Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  No kidding.

  ‘He’s an ex-cop, so he’s just the man to keep everybody in line,’ she added with a chuckle.

  Interesting.

  ‘He has been very helpful in our expansion into eastern territories, as he has connections throughout the Balkans and Black Sea countries. He’ll be able to tell you more about it himself: he’s popped out for a cigarette.’

  Helena introduced Parlabane to the desk jockeys, who dismayingly claimed all of the drinks and proceeded to fall upon the mini-doughnuts until the box was empty. Parlabane then sat and listened with one ear as they discussed their operations. With his other he was taking in Mairi’s progress report on their target, whom it turned out had gone to the bakery for a coffee and a sandwich to enjoy with his fag.

  Bugger. Talk about no battle plan surviving first contact with the enemy: ten minutes in and it was already falling apart. He still had three more mini-doughnuts secreted away in his man-bag, coated in an extra-special frosting, but Bodo was tucking into a late lunch downstairs.

  ‘He’s on his way back up,’ Mairi warned. This gave Parlabane sufficient notice to wrap up his present discussion, apparently just in time for his next subject to come walking in the door.

  A few minutes later (and upon Helena’s insistence, no doubt enforced by authority from further up the corporate chain) Parlabane was sitting four feet from Bodo Hoefner, the man who had been hunting him for days. He felt a tingle of fear buzzing like an old fluorescent tube somewhere inside him. On a rooftop across the street Mairi was looking on in terrified silence.

  Bodo hadn’t seen him close up, as far as he knew, and was looking for a scruffily dressed man with blond/grey hair and no glasses. He was also, Parlabane assumed, looking for someone Scottish. Since walking into the office Parlabane had been conversing in his best generic, non-regional English tones, but the extent to which this was part of his disguise depended on how easy it was for a non-native speaker to notice the difference. Bodo had actually only heard Parlabane speak briefly on the phone two nights ago, though everything else he knew would have identified him as Scottish: the Savage Earth Heart connection, the Islay sighting and whatever that sleazeball Jan had told him.

  Bodo gave no indication of recognising him. He barely looked at him, in fact, keen to discharge whatever duty he had agreed with Helena and then discharge this inconvenience from his office as soon as possible.

  Parlabane had transferred the mini-doughnuts from his bag to the box and placed it on the edge of Bodo’s desk. It sat with the lid hinged back towards Parlabane so that it was obvious they were being offered to his host. They twinkled invitingly, sugar mixed with the special extra frosting he had sprinkled on. The bastard proceeded to give them a damn good ignoring.

  He talked about Bad Candy’s logistics operations in impressive English, telling Parlabane little he couldn’t have found on the company’s website or a press release. Bodo knew he couldn’t be unhelpful, but he also knew he ought not to be interesting or memorable: he did not want to be the story here. He prattled on, speaking without saying anything specific to himself, and all the time the only thing going through Parlabane’s mind was, Just eat a fucking doughnut you monkfish-looking cunt.

  Eventually it was clear that Bodo had decided time was up. He placed his hands together and asked if there was anything else, in a tone that suggested they both knew his visitor would be seriously pushing it if he said yes.

  As he stood up Parlabane stole a glance at the satchel, tucked under the desk next to Bodo’s right foot. It looked like it might be as close as he was going to get.

  He thanked Bodo for his courtesy, their eyes meeting close up for the first time. There was a flicker there now, he was sure, and he felt the fluorescent tube start to thrum, warming up the flight reflex. The moment passed, however, and Parlabane walked out, leaving the doughnuts on the desk next to his digital voice recorder, the latter giving him a pretext to return once more before he finally left Bad Candy.

  Mairi spoke as he stepped back into the corridor. Her voice was breathy and tremulous.

  ‘I’ve got good news and bad news.’

  ‘Fire away,’ he replied quietly.

  ‘The good news is he just scarfed two doughnuts in one gulp. The bad news is that he made a phone call the second you left the room.’

