From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson
I remember a Monty Python sketch where a character complains, “My brain hurts. I’ve got my head stuck in the cupboard.” I knew just how he felt when the opening chords of Free’s “All Right Now” crashed through my head. It felt like the middle of the night. It was still dark. Mind you, in Manchester in December, that could make it mid-morning. I dug Richard in the ribs. It was his house, after all. He made a noise like a sleeping triceratops, rolled over and started snoring.
I stumbled out of bed, wincing as my aching feet hit the ground and gasping at the stiffness in my hips as I straightened up. Richard’s “Twenty Great Rock Riffs” doorbell blasted out again as I rubber-legged my way down the hall, wrapping my dressing gown around me, managing to tie the belt at the third fumbling attempt. I knew I shouldn’t have had that last treble Polish hunter’s vodka on the rocks. I yanked the door open and Gizmo practically fell in the door, accompanied by half a snowdrift.
“I’ve done it,” he said without preamble.
I wiggled my jaw in various directions, trying to get my mouth to work. “Oh God,” I finally groaned through parched lips. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes while the floor and ceiling rearranged themselves in their normal configuration.
“You look like shit,” Gizmo observed from the living-room doorway.
“Bastard,” I said, gingerly pushing myself away from the wall to test whether I could stand upright. Nothing seemed to collapse, so I put one foot in front of the other until I made it to the living room. “My place,” I croaked, leading the way through the conservatory to the life-support system in my kitchen.
“It’s not that early,” Gizmo said defensively. “You said it was important.”
The clock on the microwave said 07:49. “Early’s relative,” I told him, opening the fridge and reaching for the milk. “So’s important.” I poured a glass with shaking hand and got the vitamins out. Four grams of C, two B-complex tablets and two extra-strength paracetamol. I had a feeling it was going to be one of those days when ibuprofen and paracetamol count as two of the four main food groups. I washed the pills down with the milk, shuddered like a medieval peasant with the ague and wished I’d remembered to drink more water when we’d finally got home the wrong side of four o’clock.
“Did you come on the bus?” I asked. Gizmo has the same affection for public transport as most obsessives. He’s the sort who writes to TV drama producers to complain that they had the hero catching the wrong bus on his way to his rendezvous with the killer.
“The one-nine-two,” he said. “Single decker.”
“Do me a favor? I left my car at the O-Pit. If you get a cab round there and pick it up for me, by the time you come back I’ll be able to listen to whatever you’ve got to say.”
His mouth showed his discontent. “Do I have to?” he asked like a ten-year-old.
“Yes,” I said, pointing to the door. “Call a cab, Giz.”
Half an hour later, I’d kick-started my system with a mixture of hot and cold showers followed by four slices of peanut-buttered toast from a loaf that had been lurking in the freezer longer than I liked to think about. I even managed a smile for Gizmo when he returned twirling my car keys round his trigger finger.
“Thanks,” I said, settling us both down in my home office with a pot of coffee. “Sorry if I was a bit off. Rough night, you know?”
“I could tell,” he said. “You looked like you needed a new motherboard and a few more RAM chips.”
“It’s not just the brain, it’s the chassis,” I complained. “This last year I’ve been starting to think something terrible happens to your body when you hit your thirties. I’m sure my joints never used to seize up from a night’s clubbing.”
“It’s downhill all the way,” he said cheerfully. “It’ll be arthritis next. And then you’ll start losing nouns.”
“Losing nouns?”
“Yeah. Forgetting what things are called. You watch. Any day now, you’ll start calling everything wossnames, or thingumajigs, or whatchamacallits.” He looked solemn. It took me a few seconds to realize I was experiencing what passed for a joke on his planet. I shook my head very slowly to avoid killing off any more neurones and groaned softly.
Gizmo reached past me and switched on my computer. “You’ve got Video Translator on this machine, haven’t you?”
“It’s on the external hard disk, the E drive,” I told him.
He nodded and started doing things to my computer keyboard and peripherals too quickly for my hungover synapses to keep up. After a few minutes of tinkering and muttering, he sat back and said, “There. It’s a bit clunky in places, not enough polygons in the program to keep it smooth. The rendering’s definitely not going to win any awards. But it’s what you asked for. I think.”
I managed to get my bleary eyes to focus on the screen. Somehow, the color looked brighter than they had on the original crime-scene photographs. If I’d been alone, I’d have been reaching for the sunglasses, but my staff has little enough respect for me as it is. I leaned forward and concentrated on what Gizmo had put together.
We both sat in silence as his work unfolded before us. At the end, I clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s brilliant,” I enthused. “That must have taken you hours.”
He tilted his head while shrugging, regressing to awkward adolescent. “I started soon as I got home. I finished about two. But I did have a little break to talk to Jan. So it wasn’t like I blew the whole night on it or anything.” He scuffed his feet on the carpet. “Anyway, Dennis is your mate.”
“He owes you,” I said. “Don’t let him forget it. There must be somebody out there you want menacing.”
Gizmo looked shocked. “I don’t think so. Unless he knows where to find the moron who sent me that virus that ate all my.DLL files.”
I said nothing. It wasn’t the time to point out that if the lovely Jan was a hoax, he might want Dennis’s talent for terror sooner than he thought. “I’m going to be half an hour or so on the phone. You can either wait or head on into the office.”
“I’ve got my Docs on. I’ll walk over,” he said. “I like it in the snow. I’ll let myself out.”
I reached for the phone and called Ruth. Within ten minutes, she’d rung back to tell me she’d set up a meeting with DI Tucker at our office later that morning. “He’s not keen,” she warned me. “I think your fame has spread before you. He did ask if you were the PI involved with the Dorothea Dawson case.”
“Did you lie?”
“No, I told him to check you out with Della. Apparently his bagman used to work for her, so it’s a name that meant something to him.”
“Ah.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not for me, but it might be for the bagman,” I said. Tucker wouldn’t have to be much of a detective to work out where I’d gained my access to the crime-scene photographs. “My fault. I should have warned you.”
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Ruth said warily.
“Don’t worry. I’ll see you later.”
It took another twenty minutes to sort out Donovan and Gloria. We finally fixed that he would pick up her and her daughter, take them to the police station and hang on while Gloria gave the statement that would get him off the hook. Then he’d take them shopping. I hoped they’d stick to the plan of going a very long way away from anywhere policed by the Greater Manchester force. If they were going to be arrested for shoplifting, I didn’t want to be involved.
I took a fresh pot of coffee out into the conservatory. The sun had come back from wherever it had been taking its winter holiday. The reflection on the snow was a killer. I fished a pair of sunglasses out of the magazine rack and stared at the blank white of the