Star Struck

Chapter 19 NEPTUNE IN SCORPIO IN THE 6TH HOUSE

She loves research and investigation, particularly if it is done secretly. She uses her discoveries to assert her power in the workplace. She is subtle, fascinated by secrets and their revelation and loves to expose hidden wickedness, especially if they feed her sense of social justice.

From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

I remember a Monty Python sketch where a character complains, “My brain hurts. I’ve got my head stuck in the cupboard.” I knew just how he felt when the opening chords of Free’s “All Right Now” crashed through my head. It felt like the middle of the night. It was still dark. Mind you, in Manchester in December, that could make it mid-morning. I dug Richard in the ribs. It was his house, after all. He made a noise like a sleeping triceratops, rolled over and started snoring.

I stumbled out of bed, wincing as my aching feet hit the ground and gasping at the stiffness in my hips as I straightened up. Richard’s “Twenty Great Rock Riffs” doorbell blasted out again as I rubber-legged my way down the hall, wrapping my dressing gown around me, managing to tie the belt at the third fumbling attempt. I knew I shouldn’t have had that last treble Polish hunter’s vodka on the rocks. I yanked the door open and Gizmo practically fell in the door, accompanied by half a snowdrift.

“I’ve done it,” he said without preamble.

I wiggled my jaw in various directions, trying to get my mouth to work. “Oh God,” I finally groaned through parched lips. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes while the floor and ceiling rearranged themselves in their normal configuration.

“You look like shit,” Gizmo observed from the living-room doorway.

“Bastard,” I said, gingerly pushing myself away from the wall to test whether I could stand upright. Nothing seemed to collapse, so I put one foot in front of the other until I made it to the living room. “My place,” I croaked, leading the way through the conservatory to the life-support system in my kitchen.

“It’s not that early,” Gizmo said defensively. “You said it was important.”

The clock on the microwave said 07:49. “Early’s relative,” I told him, opening the fridge and reaching for the milk. “So’s important.” I poured a glass with shaking hand and got the vitamins out. Four grams of C, two B-complex tablets and two extra-strength paracetamol. I had a feeling it was going to be one of those days when ibuprofen and paracetamol count as two of the four main food groups. I washed the pills down with the milk, shuddered like a medieval peasant with the ague and wished I’d remembered to drink more water when we’d finally got home the wrong side of four o’clock.

“Did you come on the bus?” I asked. Gizmo has the same affection for public transport as most obsessives. He’s the sort who writes to TV drama producers to complain that they had the hero catching the wrong bus on his way to his rendezvous with the killer.

“The one-nine-two,” he said. “Single decker.”

“Do me a favor? I left my car at the O-Pit. If you get a cab round there and pick it up for me, by the time you come back I’ll be able to listen to whatever you’ve got to say.”

His mouth showed his discontent. “Do I have to?” he asked like a ten-year-old.

“Yes,” I said, pointing to the door. “Call a cab, Giz.”

Half an hour later, I’d kick-started my system with a mixture of hot and cold showers followed by four slices of peanut-buttered toast from a loaf that had been lurking in the freezer longer than I liked to think about. I even managed a smile for Gizmo when he returned twirling my car keys round his trigger finger.

“Thanks,” I said, settling us both down in my home office with a pot of coffee. “Sorry if I was a bit off. Rough night, you know?”

“I could tell,” he said. “You looked like you needed a new motherboard and a few more RAM chips.”

“It’s not just the brain, it’s the chassis,” I complained. “This last year I’ve been starting to think something terrible happens to your body when you hit your thirties. I’m sure my joints never used to seize up from a night’s clubbing.”

“It’s downhill all the way,” he said cheerfully. “It’ll be arthritis next. And then you’ll start losing nouns.”

“Losing nouns?”

“Yeah. Forgetting what things are called. You watch. Any day now, you’ll start calling everything wossnames, or thingumajigs, or whatchamacallits.” He looked solemn. It took me a few seconds to realize I was experiencing what passed for a joke on his planet. I shook my head very slowly to avoid killing off any more neurones and groaned softly.

Gizmo reached past me and switched on my computer. “You’ve got Video Translator on this machine, haven’t you?”

“It’s on the external hard disk, the E drive,” I told him.

