Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

Now she passed the letter across. It was plain A4 bond, the text printed unidentifiably on a laser printer. “Doreen Satterthwaite, it’s time you paid for what you’ve done. You deserve to endure the same suffering you’ve been responsible for. I know where you live. I know where your daughter Sandra and her husband Keith live. I know your granddaughter Joanna goes to Gorse Mill School. I know they worship at St Andrew’s Church and have a caravan on Anglesey. I know you drive a scarlet Saab convertible. I know you, you bitch. And soon you’re going to be dead. But there’ll be no quick getaway for you. First, you’re going to suffer.” She was right. The letter sounded disturbingly in control.

“Any idea what the letter writer is referring to?” I asked, not really expecting an honest answer.

Gloria shrugged. “Who the heck knows? I’m no plaster saint, but I can’t think of anybody I’ve done a really bad turn to. Apart from my ex, and I doubt he could manage a letter to me that didn’t include the words, ‘you effing bitch.’ He certainly can’t manage a conversation without it. And besides, he wouldn’t threaten our Sandra or Joanna. No way.” I took her response for genuine perplexity, then reminded myself how she made her living.

“Have there been many of them?”

“This is the third. Plus the one that went to Sandra. That were about the sins of the mother. To be honest, the first couple I just binned. I thought they were somebody at the wind-up.” Suddenly, Gloria looked away. She fumbled another cigarette from the packet and this time, the hand that lit it shook.

“Something happened to change your mind?”

“My car tires were slashed. All four of them. Inside the NPTV compound. And there was a note stuck under the windscreen wipers. ‘Next time your wardrobe? Or you?’ And before you ask, I

“That’s serious business,” I said. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be talking to the police?” I hated to lose a potential client, but it would have verged on criminal negligence not to point out that this might be one for Officer Dibble.

Gloria fiddled with her cigarette. “I told the management about it. And John Turpin, he’s the Administration and Production Coordinator, he persuaded me not to go to the cops.”

“Why not? I’d have thought the management would have been desperate to make sure nothing happened to their stars.”

Gloria’s lip curled in a cynical sneer. “It were nowt to do with my safety and everything to do with bad publicity. Plus, who’d want to come and work at NPTV if they found out the security was so crap that somebody could walk into the company compound and get away with that? Anyway, Turpin promised me an internal inquiry, so I decided to go along with him.”

“But now you’re here.” It’s observational skills like this that got me where I am today.

She flashed a quick up-and-under glance at me, an appraisal that contained more than a hint of fear held under tight control. “You’re going to think I’m daft.”

I shook my head. “I don’t see you as the daft type, Gloria.” Well, it was only a white lie. Daft enough to spend the equivalent of a week’s payroll for Brannigan & Co on a matching outfit, but probably not daft when it came to a realistic assessment of personal danger. Mind you, neither was Ronald Reagan and look what happened to him.

“You know Dorothea Dawson?” Gloria asked, eyeing me out of the corner of her eye.

“‘The Seer to the Stars’?” I asked incredulously. “The one who does the horoscopes in TV Viewer ? The one who’s always on the telly? ‘A horse born under the sign of Aries will win the Derby’?” I intoned in a cheap impersonation of Dorothea Dawson’s sepulchral groan.

“Don’t mock,” she cautioned me, wagging a finger. “She’s a brilliant clairvoyant, you know. Dorothea comes into the studios

I bet she had. Gifts from all the stars of Northerners . “And Dorothea said something about these letters?”

“I took this letter in with me to my last consultation with her. I asked her what she could sense from it. She does that as well as the straight clairvoyance. She’s done it for me before now, and she’s never been wrong.” In spite of her acting skills, anxiety was surfacing in Gloria’s voice.

“And what did she say?”

Gloria drew so hard on her cigarette that I could hear the burning tobacco crackle. As she exhaled she said, “She held the envelope and shivered. She said the letter meant death. Dorothea said death was in the room with us.”

Creative thinking resolves difficult circumstances; she will tackle difficulties with bold resolution. The subject feels at home wherever she is, but can be blind to the real extent of problems. She will not always notice if her marriage is falling apart; she doesn’t always nip problems in the bud.

From Written in the Stars , by Dorothea Dawson

Anybody gullible enough to fall for the doom and gloom dished out by professional con merchants like astrologers certainly wasn’t going to have a problem with my expense sheets. Money for old rope, I reckoned. By Gloria’s own admission, hate mail was as much part of the routine in her line of work as travelling everywhere with stacks of postcard-sized photographs to autograph for the punters. OK, the tire slashing was definitely more serious, but that might be unconnected to the letters, an isolated act of vindictiveness. It was only because the Seer to the Stars had thrown a wobbler that this poison pen outbreak had been blown up to life-threatening proportions. “Does she often sense impending death when she does predictions for people?” I asked, trying not to snigger.

Gloria shook her head vigorously. “I’ve never heard of anybody else getting a prediction like that.”

“And have you told other people in the cast about it?”

“Nobody,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing you go on about.”

Not unless you liked being laughed at, I reckoned. On the other hand, it might mean that the death prediction was one of Dorothea Dawson’s regular routines for putting the frighteners on her clients and making them more dependent on her. Especially the older ones. Let’s face it, there can’t be that many public figures Gloria’s age who go through more than a couple of months without knowing

The news seemed to cheer her up. “Right then, we’d better be off,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and gathering her mac around her shoulders.

“We’d better be off?” I echoed.

She glanced at her watch, a chunky gold item with chips of diamond that glittered like a broken windscreen in a streetlight. “Depends where you live, I suppose. Only, if I’m opening a theme pub in Blackburn at eight and we’ve both got to get changed and grab a bite to eat, we’ll be cutting it a bit fine if we don’t get a move on.”

“A theme pub in Blackburn,” I said faintly.

“That’s right, chuck. I’m under contract to the brewery. It’s straightforward enough. I turn up, tell a few jokes, sing a couple of songs to backing tapes, sign a couple of hundred autographs and off.” As she spoke, she was setting her hat at a rakish angle and replacing her sunglasses. As she made for the door, I dived behind the desk and swept my palmtop computer and my moby into my shoulder bag. I only caught up with her because she’d stopped to sign a glossy color photograph of herself disguised as Brenda Barrowclough for Shelley.

Something terrible had happened to the toughest office manager in Manchester. Imagine Cruella De Vil transformed into one of those cuddly Dalmatian puppies, only more so. It was like watching Ben Nevis grovel. “And could you sign one, ‘for Ted’?” she begged. I wished I had closed-circuit TV cameras covering the office. A video of this would keep Shelley off my back for months.