Star Struck

by Val McDermid

  I put an arm round her and steered her to the nearest sofa. Linda was staring at her with avid eyes. I didn’t think it was Gloria’s bedraggled appearance that had gobsmacked her. She was star struck. I’ve seen it happen. Normal, intelligent people faced with their heroes become open-mouthed, wittering wrecks. Back before she became crime correspondent, Alexis once got to interview Martina Navratilova for the features department. She claims the most intelligent question she managed to come out with was, “What did you have for breakfast, Martina?”

  So now I had a star-struck detective, an hysterical soap star and a cop who wanted to arrest me for daring to find a murder

  “I can’t believe it,” Gloria was saying for the dozenth time. This time, however, she moved the narrative forward. “I keep thinking, I must have been the last person to see her alive.”

  The words brought Linda back to something approximating normality. “What do you mean, Ms. Kendal?” she asked gently, crossing to the sofa and sitting next to Gloria.

  “Gloria, this is Detective Sergeant Shaw. She’s involved in the inquiry into Dorothea’s death.”

  Gloria fixed Linda with eyes brimming with sooty tears. When this was all over, I’d have to speak to her about waterproof mascara. “What happened, chuck? All they’d say out in the car park was that there had been an accident, that Dorothea were dead. I’d gone out looking for you. You were gone so long, I was beginning to worry. I had this feeling …” Her voice tailed off into another whooping sob. “Oh God, I can’t believe it,” she wailed. I got up and silently fetched her a glass of water. She emptied it in a few swift gulps then clutched it histrionically to her bosom.

  Linda patted her free hand. “It’s hard to grasp, losing a friend,” she said. “But the best thing you can do for Dorothea now is to help us find the person responsible for this.”

  “It wasn’t an accident, then?” Gloria demanded. I saw an alertness spring into her eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  Linda obviously hadn’t. “You’ll have to brace yourself for a shock, I’m afraid, Gloria. It looks like Dorothea has been murdered.”

  Gloria’s face froze. The tears stopped as suddenly as they would when the director yelled, “Cut.” “Murdered?” she said, her voice an octave lower. “I don’t understand. Dorothea were fine when I left her. And Kate went right back to her. How could anybody have murdered her?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Linda said reassuringly. Much more of this and I was going to throw up. A couple of generations ago, it was the professional classes who got this kind of veneration from the police. Before that, you had to have a title. But

  I cleared my throat. “Apart from the killer, it seems likely that Gloria was the last person to see Dorothea alive.”

  “Do you have any idea what time that might have been?” Linda asked Gloria.

  “Just before six,” I said. “I’d been sitting in Gloria’s car in the car park, waiting for her to finish her half past five session with Dorothea. And before you ask, I didn’t notice anyone hanging around suspiciously, just a lot of people rushing to their cars and a few others crossing from the production building to the admin block. At five to six, I left the car and went to the camper van. I knocked, and Gloria came out.”

  “Did you see Dorothea?” Linda asked me. I couldn’t believe she was getting into this with Gloria present. It broke all the unwritten rules about interviewing witnesses separately.

  “No, I didn’t enter the van.”

  “Did you hear her voice?”

  I shook my head. “The wind was blowing, there were cars driving past, she wouldn’t have been shouting anyway.”

  I could see the implications registering with Linda. I could also see her dismissing the possibility that Gloria could have killed Dorothea for no more substantial reason than that Brenda Barrowclough could never have done such a thing. “She said cheerio to me and said she’d expect Kate along in a few minutes. But Kate’s right. She wasn’t shouting. There was no reason why she should, and she wasn’t one for raising her voice at the best of times,” Gloria said kindly, as if she was explaining something obvious to a child.

  “Was the door on the latch, or did it automatically lock behind you?” Linda asked.

  “Just on the latch. We’d all knock and walk in when it were time for our appointments,” Gloria said. “She were strict about not overrunning, was Dorothea.”

  “And how long was it before you got back to the van?” Linda asked me.

  I’d already given the timing a lot of thought. “Ten minutes, tops.

  “It’s not long,” Linda observed.

  Suddenly, Gloria burst into tears again. “It’s terrible,” she wailed. “It’s a warning. It’s a warning to me. All those letters, and Dorothea’s premonition. There’s a killer out there and he’s after me!”

  I couldn’t quite see the logic, but Gloria’s fear seemed real enough. She sobbed and hiccuped and wailed. Linda and I exchanged desperate looks, neither sure how to deal with this. Then, as abruptly as her hysterics had begun, they ended and she took control of herself. “This is aimed at me,” Gloria said, her voice shaky. “Everybody knew I relied on Dorothea. Everybody knew Dorothea had predicted there was death in the room that last time I saw her. She’s been killed to put the fear of death into me.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely,” Linda said soothingly. “It’s a very extreme thing to do if all this letter writer wants to do is frighten you. It’s more likely that it’s all just a horrible coincidence.”

