Star Struck (2 page)

I dredged my memory for recent tabloid headlines. “Hasn’t there been some storyline about abortion? Sorry, I don’t get the chance to watch much TV.”

“You’re all right, chuck. Me neither. You know Brenda’s granddaughter, Debbie?”

“The one who’s lived with Brenda since she was about ten? After her mum got shot in the post office raid?”

“You used to be a fan, then?”

“I still watch when I can. Which was a lot more back when Debbie was ten than it is now.”

“Well, what’s happened is that Brenda’s found out that Debbie’s had an abortion. Now, Brenda had a real down on Debbie’s boyfriend because he was black, so the audience would have expected her to support Debbie rather than have a mixed-race grandson. But Brenda’s only gone mental about the right to life and thrown Debbie out on her ear, hasn’t she? So me and Sarah Anne Kelly who plays Debbie were expecting a right slagging off.”

“And that’s what’s happened?”

Gloria shook her head, leaving a ribbon of smoke drifting level with her mouth. “Sort of,” she said, confusing me. “What happens is the studio goes through our post, weeding out the really nasty letters so we don’t get upset. Only, of course, you ask, don’t you? I mean, you want to know if there’s any real nutters out there looking for you.”

“And the studio told you there was?”

“No, chuck. It weren’t the studio. The letters I’m worried about are the ones coming to the house.”

Now I was really confused. “You mean, your real house? Where you actually live?”

“Exactly. Now, I mean, it’s not a state secret, where I live. But unless you’re actually a neighbor or one of the reptiles of the press, you’d have to go to a bit of trouble to find out. The phone’s ex-directory, of course. And all the official stuff like electricity bills and the voters’ roll don’t come under Gloria Kendal. They come under my real name.”

“Which is?”

“Doreen Satterthwaite.” She narrowed her eyes. I didn’t think it was because the smoke was getting into them. I struggled to keep my face straight. Then Gloria grinned. “Bloody awful, isn’t it? Do you wonder I chose Gloria Kendal?”

“In your shoes, I’d have done exactly the same thing,” I told her. I wasn’t lying. “So these threatening letters are coming directly to the house?”

“Not just to my house. My daughter’s had one too. And they’re different to the usual.” She opened her handbag again. I wondered at a life where it mattered to have suit, shoes and handbag in identical shades. I couldn’t help my mind slithering into speculation about her underwear. Did her coordination extend that far?

Gloria produced a sheet of paper. She started to pass it to me, then paused. I could have taken it from her, but it was an awkward reach, so I waited. “Usually, letters like this, they’re semi-literate. They’re ignorant. I mean, I might have left school when I were fifteen, but I know the difference between a dot and a comma. Most of the nutters that write me letters wouldn’t know a paragraph

Now she passed the letter across. It was plain A4 bond, the text printed unidentifiably on a laser printer.
“Doreen Satterthwaite, it’s time you paid for what you’ve done. You deserve to endure the same suffering you’ve been responsible for. I know where you live. I know where your daughter Sandra and her husband Keith live. I know your granddaughter Joanna goes to Gorse Mill School. I know they worship at St Andrew’s Church and have a caravan on Anglesey. I know you drive a scarlet Saab convertible. I know you, you bitch. And soon you’re going to be dead. But there’ll be no quick getaway for you. First, you’re going to suffer.”
She was right. The letter sounded disturbingly in control.

“Any idea what the letter writer is referring to?” I asked, not really expecting an honest answer.

Gloria shrugged. “Who the heck knows? I’m no plaster saint, but I can’t think of anybody I’ve done a really bad turn to. Apart from my ex, and I doubt he could manage a letter to me that didn’t include the words, ‘you effing bitch.’ He certainly can’t manage a conversation without it. And besides, he wouldn’t threaten our Sandra or Joanna. No way.” I took her response for genuine perplexity, then reminded myself how she made her living.

“Have there been many of them?”

“This is the third. Plus the one that went to Sandra. That were about the sins of the mother. To be honest, the first couple I just binned. I thought they were somebody at the wind-up.” Suddenly, Gloria looked away. She fumbled another cigarette from the packet and this time, the hand that lit it shook.

“Something happened to change your mind?”

