Star Struck (17 page)

“That’s right,” Little Joe confirmed. “I mean, what kind of bastard has to top some drunken tosser just to make a point? O’Brien could just have broken a few bones and chucked Patrick out on his ear. He didn’t have to go and kill him. Anybody could see Patrick was an eejit.”

“What about the dog, though?” I persisted.

Paul gave a contemptuous bark of laughter. “Yeah, well, even a hard nut like O’Brien might have thought twice about taking on that mad bastard dog. I can’t figure out how the dog didn’t rip his throat out.”

Suddenly, Little Joe’s eyes were full of tears. “He didn’t have to kill him, though, did he? The bastard didn’t have to kill my baby brother.” His hand snaked out and grabbed my lapel. “You tell them that in your paper. My baby brother was a big soft lump. Even with a drink and a draw in him, he wouldn’t have done to O’Brien what that shit O’Brien done to him. You tell them, d’you hear? You tell them.”

I promised I’d tell them. I promised several times. I listened to the Kelly boys telling me the same things a few more times, then made my excuses and left. I carried my own haze of stale smoke and spilled drink into the car and made for the city center.

I virtually had to drag Gloria off Donovan in the end. She’d been taking advantage of having a driver to attack the champagne with the brio of an operatic tenor. As she slid from happy to drunk to absolutely arseholed, so her amorousness had grown, according to Donovan, who I found with a slew of red lipstick below one ear and one shirt-tail hanging down the front of his trousers. He was keeping Gloria upright by pure strength, lurking in a corner near the revolving doors.

“Why didn’t you sit her down in a quiet corner of the bar?” I hissed as we steered her into the street. It was like manipulating one of those wooden articulated models artists use, only life-sized and heavy as waterlogged mahogany.

“Every time I sat down she climbed on my lap,” he growled as we poured Gloria into the passenger seat of her car.

“Fair enough.” I slammed the door and handed him my car keys. “Thanks, Don. You did a good job in very trying circumstances.”

He scratched his head. “I expect it’ll be reflected in my pay packet.”

Like mother, like son. “It would be nice to find my car outside my house sometime tomorrow, keys through the letterbox. I’ll talk to you soon.” I patted his arm. It was like making friends with one of the Trafalgar Square lions.

Gloria was snoring gently when I got behind the wheel. The engine turning over woke her up. She rolled towards me, hand blindly groping for my knee. “I don’t think so,” I said firmly, returning it to her own lap.

Her eyes snapped open and she looked at me in astonishment. “Hiya, chuck,” she said blearily. “Where did Donovan go?”

“Home to bed.”

She gurgled. I hoped it was a chuckle and not the overture to a technicolor yawn. “Lucky girl,” she slurred. “Poor old Glo. Whatchou been up to, then? Bit of nookie with the boyfriend?”

We turned into Albert Square where the giant inflatable red-and-white figure of Santa Claus clutched the steeple that rises out of the middle of the town hall roof. It looked vaguely obscene in the garish glare of the Christmas lights. I jerked my thumb upwards. “He’s seen more action than I have tonight. I’ve been trying to find out about Dorothea’s past,” I said, more to fill the space than in any hope of a sensible response.

“Bloody tragic, that’s what it was. Tragic,” Gloria mumbled.

“Murder always is.”

“No, you daft get, not the murder, her life. It was tragic.” Gloria gave me one of those punches to the shoulder that drunks think are affectionate. The car swerved across two lanes and narrowly missed a bus. Gloria giggled as I wrestled with the wheel.

“What was tragic?” I asked, my jaw clenched so tight the muscles hurt.

“She never got over losing him.” She groped in her evening purse for a cigarette and lit up.

“Losing who? Her husband?”

“Flamin’ Nora, Kate. When did a woman ever regret losing a no-good waste of space like her old man?” she reproached me. “Her son, of course. She never got over losing her son.”

“I didn’t know she’d had a son.”

“Not a lot of people know that,” Gloria intoned in a very bad impersonation of Michael Caine. “She had a son and then she had post-natal depression.”

“And the baby died?”

“’Course he didn’t die,” she said scornfully. “He got taken off her. When she got put away.”

