by Val McDermid
She emerged in knee-high snow boots and a scarlet ski suit with royal-blue chevrons and matching earmuffs. “Hiya, chuck,” she greeted me. “I’ve never been skiing in my life, but they do great gear, don’t they?” she enthused. As usual, I felt underdressed. Wellies over jeans topped with my favorite leather jacket had seemed fine in Ardwick, but somehow they just didn’t cut it in the country.
“Got over your hangover?”
“I’ll thank you to remember it was a migraine, young lady.” She wasn’t entirely joking. “By the way,” she said as she settled into the car, “there’s been a change of schedule. Somebody got excited about the snow, so we’re going to do some location shooting instead of studio filming.” Gloria explained that because of the weather, cast members involved in the location shooting had been told to go directly to Heaton Park on the outskirts of the city rather than to the NPTV compound. The park was easier to reach than the
The one good thing about being away from NPTV was that we seemed to have escaped the delights of Cliff Jackson’s company. According to Rita, Jackson and his team had been interviewing cast members in their homes over the weekend, but they were concentrating on office and production staff at the studios now. Also according to Rita, who had clearly elected herself gossip liaison officer, they were no closer to an arrest than they had been on Friday night. She had managed to get Linda Shaw to admit that neither Gloria nor I were serious suspects; Gloria because there were no spatters of blood on the flowing white top she’d been wearing, me because Linda thought it was one of the daftest ideas she’d ever heard. I thought she’d probably been telling the truth about me, but suspected she might have had her fingers crossed when she exonerated Gloria. In her shoes, I would have.
Gloria went off with Ted so Freddie Littlewood could work his magic on their faces. I let them go alone since I could see the short gap between the two vehicles from where I was sitting in a corner of the cast bus with Rita and Clive. I settled down, ready to soak up whatever they were prepared to spill. “So who had it in for Dorothea?” I asked. Some people just don’t respond to the subtle approach. Anyone with an Equity card, for example.
Clive looked at Rita, who shrugged like someone auditioning for ’Allo, ’Allo. “It can’t have been to do with her professional life, surely,” he said. “Nobody murders their astrologer because they don’t like what she’s predicted.”
“But nobody here really knew anything about her private life,” Rita objected. “Out of all the cast, I was one of her first regulars, and I know almost nothing about her. I’ve even been to her house for a consultation, but all I found out from that was that she must
“Did she live alone?” I asked.
“Search me,” Rita said. “She never said a dicky bird about a boyfriend or a husband. The papers all said she lived alone, and they probably know more than the rest of us because they’ll have been chatting up the locals.”
Clive scratched his chin. “She knew a lot about us, though. I don’t know if she was psychic or just bloody good at snapping up every little scrap of information she could get her hands on, but if she’d written a book about Northerners, it would have been dynamite. Maybe she went too far with somebody. Maybe she found something out that she wasn’t prepared to keep quiet about.”
The notion that there was any secret black enough for a Northerners star to feel squeamish about using for publicity was hard for me to get my head round. Then I remembered Cassie. Not only what had happened to her, but what she’d said about the prospect of losing a plum role being motive enough for some desperate people. “If that’s the case, then the dark secret probably died with her,” I said despondently.
“I’m afraid so,” Clive said. “Unless she kept the details on her computer along with our horoscope details.”
My ears pricked up. “You think that’s likely?”
Rita’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. “That’ll be why the police have taken her computer off to analyze what’s on it,” she said. “That nice Linda said they’d got someone working on it already, but they’ve got to call in an expert who knows about astrology because a lot of it’s in symbols and abbreviations they can’t make head nor tail of.”
Another alley closed off to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ted emerge from the make-up caravan. Time for action, I thought. I didn’t want Gloria left alone with anybody connected to Northerners, even someone as seemingly innocuous as Freddie from make-up. He was just finishing off painting Gloria’s lips with Brenda’s trademark pillar-box-red gloss as I walked in. “Don’t say a word,” he cautioned Gloria. “I won’t be a minute,” he added,
Gloria surveyed herself critically in the mirror and said, “Bloody hell, Freddie, that’s the most you’ve said all morning.”
“We’re all a bit subdued today, Gloria,” he said, sounding exhausted. “It’s hard not to think about what happened to Dorothea.”
Gloria sighed. “I know what you mean, chuck.” She leaned forward and patted his hand. “It does you credit.”
“It’s scary, though,” Freddie said, turning away with a tired smile and repacking his make-up box. “I mean, chances are it’s somebody we know who killed her. Outsiders don’t wander around inside the NPTV compound. It’s hard to imagine any of us killing someone who was more or less one of us.”
“The trouble is,” Gloria said, getting to her feet and pulling her coat on, “that half of us are actors. Who the hell knows what goes on in our heads?”
Neither Freddie nor I could think of anything to say to that one. I followed her out the door and caught up with her and Ted at the edge of the car park. The director was explaining how he wanted them to circle round so that they could walk down the virgin snow of the path towards the camera. It looked like they were set for a while, but I didn’t want to go back to the bus and leave Gloria exposed. It wasn’t as if I could prevent an attack on her; but I hoped my presence would be enough to give her menacer pause.