“My car tires were slashed. All four of them. Inside the NPTV compound. And there was a note stuck under the windscreen wipers. ‘Next time your wardrobe? Or you?’ And before you ask, I

“That’s serious business,” I said. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be talking to the police?” I hated to lose a potential client, but it would have verged on criminal negligence not to point out that this might be one for Officer Dibble.

Gloria fiddled with her cigarette. “I told the management about it. And John Turpin, he’s the Administration and Production Coordinator, he persuaded me not to go to the cops.”

“Why not? I’d have thought the management would have been desperate to make sure nothing happened to their stars.”

Gloria’s lip curled in a cynical sneer. “It were nowt to do with my safety and everything to do with bad publicity. Plus, who’d want to come and work at NPTV if they found out the security was so crap that somebody could walk into the company compound and get away with that? Anyway, Turpin promised me an internal inquiry, so I decided to go along with him.”

“But now you’re here.” It’s observational skills like this that got me where I am today.

She flashed a quick up-and-under glance at me, an appraisal that contained more than a hint of fear held under tight control. “You’re going to think I’m daft.”

I shook my head. “I don’t see you as the daft type, Gloria.” Well, it was only a white lie. Daft enough to spend the equivalent of a week’s payroll for Brannigan & Co on a matching outfit, but probably not daft when it came to a realistic assessment of personal danger. Mind you, neither was Ronald Reagan and look what happened to him.

“You know Dorothea Dawson?” Gloria asked, eyeing me out of the corner of her eye.

“‘The Seer to the Stars’?” I asked incredulously. “The one who does the horoscopes in
TV Viewer
? The one who’s always on the telly? ‘A horse born under the sign of Aries will win the Derby’?” I intoned in a cheap impersonation of Dorothea Dawson’s sepulchral groan.

“Don’t mock,” she cautioned me, wagging a finger. “She’s a brilliant clairvoyant, you know. Dorothea comes into the studios

I bet she had. Gifts from all the stars of
Northerners
. “And Dorothea said something about these letters?”

“I took this letter in with me to my last consultation with her. I asked her what she could sense from it. She does that as well as the straight clairvoyance. She’s done it for me before now, and she’s never been wrong.” In spite of her acting skills, anxiety was surfacing in Gloria’s voice.

“And what did she say?”

Gloria drew so hard on her cigarette that I could hear the burning tobacco crackle. As she exhaled she said, “She held the envelope and shivered. She said the letter meant death. Dorothea said death was in the room with us.”

SUN TRINE MOON
Creative thinking resolves difficult circumstances; she will tackle difficulties with bold resolution. The subject feels at home wherever she is, but can be blind to the real extent of problems. She will not always notice if her marriage is falling apart; she doesn’t always nip problems in the bud.
From
Written in the Stars
, by Dorothea Dawson

Anybody gullible enough to fall for the doom and gloom dished out by professional con merchants like astrologers certainly wasn’t going to have a problem with my expense sheets. Money for old rope, I reckoned. By Gloria’s own admission, hate mail was as much part of the routine in her line of work as travelling everywhere with stacks of postcard-sized photographs to autograph for the punters. OK, the tire slashing was definitely more serious, but that might be unconnected to the letters, an isolated act of vindictiveness. It was only because the Seer to the Stars had thrown a wobbler that this poison pen outbreak had been blown up to life-threatening proportions. “Does she often sense impending death when she does predictions for people?” I asked, trying not to snigger.

Gloria shook her head vigorously. “I’ve never heard of anybody else getting a prediction like that.”

“And have you told other people in the cast about it?”

“Nobody,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing you go on about.”

Not unless you liked being laughed at, I reckoned. On the other hand, it might mean that the death prediction was one of Dorothea Dawson’s regular routines for putting the frighteners on her clients and making them more dependent on her. Especially the older ones. Let’s face it, there can’t be that many public figures Gloria’s age who go through more than a couple of months without knowing

The news seemed to cheer her up. “Right then, we’d better be off,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and gathering her mac around her shoulders.

“We’d better be off?” I echoed.

She glanced at her watch, a chunky gold item with chips of diamond that glittered like a broken windscreen in a streetlight. “Depends where you live, I suppose. Only, if I’m opening a theme pub in Blackburn at eight and we’ve both got to get changed and grab a bite to eat, we’ll be cutting it a bit fine if we don’t get a move on.”

“A theme pub in Blackburn,” I said faintly.