  ‘Mobile or landline?’

  ‘Mobile.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I’m worried he made you. You should get out of there.’

  ‘I only need a little more time. The clock is ticking on him now.’

  ‘It might be ticking on you too.’

  Helena strode along from the main office, asking if he’d got everything he needed.

  ‘Not quite,’ he answered.

  Parlabane asked if he could take some pictures of the place and the staff for the article. He needed a plausible excuse to hang around, and given that these people must have witnessed a photographer at work before, they would surely understand that time had just entered a new realm of elasticity.

  He was taking roughly his twenty-fifth ‘pretend I’m not here’ shot of everyone getting on with their work when Mairi gave him the news he’d been waiting for.

  ‘He just shot up from his desk and sprinted for the door.’

  Finally.

  ‘Would you excuse me,’ he said to Helena. ‘I realise I’ve left my digital recorder in the other office. I’ll only be a moment.’

  Parlabane hurried along the corridor, the urgency of his pace hopefully conveying merely his keenness to retrieve his device. Somewhere ahead of him he heard a door bang as a body thundered through. It was the sound of Bodo being assailed by a need to urinate like he’d drunk ten pints of Pilsner and then walked past a waterfall on a cold winter’s night. He’d be in there a minute at least, though Parlabane couldn’t count on wash time. Bodo might not be the kind of guy who worried too much about germs.

  Mairi had been less than impressed when he outlined his strategy.

  ‘Given all the rumours and the accusations about you, I was kind of expecting that your plan for sneaking into his office and stealing his iPad would be a bit more ingenious than simply waiting for the guy to go to the toilet.’

  Admittedly it didn’t sound very impressive when she put it that way, but there was a little more to it than her description allowed. For one thing, he had to make sure that Bodo went to the toilet, and that Parlabane was free to make his move when that happened. This was not something he could leave to chance during the brief window he had: the guy could be in the office all afternoon and not hit the loo. But an even greater consideration was the possibility that Bodo was so protective of his iPad that he didn’t leave it even to go for a slash, perhaps slinging his satchel over his shoulder and taking it with him every time.

  Thus Parlabane had to engineer in Bodo a need to pee so sudden and severe that it would cast all other considerations aside; an urgency that could let nothing slow his path to a urinal in the brief few seconds he had left before he knew he would be pissing like a horse inside his trousers.

  He had remembered Sarah telling him about an experiment she did as a medical undergraduate. Everyone in the group was given an identical white pill: one third were placebos, one third were a mild diuretic and one third were furosemide. They all had to pee into bottles, and at the end of the class they were to measure their urine output. Sarah knew very quickly that she’d been given the furosemide, as its effect on healthy kidneys was dramatic to the point of terrifying.

  Once Bodo ate those doughnuts it was only a matter of time before he had to go, and with the seal broken he’d be going pretty regularly for the rest of the afternoon.

  Parlabane slipped into Bodo’s office and crouched behind the desk, relieved to note that the satchel was still where he’d last seen it. He slid out Bodo’s iPad and removed it from its smart-case, swiftly replacing it with the iPad he’d bought that morning. He popped his prize inside the man-bag and headed for the door, pausing brie
fly to pick up his digital recorder and to give Mairi a big thumbs-up through the window.

  ‘That, Miss Lafferty,’ he said, ‘was international-level piss-ripping.’

  The tone of Mairi’s response didn’t suggest she was quite sharing his elation.

  ‘Jack, a black Audi just pulled up in front of the building, and two of the guys from the other night are getting out of it.’

  ‘Christ.’

  His mind raced through contingencies. They wouldn’t go hauling him out of the office as Bodo had an image to maintain in front of his Bad Candy colleagues, but they’d be lying in wait, perhaps in the stairwell. He should have checked the building layout. He’d have to head up to find an exit, along the roof and down through another building. He would also need to ensure they saw him when he hit the street, so that he could lead them away from this neighbourhood before doubling back.

