had one too. And they’re different to the usual.’ She opened her handbag again. I wondered at a life where it mattered to have suit, shoes and handbag in identical shades. I couldn’t help my mind slithering into speculation about her underwear. Did her coordination extend that far?
Gloria produced a sheet of paper. She started to pass it to me, then paused. I could have taken it from her, but it was an awkward reach, so I waited. ‘Usually, letters like this, they’re semi-literate. They’re ignorant. I mean, I might have left school when I were fifteen, but I know the difference between a dot and a comma. Most of the nutters that write me letters wouldn’t know a paragraph if they woke up next to one. They can’t spell, and they’ve got a tendency to write in green ink or felt-tip pens. Some of them, I don’t think they’re allowed sharp objects where they live,’ she added. I’ve noticed how actors and audiences often hold each other in mutual contempt. It looked like Gloria didn’t have a whole lot of respect for the people who paid for the roof over her head.
Now she passed the letter across. It was plain A4 bond, the text printed unidentifiably on a laser printer. ‘Doreen Satterthwaite, it’s time you paid for what you’ve done. You deserve to endure the same suffering you’ve been responsible for. I know where you live. I know where your daughter Sandra and her husband Keith live. I know your granddaughter Joanna goes to Gorse Mill School. I know they worship at St Andrew’s Church and have a caravan on Anglesey. I know you drive a scarlet Saab convertible. I know you, you bitch. And soon you’re going to be dead. But there’ll be no quick getaway for you. First, you’re going to suffer.’ She was right. The letter sounded disturbingly in control.
‘Any idea what the letter writer is referring to?’ I asked, not really expecting an honest answer.
Gloria shrugged. ‘Who the heck knows? I’m no plaster saint, but I can’t think of anybody I’ve done a really bad turn to. Apart from my ex, and I doubt he could manage a letter to me that didn’t include the words, “you effing bitch”. He certainly can’t manage a conversation without it. And besides, he wouldn’t threaten our Sandra or Joanna. No way.’ I took her response for genuine perplexity, then reminded myself how she made her living.
‘Have there been many of them?’
‘This is the third. Plus the one that went to Sandra. That were about the sins of the mother. To be honest, the first couple I just binned. I thought they were somebody at the wind-up.’ Suddenly, Gloria looked away. She fumbled another cigarette from the packet and this time, the hand that lit it shook.
‘Something happened to change your mind?’
‘My car tyres were slashed. All four of them. Inside the NPTV compound. And there was a note stuck under the windscreen wipers. “Next time your wardrobe? Or you?” And before you ask, I haven’t got the note. It’d been raining. It just fell to bits in my hand.’
‘That’s serious business,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t be talking to the police?’ I hated to lose a potential client, but it would have verged on criminal negligence not to point out that this might be one for Officer Dibble.
Gloria fiddled with her cigarette. ‘I told the management about it. And John Turpin, he’s the Administration and Production Coordinator, he persuaded me not to go to the cops.’
‘Why not? I’d have thought the management would have been desperate to make sure nothing happened to their stars.’
Gloria’s lip curled in a cynical sneer. ‘It were nowt to do with my safety and everything to do with bad publicity. Plus, who’d want to come and work at NPTV if they found out the security was so crap that somebody could walk into the company compound and get away with that? Anyway, Turpin promised me an internal inquiry, so I decided to go along with him.’
‘But now you’re here.’ It’s observational skills like this that got me where I am today.
She flashed a quick up-and-under glance at me, an appraisal that contained more than a hint of fear held under tight control. ‘You’re going to think I’m daft.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t see you as the daft type, Gloria.’ Well, it was only a white lie. Daft enough to spend the equivalent of a week’s payroll for Brannigan & Co on a matching outfit, but probably not daft when it came to a realistic assessment of personal danger. Mind you, neither was Ronald Reagan and look what happened to him.
‘You know Dorothea Dawson?’ Gloria asked, eyeing me out of the corner of her eye.
‘“The Seer to the Stars”?’ I asked incredulously. ‘The one who does the horoscopes in TV Viewer? The one who’s always on the telly? “A horse born under the sign of Aries will win the Derby”?’ I intoned in a cheap impersonation of Dorothea Dawson’s sepulchral groan.
‘Don’t mock,’ she cautioned me, wagging a finger. ‘She’s a brilliant clairvoyant, you know. Dorothea comes into the studios once a week. She’s the personal astrologer to half the cast. She really has a gift.’
I bet she had. Gifts from all the stars of Northerners. ‘And Dorothea said something about these letters?’
‘I took this letter in with me to my last consultation with her. I asked her what she could sense from it. She does that as well as the straight clairvoyance. She’s done it for me before now, and she’s never been wrong.’ In spite of her acting skills, anxiety was surfacing in Gloria’s voice.
‘And what did she say?’
Gloria drew so hard on her cigarette that I could hear the burning tobacco crackle. As she exhaled she said, ‘She held the envelope and shivered. She said the letter meant death. Dorothea said death was in the room with us.’
SUN TRINE MOON
Creative thinking resolves difficult circumstances; she will tackle difficulties with bold resolution. The subject feels at home wherever she is, but can be blind to the real extent of problems. She will not always notice if her marriage is falling apart; she doesn’t always nip problems in the bud.
From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson
Anybody gullible enough to fall for the doom and gloom dished out by professional con merchants like astrologers certainly wasn’t going to have a problem with my expense sheets. Money for old rope, I reckoned. By Gloria’s own admission, hate mail was as much part of the routine in her line of work as travelling everywhere with stacks of postcard-sized photographs to autograph for the punters. OK, the tyre slashing was definitely more serious, but that might be unconnected to the letters, an isolated act of vindictiveness. It was only because the Seer to the Stars had thrown a wobbler that this poison pen outbreak had been blown up to life-threatening proportions. ‘Does she often sense impending death when she does predictions for people?’ I asked, trying not to snigger.
Gloria shook her head vigorously. ‘I’ve never heard of anybody else getting a prediction like that.’
‘And have you told other people in the cast about it?’
‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you go on about.’
Not unless you liked being laughed at, I reckoned. On the other hand, it might mean that the death prediction was
