Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

Anyway, Gran says Dorothea had this baby and then she went mad and had to go into the loony bin (Gran calls it that, but she really means a mental hospital). Anyway, her husband went away and was never seen again, and when Dorothea came out of the hospital after a couple of years, she only came back to pack her bags and get the next bus out.

I don’t know what happened to the baby, Gran says it probably got put in a home, which is not a good place to be brought up even if your mum is a bit barking.

I hope this helps.

Yours sincerely

Megan Hall

The other was better written. I didn’t much care; literary style wasn’t what I was after.

Dear Ms. Brannigan

It may come as a surprise that a man of my age knows how to , but I am a contemporary of Dorothea Dawson. I was a year younger than her,

That all changed when Dorothea met Harry Thompson. He was a bank clerk, good-looking in a rather grim sort of way, and he was drawn to girls inappropriately young. When they met, Dorothea was, I think, a rather young 17, and he must have been 25 or 26. He was what I think we would now call a control freak and Dorothea was always on pins lest she upset him.

Quite why she agreed to marry him none of us ever knew, though it may well have been the only route she could see by which she could escape the equally oppressive regime of her stepmother. They were married and within eighteen months Dorothea was confined to the cheerless Victorian world of the local mental hospital following an appalling experience with what we now term post-natal depression.

Harry resolutely refused to have anything to do with the child, claiming that the baby was tainted with the same madness that had claimed the mother. An ignorant and cruel man, he sought and gained a transfer to a branch of the bank in the Home Counties, handing the child over to an adoption agency. What became of the baby, I have no knowledge. This far on, I am ashamed to say that neither my sister nor I can remember if the child were a boy or girl; in my sister’s defense, I would say that by that time, thanks to Harry, there was little contact between her and Dorothea.

When she finally was allowed to leave the mental hospital, Dorothea was very bitter and wanted to cast her past entirely from her. My sister was saddened by this, but not surprised. We were delighted to see her rise to celebrity, though both horrified by the news of her death.

I do hope this is of some assistance. Should you wish to talk to me, you will find me in the Wakefield telephone book under my parish of St. Barnabas-nextthe-Wall.

With best wishes

Rev. Tom Harvey

I wasn’t surprised that Gloria had called the whole sorry business tragic. I couldn’t help wondering where Harry Thompson was now and what he was doing. Not to mention the mysterious baby. I kept having visions of a swaddling-wrapped infant abandoned on the doorstep of the local orphanage. I think I saw too many BBC classic serials when I was a child.

It was time for some serious digging, the kind that is well beyond my limited capabilities with electronic systems. I copied the two key e-mails to Gizmo, with a covering note explaining that I needed him to use his less advertised skills to unearth all he could about Harry Thompson and the riddle of the adopted child. Then I started accessing what legitimate data sources were available on a Sunday evening to answer the queries that had come in from the two foreign agencies.

When the doorbell rang, I exited the database I’d been in and severed my connection. Those on-line services charge by the minute and I wasn’t prepared to put myself in hock if it took me five minutes to dislodge a Jehovah’s Witness or a local opportunist offering to dig my car out of snow that would probably be gone by morning. To my astonishment, it was Gizmo. “I just sent you an e-mail,” I said.

“I know, I got it.” He marched in without waiting to be asked, stamping slush into my hall carpet. On the way to the spare room that doubles as my home office, he shed a parka that looked like it had accompanied Scott to the Antarctic and had only just made it home again. By the time I’d hung it up, he was ensconced in front of my computer. “Gotta beer?”

I was shocked. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Gizmo with any kind of liquid within three feet of a keyboard. Same with food. If it wasn’t for thirst and hunger and bodily functions, I’ve often

Gizmo went for the elderberry beer. Judging by the look on his face as it hit his taste buds, he’d have preferred a can of supermarket own-brand lager. I sat on the edge of the bed and sipped the Stoly and grapefruit juice I’d sensibly sorted for myself. “You were about to tell me what was in my e-mail that made you rush round,” I lied.

Gizmo shifted in his seat and wrapped his legs around each other. I’d seen it done in cartoons, but I’d always thought until then it was artistic license. “I felt like some fresh air.” Lie number one. I shook my head. “I was a bit worried about discussing hacking in e-mail that wasn’t encrypted.” Lie number two. I shook my head again. “I wanted to check what virus protection you’ve got running on this machine because I’ve not looked at it for a while and there’s all sorts of clever new shit out there.”

I shook my head sadly. “Strike three, Giz. Look, you’re here now. You’ve made the effort. You might as well tell me what you came to tell me because we’re both so busy it could be weeks before there’s another window of opportunity.” I felt like a detective inspector pushing for a confession. I hoped it wasn’t going to be another murder.

Gizmo ran a finger up and down the side of the beer bottle, his eyes following its movement. “There’s this …” He stopped. He looked up at me like dogs do when they’re trying to tell you where it hurts. “I’ve met … well, not actually met …”

Light dawned. “The flowers,” I said.

The blush climbed from the polo neck of his black sweater, rising unevenly like the level of poured champagne in a glass. He nodded.

“‘www gets real.’ The cyberbabe,” I said, trying to sound sensitive and supportive. The effort nearly killed me.

“Don’t call her that,” Gizmo said, a plea on his face. “She’s not some bimbo. And she’s not a saddo Nethead who hasn’t got a life. She’s really interesting. I’ve never met a woman who can talk about computer code, politics, sociology, music, all of those things.”

All of those things I never knew Gizmo knew anything about. Except computer code, of course. “You’ve never met this one,” I said drily.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“A meeting? Getting together for real?” I checked my voice for skepticism and thought I’d probably got away with it.

“What do you think?”

What did I think? What I really thought was that Gizmo was probably typical of the people who spent their nights chattering to strangers in Siberia and São Paolo and Salinas, weird computer geeks telling lies about themselves in a pathetic attempt to appear interesting. A blind date with Gizmo would probably have turned me celibate at sixteen. On the other hand, if I’d been a geek too — and there were one or two female nerds out there, most of them inevitably working for Microsoft — I might have been charmed, especially since my efforts at grooming had rendered Gizmo almost indistinguishable from the human species. “Does she work for Microsoft?” I asked.

He gave me a very peculiar look. “That’s sick. That’s like asking a member of CND if he fancies someone who works for MOD procurement.”

“Has she got a name?”

His smile was curiously tender. “Jan,” he said. “She has her own consultancy business. She does training packages for the computer industry.”