  “Oh aye?” Gloria sat upright, her shoulders straightening. It was a classic Brenda Barrowclough move that signalled to Northerners viewers that it was flak-jacket time. “And is it just a horrible coincidence that I was the last person to see Dorothea alive? If somebody had it in for Dorothea, there must have been plenty of other times they could have killed her without taking the risk that somebody would see them going in or out of the van. Or even walk in on them. The only reason anybody would have for killing her when they did was to make it look like I was the killer. You mark my words, whoever killed my friend has got it in for me an’ all.”

  There was a moment’s stunned silence. “She has a point,” I said.

  “So what are your lot going to do to protect me?” Gloria demanded.

  Linda just stared.

  “The short answer is, nothing,” I told her. “Even if they had the bodies, you wouldn’t be a priority, on account of your poison-pen letters don’t actually threaten to kill you. That’s right, isn’t it, Linda?”

  Linda made a strangled sort of noise. I figured she was agreeing with me.

  “Right then,” said Gloria. “I’ll have to keep relying on Kate.” She gathered herself together. I suddenly understood the expression “girding your loins.” Gloria stood up and said, “Come on, chuck. I’ve had enough of this. I’m distraught and I need to go home and have a lie-down.”

  She was halfway to the door when she looked behind to check I was following. I gave Linda a hapless shrug. “We’ll need formal statements,” Linda tried plaintively.

  “Call my lawyer in the morning,” Gloria said imperiously. “Kate, who’s my lawyer?”

  I grinned. Jackson was going to love this. “Same as mine, of course. Ruth Hunter.”

  The last thing I heard as the door swung shut behind us was Linda groaning, “Ah, shit.” In grim silence we marched out of the building. The sleet had stopped, which was the one good thing that had happened since lunchtime. Gloria swept straight through the mêlée of activity around Dorothea’s van, looking neither to right nor left. I scuttled in her wake, trying to look invisible to anyone who might be tempted to alert Jackson. We made it to the car without a challenge.

  Once we’d got past the two bobbies working with the NPTV security men on the main gate, all the fight went out of Gloria. Her shoulders slumped and she reached for her cigarettes. “This is an emergency,” she said. “Don’t you dare open that bloody window.” She in
haled deeply. “You know I didn’t kill Dorothea, don’t you?”

  I pulled a wry smile. “You’re an actress, Gloria. Would I know if you had?”

  She snorted. “I’m no Susan Sarandon. I play myself with knobs on. Come on, Kate, did I kill Dorothea?”

  “I can’t believe you did,” I said slowly.

  “That’ll do me. So you’ll try and find out who’s done this? Before he decides it’s my turn? Or my granddaughter’s?”

  “Cliff Jackson, the cop that’s in charge of this? He’s not a bad investigator. But he’s been wrong before. I’ll give it my best shot.”

  “I’ll sleep easier knowing that,” she said, toking on her cigarette as if it gave life instead of stealing it.

  “Speaking of sleep … Do you want to stay over at my place tonight? I’m thinking partly of the weather and partly from the security point of view.”

  Gloria frowned. “It’s nice of you to offer, but I could do with being in my own space. I need to feel grounded. And I don’t want to be under your feet. You’re going to have to get stuck into your inquiries tomorrow, and I don’t want to get in the road.”

  “I don’t want to leave you on your own. Even behind those high walls.” I thought for a moment, then pulled over to the roadside and took out my phone. A couple of phone calls and I had it sorted. It meant an awkward detour via the students’ union, but as soon as Gloria saw Donovan in all his hulking glory, she was perfectly happy for me to hoof it the mile across town to my house while she disappeared over the hills and far away with the best-looking bodyguard either side of the Pennines. The only question was whether she’d still respect him in the morning.

  I stepped out briskly. The temperature was plummeting now the sleet had stopped, the pavements rapidly icing over. Twice the only thing that saved me from crashing to the pavement was a handy lamppost. All I wanted was to curl up in my dressing gown with a very large amount of Absolut Citron and a smudge of grapefruit juice. With luck, Richard might be home early, preferably armed with a substantial Chinese. He always says Friday night is amateurs’ night out as far as live music is concerned. I could almost taste the salt and pepper king prawns.

  I should have known better. Nights like that just don’t get better. The man I suppose I love was home all right. But not home alone. I found him fast asleep in his bed, his arms around someone else. When I walked into the room, her eyes snapped open. She took one look at me and screamed.

  Sensible girl.

  Chapter 10

  MERCURY IN VIRGO IN THE 5TH HOUSE

  She can turn her hand to anything. She has a discriminating intellect but tends to be overcritical of herself and others in times of stress. She analyzes problems with tenacity and is capable of painstaking research. She is logical, skeptical and can be obsessive.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  Divorce may have deprived Richard of most of the last five years of his son Davy’s life, but because a lot of his work is done at night, he did most of the daytime childcare for the first three. Thankfully the old skills hadn’t deserted him. That meant I didn’t have to take any responsibility for the most remarkable child on the planet (if you believed Alexis and Chris). I watched with a mixture of relief and astonishment as he spooned greyish-pink mush into the eager mouth of his nine-month-old girlfriend. He managed it almost without looking, and without ever breaking off in mid-sentence. He’d already changed a nappy without flinching, which was a long way away from my idea of getting the day off to a good start.

