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 centre, 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 Cayman Islands and a deal to buy out his share of the business piecemeal as and when I could afford it, so it would be a long time before I could consider heading for the southern suburbs where all my sensible friends had moved.
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.
In the December dark, Saddleworth looked like a Christmas card, early fairy lights twinkling against a light dusting of snow. I wished I’d listened to the weather forecast; the roads out here can be closed by drifts when there hasn’t been so much as a flake on my roof. Yet another argument against country living. Gloria directed me down the valley in a gentle spiral to Greenfield. We turned off the main street into a narrow passage between two high walls. I hoped I wouldn’t meet something coming the other way in a hurry. About a hundred yards in, the passage ended in two tall wrought-iron gates. Gloria fumbled with something in her handbag and the gates swung open.
I edged forward slowly, completely gobsmacked. I appeared to have driven into the set of a BBC period drama. I was in a large cobbled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by handsome two-storey buildings in weatherworn gritstone. Even my untrained eye can spot early Industrial Revolution, and this was a prime example. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘It were built as offices for the mill,’ Gloria said, pointing me towards a pair of double doors in the long left-hand side of the square. ‘Leave the car in front of my garage for now. Then the mill became a cat food factory. Sound familiar?’
‘The factory where you used to work?’
‘Got it in one.’ She opened the car door and I followed her across the courtyard. The door she stopped at was solid oak, the lock a sensible mortise. As we went in, a burglar alarm klaxoned its warning. While Gloria turned it off, I walked across the wide room that ran the whole depth of the building. Through the tall window, I could see light glinting off water. The house backed on to the canal. Suddenly life looked better. This house was about as impregnable as they come. Unless Gloria’s letter writer had the Venetian skill of climbing a ladder from a boat, I was going to be able to sleep in my own bed at night rather than across the threshold of Gloria’s bedroom.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘Especially when your living room used to be the cashier’s office where you picked up your wages every week smelling of offal,’ Gloria said ironically.
I turned back to look round the room. Wall uplighters gave a soft glow to burnished beams and the exposed stone of the three outer walls. The furnishings looked like a job lot from John Lewis, all pastel-figured damask and mahogany. The pictures on the wall were big watercolour landscapes of the Yorkshire moorland and the expanse of stripped floorboards was broken up by thick pile Chinese rugs. There was nothing to quarrel with, but nothing that spoke of individual taste, unlike Gloria’s clothes. ‘You live here alone?’ I asked.
‘Thank God,’ she said with feeling, opening a walk-in cupboard and hanging up her coat.
‘Anyone else have keys?’
‘Only my daughter.’ Gloria emerged and pointed to a door in the far wall. ‘The kitchen’s through there. There’s a freezer full of ready meals. Do you want to grab a couple and stick them in the microwave while I’m getting changed?’ Without waiting for an answer, she started up the open-plan staircase that climbed to the upper floor.
The kitchen was almost as big as the living room. One end was laid out as a dining area, with a long refectory table and a collection of unmatched antique farm kitchen chairs complete with patchwork cushions. The other end was an efficiently arranged working kitchen, dominated by an enormous freestanding fridge-freezer. The freezer was stacked from top to bottom with meals from Marks and Spencer. Maybe country living could be tolerable after all, I thought. All you needed to get through the winter was a big enough freezer and an endless supply of computer games. I chose a couple of pasta dishes and followed the instructions on the pack. By the time they were thawed and reheated, Gloria was back, dressed for action in a shocking-pink swirl of sequins. All it needed was the Brenda Barrowclough beehive to define camp kitsch better than any drag queen could have.
‘Amazing,’ I said faintly, scooping chicken and pasta into bowls.
‘Bloody awful, you mean,’ Gloria said, sitting down in a flounce of candyfloss. ‘But the punters are paying for Brenda, not me.’ She attacked her pasta like an extra from Oliver Twist. She finished while I was barely halfway through. ‘Right,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I’ll be five minutes putting on me slap and the wig. The dishwasher’s
