Star Struck

by Val McDermid

  “Did Dorothea tell you about this?”

  “Who else? It were when I asked her to do a horoscope for my granddaughter. We’d gone out for a meal and we ended up back at my place, pissed as farts. And she started on about how she could be a grandmother half a dozen times over and she’d never be any the wiser. When she sobered up, she made me swear not to tell another living soul. And I haven’t, not until now. Tragic, that’s what it was. Tragic.”

  I came at the subject half a dozen different ways before we finally arrived back at the deserted alley leading to her fortification. Each time I got the same version. No details added, no details different. Dorothea might have been lying to Gloria, but Gloria was telling me the truth.

  I helped her out of the car and across cobbles covered in feathery white powder to her front door. I wasn’t in the mood to go any further. I wanted home and bed and the sleep that would make sense of the jumbled jigsaw pieces of information that were drifting through my head like the snow across the windscreen. And not a snowplow in sight.

  God, I hate the country.

  Chapter 13

  SUN CONJUNCTION WITH PLUTO

  Compromise is not in her vocabulary. She is not afraid of initiating confrontations and is a great strategist. She enjoys conflict with authority, she will not stand for personal or professional interference, but she is capable of transforming her own life and the world around her. People can be nervous of her, but this is a splendid aspect for a detective.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  I woke up with that muffled feeling. It didn’t go away when I stuck my head out from under the duvet. Richard only grunted when I slipped out of bed and pulled on my dressing gown before I died of hypothermia. The central heating had obviously been and gone while I was still sleeping, which made it sometime after nine. I lifted the curtain and looked out at a world gone white. “Bugger,” I said.

  Richard mumbled something. “Whazza?” it sounded like.

  “It’s been snowing. Properly.”

  He pushed himself up on one elbow and reached for his glasses. “Lessee,” he slurred. I opened one side of the curtain. “Fabulous,” he said. “We can make a snowman.”

  “And what about Gloria? I’m supposed to be minding her.”

  “Not even a mad axman would be daft enough to go on a killing spree in Saddleworth in this weather,” he pointed out, not unreasonably. “It’ll be chaos on the roads out there. And if Gloria’s got the hangover she deserves, she won’t be thinking about going anywhere. Come back to bed, Brannigan. I need a cuddle.”

  I didn’t need asking twice. “I obey, o master,” I said ironically, slipping out of my dressing gown and into his arms.

  The second time we woke, the phone was to blame. I noted

  “It’s me, chuck.” It was the voice of a ghost. It sounded like Gloria had died and somehow missed the pearly gates.

  “’Morning, Gloria,” I said cheerfully, upping the volume in revenge for her attempt at groping my knee. “How are you today?”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t. For some reason, I seem to have a bit of a migraine this morning. I thought I’d just spend the day in bed with the phone turned off, so you don’t have to worry about coming over.”

  “Are you sure? I could always send Donovan,” I said sadistically.

  I sensed the shudder. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, usual time.” Click. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

  Richard emerged, blinking at the snow-light. “Gloria?” he asked.

  “I’m reprieved for the day. She sounds like the walking dead.”

  “Told you,” he said triumphantly. “Shall we make a snowman, then?”

  By the time we’d made the snowman, then had a bath to restore our circulation, then done some more vigorous horizontal exercises to raise our core body temperatures, it was late afternoon and neither of us could put off work any longer. He had some copy to write for an Australian magazine fascinated by Britpop. Personally, I’d rather have cleaned the U-bend, but I’m the woman who thinks the best place for Oasis is in the bottom of a flower arrangement. I settled down at my computer and trawled the Net for responses to last night’s queries.

  I downloaded everything, then started reading my way through. I immediately junked the tranche from people who thought it must be cool to be a private eye, would I give them a work-experience placement? I also quickly dumped the ones that were no more than a rehash of what had been in the papers and on the radio. That left me with half a dozen that revealed Dorothea had had a breakdown back in the 1950s. There were two that seemed to have some real credibility. The first came from someone who lived in the picturesque Lancashire town where Dorothea had grown up.

  Dear Kate Brannigan, it read, I am a sixteen-year-old girl and I live in Halton-on-Lune where Dorothea Dawson came from. My grandmother was at school with Dorothea, so when I saw your query in the astrology newsgroup, I asked her what she remembered about her.

  She said Dorothea was always a bit of a loner at school, she was an only child, but there was nothing weird or spooky about her when she was growing up, she was just like everybody else. My gran says Dorothea got married to this bloke Harry Thompson who worked in the bank. She says he was a real cold fish which I think means he didn’t know how to have a good time, except I don’t know what they did then to have a good time because they didn’t have clubs or decent music or anything like that.

  Anyway, Gran says Dorothea had this baby and then she went mad and had to go into the loony bin (Gran calls it that, but she really means a mental hospital). Anyway, her husband went away and was never seen again, and when Dorothea came out of the hospital after a couple of years, she only came back to pack her bags and get the next bus out.

  I don’t know what happened to the baby, Gran says it probably got put in a home, which is not a good place to be brought up even if your mum is a bit barking.

