Star Struck

Chapter 11 MOON SQUARES MIDHEAVEN

She can feel insecure socially because she tends to find herself in conflict with conventional norms. She will construct a world of her own where she can be herself, but will maintain the pretense of being tough and self-sufficient to the outside world. She does not express emotion readily, but nevertheless will often choose a caring or self-sacrificing role in life.

From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

It was the first time anybody had even hinted that Gloria wasn’t the most popular girl in the school. I leaned forward and said as calmly as I could manage, “And there was me thinking everybody loved Gloria.”

“They do. That’s why she provokes thoughts of murder on a regular basis. Or at least, she always used to. It drives you insane to be around somebody who’s always kind, always generous, always doing charity work, always making time for the fans. There are people in the cast of Northerners who have a permanent inferiority complex thanks to Gloria.” Cassie’s voice was light, but there was an edge of something harder in her eyes.

“But like you just said, that’s no reason to kill somebody.”

Cassie raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows. “No? Well, you have more experience in these matters than I do. I tell you what people would kill for, though, and that’s their roles in Northerners. Gloria’s hot right now. The public adore her, and the management knows it. Granted, nobody’s bigger than the show, but when actors are riding the crest of the wave, they do get a certain amount of input into the storylines. If somebody in the cast knew Gloria was suggesting a storyline that would see them written out, that’d be a

I sighed. “No. But one way or another, Dorothea’s death has rebounded quite nastily on Gloria’s life. She was the one who was in the room when Dorothea talked about the presence of death. She never said anything similar to anyone else, as far as I’ve been able to find out.”

Cassie suddenly jumped to her feet. “Stay there a minute,” she said, crossing to a door in the far wall. “I’ll be right back.”

The minute stretched into two, then five. The more I thought about what she’d suggested, the more uneasy I became. I pulled out my phone and rang Gloria’s number. “Hiya, chuck,” she greeted me.

“Everything OK?” I asked.

“Grand as owt. We’re watching a Bette Davis video and having a lovely time.”

All right for some. “Can I speak to Donovan?” I waited while she summoned him. He came on the line almost immediately. “Don? How’s things?”

“Nothing except endless phone calls from the papers. Gloria just tells them she’s too devastated to talk and puts the phone down. It’s a class act.” He sounded both admiring and cautious.

“I’ve got something to do in town, but I’ll be over in a couple of hours to relieve you. Is that OK?”

“Great.” I wasn’t imagining the relief in his voice. Considering they’ve grown up in the inner city, Shelley’s kids have led remarkably sheltered lives. There was no way Donovan had the sophistication to deal with a demanding woman like Gloria indefinitely. If I didn’t rescue him before nightfall, his mother almost certainly would, and then we’d have another corpse on our hands. And I’m still too young to die.

Cassie returned just as I finished the call, carrying a paperback. She held it up so I could see the cover, a misty head-and-shoulders shot of Dorothea looking significantly younger than when I’d met her. If I’d Known Then, by Dorothea Dawson. The Life of a Stargazer, was emblazoned top and bottom across the cover. “It

I opened it. The title page had an inscription. To my darling Cassie. Fire and water make for a steamy combination! Where you are is better for you than where you were. Go in peace. Love, Dorothea Dawson. “She seemed to know you well,” I remarked.

“Not as well as she liked to think,” Cassie said drily. “Like most people, she thought anyone whose sexuality or gender was expressed differently from the mainstream had to be obsessed with sex. Anyway, you’re welcome to borrow it. It’s life with all the edges smoothed down, but it does show you a bit of what the woman herself was like.”

I pocketed the book and thanked her. It was clear from the way she was still standing that as far as Cassie was concerned, there was no more to be said. But before I left, I had to ask her one thing. “You know they’ve got a mole,” I said. “Any ideas who it might be?”

An indefinable bitterness crept into Cassie’s face. She knew all about the damage that moles could do to the foundations of a life. “John Turpin must be biting the carpet,” she said. “There’s nothing the management hates more than storyline leaks.”

“This isn’t just storyline leaks,” I pointed out. “It’s the kind of stuff that ruined your career.”

She sighed. “I know. I try not to think about it because it reminds me of what was probably the worst point in my life. When I was splashed all over the tabloids, I think I was actually more depressed than I ever was when I was still trapped inside a male shape. So when I see other people’s lives being trashed in the same way, I just try to tune out and remind myself that it turned into the best thing that could have happened to me. But I don’t know who’s ratting on the Northerners cast any more than I know who gave me up.”