This was beginning to feel like one of those terrible black-and-white Northern kitchen sink dramas scripted by men with names like Arnold and Stanley. “When you say ‘put away,’ do

“Tha’s right,” she said. “Put away in the loony bin. He did that to her. Her old man had her put away because having the baby had sent her a bit off her rocker. Christ, every woman goes a bit off her rocker when she’s had a littl’un. If they put us all away just because we went a bit daft, there’d be a hell of a lot of men changing nappies. Right bastard he must have been.”

“So Dorothea’s baby was adopted then, is that what you’re saying?”

“Aye. Taken off her and given to somebody else. And they gave her electric shocks and cold showers and more drugs than Boots the Chemist and wondered why it took her so bloody long to get better. Bastards.” She spat the last word vehemently, as if it was personal, her eyes on the swirl of pinprick snowflakes tumbling thinly in the cones of sulphur-yellow streetlights.

“Did Dorothea tell you about this?”

“Who else? It were when I asked her to do a horoscope for my granddaughter. We’d gone out for a meal and we ended up back at my place, pissed as farts. And she started on about how she could be a grandmother half a dozen times over and she’d never be any the wiser. When she sobered up, she made me swear not to tell another living soul. And I haven’t, not until now. Tragic, that’s what it was. Tragic.”

I came at the subject half a dozen different ways before we finally arrived back at the deserted alley leading to her fortification. Each time I got the same version. No details added, no details different. Dorothea might have been lying to Gloria, but Gloria was telling me the truth.

I helped her out of the car and across cobbles covered in feathery white powder to her front door. I wasn’t in the mood to go any further. I wanted home and bed and the sleep that would make sense of the jumbled jigsaw pieces of information that were drifting through my head like the snow across the windscreen. And not a snowplow in sight.

God, I hate the country.

SUN CONJUNCTION WITH PLUTO
Compromise is not in her vocabulary. She is not afraid of initiating confrontations and is a great strategist. She enjoys conflict with authority, she will not stand for personal or professional interference, but she is capable of transforming her own life and the world around her. People can be nervous of her, but this is a splendid aspect for a detective.
From
Written in the Stars
, by Dorothea Dawson

I woke up with that muffled feeling. It didn’t go away when I stuck my head out from under the duvet. Richard only grunted when I slipped out of bed and pulled on my dressing gown before I died of hypothermia. The central heating had obviously been and gone while I was still sleeping, which made it sometime after nine. I lifted the curtain and looked out at a world gone white. “Bugger,” I said.

Richard mumbled something. “Whazza?” it sounded like.

“It’s been snowing. Properly.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow and reached for his glasses. “Lessee,” he slurred. I opened one side of the curtain. “Fabulous,” he said. “We can make a snowman.”

“And what about Gloria? I’m supposed to be minding her.”

“Not even a mad axman would be daft enough to go on a killing spree in Saddleworth in this weather,” he pointed out, not unreasonably. “It’ll be chaos on the roads out there. And if Gloria’s got the hangover she deserves, she won’t be thinking about going anywhere. Come back to bed, Brannigan. I need a cuddle.”

I didn’t need asking twice. “I obey, o master,” I said ironically, slipping out of my dressing gown and into his arms.

The second time we woke, the phone was to blame. I noted

“It’s me, chuck.” It was the voice of a ghost. It sounded like Gloria had died and somehow missed the pearly gates.

“’Morning, Gloria,” I said cheerfully, upping the volume in revenge for her attempt at groping my knee. “How are you today?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t. For some reason, I seem to have a bit of a migraine this morning. I thought I’d just spend the day in bed with the phone turned off, so you don’t have to worry about coming over.”

“Are you sure? I could always send Donovan,” I said sadistically.

I sensed the shudder. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, usual time.” Click. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

Richard emerged, blinking at the snow-light. “Gloria?” he asked.

“I’m reprieved for the day. She sounds like the walking dead.”

“Told you,” he said triumphantly. “Shall we make a snowman, then?”