He nodded and started doing things to my computer keyboard and peripherals too quickly for my hungover synapses to keep up. After a few minutes of tinkering and muttering, he sat back and said, “There. It’s a bit clunky in places, not enough polygons in the program to keep it smooth. The rendering’s definitely not going to win any awards. But it’s what you asked for. I think.”

I managed to get my bleary eyes to focus on the screen. Somehow, the color looked brighter than they had on the original crime-scene photographs. If I’d been alone, I’d have been reaching for the sunglasses, but my staff has little enough respect for me as it is. I leaned forward and concentrated on what Gizmo had put together.

We both sat in silence as his work unfolded before us. At the end, I clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s brilliant,” I enthused. “That must have taken you hours.”

He tilted his head while shrugging, regressing to awkward adolescent. “I started soon as I got home. I finished about two. But I did have a little break to talk to Jan. So it wasn’t like I blew the whole night on it or anything.” He scuffed his feet on the carpet. “Anyway, Dennis is your mate.”

“He owes you,” I said. “Don’t let him forget it. There must be somebody out there you want menacing.”

Gizmo looked shocked. “I don’t think so. Unless he knows where to find the moron who sent me that virus that ate all my.DLL files.”

I said nothing. It wasn’t the time to point out that if the lovely Jan was a hoax, he might want Dennis’s talent for terror sooner than he thought. “I’m going to be half an hour or so on the phone. You can either wait or head on into the office.”

“I’ve got my Docs on. I’ll walk over,” he said. “I like it in the snow. I’ll let myself out.”

I reached for the phone and called Ruth. Within ten minutes, she’d rung back to tell me she’d set up a meeting with DI Tucker at our office later that morning. “He’s not keen,” she warned me. “I think your fame has spread before you. He did ask if you were the PI involved with the Dorothea Dawson case.”

“Did you lie?”

“No, I told him to check you out with Della. Apparently his bagman used to work for her, so it’s a name that meant something to him.”

“Ah.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Not for me, but it might be for the bagman,” I said. Tucker wouldn’t have to be much of a detective to work out where I’d gained my access to the crime-scene photographs. “My fault. I should have warned you.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Ruth said warily.

“Don’t worry. I’ll see you later.”

It took another twenty minutes to sort out Donovan and Gloria. We finally fixed that he would pick up her and her daughter, take them to the police station and hang on while Gloria gave the statement that would get him off the hook. Then he’d take them shopping. I hoped they’d stick to the plan of going a very long way away from anywhere policed by the Greater Manchester force. If they were going to be arrested for shoplifting, I didn’t want to be involved.

I took a fresh pot of coffee out into the conservatory. The sun had come back from wherever it had been taking its winter holiday. The reflection on the snow was a killer. I fished a pair of sunglasses out of the magazine rack and stared at the blank white of the

I wasn’t any nearer a solution by the time I had to leave for my meeting with Tucker and Ruth. Richard was still asleep, flat on his back, arms in the crucifixion position. I considered nails but settled for sticking an adhesive note to his chest suggesting lunch. When all else fails, I’ve found it helps to enlist another brain. Failing that, I’d make do with Richard and his hangover.

If Shelley had heard about the previous night’s debacle, the atmosphere in the office was going to be frostier than it was outside. I stopped off at the florist on the way in and bought the biggest poinsettia they had. It would act both as peace offering and office decoration. There were three weeks to Christmas, and even with my chlorophyll-killer touch the plant had to stand a good chance of making it into the New Year.

I placed the poinsettia on her desk, a tentative smile nailed on. She looked up briefly, surveyed the plant and savaged me with fashion folk wisdom. “Red and green are never seen except upon a fool,” she said. “Gizmo was right. You do look like shit.”

“And a merry Christmas to you too, Scrooge,” I muttered.

“I don’t have to work here,” she sniffed.

“Nobody else would put up with you now the war’s over,” I told her sweetly and swept into my office. Gizmo had already set everything up. All I needed now was a cop with an open mind. If they could get miracles on 34th Street, I didn’t see why we couldn’t have them on Oxford Road.

Ruth was first to arrive. “I hate surprises,” she grumbled, dropping her fake fur in a heap in the corner. Maybe Tucker would take it for a timber wolf and be cowed into submission.

“Nice outfit,” I said, trying to change the subject.

“Mmm,” she said, preening her perfectly proportioned but extremely large body in its tailored kingfisher-blue jacket and

“Sweetheart, you are a Cheshire Wife.”

