Star Struck (18 page)

When the doorbell rang, I exited the database I’d been in and severed my connection. Those on-line services charge by the minute and I wasn’t prepared to put myself in hock if it took me five minutes to dislodge a Jehovah’s Witness or a local opportunist offering to dig my car out of snow that would probably be gone by morning. To my astonishment, it was Gizmo. “I just sent you an e-mail,” I said.

“I know, I got it.” He marched in without waiting to be asked, stamping slush into my hall carpet. On the way to the spare room that doubles as my home office, he shed a parka that looked like it had accompanied Scott to the Antarctic and had only just made it home again. By the time I’d hung it up, he was ensconced in front of my computer. “Gotta beer?”

I was shocked. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Gizmo with any kind of liquid within three feet of a keyboard. Same with food. If it wasn’t for thirst and hunger and bodily functions, I’ve often

Gizmo went for the elderberry beer. Judging by the look on his face as it hit his taste buds, he’d have preferred a can of supermarket own-brand lager. I sat on the edge of the bed and sipped the Stoly and grapefruit juice I’d sensibly sorted for myself. “You were about to tell me what was in my e-mail that made you rush round,” I lied.

Gizmo shifted in his seat and wrapped his legs around each other. I’d seen it done in cartoons, but I’d always thought until then it was artistic license. “I felt like some fresh air.” Lie number one. I shook my head. “I was a bit worried about discussing hacking in e-mail that wasn’t encrypted.” Lie number two. I shook my head again. “I wanted to check what virus protection you’ve got running on this machine because I’ve not looked at it for a while and there’s all sorts of clever new shit out there.”

I shook my head sadly. “Strike three, Giz. Look, you’re here now. You’ve made the effort. You might as well tell me what you came to tell me because we’re both so busy it could be weeks before there’s another window of opportunity.” I felt like a detective inspector pushing for a confession. I hoped it wasn’t going to be another murder.

Gizmo ran a finger up and down the side of the beer bottle, his eyes following its movement. “There’s this …” He stopped. He looked up at me like dogs do when they’re trying to tell you where it hurts. “I’ve met … well, not actually met …”

Light dawned. “The flowers,” I said.

The blush climbed from the polo neck of his black sweater, rising unevenly like the level of poured champagne in a glass. He nodded.

“‘www gets real.’ The cyberbabe,” I said, trying to sound sensitive and supportive. The effort nearly killed me.

“Don’t call her that,” Gizmo said, a plea on his face. “She’s not some bimbo. And she’s not a saddo Nethead who hasn’t got a life. She’s really interesting. I’ve never met a woman who can talk about computer code, politics, sociology, music, all of those things.”

All of those things I never knew Gizmo knew anything about. Except computer code, of course. “You’ve never met this one,” I said drily.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“A meeting? Getting together for real?” I checked my voice for skepticism and thought I’d probably got away with it.

“What do you think?”

What did I think? What I really thought was that Gizmo was probably typical of the people who spent their nights chattering to strangers in Siberia and São Paolo and Salinas, weird computer geeks telling lies about themselves in a pathetic attempt to appear interesting. A blind date with Gizmo would probably have turned me celibate at sixteen. On the other hand, if I’d been a geek too—and there were one or two female nerds out there, most of them inevitably working for Microsoft—I might have been charmed, especially since my efforts at grooming had rendered Gizmo almost indistinguishable from the human species. “Does she work for Microsoft?” I asked.

He gave me a very peculiar look. “That’s sick. That’s like asking a member of CND if he fancies someone who works for MOD procurement.”

“Has she got a name?”

His smile was curiously tender. “Jan,” he said. “She has her own consultancy business. She does training packages for the computer industry.”

“So how did you … meet?”

“Remember when Gianni Versace got shot? Well, there was a lot of discussion on the Net about it, how the FBI were using the on-line community to warn people about the suspect, and how far the federal agencies should go in trying to exploit the Net to catch criminals. I was checking out one of the newsgroups and I saw Jan had said some interesting things, and we started exchanging private mail.” Oh great, I thought. A mutual interest in serial killers.

“And?”

“And we really hit it off. Loads of stuff in common. Lately, it’s been getting more and more intense between us. I…I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before,” he mumbled.

“And now you want to do a reality check by getting together in the flesh?”

He nodded. “Why not? Pen friends have been doing it for years.”

This wasn’t the time to remind him that pen friends had one or two little safeguards like knowing where each other lived. It also wasn’t the time to remind him that it was somehow easier to lie in cyberspace than in meatspace, since right from the beginning the hackers and computer freaks who had hung out on the very first bulletin boards had always hidden behind nicknames. The first time I’d been confronted with Gizmo’s real name was years into our acquaintance, when he’d signed his initial consultancy contract with Brannigan & Co. I sipped my drink and raised my eyebrows. “And sometimes it’s a big disappointment. Why is it so important that you meet? If things are so excellent between you, maybe it’s better to keep it cyber.”

