Star Struck

by Val McDermid

  But NPTV insisted on their power trip, and I’d persuaded Gloria it would be simpler all round if we were upfront. The downside of being out in the open was that everyone was on their guard. Nobody was going to let anything slip accidentally. If my target was a member of the Northerners team, they’d be very careful around me.

  In order to be effective protection for my client, I had to be visible, which meant that I couldn’t even find a quiet corner and catch up with my e-mail and my invoices. If Gloria was in make-up, I was in make-up. If Gloria was on set, I was hovering round the edges of the set, getting in everybody’s way. If Gloria was having a pee, I was leaning against the tampon dispenser. I could have made one of those video diary programs that would have had any prospective private eye applying for a job as a hospital auxiliary.

  I was trying to balance that month’s books in my head when a hand on my shoulder lifted my feet off the floor. Spot the alert bodyguard. I spun round and found my nose level with the top button of a suit jacket. I took a step back and looked up. The man must have been six-three, wide shouldered and heavy featured. The suit, whose tailoring owed more to Savile Row than to Armani, was cut to disguise the effects of too many business lunches and dinners, but this guy was still a long way off fat. On the other hand, he looked as if he was still only in his early forties and in the kind of trim that betrays a commitment to regular exercise. In a few years, when his joints started complaining and his stamina wasn’t what it had been, he’d swiftly slip into florid flabbiness. I’d seen the type. Greed was always a killer.

  The smile on his broad face softened the stern good looks that come with a square jaw, a broad brow and deep-set eyes under overhanging brows. “You must be Kate Brannigan,” he said, extending a hand. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m John Turpin.”

  For a man who’d gone out of his way to try to persuade Gloria to keep her problems in the family, he seemed amazingly cordial. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “How are your investigations proceeding?” he asked, smiling down on me benevolently.

  “I could ask you the same question.” If the guy was trying to win me over with his affable helpfulness, the least I could do was take advantage and trawl for some information.

  His smile curved up at one corner, suddenly turning his expression from magnanimous to predatory. “I’m afraid I’m more of a

  “But you expect me to share with you?” I asked innocently.

  He chuckled. “Not really, but it never hurts to try. As you yourself so ably demonstrated. I had hoped we could keep Ms. Kendal’s little problem in-house, but if she insists on wasting her money on services we can provide more effectively and for free, I can’t stop her.”

  “Can I tell her when to expect the results of your internal inquiry?” I wasn’t playing the sweetness and light game any more. It hadn’t got me anywhere so I figured I might as well turn into Ms. Businesslike.

  Turpin thrust one hand into his jacket pocket, thumb sticking out like Prince Charles always has. “Impossible to say. I have so many calls on my time, most of them rather more serious than the antics of some poison-pen writer.”

  “She had her car tires slashed. All four of them. On NPTV premises,” I reminded him.

  “It’s a bitchy business, soap,” he said calmly. “I’m far from convinced there’s any connection between the letters and the car tires. I can’t believe you find it hard to credit that Ms. Kendal could annoy a colleague enough for them to lose their temper and behave so childishly.”

  “You’re really not taking this seriously, are you? ” I said, struggling to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “That’s what you’re being paid for, Ms. Brannigan. Me, I’ve got a television production company to run.” He inclined his head and gave me the full charm offensive again. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  I said nothing, just watched his retreating back with its doublevent tailoring that perfectly camouflaged the effects of too many hours sitting behind a desk. If our conversation was par for the course around here, the only surprise was that it had taken Gloria so long to get round to hiring me.

  In spite of Turpin’s intervention, by lunchtime I was more bored than I’d been in the weeks before I finally managed to jettison A level Latin. If anyone had asked, I’d have admitted to being up for

  Mortified, I twisted my face into an apologetic grimace as the actor playing opposite Gloria glared at me and muttered, “For fuck’s sake. What is this? Fucking amateur city?” The six months he’d once spent on remand awaiting trial for rape (according to the front page of the Sun a couple of months back) hadn’t improved his word power, then.

  I ducked behind a props skip and tucked my head down into my chest as I grunted, “Hello?”

  “Kate? I’ve been arrested.” The voice was familiar, the scenario definitely wasn’t. Donovan Carmichael was a second-year engineering student at UMIST. He’d just started eking out his pathetic student grant by working part time for me as a process-server, doing the bread and butter work that pays his mother’s wages. Did I mention Shelley the office tyrant was his mother? And that she hated the thought that her highly educated baby boy might be tempted to throw it all away to become a maverick of the mean streets like her boss? That probably explained why said boy was using his one phone call on me rather than on his doting mother.

  “What for?”

  “Being black, I think,” he said angrily.

  “What happened?”

  “I was in Hale Barns.” That explained a lot. They don’t have a lot of six-feet-three-inch black lads in Hale Barns, especially not ones with shoulders wider than the flashy sports cars in their four-car garages. It would lower the property values too much.

  “Doing what?”

  “Working,” he said. “You know? Trying to make that delivery that came in yesterday afternoon?” His way of telling me there were other ears on our conversation. I knew he was referring to a domestic violence injunction we’d been hired to serve. The husband had broken his wife’s cheekbone the last time he’d had a bad day. If Donovan succeeded in serving the paper, there might not be a

  “Are they charging you with anything?”

