Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

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.