Star Struck Read Free Page B

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
    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
    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 twostory 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.