Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  That’s the kind of guy he was. And I had just shagged him. The chemistry between us was simply lust with nothing beyond it, no fascination with each other’s personality and presence.

  By contrast, I had wanted to be in Heike’s company constantly, like I was pulled in by gravity. I had thought about her all the time, wondered what she was thinking, felt something radiate inside me when we shared a smile. I had been drawn to her for reasons and by things that seemed to make gender incidental. When we kissed, there had been an innocence to it, like a kiss was everything in and of itself. It was not a prelude or an overture: I hadn’t thought beyond it, about what it might lead to. In that sense it had reminded me of a time when that was how it felt with Keith.

  I missed her, and I wondered if, beneath all the anger and the sulks, she missed me too.

  Unfortunately, our chances of making up were not helped when she saw me leaving Rory’s room. As soon as I stepped into the corridor a door opened across the hall, and there she was. She’d been in 307, Rory in 304. What were the bloody odds. She left it ajar just long enough to ensure I knew she had seen me, then closed it again.

  As I stood there with my hair a mess and in serious need of a shower, I heard the sound of a TV from 305: someone watching CNN. It wasn’t loud, but I could make out every word, which was when I realised the sound insulation was non-existent.

  We had been really noisy, and Heike would have heard it all. She must have been waiting for me to come out so that she could communicate this. She had an expression of what I took to be disdain, but at the time my own feelings clouded my reading.

  Looking back, I realised she mostly looked hurt.

  As always, it was Damien who started the healing efforts, as he was concerned that the wall of ice on stage was detracting from the overall impact of the shows.

  ‘You two need to sort this out,’ he said to me on the bus to Dortmund.

  You two, he said, but he wasn’t talking to both of us. Heike was sitting a couple of rows forward, headphones on. I took this to mean he wanted me to make the first move.

  ‘You think I should apologise?’ I asked, keeping my voice down in case Heike’s iPod wasn’t playing as loud as I thought. ‘Ask her to apologise.’

  Way to go, Mon. Very mature.

  ‘It’s not about who’s to blame. It’s about moving on. It’s about what’s best for the band.’

  ‘Heike finds it kind of difficult to tell between what’s best for the band and what’s best for Heike. That’s why she started kissing me for the cameras just to help boost “Stolen Glances”.’

  Damien’s face crumpled.

  ‘Wait, you’re saying that’s what this is all about? That you think Heike had something to do with the press catching you two…’

  ‘How the hell else do you think it happened?’ I asked him.

  ‘No idea, but I can tell you for sure Heike would never do that. Are you kidding me? Sell herself to the press? To the Daily Heil?’

  ‘You never know how mercenary you can be until the choice is put in front of you, Damien. Do you remember telling me about a lifeboat with only room for one?’

  He looked wounded and I felt shitty for what I’d said, but it was out there now, and I felt the point needed to be made.

  Damien sighed.

  ‘I’ve known Heike a lot longer than you, Monica. I know what she is and isn’t capable of. She can be selfish, arrogant, controlling, careerist and the most infuriatingly bloody-minded person on the planet. But what goes along with it all is that she is utterly brazen when she’s in the wrong: full, over-compensating defiance as it gets harder and harder for her to back down.’

  ‘So you’re saying I just have to ride it out? That I’m only making it worse by expecting her to apologise for what she’s done?’

  ‘No. Because that’s not what’s going on here. Heike isn’t acting brazen: she’s in the huff, and that only happens when somebody’s hurt her feelings. It only happens when she’s the one who’s been wronged.’

  It took a few seconds for logic to defuse my emotions, and even then I couldn’t quite get the importance of what Damien was telling me. Kind of like you can’t quite make out the rock wall in front of you is actually a mountain because it’s so huge.

  Oh.

  Dear.

  God.

  How do you say sorry for that?

  The short answer is you can’t. Not to Heike.

