Dee Grayson was a woman who lived at 22 Station Road in Weatherfield who had been burgled by Michael Rodwell two years earlier. The event had had a devastating effect on her self-confidence.
Michael had never been easy in his conscience about his life of crime and had become fully reformed and settled in Coronation Street, despite the loss of his son and the collapse of his marriage to Gail. Working on the switch at Street Cars one day, he was unsettled when Dee rang for a cab and gave him her address - one that he knew only too well. The call was to pick her up from Freshco and Nick, the driver, regaled Michael's partner Eileen Grimshaw afterwards with stories of how Dee made him check the house and its locks before letting him go, forgetting her shopping in the confusion. Overhearing this, Michael said he would arrange to have the items delivered but Dee turned up at the cab office to collect them herself, worried about the lettuce in the bag. Michael eagerly took her home in another cab, offering to carry out the house check again for her. Once back home, Eileen was surprised to find out that he had also agreed to organise the cleaning of her gutters and carry out other odd jobs round the house.
After a week or so, Eileen grew tired of the amount of time that Michael was spending helping her out and it started to cause a rift between them, especially when he started to fall asleep at work at Street Cars through exhaustion. To Michael's annoyance, she started to shield calls from Dee, saying that the woman was starting to take the mickey but she also began to take more care of her appearance, feeling jealous of the growing friendship between the two. She totally changed her stance when she heard that Dee had nominated a very reluctant Michael for that year's Weatherfield Good Samaritan Award and promptly started to boast to all and sundry about it.
As the neighbours heaped praise on him, Michael grew more and more uneasy and confessed to Gail that he was helping because of his guilt about the burglary. He refused to accept the invitation to the award ceremony to be held in Nick's Bistro, putting it in the bin but Eileen, non-plussed at his attitude, fished it out and accepted on his behalf. The pressure grew further on him when Dee pushed him into wearing her father's cufflinks at the ceremony and Eileen made sure that a flattering article appeared about him in the Weatherfield Gazette, complete with photograph. Michael could only turn to his estranged wife Gail for help, confessing to her that he worried what would happen if Dee found out the truth and he ended up back in prison, something he didn't think he could cope with again.
On the night of the ceremony, things went wrong from the start: Michael couldn't bring himself to even walk into the venue until pushed to by Gail, thereby annoying Eileen, but everyone was thrown when Dee came in with her neighbour Patricia who had read the Gazette article and had instantly recognised Michael as the man she had seen running away from Dee's house two years before. Dee tore into Michael in front of all the attendees, telling him the adverse effect that he'd had on his life and that now that she knew who he was she hated him a hundred times more than when he was a faceless entity to her.
Michael ran after her, begging her not to report him to the police and saving him from jail. After further pleading from Gail, Dee agreed, provided that he never made any attempts to contact her again.
List of appearances
2015