  ‘Okay, I’m going to have to improvise an exit strategy,’ he said, as he spotted Bodo coming back around the corner from the gents’ toilet.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Mairi told him. ‘I made the last bit up. You were just sounding way too pleased with yourself.’

  Public Interest

  I was in a bit of a dream for most of the next day and night. I felt totally disconnected at times, alternating with stomach-churning confusion when I remembered what was waiting for me back in the real world where I had a fiancé.

  We travelled to Salzburg and played a place called Rockhouse, which looked like a cubist sculpture on the outside, but on the inside was like a giant subway tunnel. From the stage, we could have been playing the Arches under Central Station back in Glasgow.

  Throughout the journey, the soundcheck and the show, I felt strangely isolated from everyone but Heike, the closeness to her undermined by a sense of loneliness. I was caught between worrying about what might happen between us after the gig, and worrying that nothing would. I treasured every smile we shared, every glance that was meant only for me, then fretted that everyone else could read what was going on, that our seemingly subtle intimacies were obvious to anyone outside our circle of two.

  I kept changing my mind as to whether I would be relieved if what happened in Berlin was never repeated, or whether I would feel I had lost something really precious.

  As it turned out, we didn’t get much time alone anyway, all of us gathering around one huge and groaning table of food in a busy café bar. With it getting late, Heike moved round to sit beside me and squeezed my hand under the table out of sight. It felt both exhilaratingly secret and disappointingly quick. With thumping music covering our conversation, she leaned close and spoke what were supposed to be words of reassurance, but they couldn’t have been more ambiguous.

  ‘You’re worried about where this is going,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t have to go anywhere. There’s no pressure. This is just now. It’s whatever you want it to be. Don’t worry about the future until you have to. As the boys are fond of saying, what happens on tour stays on tour.’

  I was woken up by the phone: not my mobile, but the landline by my bed. My first instinct was that I must have overslept and Jan was putting a call through hotel reception. That, or somebody had dialled the wrong room.

  I drowsily managed a ‘Hello’ into the handset, resting my elbow on the pillow.

  An English female voice replied down the line, over the hubbub of a busy office in the background.

  ‘Hello, Monica? Hi, this is Petra Collins at the Daily Mail. I was wondering if you could speak to me a little about your relationship with Heike Gunn.’

  I fumbled for a light switch, the heavy curtains keeping the room in darkness.

  ‘Ehm, I’m sorry,’ I said, stifling a yawn, ‘but I can’t talk about the band unless it’s been cleared through the record company press office.’

  This wasn’t actually true, but it was what Damien told me to say if I ever didn’t want to answer a journalist’s questions.

  ‘Well, it’s not your musical relationship with Ms Gunn that I’m interested in. I was wondering if you could tell me a little about your personal relationship with her.’

  I shuffled my way into a sitting position, my shoulders against the headboard.

  ‘It’s still a matter for the press office. You need to ask for our publicist, Tanya Gallach—’

  ‘It’s just that we’ve got photographs of you and Heike kissing in a lesbian bar in Berlin. They’re already live on our website, but I’m working on some background for tomorrow’s print edition. The person who took them said you were in a clinch for quite some time – twenty minutes on and off – so I’m asking if you’ve any comment. Is this an affair that has blossomed on tour, or were the two of you an item before? Is this why she brought you into the band?’

  I felt like the walls around me were about to collapse, or that I had been suddenly cut adrift on this bed in the middle of a raging flood. I went to hang up but dropped the handset because my hands were like rubber all of a sudden. It bumped off the nightstand and dangled by the cord, spinning slowly. I could still hear the journalist’s voice, tinny and distant.

  ‘What do the other members of the group think about it? Has it caused any tensions?’

  I replaced the handset at the second attempt, then scrambled across to my laptop, my heart thumping and my fingers trembling as I waited for it to boot and the browser to launch.

  They’re already live on our website. The most-visited newspaper website in the world.

