Star Struck (28 page)

Freddie stared at the floor. “It wasn’t like she was blackmailing him. She was too straight for that.”

“She let you blackmail her,” I pointed out.

“That was different. That was guilt.”

“Looks like it killed her, Freddie.”

I got up and put a hand on his arm. He pulled away. “Don’t touch me! It’s meaningless to you. You never knew my mother.”

There was nothing more to say. I’d got what I came for and Freddie Littlewood was determined to need nobody’s sympathy for the death of a mother he’d barely come to know. I walked back to the car, glad I wasn’t living inside his skin.

I’d barely closed the door when my moby rang. “Hello?”

“Hey, Kate, I’m out!” Dennis’s voice was elated.

“Free and clear?” I could hardly believe it.

“Police bail pending results from the lab. Ruth says you played a blinder! Where are you? Can I buy you some bubbly?”

If anyone deserved champagne, it was the long-suffering Debbie. But female solidarity only stretches so far, and I needed Dennis more than she did. I was glad I hadn’t done as Ruth suggested and submitted a bill, because tonight I needed payment in kind. “Never mind the bubbly,” I said. “I need a favor. Where are you?”

“I’m in the lobby bar at the Ramada,” he announced. “And I’ve already got the bottle in front of me.”

“Take it easy. I’ll be there in half an hour.” I needed to make a

If you walk out of Strangeways Prison up towards town, the Ramada Hotel is probably the first civilized place to buy a drink. It’s certainly the first where you can buy a decent bottle of champagne. Following the IRA bomb, its façade reminded me of those mechanical bingo cards you get on seaside sideshow stalls where you pull a shutter across the illuminated number after the caller shouts it out. So many of the Ramada windows were boarded up, it looked like they’d won the china tea service. I found Dennis on a bar stool, a bottle of Dom Perignon in front of him. I wondered how many “Under a Pound” customers it had taken to pay for that.

He jumped off the stool when he saw me, pulling me into a hug with one arm and handing me a glass of champagne with the other. “My favorite woman!” he crowed, toasting me with the drink he retrieved from the bar.

“Shame we’re both spoken for,” I said, clinking my crystal against his.

“Thanks for sorting it,” he said, more serious now.

“I knew it wasn’t down to you.”

“Thanks. This favor … we need a bit of privacy?”

I gestured towards a vacant table over in the corner. “That’ll do.” I led the way while Dennis followed, a muscular arm embracing the ice bucket where the remains of the champagne lurked. Once we were both settled, I outlined my plan.

“We know where he lives?” Dennis asked.

“There’s only one in the phone book. Out the far side of Bolton. Lostock.”

He nodded. “Sounds like the right area.”

“Why? What’s it like?”

“It’s where Bolton folk go when they’ve done what passes for making it. More money than imagination.”

“That makes sense. I looked it up on the
A-Z
. There’s only houses on one side of the road. The other side’s got a golf course.”

“You reckon he’ll be home?”

I finished my champagne. “Only one way to find out.” I pointed to his mobile.

“Too early for that,” Dennis said dismissively. Then he outlined his plan.

An hour later, I was lying on my stomach in a snowdrift. I never knew feet could be that cold and still work. The only way I could tell my nose was running was when the drips splashed on the snow in front of me. In spite of wearing every warm and waterproof garment I possessed, I was cold enough to sink the
Titanic
. This was our second stakeout position. The front of the house had proved useless for Dennis’s purposes and now we were lying inside the fence surrounding an old people’s home, staring down at the back garden of our target. “Is it time yet?” I whimpered pathetically.

Dennis was angled along the top of the drift, a pair of lightweight black rubber binoculars pressed to his eyes. “Looks like we got lucky,” he said.

“Do tell me how.”

“He’s not bothered to pull the curtains in the kitchen. I’ve got a direct line of sight to the keypad that controls the burglar alarm. If he sets that when he goes out, I’ll be able to see what number he taps in.”

“Does that mean we’re going to do it now?” I said plaintively.

“You go back round the front. I’ll give you five minutes before I make the call. Soon as he leaves, you shoot up the drive and start working on the front-door lock. I’ll get to you fast as I can.” He turned and waved a dismissive hand at me. “On your bike, then. And remember, we’re dressed for the dark, not the snow. Keep in the shadows.”