I walked over to the catering bus, where Ross was working with a teenage lad I’d not seen before. “I suppose a bacon butty would be out of the question?” I asked. “I left the house too early for breakfast.”
Ross served me himself, piling crispy rashers into a soft floury roll. “There you go. Coffee?” I nodded and he poured me a carton. “Mind the shop a wee minute, son,” he said, coming out of the side door and beckoning me to join him. “You got anything for me?” he asked.
I shook my head, my mouth full of food. “I’m working on it,” I managed to mumble. “Irons in the fire.”
“I was doing some thinking myself. You know, nobody knows more about what goes on behind the scenes of Northerners than Dorothea did. She had the inside track on everybody. She’d have been perfectly placed to be the mole,” he said eagerly.
“Handy for you,” I said cynically. “What better way to get yourself off the hook than to blame a dead woman?”
His mouth turned down at the corners and his bright blue eyes looked baffled. “That’s a wee bit uncalled for. You know I liked Dorothea fine. It’s just with her being in the news this weekend, I couldn’t help remembering how she always had everybody’s particulars at her fingertips. And she was never backwards about taking advantage of the press for her own purposes. That’s all I was getting at.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You might have a point. The only problem I can see is that Dorothea didn’t have access to scripts, so she wouldn’t have known the details of the future storylines, would she?”
Ross looked crestfallen, his shaggy red hair falling unheeded over his forehead. “I suppose,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking it through. My wife says I never do.”
Before I could say anything more, the bleat of my moby vibrated in my armpit. I unzipped my jacket and pulled it out. “Hello?”
“All right, KB? Where are you?” It was Alexis, far brighter than she had any right to be on a Monday morning when she was the co-parent of a teething baby.
“Why?”
“I’m out and about making some calls and I thought we could link up. I’ve got a juicy bit of info for you, and you know how insecure the airwaves are these days. We’ve probably got half the world’s press listening in at your end and the bizzies at mine. Are you down at NPTV?” she asked, her voice all innocence.
“Security be buggered,” I said. “You just want to get alongside the Northerners cast to see how many exclusives you can dig up about Dorothea.”
A throaty chuckle turned into a cough. “You got me bang to rights. Call it the quid pro quo.”
I wiggled my fingers at Ross. He took the hint and shambled
“They’ll be laying out the red carpet for me, girl, just you wait and see. I won’t be long, I’m only down the road in Salford.”
I cut across the car park at an angle, plowing my feet through the dirty slush. It’s just as much fun at thirty-one as it is at five. I ended up over near the entrance, but still in a line of sight to Gloria. I was pretty certain by now that she was at no real risk, but being visible was what I was being paid for, so visible I’d be.
Alexis was as good as her word. Within ten minutes of our phone call, she drove authoritatively into the car park. The two elderly security men made a few futile gestures in a bid to get her to stop, but it’s hard to argue with something as big as the Range Rover she and Chris had bought to combat the wild weather on the Pennines. Nobody else was interested. I’d soon realized that in a TV production unit, everybody’s too busy with their own job to pay attention to anything else short of a significant thermonuclear explosion. That would make Cliff Jackson’s job a lot harder. I couldn’t resist a shiver of schadenfreude at the thought.
Alexis jumped down into the slush and took a few steps towards the security men. “I’m with her,” I heard as her arm waved in my general direction. There was nothing wrong with her eyesight. “Brannigan and Co,” she added, veering off towards me.
“You really are a lying get,” I said when she was close enough for them not to hear.
“Only technically,” she said. “I am, after all, here on a mission on your behalf.”
“No, you’re not, you’re here entirely on a fishing expedition to net you tomorrow’s front page. So what’s this momentous news you have to impart?” I glanced over my shoulder to make absolutely sure we couldn’t be overheard.
“Does F. Littlewood mean anything to you? F. Littlewood of fiftynine, Hartley Grove, Chorlton?”
I tried not to show that more bells were ringing and lights flashing inside my head than on the average pinball machine. The address was unfamiliar, but I had no trouble recognizing the name. Northerners scandals. Alexis had done me a favor, but in the process she’d given me a headache.
I found a pen and notepad in my bag and got Alexis to write down Freddie’s address. “You’re sure this is the mole?” I asked.
“This is the person who got paid for the story about you bodyguarding Gloria,” she said cautiously. “More likely than not, that’s your mole. I finally got my hands on the credits book this morning, and that didn’t take me a whole lot further forward. What it is, you see, sometimes we need to make irregular payments to regular sources who need to be protected. So then we use code names. The very fact that this Littlewood person has a code name means he or she has done this before.”
“So how did you get from the code name to the identity?” I asked. It wasn’t important, but I’m a sucker for other people’s methods. I’m not such an old dog that I can’t learn new tricks.
Alexis winked. “There’s this cute little baby dyke in accounts. She thinks being a reporter is seriously the business. She thinks my new haircut is really cool.”
I groaned. Forget the new tricks. “And does she also know you’re happily married?”
“Let the girl have her dreams. Besides, it made her day to tell me that The Mask is F. Littlewood. Whoever he or she is?”