  The lead item was a piece about immigration. I scrolled down, seeing nothing, then spotted the link on the infamous ‘sidebar of shame’, to the right of the main story. It was just a thumbnail, but even at that size I recognised us both.

  The link took me to the showbiz section, where they had posted two photos of Heike and me at our table: us sitting close together, face-to-face; then us locked in a kiss. A further link took me to eight more: two sequences shot from different angles. One had been taken through the window, using a zoom lens, and the other was from inside the bar, possibly snapped with a phone.

  I sat staring with my hands on my cheeks, physically shuddering, my breathing becoming deeper until I was starting to hyperventilate.

  A pitiless voice asked me how I couldn’t have seen this coming.

  I had somehow convinced myself we were in a world of our own. Our tour was the land of do-as-you-please, but now I could see I had grown donkey ears. Yesterday my biggest concern had been that someone in the band would pick up on our secret, but I hadn’t worried about the outside world, other than what this meant when the tour was over and I had to go back to reality.

  I thought we were invisible, far from home: out of sight, out of mind. What happens on tour stays on tour.

  Oh God.

  The old saying about tomorrow’s chip wrappers didn’t work any more. Now that these pictures were out there, they were out there for ever.

  My mum was going to see these. Keith was going to see these.

  This realisation plunged me to a new level of despair.

  Keith. My fiancé. I thought of how happy he sounded, telling me about his promotion, our talk of a holiday in Thailand, his cosy plans for the future. He was completely oblivious to all this. It was going to hit him like a train. There was no way he could understand this. There was no way he could forgive this.

  I thought of how long I’d known him, everything we’d shared, everything we assumed we’d share in future. How certain it had all seemed.

  All of it had fallen apart in a matter of seconds.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, numb and paralysed. I was only roused from my trance by a knock at the door, to which I wouldn’t have responded had it not been accompanied by Heike’s voice.

  I zombie-walked across the room and let her in. She was dressed in black trousers and a loose-fitting blouse, which she always wore to travel. It was only as I took this in that I realised I was still in only the T-shirt I’d worn to bed, my feet bare on the carpet.

  From her
expression there was no need to ask if she knew.

  I wandered back to the edge of the bed, a couple of feet from where my laptop sat on the dresser. The screensaver had long since kicked in: rain on a window, droplets running down the screen and distorting the display. To my eyes, they looked like tears streaking the images that stared out from the website.

  I couldn’t find anything to say. I just sat there, glancing from the laptop to where Heike stood, and felt totally helpless.

  She folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘The bus is scheduled to be leaving in about five minutes,’ she said. ‘You need to get your shit together.’

  Her tone was businesslike, the terse side of neutral. There was no warmth in it at all.

  I got the impression I had done something wrong; or at least hadn’t done anything right.

  I had expected her to act as she had done when we both got the nude pictures on our phones: concerned, angry and sorry for dragging me into this. Instead she seemed distant and severe, like I was a problem employee who needed to be dealt with. I had the definite sense that whereas the nude photos had pulled us together, this had driven us apart.

  ‘I can’t go out there,’ I told her, grabbing uselessly at the bottom of my T-shirt, like I could stretch it down to my ankles. I wanted to pull a sheet over my head. ‘I can’t face them. Not if they’ve found out like this.’

  Heike grabbed my pull-along and flipped it open, chucking me a pair of jeans.

  ‘Aye, so, welcome to my world, Monica,’ she said, rattling the space-bar on my laptop and bringing the images back into perfect focus. ‘This says you live there now too, I’m afraid. There’s no escape and no hiding place, so the sooner you get out there the sooner you can start getting used to it.’

  I fought tears, feeling like a wee girl being scolded by her unsympathetic mum.

  ‘I can’t live there,’ I protested. ‘I can’t do this.’

  Heike all but manhandled me into the bathroom with a roll of her eyes. There was no compassion, only impatience. I didn’t understand what I could have done to make her react this way, for her not to see that I was in way over my head and in danger of drowning.