“You never found out?”

“I never found out. There were so few people who knew, you see, and I trusted them all with my life. I always thought someone from the Amsterdam clinic where I had my surgery must have been

I got to my feet. “Was Ross Grant doing the outside catering when you were on the show?”

“Ross? Big cuddly Scotsman? Wife with eyes like a hawk? Yeah, he took over the contract about a year before I was demolished. Wait a minute … You’re not suggesting Ross is the mole?”

“I’m not, but Turpin seems determined to give it a whirl.”

Cassie laughed scornfully. “Ross hasn’t got the malice to do it or the brains to cover his tracks.”

“What about his wife?”

“Why should she? Why risk the goose that lays the golden eggs?”

“Greed?”

Cassie looked skeptical. “I can’t see her going in for that kind of short-term thinking.”

“Not even if she thought they were going to lose the contract? That way she kills two birds with one stone. She gets her revenge on Turpin for dumping them and she earns a nice little nest egg to cushion the blow while they look for other work.”

“They already have other work,” Cassie objected. “Or they used to, at any rate. Northerners is their most regular source of income, but they do cater for other people’s location shoots. So it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they did lose the contract. And if she was discovered, it would mean the end of their business altogether. I just don’t see it.”

As I walked back to my car, I pondered what Cassie had said. For it to be worth the mole’s while, he or she had to be indifferent to the outcome of being found out. That meant it was either someone sufficiently skilled to overcome the stigma of being known in the TV business as the Northerners mole, or someone who was prepared to risk their career to vent their venom against the program or its makers.

However I cut it, it didn’t sound like a cast member to me.

I was back in my office by three. I wasn’t alone; Gizmo was in the computer room in weekend uniform of jeans, Converse baseball

As soon as I had five minutes that I didn’t need for sleeping, I was going to have to do some digging.

Ruth walked through the door with ten seconds to spare. She’s the only person I know who’s even more punctual than me. One of the mysteries of the universe for both of us is how we ended up hitched to men who think if you get to the cinema in time to see the British Board of Film Censors certificate, you’re far too early. If I could change one thing about Richard, that’s what it would be.

She pulled me into her arms and gave me the kind of hug that always makes me feel five years old. It was exaggerated today because she was swathed in a vast silver-gray fake fur that felt like the best fluffy toy a child ever held. “You look like the Snow Queen,” I said, disentangling myself and giving her an admiring look from the perfectly pleated blonde hair to the soft leather boots that clung to her well-shaped calves.

“I was aiming for the scary-monster effect,” she said, shrugging out of her fur and dropping into a chair.

“Did it work?”

She pulled a face. “Dennis is still in custody, so it rather looks as if I failed.”

“What’s the score?” I asked, switching on the cappuccino machine that was one of the few permanent reminders of my former business partner Bill Mortensen.

Ruth shook her head wearily. “It’s really not looking good for him. Especially with a record that includes burglary, robbery and GBH.”

“GBH? I didn’t know about that.”

“He was twenty-two and he’d just come out of the Paras after a tour in Northern Ireland where his best friend was shot by a sniper in front of his eyes. Post-traumatic shock hadn’t been invented

I passed her a cup of frothy coffee and perched with my own on the corner of the desk. “What exactly happened?”

Ruth filled me in succinctly. Patrick “Pit Bull” Kelly was one of a gang of eight brothers from the unappetizing redbrick terraces of Cheetham Hill in North Manchester. They were all small-time criminals, good only at getting caught. Pit Bull had been running a shop-squat scam like Dennis, but since he lacked Dennis’s nerve or imagination, he’d steered clear of the city center and worked his own familiar turf with its restricted numbers of punters, none of whom had much cash to spare. When he’d heard about Dennis’s operation, he’d decided he wanted a slice so last night he’d told two of his brothers he was going into town to “take that scumbag O’Brien’s shop off him.”

The next anyone had seen of Pit Bull Kelly had been early that morning. The manager of the cut-price butcher’s shop next door to Dennis’s squat got more than he’d bargained for when he went to open up. He’d opened the door to the service corridor that ran behind the six-unit section. Facing him was a brindle-and-white pit bull terrier, the bulges of muscle making the hair on its shoulders and ribs stand out like a bristly halo. Its teeth were bared in a rictus that would have made Jaws look friendly, but instead of growling, it was whimpering. The poor bloke froze in his tracks, but the dog showed no signs of attacking him. Instead, it had backed up to Dennis’s back door and started howling. According to Ruth, the witness claimed it sounded like the hound from hell.

