Val Mcdermid - Star Struck

The need to know was obviously too deeply rooted in me to ignore. Sometimes it even seemed stronger than the urge for selfpreservation. Driven as I was by the prospect of finding out what lay behind the string of recent strange events, I had to remind

I took a deep breath and pressed the bell. A light went on in the hall, illuminating me with green and scarlet patterns from the stained glass. I saw a dark shape descend the stairs and loom towards me. The door opened and Dorothea Dawson’s genetic inheritance stood in front of me. I should have seen it, really. The features were so similar.

“Hi,” I said. “I’ve come for a chat about your mum.”

Whenever she seems about to carve out a destiny or even a destination, Uranus steps in to force her to kick over the traces and express her individuality. Something always disrupts her best-laid plans; she is forever having to include new elements in her arrangements. The rest of her chart indicates capability; she will succeed in a conventional world by unconventional means.

From Written in the Stars , by Dorothea Dawson

Freddie Littlewood blinked rapidly, dark eyes glittering. His thin lips twitched. It was hard to tell if he was furious or on the point of tears. I figured he was deciding whether to brazen it out or to deny all knowledge of what I was talking about. It was possible, after all, that I was only guessing. “My private life is no concern of yours,” he said eventually, sitting firmly on the fence.

I sighed. “That’s where you’re wrong, Freddie. I’m very concerned with the relationship between you and Dorothea. The nature of my concern rather depends on whether you killed her or not. If you did, it puts my client in the clear and it probably means Gloria isn’t the next target of a killer. If you didn’t, you can probably tell me things that would help me to protect her. Either from false accusation or from murder. So my concern is legitimate.”

“I’ve nothing to say to you,” he said, closing the door in my face.

I hate bad manners. Especially when it’s late and there are almost certainly more interesting things I could be doing with my time. I took out my mobile phone and pushed open the letterbox. “The police don’t know Dorothea was your mother.” I started to press numbers on the phone, hoping the beeping was evident on the other side of the door. “Want me to tell them now?”

Before I could have pressed the “send” button if I’d been serious, the door opened again. “There’s no need for this,” Freddie snapped. “I didn’t kill Dorothea. That’s all you need to know. And it’s all you’re getting from me. I don’t care if you tell the police she was my birth mother. It’s not like it was news to me. I’ve known for ages, and I can prove it. Even the police aren’t stupid enough to take that as a motive for murder.” He was probably right. The bitterness in his voice spelled motive to me, but acrimony’s never been grounds for arresting someone.

I leaned against the doorjamb and smiled. “Maybe so. But if you factor in the stories you’ve been selling to the papers, the picture looks very different. Intimate details that people have revealed to Dorothea, spiced with the snippets you’ve picked up, that’s what’s been tarted up in the tabloids. Maybe Dorothea decided she didn’t need a partner any more?”

His eyes widened and he flashed a panicky glance to either side of me, as if checking whether I was alone. “You’re talking rubbish,” he said, his voice venomous.

I smiled. “Have it your own way. But you didn’t get paid in cash. Somewhere there’s a paper trail. And one thing the stupid old plod is very good at is following a paper trail. Freddie, if what you’re saying is true, and you didn’t kill Dorothea, I’ve got no ax to grind with you. John Turpin isn’t paying me to find out who the Northerners mole is.” I refrained from mentioning that Ross Grant might be. There was no point in complicating things that were already difficult. “All I’m interested in is protecting Gloria. You like Gloria, for God’s sake, I know you do. I’ve seen the way you are with her. Can we not just sit down and talk about this? Or do I have to blow your life out of the water with NPTV as well as the cops?”

One side of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Gloria said you were smart,” he said, opening the door wide enough to let me enter. He shooed me ahead of him into a small square dining room. There was an oak table with four matching chairs, all stripped back to the bare wood, oiled and polished till they gleamed in the soft glow of opalescent wall lights. A narrow sideboard in darker oak sat against the far wall. The only decoration came from the vibrant color of the

“How did you find out she was my birth mother?” he asked.

I raised one shoulder in a shrug. “There’s not much a good hacker can’t find out these days. How did you find out?”

He ran his thumb along the sharp line of his jaw in a curious stropping gesture. “A mixture of luck and hard work,” he said. “The first time I got into a serious relationship, when I was in my twenties, I decided I wanted to know where I’d come from. It hadn’t seemed important before, but the idea of being with someone long term, maybe even having kids with them, made me curious. I searched the records, and found out my father was already dead. Killed by a heart attack.” He gave a bitter cough of laughter. “Not bad for a heartless bastard. I carried on looking and I discovered my mother was Dorothea Thompson, née Dawson. But the trail went cold.” His eyes were alert, never leaving my face. I suspected he was watching for any signs that he was breaking new ground, revealing things I didn’t already know.

“I know about the breakdown,” I said. “Was that where the trail petered out?”

He nodded. “She was released from the hospital still using her married name, and she disappeared without trace. I found a cousin, the only other member of the family still alive, but he had no idea what had happened to her. The only useful thing I got from him was a copy of her wedding picture. I even hired one of your lot, but he never found her. Then one day I was sitting in the staff canteen at NPTV and Edna Mercer walked in with her latest fad. It was like someone took my stomach in their fist and squeezed it tight. I didn’t need to hear her name to know who she was. That was just confirmation of what I knew the minute I saw her face. All those years later, she was still the spitting image of her wedding picture.”

“But you didn’t rush across the room and reveal you were her long-lost son.”

He gave a twisted smile. “When I started out looking for my

I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t offensively trite. My childhood was breathtaking in its comforting and confident normality. When I’d fallen over, there had been someone there to pick me up and stick a plaster on my knee. I’d fallen asleep with stories, not nightmares. There had always been arms to hold me and faces to reflect pride in my achievement. I could barely imagine the yawning gap of such an absence, never mind the agony of having it filled with such poisonous viciousness. “You must have come to hate her,” I said, surprised by the huskiness of my voice.

He shifted in his chair so his face was obscured by shadow, his spiky hair emphasized in a dark fragmented halo. With his black polo neck and black trousers, he looked like a satanic ghost. “I wanted to make her life a misery too,” he said. “I wanted her to understand something about the pain and misery she’d given me.”

“I don’t think she had a lot of choice in the matter.”

“More choice than I did,” he blazed back at me. “She could have come looking for me. It couldn’t have been that hard to find a child in care. But she made the decision to leave me in whatever hell I happened to be in.”