Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

Once we’d got past the two bobbies working with the NPTV security men on the main gate, all the fight went out of Gloria. Her shoulders slumped and she reached for her cigarettes. “This is an emergency,” she said. “Don’t you dare open that bloody window.” She inhaled deeply. “You know I didn’t kill Dorothea, don’t you?”

I pulled a wry smile. “You’re an actress, Gloria. Would I know if you had?”

She snorted. “I’m no Susan Sarandon. I play myself with knobs on. Come on, Kate, did I kill Dorothea?”

“I can’t believe you did,” I said slowly.

“That’ll do me. So you’ll try and find out who’s done this? Before he decides it’s my turn? Or my granddaughter’s?”

“Cliff Jackson, the cop that’s in charge of this? He’s not a bad investigator. But he’s been wrong before. I’ll give it my best shot.”

“I’ll sleep easier knowing that,” she said, toking on her cigarette as if it gave life instead of stealing it.

“Speaking of sleep … Do you want to stay over at my place tonight? I’m thinking partly of the weather and partly from the security point of view.”

Gloria frowned. “It’s nice of you to offer, but I could do with being in my own space. I need to feel grounded. And I don’t want to be under your feet. You’re going to have to get stuck into your inquiries tomorrow, and I don’t want to get in the road.”

“I don’t want to leave you on your own. Even behind those high walls.” I thought for a moment, then pulled over to the roadside and took out my phone. A couple of phone calls and I had it sorted. It meant an awkward detour via the students’ union, but as soon as Gloria saw Donovan in all his hulking glory, she was perfectly happy for me to hoof it the mile across town to my house while she disappeared over the hills and far away with the best-looking bodyguard either side of the Pennines. The only question was whether she’d still respect him in the morning.

I stepped out briskly. The temperature was plummeting now the sleet had stopped, the pavements rapidly icing over. Twice the only thing that saved me from crashing to the pavement was a handy lamppost. All I wanted was to curl up in my dressing gown with a very large amount of Absolut Citron and a smudge of grapefruit juice. With luck, Richard might be home early, preferably armed with a substantial Chinese. He always says Friday night is amateurs’ night out as far as live music is concerned. I could almost taste the salt and pepper king prawns.

I should have known better. Nights like that just don’t get better. The man I suppose I love was home all right. But not home alone. I found him fast asleep in his bed, his arms around someone else. When I walked into the room, her eyes snapped open. She took one look at me and screamed.

Sensible girl.

She can turn her hand to anything. She has a discriminating intellect but tends to be overcritical of herself and others in times of stress. She analyzes problems with tenacity and is capable of painstaking research. She is logical, skeptical and can be obsessive.

From Written in the Stars , by Dorothea Dawson

Divorce may have deprived Richard of most of the last five years of his son Davy’s life, but because a lot of his work is done at night, he did most of the daytime childcare for the first three. Thankfully the old skills hadn’t deserted him. That meant I didn’t have to take any responsibility for the most remarkable child on the planet (if you believed Alexis and Chris). I watched with a mixture of relief and astonishment as he spooned greyish-pink mush into the eager mouth of his nine-month-old girlfriend. He managed it almost without looking, and without ever breaking off in mid-sentence. He’d already changed a nappy without flinching, which was a long way away from my idea of getting the day off to a good start.

I remember when northern men would have died rather than admit they knew how Pampers worked. Now, they pin you to the wall in café bars and tell you it’s possible for men to produce tiny amounts of breast milk. Certainly, Jay’s arrival had already achieved the seemingly impossible task of ending the superficial hostilities between Alexis and Richard. Before Jay, Alexis maintained she was a real journo and Richard a sycophant; Richard that he was a real journo and Alexis a police lackey. Work never entered their conversations any more.

As he did about once a week, Richard had taken Jay for the night to give Chris a chance at a straight eight hours. Oddly, when Jay

“So what are your plans for today?” Richard asked as we sat in the conservatory watching wet snow cascading from the sky.

“I’ve got Donovan minding Gloria, so I probably don’t need to go over there. I’ve told him she’s to stay indoors, but looking at the weather, I don’t think there’ll be much temptation to leave the fireside. I’m going to do some background research in the Chronicle library so I can start asking sensible questions about Dorothea Dawson.”

“Great,” he said enthusiastically. “You can take Jay in with you. I was supposed to drop her at the Chronicle crèche so Alexis can pick her up, but if you’re going in anyway, I can stay home and get on with some writing.”

Time for the application of the Kate Brannigan irregular verb theory of life. In this case, “I am diplomatic, you are economical with the truth, s/he is a lying little gobshite.” “No problem,” I said. Why should I mind drumming my fingers on the table while Richard finished feeding her, changing her, swaddling her for the outside world, swapping the baby seat from his car to mine then strapping her in? It wasn’t as if I had anything important like a murder to solve, after all.

I eventually tracked Alexis down in the office canteen. “Your daughter is in the crèche,” I told her. “So’s her car seat.”

“That’s great,” she said. “I’ll bob along in a minute and say hello. We really appreciate it, you know. It’s the only time we get a decent night’s sleep. She been OK?”

“As far as I know. She screamed her socks off when I got home last night, but that’s just because she can’t stand any competition for Richard’s attention. So I left them to it. She probably had a better night’s sleep than I did.”

Alexis shook her head, smiling. “I know you love her really.”

She knew more than I did. I smiled vacantly and said, “Dorothea Dawson.”

“She didn’t see that coming, did she?”

I love journalistic black humor. It always comforts me to know there are people more cynical than me around. “What’s this morning’s story?”

“What’s your interest?” she asked, instantly on the alert. Her cigarettes came out and she lit one for real.

“I found the body.”

Alexis ran her free hand through her hair so it stood up in a punk crest. “Shit,” she said. “The bizzies never said anything about that at the press conference. They said the body had been discovered by a member of staff, the lying gets.”

“You’re surprised?”

“No. Cliff Jackson would superglue his gob shut before he let the name ‘Brannigan’ pass his lips. Unless the sentence also contained the words, ‘has been charged with.’ So give, KB. A first-person color piece, that’s just what I need for the city final.” Her notebook had appeared on the table.

“What are they saying?”

“That she was killed in her camper van in the car park of the NPTV compound by a blow to the head around six last night. And that’s about all. What can you give me?”

I sighed. “It isn’t exactly something I want to dwell on. I needed to talk to Dorothea about the warning she’d given Gloria the last time she’d done a reading for her. I’d arranged to see her after her final client of the day. When I got there, I knocked but there was no reply. I knew she was expecting me, so I opened the door and walked in. She was lying face down on the table with her head caved in. It was obvious she was dead. Her crystal ball was lying on the carpet at the end of a track of blood. It looked to me as if that’s what the killer used. It’s much bigger than the usual crystal ball. It must be nine, ten inches across.”