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.
Chapter 13
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.”