Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

Clive scratched his chin. “She knew a lot about us, though. I don’t know if she was psychic or just bloody good at snapping up every little scrap of information she could get her hands on, but if she’d written a book about Northerners , it would have been dynamite. Maybe she went too far with somebody. Maybe she found something out that she wasn’t prepared to keep quiet about.”

The notion that there was any secret black enough for a Northerners star to feel squeamish about using for publicity was hard for me to get my head round. Then I remembered Cassie. Not only what had happened to her, but what she’d said about the prospect of losing a plum role being motive enough for some desperate people. “If that’s the case, then the dark secret probably died with her,” I said despondently.

“I’m afraid so,” Clive said. “Unless she kept the details on her computer along with our horoscope details.”

My ears pricked up. “You think that’s likely?”

Rita’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. “That’ll be why the police have taken her computer off to analyze what’s on it,” she said. “That nice Linda said they’d got someone working on it already, but they’ve got to call in an expert who knows about astrology because a lot of it’s in symbols and abbreviations they can’t make head nor tail of.”

Another alley closed off to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ted emerge from the make-up caravan. Time for action, I thought. I didn’t want Gloria left alone with anybody connected to Northerners , even someone as seemingly innocuous as Freddie from make-up. He was just finishing off painting Gloria’s lips with Brenda’s trademark pillar-box-red gloss as I walked in. “Don’t say a word,” he cautioned Gloria. “I won’t be a minute,” he added,

Gloria surveyed herself critically in the mirror and said, “Bloody hell, Freddie, that’s the most you’ve said all morning.”

“We’re all a bit subdued today, Gloria,” he said, sounding exhausted. “It’s hard not to think about what happened to Dorothea.”

Gloria sighed. “I know what you mean, chuck.” She leaned forward and patted his hand. “It does you credit.”

“It’s scary, though,” Freddie said, turning away with a tired smile and repacking his make-up box. “I mean, chances are it’s somebody we know who killed her. Outsiders don’t wander around inside the NPTV compound. It’s hard to imagine any of us killing someone who was more or less one of us.”

“The trouble is,” Gloria said, getting to her feet and pulling her coat on, “that half of us are actors. Who the hell knows what goes on in our heads?”

Neither Freddie nor I could think of anything to say to that one. I followed her out the door and caught up with her and Ted at the edge of the car park. The director was explaining how he wanted them to circle round so that they could walk down the virgin snow of the path towards the camera. It looked like they were set for a while, but I didn’t want to go back to the bus and leave Gloria exposed. It wasn’t as if I could prevent an attack on her; but I hoped my presence would be enough to give her menacer pause.

I walked over to the catering bus, where Ross was working with a teenage lad I’d not seen before. “I suppose a bacon butty would be out of the question?” I asked. “I left the house too early for breakfast.”

Ross served me himself, piling crispy rashers into a soft floury roll. “There you go. Coffee?” I nodded and he poured me a carton. “Mind the shop a wee minute, son,” he said, coming out of the side door and beckoning me to join him. “You got anything for me?” he asked.

I shook my head, my mouth full of food. “I’m working on it,” I managed to mumble. “Irons in the fire.”

“I was doing some thinking myself. You know, nobody knows more about what goes on behind the scenes of Northerners than Dorothea did. She had the inside track on everybody. She’d have been perfectly placed to be the mole,” he said eagerly.

“Handy for you,” I said cynically. “What better way to get yourself off the hook than to blame a dead woman?”

His mouth turned down at the corners and his bright blue eyes looked baffled. “That’s a wee bit uncalled for. You know I liked Dorothea fine. It’s just with her being in the news this weekend, I couldn’t help remembering how she always had everybody’s particulars at her fingertips. And she was never backwards about taking advantage of the press for her own purposes. That’s all I was getting at.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You might have a point. The only problem I can see is that Dorothea didn’t have access to scripts, so she wouldn’t have known the details of the future storylines, would she?”

Ross looked crestfallen, his shaggy red hair falling unheeded over his forehead. “I suppose,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking it through. My wife says I never do.”

Before I could say anything more, the bleat of my moby vibrated in my armpit. I unzipped my jacket and pulled it out. “Hello?”

“All right, KB? Where are you?” It was Alexis, far brighter than she had any right to be on a Monday morning when she was the co-parent of a teething baby.

“Why?”

“I’m out and about making some calls and I thought we could link up. I’ve got a juicy bit of info for you, and you know how insecure the airwaves are these days. We’ve probably got half the world’s press listening in at your end and the bizzies at mine. Are you down at NPTV?” she asked, her voice all innocence.

“Security be buggered,” I said. “You just want to get alongside the Northerners cast to see how many exclusives you can dig up about Dorothea.”

A throaty chuckle turned into a cough. “You got me bang to rights. Call it the quid pro quo.”

I wiggled my fingers at Ross. He took the hint and shambled

“They’ll be laying out the red carpet for me, girl, just you wait and see. I won’t be long, I’m only down the road in Salford.”

I cut across the car park at an angle, plowing my feet through the dirty slush. It’s just as much fun at thirty-one as it is at five. I ended up over near the entrance, but still in a line of sight to Gloria. I was pretty certain by now that she was at no real risk, but being visible was what I was being paid for, so visible I’d be.

Alexis was as good as her word. Within ten minutes of our phone call, she drove authoritatively into the car park. The two elderly security men made a few futile gestures in a bid to get her to stop, but it’s hard to argue with something as big as the Range Rover she and Chris had bought to combat the wild weather on the Pennines. Nobody else was interested. I’d soon realized that in a TV production unit, everybody’s too busy with their own job to pay attention to anything else short of a significant thermonuclear explosion. That would make Cliff Jackson’s job a lot harder. I couldn’t resist a shiver of schadenfreude at the thought.

Alexis jumped down into the slush and took a few steps towards the security men. “I’m with her,” I heard as her arm waved in my general direction. There was nothing wrong with her eyesight. “Brannigan and Co,” she added, veering off towards me.

“You really are a lying get,” I said when she was close enough for them not to hear.

“Only technically,” she said. “I am, after all, here on a mission on your behalf.”

“No, you’re not, you’re here entirely on a fishing expedition to net you tomorrow’s front page. So what’s this momentous news you have to impart?” I glanced over my shoulder to make absolutely sure we couldn’t be overheard.

“Does F. Littlewood mean anything to you? F. Littlewood of fiftynine, Hartley Grove, Chorlton?”