Visitors were asked to write a short story on modern celebrity. The winner would get star billing on the Steffi site as well as having Andrew Crofts as a mentor to help work up the story into a novel, find an agent, publisher and so on.

Short Listed: The Mysterious Celebrity
By Della Galton

 “The camera adores her. Look at these.”  Ironman tossed the pictures onto the table and began to spread them out. 
            I could see he was smitten. His eyes gleamed and he couldn’t keep still. He paced; hands drawing air pictures – all that pent up artistic energy trying to escape through his fluttering fingers. 
            The girl was attractive.  Much more so on film than in real life where she’d struck me as gawky.  In real life her eyes were too big, so was her mouth. In these pictures she looked sultry, yet somehow innocent at the same time. It was the colouring – blonde bombshell coupled with her great big cow eyes. 
            “We’ve got to have her on the show, Laura. She’ll increase the ratings by 15%.”
            “Yeah, but she hasn’t done anything, has she? It’s a celebrity show not a model agency.”
            “I’m sure she’s talented at something.” He looked agitated, a frown forming beneath his spiky fringe.
            “No doubt she is – but it’ll need to be something pretty spectacular to get her past Irene.
            “How about that swearing thing? We’ve not had one of those on the show.”
            “Tourette’s? No, it’s been done.”
            “Addiction, alcoholism, abused as a child?”
            “All old hat – and none of them are actually talents, are they? They’re more – er – afflictions.”
            “Of course. Of course.” Ironman stroked his beard. “Leave it with me. I’ll talk to her. I’m sure I can come up with something.”  
           
He came back later that afternoon. “She’s a writer.”
            “A writer?”
            “Yeah – she did these murder mystery novels.” He presented me with a couple of tacky-looking paperbacks. One had a dagger dripping blood on its cover and the other a gun.
            “Oh yeah!” I picked one up. “A J Howard’s her pseudonym is it? I thought her name was Diana Stokes.”
            Ironman’s eyebrows shot up in irritation. “Who cares if she wrote them or not? No one’s going to ask her questions on them.”
            “You’re very keen to get this girl on the show.”
            “I just think she needs a break.”
            “You want to shag her, you mean.”
            “I do not want to bloody shag her.” His hands flew up in front of him, fingers spread wide in denial.  He was either disgusted or doing a pretty good imitation of being disgusted.
            “OK, Laura. I’ll give it to you straight. I do want to help her out. I know her, all right? But not in the biblical sense – Jesus, she’s only seventeen.”
            He wasn’t pretending. I could see that now. I backed off a bit. We’d been working with each other for over fourteen years and I’d never seen him so agitated.
            “If you want to tell Irene she’s a writer that’s fine with me. I’ll put her on the shortlist. Just remember she’s not stupid – make sure your Diana can carry it off.”
            “No probs. Thanks.” He smiled at me from the doorway. “I owe you one, Laura.”
            “You can buy me a drink next time I see you.”
            “Sure.”
            But I never did get that drink. Because the next time I saw Ironman AKA Scott Walker, BBC cameraman, he was dead.
            They called me into the morgue to identify him. He had no family apparently. None at all. It’s funny how you can work with someone for so long and not know that.
            I looked into his blank blue eyes and I thought how sad it was that he would never again be behind a lens, creating magic out of ordinariness. He was one of the best camera men I’d known.   
            “How did he die?” I asked, a little shakily, because although I’m cool under pressure, I’d never been so close to death before.  I’d never been so close to anything this real before. We’d lived in a ‘fake it to make it’ world, Scott and I. Neither of us had paid more than lip service to reality for a long time.   
            We’d always joked that as long as we knew where the line was – it didn’t matter that the public didn’t.
            I’d sat in front of the camera – he’d sat behind it. We’d both gone for maximum impact. This was maximum impact: Scott’s silent body on a slab.
            “He was murdered,” the policeman told me. “Stabbed in the stomach with a dagger.”
            “What kind of dagger?” I’d seen a dagger somewhere recently – dripping blood. I couldn’t think where.
            “Confidential information, Miss.”
            When I got back to the studio there was a woman waiting. I recognised the blonde hair and huge dark eyes. She was beautiful even when tearstained.
            “You’ve been at the mortuary, haven’t you? I hope you didn’t mind me waiting – your assistant said it was OK.”
            I nodded. “How did you know Scott, Diana?”
            I expected her to say he was her neighbour or something like that – the drama queen in me wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said she was his long lost daughter – there’d been something about his denial when I’d accused him of wanting to shag her.
            But nothing could have prepared me for what she did say.
            “There is no link between us Laura. Or at least there wasn’t before last night. I’m his assassin.”
            “I beg your pardon.”
            “I killed him.”
            I stared at her. My office was freeze-framed in a bubble of shock: Walnut desk, pen tidy, computer and phone.  Had I stepped into some kind of alternative reality? Had Scott and I spent so long faking it to make it that we’d got caught up in one of our own bizarre productions? 
            We’d always joked that as long as we knew the difference between fiction and reality it would be OK. We could merge the boundaries for the public but we had to know where they were.
            I felt as if I were back there in the morgue, with reality staring up at me from Scott’s blank eyes.  
            And this girl was a fiction.
            I was terrified I no longer knew the difference.