Star Struck. Val McDermid

you’re going to have a mental age of three soon,’ Dennis added sententiously. ‘Of course I’m not going to be living in the shop. I’m going to be selling things in the shop.’

      ‘Take me through it,’ I said. Dennis’s latest idea was only new to him; he was far from the first in Manchester to give it a try. I remembered reading something in the Evening Chronicle about shop-squatting, but as usual with newspaper articles, it had told me none of the things I really wanted to know.

      ‘You want to know how it works?’

      Silly question to ask a woman whose first watch lasted only as long as it took me to work out how to get the back off. ‘Was Georgie Best?’

      ‘First off, you identify your premises. Find some empty shops and give the agents a ring. What you’re looking for is one where the agent says they’re not taking any offers because it’s already let as from a couple of months ahead.’

      ‘What?’ Richard mumbled.

      Dennis and I shared the conspiratorial grin of those who are several drinks behind the mentally defective. ‘That way, you know it’s going to stay empty for long enough for you to get in and out and do the business in between,’ he explained patiently.

      ‘Next thing you do is you get somebody to draw you up a moody contract. One that looks like you’ve bought a short-term lease in good faith, cash on the nail. All you gotta do then is get into the shop and Bob’s your uncle. Get the leccy and the water turned on, fill the place with crap, everything under a pound, which you can afford to do because you’ve got no overheads. And the Dibble can’t touch you for it, on account of you’ve broken no laws.’

      ‘What about criminal damage?’ I asked. ‘You have to bust the locks to get in.’

      Dennis winked. ‘If you pick the locks, you’ve not done any damage. And if you fit some new locks to give extra security, where’s the damage in that?’

      ‘Doesn’t the landlord try to close you down?’ Richard asked. It was an amazingly sensible question given his condition.

      Dennis shrugged. ‘Some of them can’t be bothered. They know we’ll be out of there before their new tenant needs the premises, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Some of them have a go. I keep somebody on the premises all the time, just in case they try to get clever and repo the place in the night. You can get a homeless kid to play night watchman for a tenner a time. Give them a mobile phone and a butty and lock them in. Then if the landlord tries anything, I get the call and I get down there sharpish. He lays a finger on me or my lad, he’s the criminal.’ Dennis smiled with all the warmth of a shark. ‘I’m told you get a very reasonable response when you explain the precise legal position.’

      ‘I can imagine,’ I said drily. ‘Do the explanations come complete with baseball bat?’

      ‘Can people help it if they get the summons when they’re on their way home from sports training?’ He raised his eyebrows, trying for innocent and failing dismally.

      ‘Profitable, is it?’ I asked.

      ‘It’s got to be a very nice little earner, what with Christmas coming up.’

      ‘You know, Dennis, if you put half the effort into a straight business that you put into being bent, you’d be a multimillionaire by now,’ I sighed.

      He shook his head, rueful. ‘Maybe so, but where would the fun be in that?’

      He had a point. And who was I to talk? I’d turned my back on the straight version of my life a long time ago. If Dennis broke the law for profit, so did I. I’d committed burglary, fraud, assault, theft, deception and breaches of the Wireless and Telegraph Act too numerous to mention, and that was just in the past six months. I dressed it up with the excuse of doing it for the clients and my own version of justice. It had led me into some strange places, forced me into decisions that I didn’t like to examine too closely in the harsh light of day. Once upon a time, I’d have had no doubt whether it was me or Dennis who could lay claim to the better view from the moral high ground.

      These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.

       4

      MOON SQUARES MARS

       An accident-prone aspect, suggesting she can harm herself through lack of forethought. She is far too eager to make her presence felt and doesn’t always practice self-control. Her feelings of insecurity can manifest themselves in an unfeminine belligerence. She has authoritarian tendencies.

      From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

      Anyone can be a soap star. All you need is a scriptwriter who knows you well enough to write your character into their series, and you’re laughing all the way to the BAFTA. I’d always thought you had to be an actor. But two hours on the set of Northerners made me realize that soap is different. About ten per cent of the cast could play Shakespeare or Stoppard. The rest just roll up to the studios every week and play themselves. The lovable rogues are just as roguish, the dizzy blondes are just as empty-headed, the salts of the earth make you thirst just as much for a long cold alcoholic drink and the ones the nation loves to hate are every bit as repulsive in the flesh. Actually, they’re more repulsive, since anyone hanging round the green room is exposed to rather more of their flesh than a reasonable person could desire. There was more chance of me being struck by lightning than being star struck by that lot of has-beens and wannabes.

      They didn’t even have to learn their words. TV takes are so short that a gnat with Alzheimer’s could retain the average speech with no trouble at all. Especially by the sixth or seventh take most of the Northerners cast seemed to need to capture the simplest sentiment on screen.

      The main problem I had was how to do my job. Gloria had told everyone I was her bodyguard. Not because I couldn’t come up with a decent cover story, but because I’d weighed up both sides of the argument and decided that if there was somebody in cast or crew who was out to get her it was time for them to understand they should back off and forget about it. Gloria had been all for the cloak and dagger approach, hoping I could catch the author of her threatening letters in the act of extracting vengeance, but I pointed out that if I was going to stay close enough to protect her, I’d be an obvious obstacle to nefarious doings anyway.

      Besides, members of the public weren’t allowed on the closed set of Northerners. The storylines were supposed to be top secret. NPTV, the company who made the soap, were so paranoid they made New Labour look relaxed. Everyone who worked on the programme had to sign an agreement that disclosure of any information relating to the cast characters or storylines was gross misconduct, a sacking offence and a strict liability tort. Even I had had to sign up to the tort clause before I was allowed into the compound that housed the interior and exterior sets, as well as the production suite and admin offices. Apart from location shooting to give the show that authentic Manchester ambience, the entire process from script conference to edited master tapes took place behind the high walls that surrounded NPTV’s flagship complex.

      A fat lot of good it did them. Northerners generated more column inches than any other TV programme in the country. The fuel for the flames had to come from somewhere, and tabloid papers have always had deep pockets. There’s not a tabloid journalist I’ve ever met who couldn’t explain in words of one syllable to a nervously dithering source that the NPTV legal threat of suing for civil damages was about as solid as the plyboard walls of Brenda Barrowclough’s living room.

      But NPTV insisted on their power trip, and I’d persuaded Gloria it would be simpler all round if we were upfront. The downside of being out in the open was that everyone was on their guard. Nobody was going to let anything slip accidentally. If my target was a member of the Northerners team, they’d be very careful around me.

      In order to be effective protection for my client, I had to be visible, which meant that I couldn’t even find a quiet corner and catch up with my e-mail and my invoices. If Gloria was in make-up, I