  I hope this helps.

  Yours sincerely

  Megan Hall

  The other was better written. I didn’t much care; literary style wasn’t what I was after.

  Dear Ms. Brannigan

  It may come as a surprise that a man of my age knows how to , but I am a contemporary of Dorothea Dawson. I was a year younger than her,

  That all changed when Dorothea met Harry Thompson. He was a bank clerk, good-looking in a rather grim sort of way, and he was drawn to girls inappropriately young. When they met, Dorothea was, I think, a rather young 17, and he must have been 25 or 26. He was what I think we would now call a control freak and Dorothea was always on pins lest she upset him.

  Quite why she agreed to marry him none of us ever knew, though it may well have been the only route she could see by which she could escape the equally oppressive regime of her stepmother. They were married and within eighteen months Dorothea was confined to the cheerless Victorian world of the local mental hospital following an appalling experience with what we now term post-natal depression.

  Harry resolutely refused to have anything to do with the child, claiming that the baby was tainted with the same madness that had claimed the mother. An ignorant and cruel man, he sought and gained a transfer to a branch of the bank in the Home Counties, handing the child over to an adoption agency. What became of the baby, I have no knowledge. This far on, I am ashamed to say that neither my sister nor I can remember if the child were a boy or girl; in my sister’s defense, I would say that by that time, thanks to Harry, there was little contact between her and Dorothea.

  When she finally was allowed to leave the mental hospital, Dorothea was very bitter and wanted to cast her past entirely from her. My sister was saddened by this, but not surprised. We were delighted to see her rise to celebrity, though both horrified by the news of her death.

  I do hope this is of some assistance. Should you wish to talk to me, you will find me in the Wakefield telephone book under my parish of St. Barnabas-nextthe-W
all.

  With best wishes

  Rev. Tom Harvey

  I wasn’t surprised that Gloria had called the whole sorry business tragic. I couldn’t help wondering where Harry Thompson was now and what he was doing. Not to mention the mysterious baby. I kept having visions of a swaddling-wrapped infant abandoned on the doorstep of the local orphanage. I think I saw too many BBC classic serials when I was a child.

  It was time for some serious digging, the kind that is well beyond my limited capabilities with electronic systems. I copied the two key e-mails to Gizmo, with a covering note explaining that I needed him to use his less advertised skills to unearth all he could about Harry Thompson and the riddle of the adopted child. Then I started accessing what legitimate data sources were available on a Sunday evening to answer the queries that had come in from the two foreign agencies.

  When the doorbell rang, I exited the database I’d been in and severed my connection. Those on-line services charge by the minute and I wasn’t prepared to put myself in hock if it took me five minutes to dislodge a Jehovah’s Witness or a local opportunist offering to dig my car out of snow that would probably be gone by morning. To my astonishment, it was Gizmo. “I just sent you an e-mail,” I said.

  “I know, I got it.” He marched in without waiting to be asked, stamping slush into my hall carpet. On the way to the spare room that doubles as my home office, he shed a parka that looked like it had accompanied Scott to the Antarctic and had only just made it home again. By the time I’d hung it up, he was ensconced in front of my computer. “Gotta beer?”

  I was shocked. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Gizmo with any kind of liquid within three feet of a keyboard. Same with food. If it wasn’t for thirst and hunger and bodily functions, I’ve often

  Gizmo went for the elderberry beer. Judging by the look on his face as it hit his taste buds, he’d have preferred a can of supermarket own-brand lager. I sat on the edge of the bed and sipped the Stoly and grapefruit juice I’d sensibly sorted for myself. “You were about to tell me what was in my e-mail that made you rush round,” I lied.

  Gizmo shifted in his seat and wrapped his legs around each other. I’d seen it done in cartoons, but I’d always thought until then it was artistic license. “I felt like some fresh air.” Lie number one. I shook my head. “I was a bit worried about discussing hacking in e-mail that wasn’t encrypted.” Lie number two. I shook my head again. “I wanted to check what virus protection you’ve got running on this machine because I’ve not looked at it for a while and there’s all sorts of clever new shit out there.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Strike three, Giz. Look, you’re here now. You’ve made the effort. You might as well tell me what you came to tell me because we’re both so busy it could be weeks before there’s another window of opportunity.” I felt like a detective inspector pushing for a confession. I hoped it wasn’t going to be another murder.

  Gizmo ran a finger up and down the side of the beer bottle, his eyes following its movement. “There’s this …” He stopped. He looked up at me like dogs do when they’re trying to tell you where it hurts. “I’ve met … well, not actually met …”

  Light dawned. “The flowers,” I said.

  The blush climbed from the polo neck of his black sweater, rising unevenly like the level of poured champagne in a glass. He nodded.

  “‘www gets real.’ The cyberbabe,” I said, trying to sound sensitive and supportive. The effort nearly killed me.

  “Don’t call her that,” Gizmo said, a plea on his face. “She’s not some bimbo. And she’s not a saddo Nethead who hasn’t got a life. She’s really interesting. I’ve never met a woman who can talk about computer code, politics, sociology, music, all of those things.”

