Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Yes you can. I hate to use the expression, but you’re just going to have to man up, because this is going to get a shitload worse before there’s any glimmer of it getting better.’

  She sure got that right.

  I sat on the bus unable to look at anybody. Damien had patted my shoulder as I went past, the gesture enough to push me over the edge into more crying. I also briefly caught Rory’s eye. He had looked sympathetic and sheepish, but all I could think about was the time I heard him talk about images of Heike and her lovers being lodged in people’s ‘spank banks’.

  This was a special kind of hell.

  I turned towards the window, feeling awful and looking every bit of it too. Occasionally we’d pass a building tall enough for the shadow to turn the bus window into a cloudy mirror. My face was teary and swollen, and my sojourn in catatonia had cost me the chance of a shower and the opportunity to even wash my hair.

  My phone started to ring about twenty minutes into the journey.

  Keith.

  I just couldn’t answer. How could I speak to him?

  I was trying to think if there was any way I could spin this. The Scottish catch-all excuse of being a bit pissed wasn’t going to cover it. What did that leave? ‘It’s not what it looks like.’ Well, it looks like we’re kissing in a women-only lesbian bar.

  I pressed ignore. Thirty seconds later he was ringing again.

  Heike was right: there was no hiding place, but I just wasn’t ready yet. I switched my phone off completely.

  I wondered why she was being so remote, why this wasn’t us against the world, but something I needed to get over instead. Man up, she had said. My distress obviously meant a lot less to her than her own anger, which seemed so unfair. But was it?

  I kept thinking how it wasn’t my fault, and that was true, but maybe there was a difference between blame and responsibility.

  I remembered that Heike had been living like this for a long time: ever since ‘Do It to Julia’ had brought her to mainstream attention. Once the tabloids found out that the outspoken and glamorous singer behind this international hit was gay, they had been all over her life. They even made the mistaken assumption, mainly from the title, that the song had some kind of lesbian message. As Heike put it: ‘You can’t expect the subliterate cockwombles on the Daily Heil showbiz and gossip desks to have read Orwell.’

  It was a song about human weakness, and how we shouldn’t judge each other too harshly for it: pretty much the antithesis of the British tabloids’ stock-in-trade.

  They had doorstepped Heike, offered money to her girlfriends for kiss-and-tell stories, but no one had come forward. There had been art before, but they never had an angle. Even Heike snogging a member of her band wasn’t enough to get these pictures promoted from the website to the paper. For that, they needed a story, and I felt my stomach drop again as I realised I had given them one.

  I had a fiancé.

  They might not be aware of that, though. What would anybody at a tabloid know about an obscure fiddler who had only properly joined the band a few months back? By way of answer, I asked myself instead how hard it would be to find out. One call to my mum would do it.

  Oh God. The thought of sleazy hacks calling up my mum – of me bringing this to her door – was almost impossible to take. How could something as tender as a few kisses cause so much hurt?

  I switched on my phone and called home. It was engaged. Before I could try again, it buzzed with an incoming call. Keith.

  I thought of Heike’s words from the hotel.

  This was where I lived now. I had to do this.

  I pressed answer.

  ‘Keith,’ I said, my voice dry.

  ‘Monica. Where are you?’

  His voice was hollow and distant, and it was nothing to do with the signal.

  ‘Outside Salzburg. On my way to Zurich.’

  His question seemed absurd, my answer irrelevant. It was like we were practising for a conversation, not yet ready to really talk.

  ‘I got a call from a reporter. A woman from the Daily Mail.’

  Probably the same woman who had called me. If I hadn’t been so spineless, I could have phoned him right away to warn him.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Keith, you have to believe me, I—’

  He talked over me. It was like he hadn’t heard me, like he was in a state of numb shock.

  ‘She made out like she was doing a general piece on you as a musician. She asked me about us. I told her I’d known you since we were kids. I told her we were getting married.’

  I could feel tears run down my face as I held the phone to my cheek. I had done this to him. That sneaky cow of a reporter had conned him, but I had done this.

  I expected him to be angry. Instead he just sounded hurt, his voice weak, his words confused and defeated.

  He had more questions than accusations, and they were the questions of someone who already knew that the answers wouldn’t help.

  This was just as well, as I didn’t have any.

  ‘Why did I have to find out like this?’

  ‘Have you any idea how humiliated I am?’

  ‘How am I going to face people?’

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Is this why you joined the band?’

  ‘Have you always had these feelings, for women?’

  ‘Are you sleeping with her?’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  I had nothing to give him, other than apologies, which I knew were worthless.

  ‘It just happened,’ was as much of an explanation as I could manage.

  I was about to add that ‘it meant nothing’, but caught myself.

  It was the title of Heike’s song about betrayal, one that nailed how this statement was never true.

  It didn’t mean nothing. It meant I didn’t love him.

  If I loved him, I wouldn’t have been in that bar telling Heike: ‘I won’t run away.’ I’d have thanked her, said I understood, accepted it as a compliment, a sign of a strong and treasured friendship. But I didn’t. I kissed her. That meant everything.

