be that many public figures Gloria’s age who go through more than a couple of months without knowing somebody who’s died or dying. Gloria might have been catapulted into panic by her astrologer, but I couldn’t imagine it being anything more than a stunt by Dorothea Dawson. Minding Gloria sounded like a major earner with no risk attached. Just what the bank manager ordered. I said a small prayer of thanks to Dorothea Dawson and told Gloria that for her, I’d be happy to make an exception to company policy. In fact, I would take personal responsibility for her safety.
The news seemed to cheer her up. ‘Right then, we’d better be off,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette and gathering her mac around her shoulders.
‘We’d better be off?’ I echoed.
She glanced at her watch, a chunky gold item with chips of diamond that glittered like a broken windscreen in a streetlight. ‘Depends where you live, I suppose. Only, if I’m opening a theme pub in Blackburn at eight and we’ve both got to get changed and grab a bite to eat, we’ll be cutting it a bit fine if we don’t get a move on.’
‘A theme pub in Blackburn,’ I said faintly.
‘That’s right, chuck. I’m under contract to the brewery. It’s straightforward enough. I turn up, tell a few jokes, sing a couple of songs to backing tapes, sign a couple of hundred autographs and off.’ As she spoke, she was setting her hat at a rakish angle and replacing her sunglasses. As she made for the door, I dived behind the desk and swept my palmtop computer and my moby into my shoulder bag. I only caught up with her because she’d stopped to sign a glossy colour photograph of herself disguised as Brenda Barrowclough for Shelley.
Something terrible had happened to the toughest office manager in Manchester. Imagine Cruella De Vil transformed into one of those cuddly Dalmatian puppies, only more so. It was like watching Ben Nevis grovel. ‘And could you sign one, “for Ted”?’ she begged. I wished I had closed-circuit TV cameras covering the office. A video of this would keep Shelley off my back for months.
‘No problem, there you go,’ Gloria said, signing the card with a flourish. ‘You right, Kate?’
I grabbed my coat and shrugged into it as I followed Gloria into the hall. She glanced both ways and down the stairwell before she set off. ‘The last thing I need is somebody clocking me coming out of your office,’ she said, trotting down the stairs at a fair pace. At the front door I turned right automatically, heading for my car. Gloria followed me into the private car park.
‘This sign says, “Employees of DVS Systems only. Unauthorized users will be clamped,”’ she pointed out.
‘It’s all right,’ I said in a tone that I hoped would end the conversation. I didn’t want to explain 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.