  I remember when northern men would have died rather than admit they knew how Pampers worked. Now, they pin you to the wall in café bars and tell you it’s possible for men to produce tiny amounts of breast milk. Certainly, Jay’s arrival had already achieved the seemingly impossible task of ending the superficial hostilities between Alexis and Richard. Before Jay, Alexis maintained she was a real journo and Richard a sycophant; Richard that he was a real journo and Alexis a police lackey. Work never entered their conversations any more.

  As he did about once a week, Richard had taken Jay for the night to give Chris a chance at a straight eight hours. Oddly, when Jay

  “So what are your plans for today?” Richard asked as we sat in the conservatory watching wet snow cascading from the sky.

  “I’ve got Donovan minding Gloria, so I probably don’t need to go over there. I’ve told him she’s to stay indoors, but looking at the weather, I don’t think there’ll be much temptation to leave the fireside. I’m going to do some background research in the Chronicle library so I can start asking sensible questions about Dorothea Dawson.”

  “Great,” he said enthusiastically. “You can take Jay in with you. I was supposed to drop her at the Chronicle crèche so Alexis can pick her up, but if you’re going in anyway, I can stay home and get on with some writing.”

  Time for the application of the Kate Brannigan irregular verb theory of life. In this case, “I am diplomatic, you are economical with the truth, s/he is a lying little gobshite.” “No problem,” I said. Why should I mind drumming my fingers on the table while Richard finished feeding her, changing her, swaddling her for the outside world, swapping the baby seat from his car to mine then strapping her in? It wasn’t as if I had anything important like a murder to solve, after all.

  I eventually tracked Alexis down in the office canteen. “Your daughter is in the crèche,” I told her. “So’s her car seat.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “I’ll bob along in a minute and say hello. We really appreciate it, you know. It’s the only time we get a decent night’s sleep. She been OK?”

  “As far as I know. She screamed her socks off when I got home last night, but that’s just because she can’t stand any competition for Richard’s attention. So I left them to it. She probably had a better night’s sleep than I did.”

  Alexis shook her head, smiling. “I know you love her really.”

  She knew more than I did. I smiled vacantly and said, “Dorothea Dawson.”

  “She didn’t see that coming, did she?”

  I love journalistic black humor. It always comforts me to know there are people more cynical than me around. “What’s this morning’s story?”

  “What’s your interest?” she asked, instantly on the alert. Her cigarettes came out and she lit one for real.

  “I found the body.”

  Alexis ran her free hand through her hair so it stood up in a punk crest. “Shit,” she said. “The bizzies never said anything about that at the press conference. They said the body had been discovered by a member of staff, the lying gets.”

  “You’re surprised?”

  “No. Cliff Jackson would superglue his gob shut before he let the name ‘Brannigan’ pass his lips. Unless the sentence also contained the words, ‘has been charged with.’ So give, KB. A first-person color piece, that’s just what I need for the city final.” Her notebook had appeared on the table.

  “What are they saying?”

  “That she was killed in her camper van in the car park of the NPTV compound by a blow to the head around six last night. And that’s about all. What can you give me?”

  I sighed. “It isn’t exactly something I want to dwell on. I needed to talk to Dorothea about the warning she’d given Gloria the last time she’d done a reading for her. I’d arranged to see her after her final client of the day. When I got there, I knocked but there was no reply. I knew she was expecting me, so I opened the door and walked in. She was lying face down on the table with her head caved in. It was obvious she was dead. Her crystal ball was lying on the carpet at the end of a track of blood. It looked to me as if that’s what the killer used. It’s much bigger than the usual crystal ball. It must be nine, ten inches across.”

  Alexis nodded as she took notes. “She was famous for it. Claimed it came from some mystical mountain mine. Me, I reckon it came from Pilkington Glass at St Helens.” She gave me an apologetic grin. “Sorry about this but … How did you feel?”
<
br />   “Sick. Can we talk about something else?”

  “What, like Cliff Jackson’s marital problems?”

  “He’s got marital problems?”

  Alexis nodded, a grim little smile on her face. “In spades. His wife’s run off with another bloke.”

  “What took her so long?”

  “She probably couldn’t find the key to the handcuffs. The best bit, though, is who she’s run off with.” Alexis paused for effect. I rotated my wrist in the classic “get on with it” gesture. “His oldest lad’s in his second year at Liverpool University. His wife’s only run off with the lad’s best mate.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “How long have you been sitting on this?” I demanded.

  “I only found out this morning. I was trying to get a comment from Jackson and he was going totally ballistic. I know one of his DCs from way back, so I cornered her and asked why Jackson was being even more of a pain than usual and she told me. So don’t expect any favors.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” I grinned. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, though. By the way, did you get anywhere in tracking down who was the source of your story about me minding Gloria?”

  Alexis savored her last mouthful of smoke and regretfully crushed the stub in the ashtray. “One of those things. Every Friday, the news credits book goes up to accounts so the payments can be processed. It doesn’t come back till Monday morning. I was too late getting to it yesterday. Sorry.”