Star Struck. Val McDermid

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. ‘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 partner in Mortensen & Brannigan it had doubled as Bill Mortensen’s office and the main client interview room. Now, it was my sanctum.

      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 like Gizmo just had to be downsized out the door.

      Their loss was my gain. There had had to be changes, of course. Plain brown envelopes stuffed with banknotes had been replaced with a system more appealing to the taxman, if not to the company accountant. Then there was the personal grooming. Gizmo had always favoured an appearance that would have served as perfect camouflage if he’d been living on a refuse tip.

      The clothes weren’t so hard. I managed to make him stop twitching long enough to get the key measurements, then hit a couple of designer factory outlets during the sales. I was planning to dock the cost from his first consultancy fees, but I didn’t want it to terrify him too much. Now he had two decent suits, four shirts that didn’t look disastrous unironed, a couple of inoffensive ties and a mac that any flasher would have been proud of. I could wheel him out as our computer security expert without frightening the clients, and he had a couple of outfits that wouldn’t entirely destroy his street cred if another of the undead happened to be on the street in daylight hours to see him.

      The haircut had been harder. I don’t think he’d spent money on a haircut since 1987. I’d always thought he simply took a pair of scissors to any stray locks whose reflection in the monitor distracted him from what he was working on. Gizmo tried to