“That’s right, chuck. I’m under contract to the brewery. It’s straightforward enough. I turn up, tell a few jokes, sing a couple of songs to backing tapes, sign a couple of hundred autographs and off.” As she spoke, she was setting her hat at a rakish angle and replacing her sunglasses. As she made for the door, I dived behind the desk and swept my palmtop computer and my moby into my shoulder bag. I only caught up with her because she’d stopped to sign a glossy color photograph of herself disguised as Brenda Barrowclough for Shelley.

Something terrible had happened to the toughest office manager in Manchester. Imagine Cruella De Vil transformed into one of those cuddly Dalmatian puppies, only more so. It was like watching Ben Nevis grovel. “And could you sign one, ‘for Ted’?” she begged. I wished I had closed-circuit TV cameras covering the office. A video of this would keep Shelley off my back for months.

“No problem, there you go,” Gloria said, signing the card with a flourish. “You right, Kate?”

I grabbed my coat and shrugged into it as I followed Gloria into

“This sign says, ‘Employees of DVS Systems only. Unauthorized users will be clamped,’” she pointed out.

“It’s all right,” I said in a tone that I hoped would end the conversation. I didn’t want to explain to Gloria that I’d got so fed up with the desperate state of car parking in my part of town that I’d checked out which office car parks were seldom full. I’d used the macro lens on the camera to take a photograph of a DVS Systems parking pass through somebody else’s windscreen and made myself a passable forgery. I’d been parking on their lot for six months with no trouble, but it wasn’t something I was exactly proud of. Besides, it never does to let the clients know about the little sins. It only makes them nervous.

Gloria stopped expectantly next to a very large black saloon with tinted windows. I shook my head and she pulled a rueful smile. I pointed the remote at my dark blue Rover and it cheeped its usual greeting at me. “Sorry it’s not a limo,” I said to Gloria as we piled in. “I need to be invisible most of the time.” I didn’t feel the need to mention that the engine under the bonnet was very different from the unit the manufacturer had installed. I had enough horsepower under my bonnet to stage my own rodeo. If anybody was stalking Gloria, I could blow them off inside the first five miles.

I drove home, which took less than five minutes even in early rush-hour traffic. I love living so close to the city center, but the area’s become more dodgy in the last year. I’d have moved if I hadn’t had to commit every spare penny to the business. I’d been the junior partner in Mortensen & Brannigan, and when Bill Mortensen had decided to sell up and move to Australia, I’d thought my career prospects were in the toilet. I couldn’t afford to buy him out but I was damned if some stranger was going to end up with the lion’s share of a business I’d worked so hard to build. It had taken a lot of creative thinking and a shedload of debt to get Brannigan & Co off the ground. Now I had a sleeping partner in the

Besides, the domestic arrangements were perfect. My lover Richard, a freelance rock journalist, owned the bungalow next door to mine, linked by a long conservatory that ran along the back of both properties. We had all the advantages of living together and none of the disadvantages. I didn’t have to put up with his mess or his music-business cronies; he didn’t have to deal with my girls’ nights in or my addiction to very long baths.

Richard’s car, a hot pink Volkswagen Beetle convertible, was in its slot, which, at this time of day, probably meant he was home. There might be other showbiz journos with him, so I played safe and asked Gloria to wait in the car. I was back inside ten minutes, wearing a bottle green crushed velvet cocktail dress under a dark navy dupion silk matador jacket. OTT for Blackburn, I know, but there hadn’t been a lot of choice. If I didn’t get to the dry cleaner soon, I’d be going to work in my dressing gown.

Gloria lived in Saddleworth, the expensively rural cluster of villages that hugs the edges of the Yorkshire moors on the eastern fringe of Greater Manchester. The hills are still green and rolling there, but on the skyline the dark humps of the moors lower unpleasantly, even on the sunniest of days. This is the wilderness that ate up the bodies of the child victims of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. I can never drive through this brooding landscape without remembering the Moors Murders. Living on the doorstep would give me nightmares. It didn’t seem to bother Gloria. But why would it? It didn’t impinge either on her or on Brenda Barrowclough, and the half-hour drive out to Saddleworth was long enough for me to realize these were the only criteria that mattered to her. I’d heard it said that actors are like children in their unconscious self-absorption. Now I was seeing the proof.