  “They’ve not interviewed me yet.”

  “Which nick are you in?”

  “Altrincham.”

  I looked at my watch. I stuck my head round the side of the skip. They were about to go for a take. “I’ll get someone there as soon as I can. Till then, say nothing. OK?” I said in a low voice.

  I didn’t wait for a reply, just ended the call and tiptoed back to the set. Gloria and the idiot boy she was acting opposite went through their interaction for the eighth time and the director announced she was satisfied. Gloria heaved a seismic sigh and walked off the set, dragging Brenda’s beehive from her head as she approached me. “That’s me for today, chuck,” she said. “Drop me at home and you can have the rest of the day off.”

  “Are you staying in?” I asked, falling into step beside her as we walked to the dressing room she shared with Rita Hardwick, the actress who played Thelma Torrance, the good-time girl who’d never grown up.

  “I am that. I’ve got to pick up next month’s scripts from the office on the way out. I’ll be lying in the Jacuzzi learning my lines till bedtime. It’s not a pretty sight, and I don’t need a spectator. Especially one that charges me for the privilege,” she added with an earthy chuckle.

  I tried not to look as pleased as I felt. I could have sent a lawyer out to rescue Donovan, but it didn’t sound as if things had reached the point where I couldn’t sort it out myself, and lawyers cost either money I couldn’t afford or favors I didn’t want to owe.

  • • •

  Two hours later, I was walking Donovan back to my car. The police don’t like private eyes, but faced with me threatening a lawsuit for false imprisonment and racial harassment, they were only too happy to release Donovan from the interview room where he’d been pacing the floor for every one of the minutes it ha
d taken me to get there.

  “I didn’t do anything, you know,” Donovan complained. His anger seethed just below the surface. I couldn’t blame him, but for all our sakes, I hoped the cycle ride back into town would get it out of his system.

  “According to the copper I spoke to, one of the neighbors saw you sneaking round the back of the house and figured you for a burglar,” I said drily.

  “Yeah, right. All I was doing was checking if he was in the snooker room round the back, like his wife said he usually is if he’s not training in the morning. I reckoned if he was there, and I walked right up to the French windows, he’d be bound to come over and open up, at least to give me a bollocking. When I saw the place was empty, I came back down the drive and went and sat on a wall down the road, where I could see him come home. It’s not like I was hiding,” he continued. “They only arrested me because I’m black. Anybody black on the street in Hale Barns has got to be a burglar, right?”

  “Or a drug dealer. The rich have got to get their coke and heroin from somewhere,” I pointed out reasonably. “Where’s your bike?”

  “Hale Barns. Chained to a lamppost, I hope.”

  “Let’s go back out there and do it,” I sighed.

  The leafy lanes of Hale Barns were dripping a soft rain down our necks as we walked along the grass verge that led to our target’s house. Wrought-iron gates stood open, revealing a long drive done in herringbone brick. There was enough of it there to build a semi. At the top of the drive, a matching pair of Mercedes sports cars were parallel parked. My heart sank. “I don’t believe it,” I muttered.

  We walked up the drive towards a vast white hacienda-style ranch that would have been grandiose in California. In Cheshire, it just looked silly. I leaned on the doorbell. There was a long pause, Chronicle. For once, I didn’t have to check ID before I served the papers. “Yeah?” he said, frowning. “Who are you?”

  I leaned forward and stuffed the papers down the front of the toweling robe that was all he was wearing. “I’m Kate Brannigan, and you are well and truly served,” I said.

  As I spoke, over his shoulder, I saw a woman in a matching robe emerge from an archway. Like him, she looked as if she’d been in bed, and not for an afternoon nap. I recognized her from the Chronicle too. From the diary pages. Former model Bo Robinson. Better known these days as the wife of the man I’d just served with the injunction her solicitor had sweated blood to get out of a district judge.

  Now I remembered what I’d hated most about my own days as a process-server.

  The last thing Donovan had said before he’d pedaled off to the university library was, “Don’t tell my mum I got arrested, OK? Not even as a joke. Not unless you want her to put the blocks on me working for you again.”

  I’d agreed. Jokes are supposed to be funny, after all. Unfortunately, the cops at Altrincham weren’t in on the deal. What I didn’t know was that while I’d been savoring the ambience of their lovely foyer (decor by the visually challenged, furnishings by a masochist, posters from a template unchanged since 1959) the desk sergeant had been calling the offices of Brannigan & Co to check that the auburn-haired midget and the giant in the sweat suit really were operatives of the agency and not a pair of smartmouthed burglars on the make.

  I’d barely put a foot inside the door when Shelley’s voice hit me like a blast furnace. “Nineteen years old and never been inside a police station,” came the opening salvo. “Five minutes working with you, and he might as well be some smackhead from Moss Side. That’s it now, his name’s on their computer. Another black bastard who’s got away with it, that’s how they’ll have him down.”

  I raised my palms towards her, trying to fend off her fury. “It’s all right, Shelley. He wasn’t formally arrested. They won’t be putting anything into the computer.”

