Star Struck. Val McDermid

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      Two hours later, I was walking Donovan back to my car. The police don’t like private eyes, but faced with me threatening a lawsuit for false imprisonment and racial harassment, they were only too happy to release Donovan from the interview room where he’d been pacing the floor for every one of the minutes it had taken me to get there.

      ‘I didn’t do anything, you know,’ Donovan complained. His anger seethed just below the surface. I couldn’t blame him, but for all our sakes, I hoped the cycle ride back into town would get it out of his system.

      ‘According to the copper I spoke to, one of the neighbours saw you sneaking round the back of the house and figured you for a burglar,’ I said drily.

      ‘Yeah, right. All I was doing was checking if he was in the snooker room round the back, like his wife said he usually is if he’s not training in the morning. I reckoned if he was there, and I walked right up to the French windows, he’d be bound to come over and open up, at least to give me a bollocking. When I saw the place was empty, I came back down the drive and went and sat on a wall down the road, where I could see him come home. It’s not like I was hiding,’ he continued. ‘They only arrested me because I’m black. Anybody black on the street in Hale Barns has got to be a burglar, right?’

      ‘Or a drug dealer. The rich have got to get their coke and heroin from somewhere,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘Where’s your bike?’

      ‘Hale Barns. Chained to a lamppost, I hope.’

      ‘Let’s go back out there and do it,’ I sighed.

      The leafy lanes of Hale Barns were dripping a soft rain down our necks as we walked along the grass verge that led to our target’s house. Wrought-iron gates stood open, revealing a long drive done in herringbone brick. There was enough of it there to build a semi. At the top of the drive, a matching pair of Mercedes sports cars were parallel parked. My heart sank. ‘I don’t believe it,’ I muttered.

      We walked up the drive towards a vast white hacienda-style ranch that would have been grandiose in California. In Cheshire, it just looked silly. I leaned on the doorbell. There was a long pause, then the door swung silently open without warning. I recognized his face from the back pages of the Chronicle. For once, I didn’t have to check ID before I served the papers. ‘Yeah?’ he said, frowning. ‘Who are you?’

      I leaned forward and stuffed the papers down the front of the towelling robe that was all he was wearing. ‘I’m Kate Brannigan, and you are well and truly served,’ I said.

      As I spoke, over his shoulder, I saw a woman in a matching robe emerge from an archway. Like him, she looked as if she’d been in bed, and not for an afternoon nap. I recognized her from the Chronicle too. From the diary pages. Former model Bo Robinson. Better known these days as the wife of the man I’d just served with the injunction her solicitor had sweated blood to get out of a district judge.

      Now I remembered what I’d hated most about my own days as a process-server.

      The last thing Donovan had said before he’d pedalled off to the university library was, ‘Don’t tell my mum I got arrested, OK? Not even as a joke. Not unless you want her to put the blocks on me working for you again.’

      I’d agreed. Jokes are supposed to be funny, after all. Unfortunately, the cops at Altrincham weren’t in on the deal. What I didn’t know was that while I’d been savouring the ambience of their lovely foyer (decor by the visually challenged, furnishings by a masochist, posters from a template unchanged since 1959) the desk sergeant had been calling the offices of Brannigan & Co to check that the auburn-haired midget and the giant in the sweat suit really were operatives of the agency and not a pair of smart-mouthed burglars on the make.

      I’d barely put a foot inside the door when Shelley’s voice hit me like a blast furnace. ‘Nineteen years old and never been inside a police station,’ came the opening salvo. СКАЧАТЬ