Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

“So how did you … meet?”

“Remember when Gianni Versace got shot? Well, there was a lot of discussion on the Net about it, how the FBI were using the on-line community to warn people about the suspect, and how far the federal agencies should go in trying to exploit the Net to catch criminals. I was checking out one of the newsgroups and I saw Jan had said some interesting things, and we started exchanging private mail.” Oh great, I thought. A mutual interest in serial killers.

“And?”

“And we really hit it off. Loads of stuff in common. Lately, it’s been getting more and more intense between us. I…I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before,” he mumbled.

“And now you want to do a reality check by getting together in the flesh?”

He nodded. “Why not? Pen friends have been doing it for years.”

This wasn’t the time to remind him that pen friends had one or two little safeguards like knowing where each other lived. It also wasn’t the time to remind him that it was somehow easier to lie in cyberspace than in meatspace, since right from the beginning the hackers and computer freaks who had hung out on the very first bulletin boards had always hidden behind nicknames. The first time I’d been confronted with Gizmo’s real name was years into our acquaintance, when he’d signed his initial consultancy contract with Brannigan & Co. I sipped my drink and raised my eyebrows. “And sometimes it’s a big disappointment. Why is it so important that you meet? If things are so excellent between you, maybe it’s better to keep it cyber.”

He squirmed in his seat. “Sometimes it’s too slow, the Net. Even in a private conference room in a newsgroup, you can still only communicate as fast as you can type, so it’s never as spontaneous as conversation.”

“I thought that was the charm.”

“It is, to an extent. You can structure your dialogue much more than you can in a meatspace conversation where you tend to go off at tangents. But we’ve been doing this for a while now. We need to move on to the next stage, and that’s got to be a face-to-face. Hasn’t it?”

I wasn’t cut out for this. If I’d been an agony aunt, my column would have invariably read, “For God’s sake, get a grip.” But Gizmo was more than just another contractor. Less than a friend,

“London. But she comes up to Manchester every two or three weeks on business. I was thinking about suggesting we got together for a beer next time she’s up.”

It would be a beer, too. Somehow I didn’t have this woman pegged as a white-wine-spritzer drinker. “You don’t think it might destroy what you’ve already built up?”

He shrugged, a difficult feat given that he was impersonating a human pretzel. “Better we find that out now, don’t you think?”

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe the cyber relationship is the shape of things to come. Communication with strangers, all of us hiding behind a façade, having virtual sex in front of our terminals. Not as replacement for face-to-face stuff, but as another dimension. Adultery without the guilt, maybe?” I hazarded.

“No,” Gizmo said, unravelling his limbs and straightening up. “I think it’s just another kind of courtship. If you don’t take it out of virtuality into reality, it’s ultimately sterile because you’ve no objective standards to measure it against.”

Profound stuff from a man I’d never suspected of being capable of love for a sentient being without microchips. “Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision,” I said gently.

He took a deep breath. His shoulders dropped from round his ears. “I suppose I have.”

“So go with your instincts.”

I’d said what he wanted to hear. The relief flowed off him like radiation. “Thanks for listening, Kate. I really appreciate it.”

“So show me how much, and dig me some dirt on Harry Thompson and the mystery baby.”

Cheerful Jupiter tempers the stern, hard-working nature of Saturn. She is a visionary, but one firmly rooted in the practicalities. She is a good organizer and seldom feels overwhelmed by her responsibilities. She is good at coordinating people to collaborate with her. She has the self-discipline to achieve her goals without getting wound up about it.

From Written in the Stars , by Dorothea Dawson

I’d set off early enough to follow the snowplow down the main road from Oldham through Greenfield. Getting down Gloria’s alley was out of the question, but the hacks had moved on to the next big thing, so the only threat to Gloria’s wellbeing was the possibility of wet feet. I should have known better.

She emerged in knee-high snow boots and a scarlet ski suit with royal-blue chevrons and matching earmuffs. “Hiya, chuck,” she greeted me. “I’ve never been skiing in my life, but they do great gear, don’t they?” she enthused. As usual, I felt underdressed. Wellies over jeans topped with my favorite leather jacket had seemed fine in Ardwick, but somehow they just didn’t cut it in the country.

“Got over your hangover?”

“I’ll thank you to remember it was a migraine, young lady.” She wasn’t entirely joking. “By the way,” she said as she settled into the car, “there’s been a change of schedule. Somebody got excited about the snow, so we’re going to do some location shooting instead of studio filming.” Gloria explained that because of the weather, cast members involved in the location shooting had been told to go directly to Heaton Park on the outskirts of the city rather than to the NPTV compound. The park was easier to reach than the

The one good thing about being away from NPTV was that we seemed to have escaped the delights of Cliff Jackson’s company. According to Rita, Jackson and his team had been interviewing cast members in their homes over the weekend, but they were concentrating on office and production staff at the studios now. Also according to Rita, who had clearly elected herself gossip liaison officer, they were no closer to an arrest than they had been on Friday night. She had managed to get Linda Shaw to admit that neither Gloria nor I were serious suspects; Gloria because there were no spatters of blood on the flowing white top she’d been wearing, me because Linda thought it was one of the daftest ideas she’d ever heard. I thought she’d probably been telling the truth about me, but suspected she might have had her fingers crossed when she exonerated Gloria. In her shoes, I would have.

Gloria went off with Ted so Freddie Littlewood could work his magic on their faces. I let them go alone since I could see the short gap between the two vehicles from where I was sitting in a corner of the cast bus with Rita and Clive. I settled down, ready to soak up whatever they were prepared to spill. “So who had it in for Dorothea?” I asked. Some people just don’t respond to the subtle approach. Anyone with an Equity card, for example.

Clive looked at Rita, who shrugged like someone auditioning for ’Allo, ’Allo . “It can’t have been to do with her professional life, surely,” he said. “Nobody murders their astrologer because they don’t like what she’s predicted.”

“But nobody here really knew anything about her private life,” Rita objected. “Out of all the cast, I was one of her first regulars, and I know almost nothing about her. I’ve even been to her house for a consultation, but all I found out from that was that she must

“Did she live alone?” I asked.

“Search me,” Rita said. “She never said a dicky bird about a boyfriend or a husband. The papers all said she lived alone, and they probably know more than the rest of us because they’ll have been chatting up the locals.”