  Nothing I said made a dent, and I could understand why. I was the one she had trusted most, the one she had opened up to. I was the one she had taken risks on, taken risks for.

  I was the one she had kissed, then I’d called her Judas for it.

  She would never forgive me.

  Last Days of the Disappeared

  She did speak to me a couple of times after I admitted my mistake, or more like talked at me, laying down what she was dealing with. I think it was part of my punishment that she was going to outline how much she was hurting but not let me do anything to help.

  The last time I spoke with her in any depth was in Rostock, after we had played a club called Moya. It was an intimate venue, a place where the crowd really went for it, and where there seemed to be an unspoken gratitude for us having come beyond the usual cities of the German circuit. The owner told me the crowds in Hamburg and Munich would never understand what it meant to watch a band rock out up here on the Baltic ‘because they never grew up listening to DDR radio’.

  The show felt special. We all came off stage on a high, and I thought that maybe the ice was melting. Heike and I found ourselves together alone in a chill-out area, quite possibly engineered by our colleagues. I thought it might be the first glimmer of a new beginning. Instead all I saw was the beginning of the end.

  There was almost nothing she said that didn’t worry me about her mental state.

  ‘We’ll be in Berlin in two days,’ she told me blankly. ‘It was my request that we finish up the European tour there. I was delighted when the first night sold out and we added another. I had it in my head as a secret kind of homecoming. Now it seems like the closer we get, the more I just feel dread.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, pleasantly surprised that she might be confiding in me again about her mum.

  ‘Because of what’s coming after.’

  She meant the launch of the third album and the US tour.

  ‘We’ll blow them away,’ I said, undercutting my bravado with a self-conscious smile. It was my way of letting her know I shared her anxiety but believed that we had what it took.

  It didn’t penetrate. I’m not sure anything would. I’m not sure she was even listening.

  ‘I don’t think I’m capable of holding all this together. I’m not sure I can keep being the person everybody else needs me to be. I don’t even know what I’m more afraid of: success or failure. You think what the press did to us last week was tough? This is early days. They’ve only just noticed me. Once this album is out there, with all that big-label machinery pushing it forward, the person I used to be will be gone for ever, buried under the masks and costumes of the persona I’ll need to inhabit.’

  She took a sip from her glass. She was on whisky again, rather than beer. Bad sign. She’d bought a whole bottle of it from the bar.

  ‘Everyone thinks I know exactly where I’m going, and that I’d do anything to get there. The truth is I’m lost, and I’m not even the one driving this thing. Do you know who Richey James Edwards was?’

  A few months ago, no would have been the answer, but I’d been on a non-stop crash-course in rock history through living around Damien.

  ‘The guy from the Manic Street Preachers who went missing,’ I said.

  ‘They were about to embark on a big US tour in support of their third album. The first track is called “Yes”, and it’s all about how you have to sell yourself in this business, become someone you’re not. He couldn’t face it.’

  She stared into her drink: Bowmore, distilled on Islay, a long way from the world she fo
und herself in now.

  ‘Part of me wants to disappear. Walk away on the verge of this album’s release and never be seen again. Let a myth grow up around me instead: the real version can only disappoint.’

  Her words made me remember other late-night conversations we’d had on this tour, and I began to wonder if I’d heard what she was really telling me.

  ‘Did you know that suicide rates actually go down during times of war and crisis?’ she had said to me in Zagreb. We were talking about the Balkan conflict of the early nineties, about what some of the people we had met that day might have seen and done. I should have realised that Heike was really talking about herself.

  ‘Some people create chaos around themselves, make their lives seemingly impossible, and we ask ourselves why. The truth is that they do it because they need the outside world to reflect what’s going on inside their heads. War and crisis does that for them. Suddenly, for once, the world makes sense.

  ‘It’s why I’m addicted to this,’ she went on, meaning her music, her lifestyle, the band, touring. ‘Even though it’s chaotic and out of control and it threatens to overwhelm me, I need it, and I’m afraid of what would happen if I didn’t have it any more.’