  All of those things I never knew Gizmo knew anything about. Except computer code, of course. “You’ve never met this one,” I said drily.

  “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “A meeting? Getting together for real?” I checked my voice for skepticism and thought I’d probably got away with it.

  “What do you think?”

  What did I think? What I really thought was that Gizmo was probably typical of the people who spent their nights chattering to strangers in Siberia and São Paolo and Salinas, weird computer geeks telling lies about themselves in a pathetic attempt to appear interesting. A blind date with Gizmo would probably have turned me celibate at sixteen. On the other hand, if I’d been a geek too—and there were one or two female nerds out there, most of them inevitably working for Microsoft—I might have been charmed, especially since my efforts at grooming had rendered Gizmo almost indistinguishable from the human species. “Does she work for Microsoft?” I asked.

  He gave me a very peculiar look. “That’s sick. That’s like asking a member of CND if he fancies someone who works for MOD procurement.”

  “Has she got a name?”

  His smile was curiously tender. “Jan,” he said. “She has her own consultancy business. She does training packages for the computer industry.”

  “So how did you … meet?”

  “Remember when Gianni Versace got shot? Well, there was a lot of discussion on the Net about it, how the FBI were using the on-line community to warn people about the suspect, and how far the federal agencies should go in trying to exploit the Net to catch criminals. I was checking out one of the newsgroups and I saw Jan had said some interesting things, and we started exchanging private mail.” Oh great, I thought. A mutual interest in serial killers.

  “And?”

  “And we really hit it off. Loads of stuff in common. Lately, it’s been getting more and more intense between us. I…I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before,” he mumbled.

  “And now you want to do a reality check by getting together in the flesh?”

  He nodded. “Why not? Pen friends have been doing it for years.”

  This wasn’t the time to remind him that pen friends had one or two little safeguards like knowing where each other lived. It also wasn’t the time to remind him that it was somehow easier to lie in cyberspace than in meatspace, since right from the beginning the hackers and computer freaks who had hung out on the very first bulletin boards had always hidden behind nicknames. The first time I’d been confronted with Gizmo’s real name was years into our acquaintance, when he’d signed his initial consultancy contract with Brannigan & Co. I sipped my drink and raised my eyebrows. “And sometimes it’s a big disappointment. Why is it so important that you meet? If things are so excellent between you, maybe it’s better to keep it cyber.”

  He squirmed in his seat. “Sometimes it’s too slow, the Net. Even in a private conference room in a newsgroup, you can still only communicate as fast as you can type, so it’s never as spontaneous as conversation.”

  “I thought that was the charm.”

  “It is, to an extent. You can structure your dialogue much more than you can in a meatspace conversation where you tend to go off at tangents. But we’ve been doing this for a while now. We need to move on to the next stage, and that’s got to be a face-to-face. Hasn’t it?”

  I wasn’t cut out for this. If I’d been an agony aunt, my column would have invariably read, “For God’s sake, get a grip.” But Gizmo was more than just another contractor. Less than a friend,

  “London. But she comes up to Manchester every two or three weeks on business. I was thinking about suggesting we got together for a beer next time she’s up.”

  It would be a beer, too. Somehow I didn’t have this woman pegged as a white-wine-spritzer drinker. “You don’t think it might destroy what you’ve already built up?”

  He shrugged, a difficult feat given that he was impersonating a human pretzel. “Better we find that out now, don’t you think?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Maybe the cyber relationship is the shape of things to come. Communication with strangers, all of us hiding behind a façade, having virtual sex in front of our terminals. Not as repl
acement for face-to-face stuff, but as another dimension. Adultery without the guilt, maybe?” I hazarded.

  “No,” Gizmo said, unravelling his limbs and straightening up. “I think it’s just another kind of courtship. If you don’t take it out of virtuality into reality, it’s ultimately sterile because you’ve no objective standards to measure it against.”

  Profound stuff from a man I’d never suspected of being capable of love for a sentient being without microchips. “Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision,” I said gently.

  He took a deep breath. His shoulders dropped from round his ears. “I suppose I have.”

  “So go with your instincts.”

  I’d said what he wanted to hear. The relief flowed off him like radiation. “Thanks for listening, Kate. I really appreciate it.”

  “So show me how much, and dig me some dirt on Harry Thompson and the mystery baby.”

  Chapter 14

  JUPITER TRINE SATURN

  Cheerful Jupiter tempers the stern, hard-working nature of Saturn. She is a visionary, but one firmly rooted in the practicalities. She is a good organizer and seldom feels overwhelmed by her responsibilities. She is good at coordinating people to collaborate with her. She has the self-discipline to achieve her goals without getting wound up about it.

  From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

  I’d set off early enough to follow the snowplow down the main road from Oldham through Greenfield. Getting down Gloria’s alley was out of the question, but the hacks had moved on to the next big thing, so the only threat to Gloria’s wellbeing was the possibility of wet feet. I should have known better.