Dead Girl Walking (27 page)

(Donald’s trendy wee sister whom he had always secretly fancied.)

‘Is this … normal for you?’ she asked. ‘I mean…’ She held up her hands, like she couldn’t begin to describe what had just happened.

‘Well, some days I’m mostly on the phone. But it would be true to say that my idea of journalism can be a little idiosyncratic. I don’t crib from press releases. Things might have gone a lot smoother with my wife if I had.’

(Ex-wife.)

Mairi looked puzzled.

‘It’s not like you’re the one who brought this down on us, Jack. It was me who dragged
you
into this.’

‘Yeah, but Sarah might say that if you’d dragged someone
else
into it the situation might not have escalated quite so drastically. She claims I’ve got a habit of finding dangerous situations and effortlessly making them worse.’

‘That doesn’t sound fair to me.’

‘Well, you definitely can’t say I don’t know how to show a girl a good time. We had drinks, went out to dinner, took in some museums, saw a gig, met some interesting new people. To be honest, I don’t know how I’m going to top it on the second date.’

Mairi laughed, and he felt relieved to see her smile. But then she looked rather serious again.

‘Is that what this was? A date?’

And suddenly there was one last danger to negotiate tonight.

Parlabane took a moment to choose his response.

‘This was work,’ he replied.

Mairi let out a tiny laugh, as if to say ‘good answer’, but it was clear that a good answer in this instance wasn’t the same as the right answer, or even the wrong one. It was a way of avoiding the question.

Before she could point this out, he posed her a more pertinent one.

‘While you were in the car, did you notice anything or overhear anything that might give us a clue?’

‘Afraid not. It was all in German. Actually, that’s wrong: I don’t know what language it was in. Something Slavic, maybe, or Russian. I’m pretty sure I heard the name Boris.’

‘That’s what he told me his name was, but I suspect it’s a pseudonym. Did he say
anything
in English? He must have asked you some questions.’

Mairi shook her head.

‘All the time I was expecting him to, and I was terrified about not being able to answer, or being able to answer but not wanting to tell him the truth. But he didn’t ask me a thing. Just prodded away at his iPad. I’d have thought he would at least ask who I was or what I wanted, but it was like I didn’t exist: I was leverage and nothing more.’

‘An iPad,’ Parlabane mused. ‘Did you get a swatch at the screen?’

‘The odd glimpse, but he was in the front seat and he had it angled away most of the time. It must have had some important stuff on it, though, because he was keying in a password every time he woke it up, and it went to sleep if it was idle for about twenty seconds.’

They went to the desk to ask for their room keys, which were attached to metal lozenges the size and weight of a cosh, thus encouraging guests to comply with the hotel’s request not to take them off the premises. The hotel was in a weathered townhouse, with heavy doors on every landing to keep out draughts from the stairwells, and old-school locks on the bedroom doors rather than modern card-swipes.

Parlabane missed proper locks, from a criminal connoisseur’s perspective. There were easy enough ways to fool a card-reader or bypass a code, but there was something altogether more satisfying and accomplished about successfully picking the old metal tumblers.

The bloke on the desk was called Ralf according to the name badge. He went to the pigeonholes and promptly turned around, clutching a thin slip of paper. There was a message.

‘Mr Parlabane?’ he enquired.

Parlabane felt himself stiffen. Nobody but Mairi knew he was here.

‘Yes?’

‘Ah, good. My colleague said you had requested to view our CCTV files. She is gone home now, but she enquired with Florian, our head of security, and it appears he kept the tapes from the day you asked about as there was a minor incident. I can show you.’

Ralf beckoned them behind the desk, where a door led into the back office. The lobby was deserted, and Parlabane guessed the guy was only too happy to indulge them in order to break the monotony of his nightshift.

‘Here,’ he said, and directed them to a computer monitor.

Ralf woke up the screen with a mouse and showed them silent footage of the lobby. It was from the day that Heike disappeared, according to the date-stamp. The time was 12:41, not long after Monica said she had last spoken to Heike.