He didn’t know what to do, so he shut the door and called the mall security. Grateful for something more interesting than teenage troublemakers, two uniformed guards had arrived within minutes. They had the local beat bobby in tow, less than thrilled at having his illicit tea break with the security men broken up. When

The bobby decided they should take a look inside. The door obviously wasn’t locked, but there was something heavy behind it. A bit of brute force got the door far enough open for the copper to stick his head inside and check out the obstruction. Which happened to be the corpse of Pit Bull Kelly.

How he’d died was far from obvious. There was no blood, no visible wound. But the bobby was sensible enough to realize that somebody who looked as dodgy as Pit Bull Kelly probably hadn’t dropped down dead with a heart attack. He’d radioed for back-up. By mid-morning, the fingerprint team had matched Dennis’s prints with the ones all over the curiously empty shop. And the pathologist had given them the tentative information that he thought Pit Bull Kelly had died from a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage.

“What’s a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage?” I asked, my first interruption. Ordinarily I’m not that restrained, but, unusually in lawyers, Ruth actually tells a story with all the pertinent details in place.

Ruth tilted her head sharply to one side and pressed her fingers under the angle of her jaw. “Just behind the jawbone here, there’s a very vulnerable blood vessel. Rupture that and you’re brain-dead in seconds. Normally it’s protected by the jaw. And by the way we instinctively duck our heads when any threat approaches. It’s almost impossible to hit accidentally, but it could be caused by, for example, a stiff-fingered karate blow to the neck.”

“And Dennis was a Para,” I said hollowly.

“Dennis was indeed a Para. He says he never learned any karate in the service, but we both know what a bugger it is to try proving a negative.”

“So the police are saying that Dennis was there, Dennis had good reason to get into a ruck with Pit Bull Kelly, so Dennis must have murdered him then emptied his stock out of the shop to cover his tracks?”

Ruth nodded. “That’s about the size of it. That, or Dennis caught Pit Bull Kelly in the act of stealing all his stock.”

“What’s Dennis’s version?”

“Perfectly plausible, as you’d expect. According to him, the landlord turned up yesterday with a couple of heavies who were even bigger than Keith. He gave Dennis twenty-four hours to get out or suffer the consequences. Dennis thought this was a not unreasonable proposition, so he spent yesterday evening with Keith and a couple of the lads, loading the stock into a van. Keith and the others went off with the van around half past nine, and Dennis went home, where he spent the rest of the evening watching a video with Debbie. They then went to bed, together, and woke up, again together, at around eight this morning.”

“That’s his alibi? The blonde with no brain?”

“The blonde with no brain who has previously been caught out giving him false alibis,” Ruth said drily.

“Wasn’t Christie home?” I asked. Dennis’s daughter obviously couldn’t testify that he’d been in bed all night, but at least she’d have been a more credible witness to his TV viewing.

“She stayed overnight with a friend.” Ruth carefully placed her empty cup on the side table. “I won’t deny it’s looking bad, Kate.”

I nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

Ruth stood up and enveloped herself in the fake fur. “I know Dennis will appreciate it. I think they’ll probably charge him tomorrow and bring him before the Mags on Monday. Once he’s remanded, you’ll be able to visit him and see if there’s anything he can tell you that he’d prefer me not to know. If you need anything, you know where to find me.”

We hugged, the silken fur stroking my face. “Just leave the coat,” I said. “I’ve got to go to Saddleworth.”

Ruth groaned. “It’s not the coat you’ll need, it’s a team of huskies and a sled. You’re surely not going there for pleasure, are you?”

I laughed. “They do pleasure in Saddleworth? A place where their idea of a good time is brass bands, Morris dancing and the annual Ducking of the Greenfield Trollop? I don’t think so.”

“So, strictly business,” Ruth said, adjusting her pelt so not a breath of chill air could penetrate. “No fun Saturday night with Richard, then.”

“He’s probably babysitting,” I said, more of an edge in my voice than I’d intended.

Ruth’s eyebrows rose. “The boy getting broody, is he?”

“If he is, he’s wasting his energy,” I told her firmly.

“I’d keep an eye on that, if I were you,” Ruth said ominously as she swept out.

Where would we be if it wasn’t for the love and support of our friends?