By the time we’d made the snowman, then had a bath to restore our circulation, then done some more vigorous horizontal exercises to raise our core body temperatures, it was late afternoon and neither of us could put off work any longer. He had some copy to write for an Australian magazine fascinated by Britpop. Personally, I’d rather have cleaned the U-bend, but I’m the woman who thinks the best place for Oasis is in the bottom of a flower arrangement. I settled down at my computer and trawled the Net for responses to last night’s queries.

I downloaded everything, then started reading my way through. I immediately junked the tranche from people who thought it must be cool to be a private eye, would I give them a work-experience placement? I also quickly dumped the ones that were no more than a rehash of what had been in the papers and on the radio. That left me with half a dozen that revealed Dorothea had had a breakdown back in the 1950s. There were two that seemed to have some real credibility. The first came from someone who lived in the picturesque Lancashire town where Dorothea had grown up.

Dear Kate Brannigan, it read, I am a sixteen-year-old girl and I live in Halton-on-Lune where Dorothea Dawson came from. My grandmother was at school with Dorothea, so when I saw your query in the astrology newsgroup, I asked her what she remembered about her.
She said Dorothea was always a bit of a loner at school, she was an only child, but there was nothing weird or spooky about her when she was growing up, she was just like everybody else. My gran says Dorothea got married to this bloke Harry Thompson who worked in the bank. She says he was a real cold fish which I think means he didn’t know how to have a good time, except I don’t know what they did then to have a good time because they didn’t have clubs or decent music or anything like that.
Anyway, Gran says Dorothea had this baby and then she went mad and had to go into the loony bin (Gran calls it that, but she really means a mental hospital). Anyway, her husband went away and was never seen again, and when Dorothea came out of the hospital after a couple of years, she only came back to pack her bags and get the next bus out.
I don’t know what happened to the baby, Gran says it probably got put in a home, which is not a good place to be brought up even if your mum is a bit barking.
I hope this helps.
Yours sincerely
Megan Hall

The other was better written. I didn’t much care; literary style wasn’t what I was after.

Dear Ms. Brannigan
It may come as a surprise that a man of my age knows how to , but I am a contemporary of Dorothea Dawson. I was a year younger than her,
That all changed when Dorothea met Harry Thompson. He was a bank clerk, good-looking in a rather grim sort of way, and he was drawn to girls inappropriately young. When they met, Dorothea was, I think, a rather young 17, and he must have been 25 or 26. He was what I think we would now call a control freak and Dorothea was always on pins lest she upset him.
Quite why she agreed to marry him none of us ever knew, though it may well have been the only route she could see by which she could escape the equally oppressive regime of her stepmother. They were married and within eighteen months Dorothea was confined to the cheerless Victorian world of the local mental hospital following an appalling experience with what we now term post-natal depression.
Harry resolutely refused to have anything to do with the child, claiming that the baby was tainted with the same madness that had claimed the mother. An ignorant and cruel man, he sought and gained a transfer to a branch of the bank in the Home Counties, handing the child over to an adoption agency. What became of the baby, I have no knowledge. This far on, I am ashamed to say that neither my sister nor I can remember if the child were a boy or girl; in my sister’s defense, I would say that by that time, thanks to Harry, there was little contact between her and Dorothea.
When she finally was allowed to leave the mental hospital, Dorothea was very bitter and wanted to cast her past entirely from her. My sister was saddened by this, but not surprised. We were delighted to see her rise to celebrity, though both horrified by the news of her death.
I do hope this is of some assistance. Should you wish to talk to me, you will find me in the Wakefield telephone book under my parish of St. Barnabas-nextthe-Wall.
With best wishes
Rev. Tom Harvey

I wasn’t surprised that Gloria had called the whole sorry business tragic. I couldn’t help wondering where Harry Thompson was now and what he was doing. Not to mention the mysterious baby. I kept having visions of a swaddling-wrapped infant abandoned on the doorstep of the local orphanage. I think I saw too many BBC classic serials when I was a child.

It was time for some serious digging, the kind that is well beyond my limited capabilities with electronic systems. I copied the two key e-mails to Gizmo, with a covering note explaining that I needed him to use his less advertised skills to unearth all he could about Harry Thompson and the riddle of the adopted child. Then I started accessing what legitimate data sources were available on a Sunday evening to answer the queries that had come in from the two foreign agencies.