She bared her teeth in a snarl. If she’d still been wearing the coat I’d have dived out of the window. “Only geographically,” she said. “I thought you needed me on your side this morning?”

Before we could get too deeply into the banter, the intercom buzzed. “I have a Detective Inspector Tucker for you,” the human icicle announced. I made a big production of crossing my fingers and opened the door.

If the man standing by Shelley’s desk had been any taller, we could have dipped his head in emulsion and repainted the ceiling. He was so skinny I bet he had to make a fist when he walked over cattle grids. He had a thick mop of salt and pepper hair, skin cratered from teenage acne and a thousand-watt smile that lit up the kind of gray eyes that can resemble granite or rabbit fur. “I’m Kate Brannigan,” I said. “Thanks for coming. Would you like to come through?”

Close up, my eyes were on a level with the breast pocket of his jacket. I flashed Ruth a “why didn’t you tell me?” look and ushered him in. He exchanged ritual greetings with Ruth and folded himself into the chair I pointed him towards. I swung the monitor screen round till it was facing them both. “I’m sorry I was so mysterious about this,” I said. “But if I’d told you what I had in mind, you’d have laughed in my face. You certainly wouldn’t have taken it seriously enough to come and see for yourself.”

“I’m here now, so let’s cut to the chase. We’re all busy people,” he said, with no trace of hostility. He obviously didn’t go to the same Masonic dinners as Cliff Jackson.

“It’s not a long preamble, I promise you. Last week, you found Pit Bull Kelly dead inside a shop that had previously been squatted by Dennis O’Brien. Pit Bull had told his brothers he was going down to the shop to sort Dennis out and take over the pitch for himself. Next morning, Pit Bull was found dead from a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage, an unusual injury and one that’s hard to inflict. You decided, not unreasonably given what you know about Dennis, that he’d used a commando karate blow to kill Pit Bull. But given what I know about Dennis, I know it couldn’t have happened like that.”

“But putting prejudice aside, there’s a key piece of evidence that tells me Dennis didn’t kill Pit Bull. I’ve known Dennis a long time, and the one thing he won’t have anything to do with is guard dogs. Back when he was burgling, he’d never touch a house that had a guard dog. If Pit Bull Kelly had turned up with his dog in tow, Dennis wouldn’t even have opened the door. But just supposing he had, that dog is a trained killer. He was Pit Bull Kelly’s private army, according to his brothers. If Dennis had lifted his hands above waist level, the dog would have gone for him. He’d never have got as far as laying a hand on the master without the dog ripping his throat out.”

Tucker nodded sympathetically. “I’ve already heard this argument from Ms. Hunter. And if this crime had taken place out in the open, I might have been forced to agree. But what you tell me about O’Brien’s dislike of fierce dogs doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Patrick Kelly. I could make the argument that the fact the dog was separated from its master by the back door of the shop lends weight to the notion that O’Brien was in fact in the shop and agreed to talk to Kelly on the sole condition that the dog stayed in the service corridor.”

“If so, how did he escape? There’s no way out through the front without being filmed by security cameras and breaking through a metal grille,” I pointed out.

Tucker shrugged. “O’Brien’s a professional burglar. If he put his mind to it, I’m sure he could find a way out that neither of us would come up with in a month of Sundays.”

“That’s not an argument that will carry much weight with a jury in the absence of any evidence to the contrary,” Ruth chipped in drily. Tucker’s eyebrows descended and his eyes darkened.

“What I want to show you,” I interrupted before the goodwill melted, “is an alternative hypothesis that answers all the problems this case presents. It should be relatively easy to make the forensic tests that will demonstrate if I’m right or wrong. But for now, all I want the pair of you to do is to watch.”

I tapped a couple of keys and the screen saver dissolved. The

“Two of his brothers confirmed that the dog was always jumping up at Pit Bull. It’s still not much more than a pup. It’s full of energy,” I said, forestalling any protest from Tucker when he saw where this was heading.

“It’s impressive,” was all he said.

We watched Kelly and the dog arrive at the door to Dennis’s squat. He reached out a hand for the doorknob and clumsily turned it. Expecting it to be locked, he stumbled as it opened under his hand. As Kelly lurched forward, the dog yanked on its leash, jerking Kelly off balance and spinning him half around so that the vulnerable angle under his jaw cracked into the doorjamb, accompanied by a thud courtesy of Gizmo.