  She poured herself another worryingly big measure of malt and swigged back about a third of it in one go. It must have burned, but there were harder things to swallow.

  ‘We’re already booked to play Letterman, did you know that?’

  I didn’t. And now that she’d told me, I was already crapping myself.

  ‘I’m on the verge of this massive exposure, this major breakthrough, and I just feel adrift. I’m not sure I can face what’s in front of me, but I do know that once I’ve had it, losing it again would be unbearable.’

  Looking back, that’s when I should have said, ‘Catch on to yourself, Heike.’ I didn’t feel such a thing was any more my right. I didn’t think she would listen, and I was cowardly, afraid she’d kick off or even storm out.

  That was when I failed her, because maybe that was my cue. Maybe she needed me to risk her anger because I cared enough to do so. Maybe that would have made things different. Maybe she’d have let me in again.

  Maybe she’d still today be here.

  Zero Option

  Mairi told the driver the name of their hotel, but Parlabane advised her to alter the destination.

  ‘We can’t go back there until we’re sure we’re not being observed.’

  ‘How can we be sure? I was pretty bloody sure when we jumped in that last cab, and then they appeared inside the dome. How the hell did they find us?’

  Parlabane thought of Bodo’s nonchalant lack of urgency, seeming as interested in his phone as he was in his quarry.

  He swiped the iPad to waken it, looking for a list of all active programs.

  ‘Remember you said there had to be something else on this thing? Well, I suspect there is: a secondary tracking app. Talk about belt and braces: he really didn’t want this thing stolen. His default Find My iPad app was essentially functioning as a decoy, because it’s the first thing a thief would disable.’

  ‘Can you disable this other one?’

  ‘No. I can’t even switch the iPad off: the tracking app must be designed to keep it running.’

  ‘So throw it out the window.’

  ‘Not yet. I want to copy the database, Bodo’s emails and the hotel room hidden-camera files to an iFlash drive.’

  ‘Then we need to get underground,’ Mairi said, instructing the driver to hang a left on Friedrichstrasse and take them to the U-Bahn station.

  They ran down the stairs to the U6 line, Mairi stepping carefully in her bare feet.

  Parlabane glanced at the progress of the transfer to his memory stick as they waited on the platform. It was getting there, but taking far longer than it should, given the sizes of the files. Something else was draining resources and busying the memory.

  Mairi was staring in consternation at her phone.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Checking my location. Successfully, I’m afraid. We’re not deep enough. If I can get a GPS signal down here, then so can that thing.’

  ‘We need to keep moving. I just need a little more time.’

  They boarded the first train, heading south, both of them casting anxious glances back along the platform until the doors closed.

  Parlabane took a seat and returned his attention to the iPad. He didn’t like what he saw. The transfer was complete, but he now knew what had been slowing it down.

  ‘I think we just got proof positive that there is something else on here that Bodo doesn’t want us to see. The problem is that he’s taken the zero option now that he knows for sure who’s got it. The tracking app is going into emergency mode and performing a remote wipe of the files. In a little while the only thing it will leave running is the shell of the OS and anything it needs to keep sending out its GPS signature.’

  ‘Did you copy the files you need?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So let’s get off at the next stop and leave it on the train.’

  ‘Two more stops,’ he countered, frantically navigating through folders.

  ‘Are you suicidal?’

  ‘The app is deleting automatically, so at least Bodo hasn’t been able to specify what gets wiped first. There might still be time to find something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He didn’t know. Almost everything on it was in German, so there was no way of knowing what terms to search for, never mind knowing what files were worth copying before the digital axe fell. He had to triage rapidly. The only material worth the effort of saving right now would be files in English: anything German was a stab in the dark. Files were being annihilated by the millisecond and he didn’t want the last thing he salvaged to turn out to be Bodo’s iTunes playlist.