There was a male figure sitting on one of the couches where Parlabane and Mairi had just been talking. He was facing the door, his back to the camera.

‘He is there a long time,’ Ralf said. ‘More than an hour before this.’

Heike Gunn came barrelling through the lobby, head down, purposeful and hurried in her gait. The man got up and strode out to block her path. There was no audio, but it was clear that he was laying into her: lots of finger-pointing and aggressive body language. Not a lot of ‘I’ statements, Parlabane reckoned.

He couldn’t say Heike gave as good as she got, as it looked like one-way verbal traffic, but her demeanour suggested any time he wanted to go fuck himself would be fine by her. Eventually she did speak, at which point he
really
kicked off, prompting the security guard to hurry over and intervene. Heike let loose a parting salvo as he was physically removed from her path, and shook her head like she really didn’t have time for this.

Mairi was staring at the screen with a look of intense concentration.

‘Do you recognise him?’ Parlabane asked hopefully.

‘He’s familiar. I’m just trying to place where from.’

‘He is on this file also,’ Ralf said. ‘Florian kept all of these in case there was a complaint arising from the incident. This is from the night before.’

Mairi gaped as they watched more soundless footage featuring the same man as in the first tape. This time he was talking to Monica Halcrow. It didn’t appear to be going any better for the guy, as he looked both crestfallen and pissed off by the time Monica got up and walked away.

‘That’s Keith,’ Mairi said. ‘Monica’s fiancé. Ex-fiancé, I should say.’

‘Ex because Heike Gunn led his betrothed astray,’ Parlabane observed. ‘And now it turns out he’s the last person to have seen her before she disappeared.’

‘I don’t follow how this fits in with what happened tonight,’ Mairi said. ‘It seems to be getting more complicated all the time.’

‘Or maybe it just got a lot simpler.’

I remember the first time Keith saw me naked; or part of me at least. Actually it was my right breast, but there was something symbolic about it that felt more like a rite of passage than when we were both finally in the altogether.

It was at his parents’ house on a Thursday morning before Christmas when we were both in sixth year. I had stayed overnight, which was often the case on weekends, but as the last day of term had been the Wednesday, it felt like a Saturday morning. The only difference was, there was nobody else around. Keith’s parents were at work and his sister Ailish was staying over at a friend’s place, which meant I got her bed.

He brought me a cup of tea and a slice of toast just after nine. I had blissfully slept in while people were showering, eating and getting ready for work. Keith sat on the edge of the bed and chatted as I ate. We talked about our plans for the holidays, by which we mainly meant lazing around watching DVDs and stuffing our faces.

I remember that the weather was horrible, rain pelting against the windows like it was determined to get in. It made me feel all the more cosy behind the double-glazed windows, with the central heating blasting out warmth from a radiator that Ailish always kept turned up to max.

We started kissing and I felt so comfortable as I lay there, so snug, so secure and so cherished. When Keith cupped my left breast, which was as far as we usually went, I undid some buttons on my pyjama top and pulled it away from my shoulder.

I’ll never forget the look we shared: he was a bit surprised, a bit unsure if I was definitely okay with this, and, of course, more than bloody delighted. I smiled to reassure him, and his gaze fell slowly upon my breast, happy in the moment but not staring. We both giggled, then he started kissing my neck really slowly. I knew where he was going, and must admit some impatience to know what it would feel like, but I loved the fact that he took his time.

When he finally kissed my nipple, my heart was beating so hard I thought it was going to bounce his lips from my chest. It was scary in a good way.

The next day, he wrote me a letter about it, describing it from his point of view, and telling me what it had meant to him. I thought that was just the sweetest thing. His letter also said this didn’t mean he was making any assumptions about what was next, and especially how soon.

What was next was not soon, but neither did it feel like there was a hurry. It was a gradual process, and every step felt like a gift, though not from me to him. It felt like something both given and received by each of us. And like that first morning, it always felt scary in a good way. We were tapping into something sacred and ancient; something innocent too, and yet exciting for an edge we were skirting, a fear of the forbidden.