  Shelley snorted. “You’re so street smart when it comes to your business. How come you can be so naive about our lives? You don’t have the faintest idea what it means for a boy like Donovan to get picked up by the police! They don’t see a hard-working boy who’s been brought up to respect his elders and stay away from drugs. They just see another black face where it doesn’t belong. And you put him there.”

  I edged across reception, trying to make the safe haven of my own office without being permanently disabled by the crossfire. “Shelley, he’s a grown man. He has to make his own decisions. I told him when I took him on that serving process wasn’t as easy as it sounded. But he was adamant that he could handle it.”

  “Of course he can handle it,” she yelled. “He’s not the problem. It’s the other assholes out there, that’s the problem. I don’t want him doing this any more.”

  I’d almost reached the safety of my door. “You’ll have to take that up with Don,” I told her, sounding more firm than I felt.

  “I will, don’t you worry about that,” she vowed.

  “OK. But don’t forget the reason he’s doing this.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

  “It’s about independence. He’s trying to earn his own money so he’s not dipping his hand in your pocket all the time. He’s trying to tell you he’s a man now.” I took a deep breath, trying not to feel intimidated by the scowl that was drawing Shelley’s perfectly shaped eyebrows into a gnarled scribble. My hand on the doorknob, I delivered what was supposed to be the knockout punch. “You’ve got to let him make his own mistakes. You’ve got to let him go.”

  I opened the door and dived for safety. No such luck. Instead of silent sanctuary, I fell into nerd heaven. A pair of pink-rimmed eyes looked up accusingly at me. Under the pressure of Shelley’s rage, I’d forgotten that my office wasn’t mine any more. Now I was the sole active partner in Brannigan & Co, I occupied the larger of the two rooms that opened off reception. When I’d been junior

  These days, my former bolthole was the computer room, occupied as and when the occasion demanded by Gizmo, our information technology consultant. In our business, that’s the polite word for hacker. And when it comes to prowling other people’s systems with cat-like tread, Gizmo is king of the dark hill. The trade off for his computer acumen is that on a scale of one to ten, his social skills come in somewhere around absolute zero. I’m convinced that was the principal reason he was made redundant from his job as systems wizard with Telecom. Now they’ve become a multinational leading-edge company, everybody who works there has to pass for human. Silicon-based life forms like Gizmo just had to be downsized out the door.

  Their loss was my gain. There had had to be changes, of course. Plain brown envelopes stuffed with banknotes had been replaced with a system more appealing to the taxman, if not to the company accountant. Then there was the personal grooming. Gizmo had always favored an appearance that would have served as perfect camouflage if he’d been living on a refuse tip.

  The clothes weren’t so hard. I managed to make him stop twitching long enough to get the key measurements, then hit a couple of designer factory outlets during the sales. I was planning to dock the cost from his first consultancy fees, but I didn’t want it to terrify him too much. Now he had two decent suits, four shirts that didn’t look disastrous unironed, a couple of inoffensive ties and a mac that any flasher would have been proud of. I could wheel him out as our computer security expert without frightening the clients, and he had a couple of outfits that wouldn’t entirely destroy his street cred if another of the undead happened to be on the street in daylight hours to see him.

  The haircut had been harder. I don’t think he’d spent money on a haircut since 1987. I’d always thought he simply took a pair of scissors to any stray locks whose reflection in the monitor distracted him from what he was working on. Gizmo tried to make me believe he liked it that way. It cost me five beers to get him to

  Three months down the line, he was still looking the business, his hollow cheeks and bloodshot eyes fitting the current image of heroin addict as male glamour. I’d even overheard one of Shelley’s adolescent daughter’
s mates saying she thought Gizmo was “shaggable.” That Trainspotting has a lot to answer for. “All right,” he mumbled, already looking back at his screen. “You two want to keep the noise down?”

  “Sorry, Giz. I didn’t actually mean to come in here.”

  “Know what you mean,” he said.

  Before I could leave, the door burst open. “And another thing,” Shelley said. “You’ve not done a new client file for Gloria Kendal.”

  Gizmo’s head came up like it was on a string. “Gloria Kendal? The Gloria Kendal? Brenda Barrowclough off Northerners?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s a client?”

  “I can’t believe you watch Northerners,” I said.

  “She was in here yesterday,” Shelley said smugly. “She signed a photograph for me personally.”

  “Wow! Gloria Kendal. Cool! Anything I can do to help?” The last time I’d seen him this excited was over an advance release of Netscape Navigator 3.0.

  “I’ll let you know,” I promised. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I have some work to do.” I smiled sweetly and sidled past Shelley. As I crossed the threshold, the outside door opened and a massive basket of flowers walked in. Lilies, roses, carnations, and a dozen other things I didn’t know the names of. For a wild moment, I thought Richard might be apologizing for the night before. He had cause, given what had gone on after Dennis had left. The thought shrivelled and died as hope was overtaken by experience.

  “They’ll be from Gloria Kendal,” Shelley predicted.

  I contradicted her. “It’ll be Donovan mortgaging his first month’s wages to apologize to you.”