  ‘I need search terms,’ he said. ‘Words that might quickly identify that a file or part of a document is in English.’

  ‘You mean like “the” or “and”?’

  ‘Too general. We’d get a load of EULAs and manuals.’

  Mairi sighed in exasperation.

  ‘Well, how about searching for Heike Gunn? Or would that be too obvious?’

  Parlabane gawped.

  ‘I’d slap myself on the forehead but I need both hands to type.’

  He keyed in the words and hit return, holding his breath as he awaited the response. About a dozen results filled the window, referencing emails in Bodo’s legit Bad Candy account. He scrolled down, hoping to find one from the alias account, but he found a more conspicuous outlier: a text file named ‘MHTB’. He pasted a copy onto the iFlash drive, then opened the original.

  The screen filled with text.

  I will always associate the sound of the fiddle with my grandfather.

  It was the sound I heard whenever I went to his house, and whenever he came over to ours. I mean, it wasn’t like he carried the thing about with him all the time, just that I have a more vivid recollection of those visits when he had his violin with him.

  Parlabane looked to Mairi, who was reading over his shoulder, her eyes almost on stalks.

  ‘MHTB,’ she said in a stunned whisper. ‘Monica Halcrow’s Tour Blog.’

  Redacted Details

  There were times when, despite your best efforts and your most cherished principles, you still ended up having to act as much of a sleazy prick as any Dacre disciple or Murdoch minion. There was no sugar-coating it. Sure, he had been pushed in front of a train and chased all across Berlin; the stakes were undoubtedly high, with a bright young woman still inexplicably missing. But what he was perusing right now was not the hacked laptop of some spoiled Tory or the incriminating data files of a thuggish sex trafficker. He was reading the candid and intimate private journal of a vulnerable girl half his age.

  They sat in Parlabane’s hotel room like two wretched reviewers speed-reading a Harry Potter novel so that they could fire out a pointless five hundred words
in the next day’s paper. Monica Halcrow and the Fiddle of Sappho was light on spells and boarding schools, heavy on jealousy and sexual tension.

  Parlabane was scrolling through it on his Ultrabook, Mairi on her iPad. Every so often one of them would look up and tantalisingly ask ‘Have you got to the bit where…?’ but ultimately it offered precious little insight. The blog just seemed to flesh out details of what they already knew, with the only revelation to carry genuine shock value being that an innocent abroad on her first tour had taken a remarkably short time to plumb the true depths of rock depravity in shagging a drummer.

  Both reviewers also felt compelled to conclude that the ending was a bummer.

  ‘It looks like Heike was in a very bad way, psychologically,’ Mairi observed, concern bordering on dread creeping into her tone.

  ‘No shit,’ Parlabane agreed. ‘She’s talking about disappearing and letting a myth grow up around her.’

  ‘I can’t help thinking this can’t be the whole story, though. Or am I looking for something that isn’t there because I don’t want to accept what is?’

  ‘It’s not the whole story,’ Parlabane stated. ‘For one thing, it ends in Rostock, with several dates still to play. And look at how it ends: with Monica beating herself up that she didn’t do enough to intervene in Heike’s downward spiral, like she’s writing this after the fact.’

  ‘You’re right. I mean, I’ve not spoken to her in a while, but as far as I know, Monica isn’t even aware that Heike’s missing. And yet the final thoughts on her blog imply she’s guilt-ridden, saying if she’d done things differently, Heike would still be here today.’

  Parlabane pointed to the last paragraph on Mairi’s iPad.

  ‘Specifically it says: “Maybe she’d still today be here”. And that wee bit of Yoda-speak follows on from “I didn’t feel such a thing was any more my right”. These last few paragraphs Monica’s writing are not.’

  ‘It’s been edited,’ Mairi said, shaking her head in mild irritation at how obvious this should have been. ‘Of course it’s been edited. But why would you censor someone’s private journal?’