Each step brought us closer as a couple: and I don’t mean through the actual removal of the next material barrier – my nightie, my bra, my pair of M&S undies – but through the bond of trust that deepened with every line we crossed.

To let someone see you naked is to give them a special privilege, like showing a secret self. So it has to be at your own deciding, and that decision must be a free one.

Why am I saying this?

Thankfully, the reason is not as obvious as it might have been.

We didn’t hang around in Nice. The bus set off at nine the next morning. Heike got a lot of resentful looks as she boarded, and on another day it might have been funny to see so many people in Savage Earth Heart T-shirts giving her the stink eye.

‘They stuck to their script,’ she had told me the night before, just as I was about to close my eyes in search of sleep. ‘The girls who got taken off the bus said they were part of the tour, hired by Bad Candy’s marketing division, and of course fucking Jan had the accreditations to prove it.’

Heike had told me this only once the lights were out. When she said the next part I understood why.

‘They also told the cops that I had pulled this whole stunt because I’m a dyke who was pissed off that they had all rebuffed my advances.’

I couldn’t see her face but from her voice I knew she was crying.

On this final leg, there were no incidents around the French–Italian border, and we made it to our hotel in Milan around the end of lunchtime.

Having once heard some been-there-seen-it-done-it idiot colleague of Keith’s slag off Milan as a grim industrial place, I was ready for somewhere that at its best would look like Birmingham on a sunny day. Instead, within half an hour of dumping my bag in my room, I was at a pavement café with Heike, Scott and Damien, sipping cappuccinos while beautiful people cruised up and down the broad boulevard on Piaggio scooters.

A group of locals came up and asked if they could have their photo taken with us. We obliged and signed autographs. They seemed so thrilled, bursting with disbelieving happiness at this chance meeting and probably posting on Facebook within minutes. It was a nice reminder of why we were in this. The sun was warm and the architecture all around me was captivating. In a few hours’ time I would be playing to a sell-out crowd at Alcatraz, performing with a band that was getting more electrifying with every show. Life was looking pretty good.

Then I heard the chime of a text pinging into my phone, and a few seconds later everything was poisoned.

My phone didn’t recognise who it was from, listing only a number. The text just said:

Stay out of our business and we stay out of yours.

With the sender anonymous and the message so vague, I thought it might have been sent by accident. Then I noticed there was an image attached. I tapped to download, my curiosity overcoming my caution at the possible roaming charges. It was my last act in a cosseted world where the price of an image was measured in pounds or euros.

My phone screen showed a photograph of me naked, stepping out of the shower in what I recognised as the bathroom I had shared with Heike last night.

I felt my face flush and my stomach tighten; confusion, anger, fear and disbelief threatening to overwhelm me. How was this possible?

Even as I looked in horror at the image I heard a chime from another of the three phones on the table. I watched as, almost in slow motion, Heike reached for it.

I wanted to stop her, wanted to tell her not to look, but I felt paralysed. It was like I was separated from the scene behind thick glass. Even if I could find my voice, I couldn’t warn her without letting the others know why.

I watched the same horror wash over her, the same shock. She glanced towards me and noticed I was mirroring her expression and her pose, my phone suddenly held like it had become a grenade. A whole conversation took place in one wordless moment between us. We were both under siege but we had to pretend all was normal until we could get away from Scott and Damien.

Somehow I forced down the rest of my coffee, but it tasted of nothing. I felt like the sun had dimmed, the colours faded, the buildings closed in.

We ditched the guys and climbed into a cab, saying we were going to look at shoes, then as soon as they were out of sight, told the driver to take us to the venue.

‘That Dutch bastard was behind this,’ Heike hissed, keeping her voice low despite the driver appearing to speak no English. ‘He booked us into the same room and we only got one keycard. He must have used the other to get in and plant a miniature camera. Christ, I feel like I might throw up.’

So did I, but weirdly the cab ride helped settle my stomach. As the driver sped along inches behind other cars, through gaps in the traffic, the tension stopped the churning sensation threatening to make me puke.