That’s the trouble with living in a climate where we only get snow for about ten days a year. Not even serious villains bother to invest in white camouflage. Neither Dennis’s lock-up nor my wardrobe had offered much that wouldn’t blend in with your average dark alley. I slunk off round the edge of the shrubbery and down the drive of the old people’s home. I nipped across the road and on to the golf course, where I waded through knee-high snow until I was opposite the double-fronted detached house we were

I checked my watch. A couple of minutes before, Dennis would have rung the house and explained that there had been a break-in at the administrative core of NPTV and that the police wanted Mr. Turpin to come down right away to assess the damage. A quick call to Gloria had already established that he was divorced and as far as she knew, unattached. We were taking a gamble that Turpin was alone. As I watched, the front door swung open and he appeared, shrugging into a heavy leather coat over suit trousers and a heavy knit sweater. On the still night air, I could hear the high-pitched whine of an alarm system setting itself. He pulled the door to behind himself, not bothering to double lock it, and walked briskly to his car. A security light snapped on, casting the drive into extremes of light and shade.

Ignition, headlights bouncing off the garage door, reversing lights, then the big Lexus crunched down the icy drive and swung into the road. I watched the tail lights as far as the junction, then scrambled over the banking, across the road and up Turpin’s drive, dodging in and out of shadow and blinding light. The porch was brighter than my kitchen. I’d never broken the law in quite so exposed a way before. I fumbled under my jacket and fleece, fingers chill in latex probing the money belt I was wearing until they closed around my lock-picks. At least I’d be able to see what I was doing.

Oddly enough, it didn’t really speed up the process. Picking a lock successfully was all about feel, not sight, and my fingers were still clumsy from the cold. Dennis was hovering impatiently by my shoulder by the time I got the right combination of metal probes, muttering, “Come on, Kate,” in a puff of white breath.

The door opened and he was past me, running down the hall to the alarm panel, tapping in the code to stop the warning siren joining forces with the klaxon that would deafen us and, in an area like this, have the police on the doorstep within ten minutes. I let him get on with it and checked out the downstairs rooms. A living room on one side of the hall, a dining table on the other. Kitchen at the

Luckily, Turpin’s study overlooked the back garden, so I felt safe enough to switch on the desk lamp. I took a quick look around. There was one wall of books, mostly military history and management texts. On the opposite wall, shelves held file boxes, stacks of bound reports and fat binders for various trade magazines. A PC squatted on the desk and I switched it on. While it booted up, I started on the drawers. None of them were locked. Either Turpin thought himself invincible here or we were doing the wrong burglary.

Suddenly, Dennis was standing next to me. “Do you want me to do the drawers while you raid the computer?” he asked.

“I’d rather you kept an eye out the front,” I said. “I know it should take Turpin an hour to get to NPTV and back, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

“You’re probably right,” Dennis said. He went out as silently as he’d come in. At least now I didn’t have to worry about being caught red-handed. I checked out the computer. It looked as if Turpin used Word for all his documents, which suited me perfectly. I took a CD-ROM out of my money belt and swapped it for the encyclopedia currently residing in the drive. It had taken all my powers of persuasion to get Gizmo to lend me this disk and I hoped it had been worth it. It was a clever little piece of software that searched all Word files for particular combinations of words. I typed “Doreen Satterthwaite,” and set the program running.

Meanwhile, I started on the desk. Not surprisingly, Turpin was an orderly man. I flicked through folders of electricity bills, gas bills, council-tax bills until I found the phone bills I was looking for. Domestic and mobile were in the same file. A quick glance around revealed that I wasn’t going to have to steal them. Turpin had one of those all-singing, all-dancing printers that also act as a computer scanner and a photocopier. I extracted the itemized bills for the last six months and fed them through the photocopier.

When the phone rang, I jumped. After three rings, the answering machine kicked in. A woman’s voice floated eerily up from the hall. “Hi, Johnny. It’s Deirdre. I find myself unexpectedly at a loose end after all. If you get this message at a reasonable time, come over for a nightcap. And if I’m not enough to tempt you, I’ve got sausages from Clitheroe for breakfast. Call me.” Bleep.