I shook my head. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Oh, I will, believe me. This isn’t soft news any more. It’s crime, and that’s my business. If the newsdesk won’t share, I’ll just have to help myself.” Alexis cupped her hands round a cigarette and lit it. She breathed a smoky sigh of satisfaction. “God, I love the first cigarette of the day. If you need more leverage, by the way, we’ve paid F. Littlewood five times in the last year. I checked out the back numbers and they were all Northerners stories. I’d bet it’s the same mole selling the stories to the nationals, because all the ones we’ve
“Just be grateful I’ve not shopped you. Thanks, Alexis.”
“No problem.” She was already on the move. “Hang in there, KB. Jackson’s so busy getting his knickers in a twist about his missus that he’s not got a fucking clue who to arrest. So there’s plenty of room for glory.”
I watched her trudge through the snow, the ultimate bulldog when it came to stories. Which reminded me that I had to see a woman about a dog. I checked my watch. Chances were that Ruth would be in court. I decided to call her mobile and leave a message with the answering service. “Ruth, it’s Kate,” I said. “Can you check for me if Dennis shows any signs of having been in a ruck with Pit Bull’s pit bull? Or if the pit bull shows any signs of having been in a ruck with person or persons unknown? I’m ashamed to say it was Debbie’s idea rather than mine, but it’s worth pursuing.”
The second call was to Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice of the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. She should have been Detective Superintendent by now, but a sting I’d set up with her had gone according to someone else’s script and Della was still scraping the egg off her face. I knew she didn’t blame me, but if anything, that made it worse. Sometimes I looked round the table on our girls’ nights out and wondered how Alexis, Ruth, Della and two or three of the others put up with the fact that one way or another I’d exploited each and every one of them and managed to drop most of them in the shit along the way. Must be my natural charm.
I tracked her down in a building society office in Blackpool. She sounded genuinely pleased to hear me, but then she was working her way through a balance sheet at the time. “I doubt you’re having a more pleasant time than I am,” she said. “I see from the papers that you and Cliff Jackson are too close for comfort again.”
“Being on the same land mass as Jackson is too close for comfort. Especially at the moment. Did you hear about his wife?”
“Even in Blackpool,” she said drily.
“You should rescue that Linda Shaw from his clutches. She’s got the makings of a good copper, but he gives her the shit work every time and sooner or later she’s going to get bored with that.”
“We’ll see. My sources tell me that my promotion’s likely to come through soon,” Della said. It sounded like a nonsequitur, but I figured she was trying to tell me that she was slated for a senior post in the Greater Manchester force. And that Linda might not be Jackson’s gofer much longer.
“I can’t tell you how relieved that makes me feel. I’m buying the champagne that night.”
“I know,” Della said without bitterness. “So what’s the favor?”
“Does there have to be a favor?” I asked, wounded.
“In working hours, yes. You never ring up for a gossip between nine and five.”
“You know about Dennis?”
“What about Dennis? I’ve been stuck in Blackpool since Thursday. I’m praying the snow keeps off so I can get home tonight. What’s Dennis done this time?”
“For once, it’s what he’s not done.” I gave her a brief rundown. “I’ve got a hunch that’s so far off the wall I’m not even prepared to tell you what it is,” I said.
“What is it you need?”
“A look at the scene-of-crime photos. I don’t know any of the team working the case, otherwise I’d ask. The boss cop’s a DI Tucker.”
“I know Tucker’s bagman. He did a stint with me at fraud before he was made up to sergeant. I expect I can persuade him he owes me
one. I’ll try and sort something out this evening, provided I can get back to Manchester,” she promised. I grovelled, she took the piss, we said goodbye.
I automatically scanned the car park, clocking Alexis over by the chuck wagon. She was leaning on the counter, steam rising from the cup of coffee in her hand, deep in conversation with Ross and a couple of the younger cast members who had braved the Chronicle.
I drifted back across the churned-up slush to where Ted and Gloria were rounding some bushes and walking into shot, their body language shouting “argument” at the top of its voice. At the same moment, I heard a commotion behind me. I swung round to see Cliff Jackson loudly lecturing a PA that he was a police officer and this was a public car park and she was in no position to tell him where to stand.
The director’s head swung round. “Jesus Christ!” she yelled. “And cut. Who the fuck do you think you are?” she demanded.
“Detective Chief Inspector Jackson of Greater Manchester Police. I’m here to interview Ms. Gloria Kendal.”
“Are you blind? She’s working.”
Nothing was calculated to make Jackson’s hackles rise faster than anyone who thought the law didn’t apply to them. “You can’t seriously imagine that your television program takes precedence over a murder investigation? I need to talk to Ms. Kendal, so, if you don’t mind, you’ll just have to rearrange your filming schedule to accommodate that.”
Gloria and Ted had reached us by now. “Accommodate what?” she demanded crossly. She was clearly not thrilled with the prospect of shooting the snow scene again.
“As I’ve just explained to your director here, I’d be obliged if you would accompany me to the police station for a further interview,” Jackson barked. He clearly wasn’t star struck like Linda Shaw.
Gloria gave me a panic-stricken look. “I don’t want to,” she protested.