The screen went black momentarily. Then the point of view shifted. We were inside the shop, behind the door. Again, we saw Kelly topple into the doorjamb, the dog skittering back from his master. The leash dropped from Kelly’s fingers and the dog scampered back into the service corridor as Kelly collapsed sideways to the floor, the weight of his body slamming the door shut as he fell. The final scene dissolved into the starkness of the crime-scene photograph that had been the starting point for the whole process.

I heard Tucker’s breath leak from him, the first sign that he’d been taking seriously what he saw. “I suppose I’d be wasting my time if I asked you where exactly your source material came from?”

I nodded. “I’m afraid so. All I will say is that it wasn’t the obvious route,” I added in an attempt to give Della’s contact a little protection.

“I take it I can expect the immediate release of my client, in the light of this?” Ruth said, leaning back expansively and lighting a cigarette. Noël Coward would have loved her.

Tucker shook his head. “A very convincing performance, Ms. Brannigan, but you know as well as I do that it doesn’t change anything.”

“It should, because it explains everything a damn sight better than any hypothesis you’ve been able to come up with,” I said. “The door was unlocked because Dennis didn’t want to be responsible for the landlord having to cause any damage getting into the premises. Dennis’s alibi holds water. It also explains why the dog didn’t get into a fight with the killer, because there was no killer. I know it’s bad for your clear-up statistics, but this wasn’t a murder, it was the purest of accidents.”

Tucker sucked his lower lip in between his teeth. “You make a good case. But O’Brien’s wife has given him false alibis before, and he did have a strong reason for falling out with the dead man.”

“You will be running full forensic checks on the doorjamb, won’t you, Inspector?” Ruth said ominously.

“I’m not sure that’s justified,” Tucker said cautiously. “Besides, the crime scene has been released.”

“Because if you don’t,” Ruth continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “I will. I’ll be getting my own expert witness down there this afternoon. And when he finds fragments of skin and maybe even a bit of blood with Patrick Kelly’s DNA all over that doorjamb at precisely the height where his jaw would have hit it, Mr. O’Brien will be suing you for false imprisonment. Won’t that be fun?”

“A lovely Christmas present for the Chief Constable,” I added. I was starting to get the hang of threatening the police. I could see why Ruth got such a buzz out of her job.

Tucker sighed then chewed his lower lip some more. “I will get someone to take a look at the door,” he eventually said. “And I will also have a word with the pathologist.” He stood up, his long body unfolding to its unnerving height. “It’s been an interesting experience, Ms. Brannigan. I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

Ruth extracted a promise that he’d call her as soon as he had any information, and I shepherded him out.

“Tell me, what set you off on this train of thought?” Ruth demanded the moment the door closed.

“I wish I could say it was some brilliant intuitive leap. But it wasn’t. I’m on the Internet mailing list of a forensic pathology newsgroup,” I said, feeling slightly sheepish. “Mostly I’m too busy to do much more than skim it, but every now and again, some bizarre detail sticks in my mind. I read about a similar case and I remembered it because the reporting pathologist described it as, ‘Man’s best friend and worst enemy.’”

If Ruth had had four paws and a tail, her ears would have pricked up. Instead, she settled for leaning forward with an intent gaze. “You’ve got a copy of this?”

I shook my head. “I don’t save the digests. But I could put out a request for whoever filed the original case report to get in touch with me. I’ve managed to track down a couple of references to it, and that should be enough to get me heading in the right direction.”

Ruth got to her feet, stubbing out her cigarette in the soil of the dying Christmas cactus on the windowsill. “Do it,” she said decisively, reaching for her coat. “You did a great job there,” she added. “I shall tell Dennis he owes his freedom entirely to you. Send me a bill, will you?”

“I thought Dennis was on Legal Aid?”

“He is.”

“But the Legal Aid Board won’t pay for this,” I protested.

Ruth’s smile matched the timber-wolf coat. “No, but Dennis will. You’re running a business, not a charity. There’s favors for friends, and there’s charges for professional services. This is one he pays for.”

“But …”

“No buts. You’re no use to either of us if you can’t make this business pay. Send me a bill.”

I would have argued. But she’s bigger than me. Besides, it always takes forever to argue with a lawyer. And I had a lunch appointment.