“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.”
“The trouble is,” Gloria said, getting to her feet and pulling her coat on, “that half of us are actors. Who the hell knows what goes on in our heads?”
Neither Freddie nor I could think of anything to say to that one. I followed her out the door and caught up with her and Ted at the edge of the car park. The director was explaining how he wanted them to circle round so that they could walk down the virgin snow of the path towards the camera. It looked like they were set for a while, but I didn’t want to go back to the bus and leave Gloria exposed. It wasn’t as if I could prevent an attack on her; but I hoped my presence would be enough to give her menacer pause.
I walked over to the catering bus, where Ross was working with a teenage lad I’d not seen before. “I suppose a bacon butty would be out of the question?” I asked. “I left the house too early for breakfast.”
Ross served me himself, piling crispy rashers into a soft floury roll. “There you go. Coffee?” I nodded and he poured me a carton. “Mind the shop a wee minute, son,” he said, coming out of the side door and beckoning me to join him. “You got anything for me?” he asked.
I shook my head, my mouth full of food. “I’m working on it,” I managed to mumble. “Irons in the fire.”
“I was doing some thinking myself. You know, nobody knows more about what goes on behind the scenes of Northerners than Dorothea did. She had the inside track on everybody. She’d have been perfectly placed to be the mole,” he said eagerly.
“Handy for you,” I said cynically. “What better way to get yourself off the hook than to blame a dead woman?”
His mouth turned down at the corners and his bright blue eyes looked baffled. “That’s a wee bit uncalled for. You know I liked Dorothea fine. It’s just with her being in the news this weekend, I couldn’t help remembering how she always had everybody’s particulars at her fingertips. And she was never backwards about taking advantage of the press for her own purposes. That’s all I was getting at.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You might have a point. The only problem I can see is that Dorothea didn’t have access to scripts, so she wouldn’t have known the details of the future storylines, would she?”
Ross looked crestfallen, his shaggy red hair falling unheeded over his forehead. “I suppose,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking it through. My wife says I never do.”
Before I could say anything more, the bleat of my moby vibrated in my armpit. I unzipped my jacket and pulled it out. “Hello?”