He squirmed in his seat. “Sometimes it’s too slow, the Net. Even in a private conference room in a newsgroup, you can still only communicate as fast as you can type, so it’s never as spontaneous as conversation.”

“I thought that was the charm.”

“It is, to an extent. You can structure your dialogue much more than you can in a meatspace conversation where you tend to go off at tangents. But we’ve been doing this for a while now. We need to move on to the next stage, and that’s got to be a face-to-face. Hasn’t it?”

I wasn’t cut out for this. If I’d been an agony aunt, my column would have invariably read, “For God’s sake, get a grip.” But Gizmo was more than just another contractor. Less than a friend,

“London. But she comes up to Manchester every two or three weeks on business. I was thinking about suggesting we got together for a beer next time she’s up.”

It would be a beer, too. Somehow I didn’t have this woman pegged as a white-wine-spritzer drinker. “You don’t think it might destroy what you’ve already built up?”

He shrugged, a difficult feat given that he was impersonating a human pretzel. “Better we find that out now, don’t you think?”

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe the cyber relationship is the shape of things to come. Communication with strangers, all of us hiding behind a façade, having virtual sex in front of our terminals. Not as replacement for face-to-face stuff, but as another dimension. Adultery without the guilt, maybe?” I hazarded.

“No,” Gizmo said, unravelling his limbs and straightening up. “I think it’s just another kind of courtship. If you don’t take it out of virtuality into reality, it’s ultimately sterile because you’ve no objective standards to measure it against.”

Profound stuff from a man I’d never suspected of being capable of love for a sentient being without microchips. “Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision,” I said gently.

He took a deep breath. His shoulders dropped from round his ears. “I suppose I have.”

“So go with your instincts.”

I’d said what he wanted to hear. The relief flowed off him like radiation. “Thanks for listening, Kate. I really appreciate it.”

“So show me how much, and dig me some dirt on Harry Thompson and the mystery baby.”

JUPITER TRINE SATURN
Cheerful Jupiter tempers the stern, hard-working nature of Saturn. She is a visionary, but one firmly rooted in the practicalities. She is a good organizer and seldom feels overwhelmed by her responsibilities. She is good at coordinating people to collaborate with her. She has the self-discipline to achieve her goals without getting wound up about it.
From
Written in the Stars
, by Dorothea Dawson

I’d set off early enough to follow the snowplow down the main road from Oldham through Greenfield. Getting down Gloria’s alley was out of the question, but the hacks had moved on to the next big thing, so the only threat to Gloria’s wellbeing was the possibility of wet feet. I should have known better.

She emerged in knee-high snow boots and a scarlet ski suit with royal-blue chevrons and matching earmuffs. “Hiya, chuck,” she greeted me. “I’ve never been skiing in my life, but they do great gear, don’t they?” she enthused. As usual, I felt underdressed. Wellies over jeans topped with my favorite leather jacket had seemed fine in Ardwick, but somehow they just didn’t cut it in the country.

“Got over your hangover?”

“I’ll thank you to remember it was a migraine, young lady.” She wasn’t entirely joking. “By the way,” she said as she settled into the car, “there’s been a change of schedule. Somebody got excited about the snow, so we’re going to do some location shooting instead of studio filming.” Gloria explained that because of the weather, cast members involved in the location shooting had been told to go directly to Heaton Park on the outskirts of the city rather than to the NPTV compound. The park was easier to reach than the

The one good thing about being away from NPTV was that we seemed to have escaped the delights of Cliff Jackson’s company. According to Rita, Jackson and his team had been interviewing cast members in their homes over the weekend, but they were concentrating on office and production staff at the studios now. Also according to Rita, who had clearly elected herself gossip liaison officer, they were no closer to an arrest than they had been on Friday night. She had managed to get Linda Shaw to admit that neither Gloria nor I were serious suspects; Gloria because there were no spatters of blood on the flowing white top she’d been wearing, me because Linda thought it was one of the daftest ideas she’d ever heard. I thought she’d probably been telling the truth about me, but suspected she might have had her fingers crossed when she exonerated Gloria. In her shoes, I would have.

Gloria went off with Ted so Freddie Littlewood could work his magic on their faces. I let them go alone since I could see the short gap between the two vehicles from where I was sitting in a corner of the cast bus with Rita and Clive. I settled down, ready to soak up whatever they were prepared to spill. “So who had it in for Dorothea?” I asked. Some people just don’t respond to the subtle approach. Anyone with an Equity card, for example.

Clive looked at Rita, who shrugged like someone auditioning for
’Allo, ’Allo
. “It can’t have been to do with her professional life, surely,” he said. “Nobody murders their astrologer because they don’t like what she’s predicted.”

“But nobody here really knew anything about her private life,” Rita objected. “Out of all the cast, I was one of her first regulars, and I know almost nothing about her. I’ve even been to her house for a consultation, but all I found out from that was that she must

“Did she live alone?” I asked.

“Search me,” Rita said. “She never said a dicky bird about a boyfriend or a husband. The papers all said she lived alone, and they probably know more than the rest of us because they’ll have been chatting up the locals.”

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.”