  I knew there was no making this right, even if he’d let me, even if he wanted me to. The girl who left to go on this tour was never coming back. The girl he had become engaged to didn’t exist any more.

  Flesh Trade

  Mairi opened her bedroom door and flung her arms around him before he could even step inside, let alone castigate her for almost giving him a coronary.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘I’m so glad you’re back safe.’

  ‘And I’d be safe with clean underpants if you hadn’t had your wee joke.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told him, closing the door. ‘It’s just, I lived and died a hundred times watching you over there, sitting a few feet from the guy, and you seemed perfectly comfortable, to the point of smug. I mean, I know you were the one with your head in the noose, but…’

  ‘I understand. Any football manager will tell you it’s hell to be watching from the sidelines, kicking every ball in your head. And if I seemed pleased with myself, it was purely relief at having got away with it.’

  ‘You haven’t got away with it yet,’ she cautioned. ‘When will we know if it’s worked?’

  He tried very, very hard not to look self-satisfied.

  ‘It worked five minutes ago. I received the code before I even made it down the stairs.’

  He held up Bodo’s iPad, already unlocked and the security disabled.

  ‘It’s a simple act of legerdemain,’ he had told Mairi a few hours back as he installed the software on to his newly purchased iPad. ‘It worked with Anthony Mead and it will work with Boris too. What’s crucial is that the wallpaper is the same, and so are any icons partially overlapped by the password interface. The hardest part with Mead was precisely matching the make and model of laptop, right down to the stickers detailing the spec. That’s not a problem with something as standardised and generic as an iPad, especially wh
en you’re swapping it into the same case.’

  ‘So you swapped Mead’s laptop for one of your own?’

  ‘Kind of. In Mead’s case he was under the impression it had been lost and then found.’

  ‘But the important thing is that he thought it was the same machine.’

  ‘Correct. This software fakes a sleep or hibernation mode: it can even imitate the boot sequence if you want it to look like the device has been off altogether. Then it presents the user with the usual familiar password screen in order to log on properly. The user keys in his password, but it tells him it’s incorrect. He keys it again, helpfully giving us confirmation, but it’s never going to let him in because that would give the game away. Meantime this programme logs the passwords that were input and immediately sends them to an email account I can access from my phone. The real beauty of it is that he won’t know anything is wrong until he’s given us what we need.’

  Mairi ran a finger almost reverently across the screen, like she had never seen a data tablet before.

  ‘All right,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘You’re entitled to look pretty chuffed with yourself now.’

  She was looking into his eyes, their faces only inches apart. The smell of her was all around him, and the warmth of her body seemed so close that in his mind he could already feel it pressed against him. He understood that if he moved forward slightly, if he gave even the merest inclination of his head, they would kiss.

  He knew it was what she wanted. He wanted it too, but there was something, still, that wouldn’t let him.

  ‘I think we should hold off on the self-congratulation until we’ve seen whether it tells us anything useful,’ he said, turning his gaze to the iPad.

  Mairi sighed, venting a frustration that he didn’t flatter himself by interpreting as being entirely about what had almost just happened.

  ‘I need to get out of this place,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve been cooped up in this hotel for days. I need air, I need space.’

  Parlabane refrained from pointing out that she had just spent the past few hours outdoors, albeit on a roof. He understood what she was feeling. The tension of not only the last few hours but the last few days was making her feel trapped.

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Dinner. And a view of something other than that place across the road.’

  They booked a taxi from reception, in order to minimise their on-street exposure. Having gone to such efforts of disguise and subterfuge, Parlabane anticipated the twisted irony of Bodo walking out of his building just in time to recognise Mairi and his recent visitor standing on the pavement opposite, trying to hail a cab.

  The taxi turned up after a couple of minutes and they hurried across the pavement, heads down like it was raining.

  Mairi gave the driver their destination, while Parlabane was getting busy with the fruit of his day’s labours. He had already changed the operating system language to English for ease of navigating through the architecture, though that wasn’t going to help in making sense of Bodo’s files.

  ‘What’s German for needle?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘In case I happen upon it inside this digital haystack.’

  Parlabane scrolled through Bodo’s emails, scanning principally for names, as they were the same in any language. Most were to his primary address at the Bad Candy domain, but roughly a third were addressed to an alias account. Parlabane separated them so that each account displayed in a separate window, concentrating first on the unofficial business.

  ‘Oops,’ he said pointedly, directing Mairi’s gaze towards the screen.

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Something familiar.’

  She stared at the iPad, Parlabane taking a moment to look at her while her attention was so intently fixed on the screen. The taxi glided towards Unter den Linden, passing the Humboldt Box on the left and Museumsinsel on the right. He recalled stealing such glances back in another age. She was no less beguiling now, and yet seemed no less forbidden to him. He just couldn’t work out why.

  ‘Jan,’ she stated, spotting it. ‘This is his email address. But this is Bad Candy business: from what I can gather, it’s something to do with truck hire for Prelude to the Slaughter’s gigs in Poland next month. Why oops?’