I glanced at the screen and discovered that there were two files containing “Doreen Satterthwaite.” I was about to access them when Dennis’s yell made my heart jolt in my chest. “Fuck!” he shouted. “We’re burned, Brannigan!”

MARS IN LEO IN THE 4TH HOUSE
She has combative strength and brings her ambitious plans to fruition. She is honorable and takes responsibility for her actions. She has a temper, acts with audacity and is often prone to involvement in incidents that embrace violence. She has a powerful sense of drama that can verge on the melodramatic. Generous, she hates small-mindedness.
From
Written in the Stars
, by Dorothea Dawson

The adrenaline surge was like being plugged into the mains. Dennis was almost screaming. “Switch off. Spare room. Now!” No time to exit properly from Windows. I stabbed my finger at the computer power button. I grabbed the photocopies and stuffed the originals back into their folder, thrusting them into the drawer without checking I was returning them to the right place. I leapt to my feet, switching off the desk lamp.

Three paces across the room, I heard the wail of the alarm siren as Dennis reset it. I dived across the hall and into a spare room bathed with light from the security lamps outside. I skidded round the door to stand against the wall. Seconds later I heard Dennis pounding up the stairs. Then he was beside me, his chest heaving with the effort of silent breathing. “There’s a sensor in the corner,” he said. “Under the bed. Quick!”

I dropped to the floor and rolled, aware of him following me. As I hit the bedside table on the far side of the bed the alarm finished setting itself and silence fell once more. I heard the slam of a car door. Then the front door opened and the warning siren went off again. By now, every nerve in my body was jangling, and I suspected Dennis was no better. I was going to wake up sweating to the nightmare sound of that burglar alarm for months

“Worst comes to worst, we wait till he goes to sleep. Just relax. But not too much. Don’t want you snoring,” Dennis muttered, clutching my hand in a tightly comforting grip. We endured a few more seconds of aural hell, then blessed silence apart from the thudding of two hearts under John Turpin’s spare bed. If he’d had parquet floors instead of carpet, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. Then a click, a bleep and a replay of Deirdre’s attempt at sultry seductiveness, thankfully muffled. I heard the clatter of a handset being picked up and the electronic stutter of a number being keyed in. Amazing how certain sounds travel and others don’t. At first all I could hear of Turpin’s voice was a low rumble. Then, as he mounted the stairs and walked into his bedroom, I could hear every word.

“… halfway down the motorway when it dawned on me. When I’d asked this supposed security man if he’d called Peter Beckman, he’d said Peter was already on his way in. But Peter’s taken a couple of days off this week to go to some stupid Christmas market in Germany with his wife. So I rang him on his mobile, and he’s only having dinner in some floating restaurant on the bloody Rhine.” I heard the sound of shoes being kicked off.

“Well, I know,” he continued after a short pause. “So I rang studio security and they denied any report of a break-in or any call to me … No, I don’t think so. It’ll be some bloody technicians’ Christmas party, some idiot’s idea of a joke, let’s bugger up Turpin’s evening …” Another pause. “Oh, all right, I’ll check, but the alarm was on … Yes, I’m just going to get changed, and I’ll be right over. You know how I feel about Clitheroe sausages for breakfast,” he added suggestively. I was going to have serious trouble with sausages for a while, I could tell.

I strained my ears and picked up the sound of sliding doors open and close, then faint sounds like someone doing exactly what Turpin had said. I heard the bathroom door open, the sound of a light cord being pulled once, twice, and the door closing. A door moved over carpet pile, a light switch snapped twice. The study. He was checking, just like he’d told Deirdre he would. My throat constricted, my muscles went rigid. Gizmo’s CD-ROM was still in Turpin’s drive. Where had I left the CD I’d taken out of it? Dennis’s

I felt the tension slowly leaking out of my body. We’d got away with it. Turpin was going out again. The terrible irony was that if we’d waited quarter of an hour longer before Dennis had made his hoax call, Deirdre would have saved us the trouble and I’d not have lost five years off my life expectancy. Dennis let go of my hand. I patted his arm in thanks.