Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

“Working for the management at NPTV. They’ve got a major mole in there, which is the last thing you need when you’re trying to finesse a major deal with the networks. I heard they’ve got a mole hunt going on. You sure they’ve not hired you to find out who’s stirring the shit for them?”

I shook my head. “Sorry. You’ll have to get your follow-up somewhere else.”

“I thought they’d be happy about all the press stories about the show,” Chris said. “I’d have thought it would increase the ratings. I had to go to London the other day on the train, and the two women opposite me talked about Northerners nonstop.”

“I think the scandalous stories about the stars whet people’s appetites,” I said. “According to my sources, what the management don’t like are the storyline leaks. They reckon that makes people turn off.”

Before anyone could say more, my moby began to bleat insistently. “Goodbye, pizza,” I said mournfully, grabbing my bag and reaching for the phone. “Brannigan,” I grunted.

“It’s me.”

My heart sank. “Donovan, you’ve not been arrested again?”

The emotional swings of the moon are minimized in this placing, leading to balance between impulsiveness and determination. She is sociable, but needs to recharge her batteries in solitude which she seeks actively. Imaginative and intuitive, she has an instinctive rapport with creative artists though not herself artistic.

From Written in the Stars , by Dorothea Dawson

This time it was Alderley Edge, the village that buys more champagne per head of population than anywhere else in the UK. Donovan had been there to serve a subpoena on a company director who seemed to think the shareholders should fund the entire cost of his affair with a member of the chorus of Northern Opera. The detached house was in a quietly expensive street, behind tall hedges like most of its neighbors. Donovan had borrowed his mother’s car and sat patiently parked a few doors down from the house for about an hour waiting for his target to return.

When the man came home, Donovan had caught him getting out of his car. He’d accepted service with ill grace and stormed into the house. Donovan had driven home via his girlfriend’s student residence bedsit to pick up some tutorial handouts for the essay he was writing. He’d arrived home to find the police waiting. They hadn’t been interested in an explanation. They’d just hauled him off in a police car to the local nick where they’d informed him he was being arrested on suspicion of burglary.

By the time I arrived, tempers were fraying round the edges. It turned out that at some point during the day, a neighbor of the company director had been burgled. And another nosy neighbor had happened to jot down Shelley’s car number because, well, you

The police computer spat out Shelley’s address in response to the car registration number, and the bizzies were round there in no time flat. Things were complicated by the fact that the bloke Donovan had served the subpoena on decided to get his own back and denied all knowledge of a young black process-server with a legitimate reason for being in the street.

It took me the best part of an hour to persuade the police that Donovan was telling the truth and that I wasn’t some gangster’s moll trying to spring my toy boy. Thighs like his, I should be so lucky.

The one good thing about the whole pathetic business was that Shelley had been out when the police had turned up. With luck, she’d still be out. As I drove him home, I said, “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, you doing the process-serving.”

“I’m serving the papers properly, what’s the problem?” he said defensively.

“It’s not good for your image or your mother’s blood pressure if you keep getting arrested.”

“I’m not letting those racists drive me out of a job,” he protested. “You’re saying I should just lie down and let them do it to me? The only places I have a problem are the ones where rich white people think that money can buy them a ghetto. People don’t call the cops when you go to serve paper in Alderley Edge, or when I turn up on a doorstep in Hulme.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking it through,” I said, ashamed of myself for only seeing the easy way out. “The job’s yours for as long as you want it. And first thing tomorrow, I’ll get your mother to have some proper business cards and ID printed up for you.”

“Fine by me. Besides, Kate, I need the money. I can’t be scrounging off my mother so I can have a beer with my mates, or go to see a film with Miranda. The process-serving’s something I can fit around studying and having fun. You can’t do that with most part-time jobs.”

I grinned. “You could always get an anorak and work with Gizmo on the computer security side of things.”

Donovan snorted. “I don’t think Gizmo’d let me. Have you noticed he’s got well weird lately?”

“How can you tell?” I signalled the right turn that would bring me into the narrow street of terraced brick houses where the Carmichael family lived.

“Yeah, right. He’s always been well weird. But this last few weeks, he’s been totally paranoid android about his files.”

“He’s always been secretive about his work,” I reminded him. “And not unreasonably. A lot of what we do for clients on computer security is commercially sensitive.”

“There’s secretive and there’s mentally ill. Did you know you even need a password to get out of his screen savers?”

“Now you are exaggerating,” I said.

“You think so? You try it the next time he goes to the loo. Touch a key when one of the screen savers is running and you’ll be asked for a password. You didn’t know?” Donovan’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He opened the car door and unfolded his long body into the street. Then he bent down and said anxiously, “Check it out. I’m not making it up. Whatever he’s up to, he doesn’t want anybody else to know. And it is your hardware he’s doing it on.”

“It’ll be OK,” I said, trying to reassure myself as much as Donovan. “Gizmo wouldn’t take risks with my business.” Which was true enough, I thought as I drove home. Except that what Gizmo thought was fair game didn’t necessarily coincide with the law’s view. And if he didn’t think it was wrong, why would he imagine it might be risky?

The response to the Chronicle ’s story sharply polarized the Northerners cast in a way I hadn’t seen before. Up to that point, I’d been beginning to wonder whether I could possibly be right about

“What happened to that lot?” I asked as soon as Gloria closed the dressing room door behind us.

Rita Hardwick, who shared the room and played rough and ready tart with a heart Thelma Torrance, paused in stitching the tapestry she passed the slack time with. “Got the cold shoulder, did she?” she said with grim good humor.

“Yeah,” I said, not caring about showing my puzzlement. “Yesterday, everybody’s everybody’s pal and today, it’s like we’ve got a communicable disease.”

“It happens when you get a big show in the papers,” Gloria said, putting her coat on a hanger and subsiding into a chair. “It’s basically jealousy. The people below you in the pecking order resent the fact that you’re important enough to make the front page of the Chronicle and have the story followed up by all the tabloids the next day.”

I’d already seen the evidence of Gloria’s importance to the tabloids. When I’d arrived to collect her that morning, we’d had to run the gauntlet of reporters and photographers clustered round the high gates that kept Gloria safe from their invasive tendencies.