  Parlabane pointed to the other window.

  ‘Because he’s forgotten to switch log-ins when he sent this email to Bodo’s other account. This proves he’s in on whatever else is going on. A whole raft of this correspondence could well be from him, when he’s remembered to use his own unofficial account.’

  ‘Yeah. Just wish we had the first clue what they’re chatting about.’

  The taxi dropped them off at the Reichstag. Mairi had expressed her intention to dine somewhere that was in marked contrast to last night’s rather cloistered repast. It was after six and neither of them had eaten anything substantial since breakfast. They made their way up to the Käfer restaurant, on the roof alongside Norman Foster’s gigantic glass dome.

  Parlabane didn’t appreciate how hungry he was until the food was presented to him, wolfing down mouthfuls with an undignified haste that was further exacerbated by his impatience to turn his attention back to the iPad.

  It felt like a perfect tableau of why all his relationships were ultimately doomed: a spectacular setting, a beautiful meal, an ideal companion, and him unable to truly appreciate any of those things as his focus was fixed upon an object he had just stolen so that he could work out why somebody had been trying to kill him.

  On the plus side, he was at least getting somewhere with that.

  ‘There’s an email here in English,’ he reported. ‘Looks like it must have been the common language for an exchange with a Danish guy who doesn’t speak German.’

  ‘Danish?’

  ‘Yeah. Bodo appears to be chartering a boat. Tomorrow, in fact. From Esbjerg.’

  ‘Anything else in English? Or Spanish? I speak a bit of that.’

  ‘Not so far. That’s why I’m switching my efforts to the non-textual.’

  ‘Images? Do you reckon Bodo and his people may have had a hand in tipping off whoever took those Daily Mail pictures?’

  ‘It’s possible. The video shoot and the free gig were both at the Brauereihallen, so it wouldn’t be a stretch for some Bad Candy apparatchik to have been tailing them that night.’

  ‘I think those photos are another reason Monica’s not best pleased with me,’ Mairi confessed.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘She called me up when they went viral, like she thought there was something I could do about it. I could have been more sympathetic, I guess, but I was angry about the situation myself. I had warned her when she joined the band: romantic relationships between band members on tour are a crawling horror. She told me I had nothing to worry about when it came to her: she was happily engaged. I guess reminding her of that conversation wasn’t the most sensitive thing I could have done at that point.’

  Parlabane ran a search for images and video files, hoping that Bodo’s browser cache wasn’t about to reveal a scat-porn fetish that would have him spewing up his dinner.

  It didn’t, but what it did disclose was no less sickening.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, placing the iPad on the table where they could both see it.

  The search had thrown up a number of similarly posed head-and-shoulder shots of girls, distinct from the hundreds of other thumbnails that had inevitably populated the results. Parlabane had gone to the file location on a random sample and been repeatedly taken to the same document.

  ‘It’s a database,’ he said. ‘Dozens of girls, each with a profile and several other fields. These numbers could be earnings – or debts.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Mairi said. ‘Ages. Physical measurements. I don’t want to even speculate as to what some of these other statistics might be. And that looks like … Oh my God.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This stu
ff at the bottom of each profile. It’s in German, but I think I know what it is. I used to work in marketing, and this looks like feedback analysis data. We used a programme that collated…’

  Mairi put her hand over her mouth. For a moment he thought she was going to gag. Her expression suggested it was still possible.

  ‘Collated what?’ he asked, bracing himself.

  ‘Satisfaction surveys.’

  She pushed her plate to the side, like she could no longer bear to look at the food still sitting there, far less eat it.

  ‘I’m starting to wish I’d spiked his doughnut with something that would make him piss blood.’

  ‘Much as I’d agree, it wouldn’t help us any,’ Mairi replied, her voice slightly dry from bitterness. ‘This is nightmarish stuff, but I still don’t see how it links to Heike.’

  ‘Only insofar as it proves she was on the money regards what was really going on with the merchandising girls. Maybe the bus incident wasn’t her final attempt to throw a spanner in the works.’

  Mairi stared at him across the table, wide-eyed and almost accusatory.

  ‘Are you saying he could have killed her, for getting in the way of his business?’

  Parlabane knew he couldn’t sugar-coat this. She had to understand what they might be dealing with.

  ‘He had someone throw me under a train just for taking his photograph. I think we might need to prepare ourselves for the worst.’

  Mairi put her hands to her temples, elbows on the table like her head suddenly weighed too much. It couldn’t have been the first time that this possibility had struck her, but that fine membrane between the hypothetical and the genuinely probable had finally ruptured.

  ‘Oh Jesus.’

  Her eyes were filling up.

  ‘I’ve been kidding myself, haven’t I? Thinking I’m on some kind of adventure here with you, that’s going to end with us finding Heike safe and sound after some, I don’t know, silly misunderstanding; or us snatching her from the clutches of Eurotrash gangsters and laughing about it in a couple of months’ time backstage in LA. We’re looking for a dead person, aren’t we?’