Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

“Bloody tragic, that’s what it was. Tragic,” Gloria mumbled.

“Murder always is.”

“No, you daft get, not the murder, her life. It was tragic.” Gloria gave me one of those punches to the shoulder that drunks think are affectionate. The car swerved across two lanes and narrowly missed a bus. Gloria giggled as I wrestled with the wheel.

“What was tragic?” I asked, my jaw clenched so tight the muscles hurt.

“She never got over losing him.” She groped in her evening purse for a cigarette and lit up.

“Losing who? Her husband?”

“Flamin’ Nora, Kate. When did a woman ever regret losing a no-good waste of space like her old man?” she reproached me. “Her son, of course. She never got over losing her son.”

“I didn’t know she’d had a son.”

“Not a lot of people know that,” Gloria intoned in a very bad impersonation of Michael Caine. “She had a son and then she had post-natal depression.”

“And the baby died?”

“’Course he didn’t die,” she said scornfully. “He got taken off her. When she got put away.”

This was beginning to feel like one of those terrible black-and-white Northern kitchen sink dramas scripted by men with names like Arnold and Stanley. “When you say ‘put away,’ do

“Tha’s right,” she said. “Put away in the loony bin. He did that to her. Her old man had her put away because having the baby had sent her a bit off her rocker. Christ, every woman goes a bit off her rocker when she’s had a littl’un. If they put us all away just because we went a bit daft, there’d be a hell of a lot of men changing nappies. Right bastard he must have been.”

“So Dorothea’s baby was adopted then, is that what you’re saying?”

“Aye. Taken off her and given to somebody else. And they gave her electric shocks and cold showers and more drugs than Boots the Chemist and wondered why it took her so bloody long to get better. Bastards.” She spat the last word vehemently, as if it was personal, her eyes on the swirl of pinprick snowflakes tumbling thinly in the cones of sulphur-yellow streetlights.

“Did Dorothea tell you about this?”

“Who else? It were when I asked her to do a horoscope for my granddaughter. We’d gone out for a meal and we ended up back at my place, pissed as farts. And she started on about how she could be a grandmother half a dozen times over and she’d never be any the wiser. When she sobered up, she made me swear not to tell another living soul. And I haven’t, not until now. Tragic, that’s what it was. Tragic.”

I came at the subject half a dozen different ways before we finally arrived back at the deserted alley leading to her fortification. Each time I got the same version. No details added, no details different. Dorothea might have been lying to Gloria, but Gloria was telling me the truth.

I helped her out of the car and across cobbles covered in feathery white powder to her front door. I wasn’t in the mood to go any further. I wanted home and bed and the sleep that would make sense of the jumbled jigsaw pieces of information that were drifting through my head like the snow across the windscreen. And not a snowplow in sight.

God, I hate the country.

Compromise is not in her vocabulary. She is not afraid of initiating confrontations and is a great strategist. She enjoys conflict with authority, she will not stand for personal or professional interference, but she is capable of transforming her own life and the world around her. People can be nervous of her, but this is a splendid aspect for a detective.

From Written in the Stars , by Dorothea Dawson

I woke up with that muffled feeling. It didn’t go away when I stuck my head out from under the duvet. Richard only grunted when I slipped out of bed and pulled on my dressing gown before I died of hypothermia. The central heating had obviously been and gone while I was still sleeping, which made it sometime after nine. I lifted the curtain and looked out at a world gone white. “Bugger,” I said.

Richard mumbled something. “Whazza?” it sounded like.

“It’s been snowing. Properly.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow and reached for his glasses. “Lessee,” he slurred. I opened one side of the curtain. “Fabulous,” he said. “We can make a snowman.”

“And what about Gloria? I’m supposed to be minding her.”

“Not even a mad axman would be daft enough to go on a killing spree in Saddleworth in this weather,” he pointed out, not unreasonably. “It’ll be chaos on the roads out there. And if Gloria’s got the hangover she deserves, she won’t be thinking about going anywhere. Come back to bed, Brannigan. I need a cuddle.”

I didn’t need asking twice. “I obey, o master,” I said ironically, slipping out of my dressing gown and into his arms.

The second time we woke, the phone was to blame. I noted

“It’s me, chuck.” It was the voice of a ghost. It sounded like Gloria had died and somehow missed the pearly gates.

“’Morning, Gloria,” I said cheerfully, upping the volume in revenge for her attempt at groping my knee. “How are you today?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t. For some reason, I seem to have a bit of a migraine this morning. I thought I’d just spend the day in bed with the phone turned off, so you don’t have to worry about coming over.”

“Are you sure? I could always send Donovan,” I said sadistically.

I sensed the shudder. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, usual time.” Click. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

Richard emerged, blinking at the snow-light. “Gloria?” he asked.

“I’m reprieved for the day. She sounds like the walking dead.”

“Told you,” he said triumphantly. “Shall we make a snowman, then?”

By the time we’d made the snowman, then had a bath to restore our circulation, then done some more vigorous horizontal exercises to raise our core body temperatures, it was late afternoon and neither of us could put off work any longer. He had some copy to write for an Australian magazine fascinated by Britpop. Personally, I’d rather have cleaned the U-bend, but I’m the woman who thinks the best place for Oasis is in the bottom of a flower arrangement. I settled down at my computer and trawled the Net for responses to last night’s queries.

I downloaded everything, then started reading my way through. I immediately junked the tranche from people who thought it must be cool to be a private eye, would I give them a work-experience placement? I also quickly dumped the ones that were no more than a rehash of what had been in the papers and on the radio. That left me with half a dozen that revealed Dorothea had had a breakdown back in the 1950s. There were two that seemed to have some real credibility. The first came from someone who lived in the picturesque Lancashire town where Dorothea had grown up.

Dear Kate Brannigan, it read, I am a sixteen-year-old girl and I live in Halton-on-Lune where Dorothea Dawson came from. My grandmother was at school with Dorothea, so when I saw your query in the astrology newsgroup, I asked her what she remembered about her.

She said Dorothea was always a bit of a loner at school, she was an only child, but there was nothing weird or spooky about her when she was growing up, she was just like everybody else. My gran says Dorothea got married to this bloke Harry Thompson who worked in the bank. She says he was a real cold fish which I think means he didn’t know how to have a good time, except I don’t know what they did then to have a good time because they didn’t have clubs or decent music or anything like that.