlord try to close you down?” Richard asked. It was an amazingly sensible question given his condition.

  Dennis shrugged. “Some of them can’t be bothered. They know we’ll be out of there before their new tenant needs the premises, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Some of them have a go. I keep somebody on the premises all the time, just in case they try to get clever and repo the place in the night. You can get a homeless kid to play night watchman for a tenner a time. Give them a mobile phone and a butty and lock them in. Then if the landlord tries anything, I get the call and I get down there sharpish. He lays a finger on me or my lad, he’s the criminal.” Dennis smiled with all the warmth of a shark. “I’m told you get a very reasonable response when you explain the precise legal position.”

  “I can imagine,” I said drily. “Do the explanations come complete with baseball bat?”

  “Can people help it if they get the summons when they’re on their way home from sports training?” He raised his eyebrows, trying for innocent and failing dismally.

  “Profitable, is it?” I asked.

  “It’s got to be a very nice little earner, what with Christmas coming up.”

  “You know, Dennis, if you put half the effort into a straight business that you put into being bent, you’d be a multimillionaire by now,” I sighed.

  He shook his head, rueful. “Maybe so, but where would the fun be in that?”

  He had a point. And who was I to talk? I’d turned my back on the straight version of my life a long time ago. If Dennis broke the law for profit, so did I. I’d committed burglary, fraud, assault, theft, deception and breaches of the Wireless and Telegraph Act too numerous to mention, and that was just in the past six months. I

  These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.

  Chapter 4

  MOON SQUARES MARS

  An accident-prone aspect, suggesting she can harm herself through lack of forethought. She is far too eager to make her presence felt and doesn’t always practice self-control. Her feelings of insecurity can manifest themselves in an unfeminine belligerence. She has authoritarian tendencies.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  Anyone can be a soap star. All you need is a scriptwriter who knows you well enough to write your character into their series, and you’re laughing all the way to the BAFTA. I’d always thought you had to be an actor. But two hours on the set of Northerners made me realize that s
oap is different. About tenper cent of the cast could play Shakespeare or Stoppard. The rest just roll up to the studios every week and play themselves. The lovable rogues are just as roguish, the dizzy blondes are just as empty-headed, the salts of the earth make you thirst just as much for a long cold alcoholic drink and the ones the nation loves to hate are every bit as repulsive in the flesh. Actually, they’re more repulsive, since anyone hanging round the green room is exposed to rather more of their flesh than a reasonable person could desire. There was more chance of me being struck by lightning than being star struck by that lot of has-beens and wannabes.

  They didn’t even have to learn their words. TV takes are so short that a gnat with Alzheimer’s could retain the average speech with no trouble at all. Especially by the sixth or seventh take most of the Northerners cast seemed to need to capture the simplest sentiment on screen.

  The main problem I had was how to do my job. Gloria had told everyone I was her bodyguard. Not because I couldn’t come

  Besides, members of the public weren’t allowed on the closed set of Northerners. The storylines were supposed to be top secret. NPTV, the company who made the soap, were so paranoid they made New Labour look relaxed. Everyone who worked on the program had to sign an agreement that disclosure of any information relating to the cast characters or storylines was gross misconduct, a sacking offense and a strict liability tort. Even I had had to sign up to the tort clause before I was allowed into the compound that housed the interior and exterior sets, as well as the production suite and admin offices. Apart from location shooting to give the show that authentic Manchester ambience, the entire process from script conference to edited master tapes took place behind the high walls that surrounded NPTV’s flagship complex.

  A fat lot of good it did them. Northerners generated more column inches than any other TV program in the country. The fuel for the flames had to come from somewhere, and tabloid papers have always had deep pockets. There’s not a tabloid journalist I’ve ever met who couldn’t explain in words of one syllable to a nervously dithering source that the NPTV legal threat of suing for civil damages was about as solid as the plyboard walls of Brenda Barrowclough’s living room.