Star Struck by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online

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 savoring 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 smartmouthed 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. “Five minutes working with you, and he might as well be some smackhead from Moss Side. That’s it now, his name’s on their computer. Another black bastard who’s got away with it, that’s how they’ll have him down.”
    I raised my palms towards her, trying to fend off her fury. “It’s all right, Shelley. He wasn’t formally arrested. They won’t be putting anything into the computer.”
    Shelley snorted. “You’re so street smart when it comes to your business. How come you can be so naive about our lives? You don’t have the faintest idea what it means for a boy like Donovan to get picked up by the police! They don’t see a hard-working boy who’s been brought up to respect his elders and stay away from drugs. They just see another black face where it doesn’t belong. And you put him there.”
    I edged across reception, trying to make the safe haven of my own office without being permanently disabled by the crossfire. “Shelley, he’s a grown man. He has to make his own decisions. I told him when I took him on that serving process wasn’t as easy as it sounded. But he was adamant that he could handle it.”
    “Of course he can handle it,” she yelled. “He’s not the problem. It’s the other assholes out there, that’s the problem. I don’t want him doing this any more.”
    I’d almost reached the safety of my door. “You’ll have to take that up with Don,” I told her, sounding more firm than I felt.
    “I will, don’t you worry about that,” she vowed.
    “OK. But don’t forget the reason he’s doing this.”
    Her eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”
    “It’s about independence. He’s trying to earn his own money so he’s not dipping his hand in your pocket all the time. He’s trying to tell you he’s a man now.” I took a deep breath, trying not to feel intimidated by the scowl that was drawing Shelley’s perfectly shaped eyebrows into a gnarled scribble. My hand on the doorknob, I delivered what was supposed to be the knockout punch. “You’ve got to let him make his own mistakes. You’ve got to let him go.”
    I opened the door and dived for safety. No such luck. Instead of silent sanctuary, I fell into nerd heaven. A pair of pink-rimmed eyes looked up accusingly at me. Under the pressure of Shelley’s rage, I’d forgotten that my office wasn’t mine any more. Now I was the sole active partner in Brannigan & Co, I occupied the larger of the two rooms that opened off reception. When I’d been junior
    These days, my former bolthole was the computer room, occupied as and when the occasion demanded by Gizmo, our information technology consultant. In our business, that’s the polite word for hacker. And when it comes to prowling other people’s systems with cat-like tread, Gizmo is king of the dark hill. The trade off for his computer acumen is that on a scale of one to ten, his social skills come in somewhere around absolute zero. I’m convinced that was the principal reason he was made redundant from his job as systems wizard with Telecom. Now they’ve become a multinational leading-edge company, everybody who works there has to pass for human. Silicon-based life forms