Dead Girl Walking (3 page)

Sitting in a railway station café seemed appropriate: a neutral space, transitory, temporary. He didn’t belong anywhere right now. He wanted out of London, but there wasn’t much waiting for him back in Edinburgh either.

Since he returned from his disastrously vainglorious quest to ‘get back in the game with one swing’, as Officer Mitchell astutely put it, he had spent recent weeks crashing in spare rooms and on settees while he tried to sort out something more permanent. He was not so much reaping a dividend of long-standing goodwill on the part of old friends as feeling like a charity case. They all wanted to help him out because they felt sorry for him, but though they were prepared to offer him a berth, it was horribly awkward. Christ, it wasn’t like anybody wanted to sit up late with a couple of bottles, blethering like they used to. How could they?

‘Well, Jack, what will we talk about first: the break-up of your marriage or the death of your career?’

He wasn’t enjoying the coffee, or the joyless atmosphere of the café, but nor was he in a hurry to get on that train. He knew he wouldn’t be travelling hopefully and he wasn’t looking forward to what awaited him when he arrived. At least sitting in this place he had an excuse for doing nothing.

There was a line between reasonably describing one’s status as freelance and more honestly calling it unemployed. He had crossed it a while back and was now wandering the hazy borderlands of the next such marker: the one that lay between the terms ‘unemployed journalist’ and ‘former journalist’.

It was busy on the other side of that line, the arse having fallen out of the industry as it struggled to accept that we were effectively in the post-print era. There were still jobs to be had, filling up the content-ravenous beasts that roamed the new digital landscape, but not for journalists. Parlabane’s problem was not so much that nobody would hire him: it was that the job he did no longer existed.

He felt the buzz of his mobile from his jacket pocket. The absence of a ringtone was a legacy of times when it went off so often that the noise was as irritating as it was unnecessary, and the device seldom off his person anyway. Nowadays the fact that it was still only on vibrate was mildly embarrassing: on the rare occasions that it sounded, it merely served to tell him he was kidding himself.

The screen showed a number rather than a name. He sighed. That most likely meant he was dealing with a misdial or about to hear some recorded spam. He answered anyway.

‘Hello. Is that … Jack?’ asked a female voice.

‘Depends,’ he replied, instantly regretting it for both its pitiful defensiveness and the fact that it made him sound like a twat. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Mairi,’ she said.

‘Mairi who?’ he replied, thinking it was turning into a knock-knock joke. Punchline: ‘Mairi whoever you like, Sarah’s divorcing you, arsehole.’

‘Mairi Lafferty. Do you remember me? Donald’s sister.’

Donald. Jesus.

It was a sledgehammer to the psyche when he realised his old friend had been dead longer than he ever knew him. And to that Parlabane could add the survivor’s guilt of realising how long it had been since he’d even thought of the guy.

‘Mairi. Sure. I haven’t seen you…’

(… since the funeral.)

‘Yeah,’ she said, not wanting to go there either. ‘You’re in Edinburgh now, is that right?’

‘Not this second. I’m actually at King’s Cross, waiting for a train.’

‘Don’t get on it. I need to talk to you about something. In person.’

Parlabane hadn’t seen Mairi in fifteen years, but they had clearly been kind to her. She stood in the doorway of a Hoxton flat dressed in black designer jeans and a leather jacket, her hair in a tinted black bob that looked expensively tasteful, matching her skin tone so as not to draw attention to the dye-job. He knew she had to be forty-one or forty-two, so she was maybe on the cusp of dressing a little young for her age, but she was carrying it off.

Back in another lifetime, Mairi had been Donald’s trendy little sister: brassy, stylish and constantly insinuating herself into her big brother’s world, where she wasn’t welcome; at least not in Donald’s view. There was one lurking in the background of every male adolescence: the mate’s younger sister who you secretly fancied but you knew it was wrong and anyway it was never going to happen. She was way too cool for you, and even if your seniority gave you some cachet, you didn’t want to be one of those creepy guys dating a girl three years younger.

So how old did that make him feel, to recall a time when three years seemed like a major difference?

She beckoned him inside and led him to the kitchen. On the way there, he had briefly wondered why she had a couch in her hall, before realising that the narrow passageway was actually her living room. She got a couple of beers from the fridge and placed them on the kitchen table alongside a blue folder and a small pile of magazines.
Mojo
was on top,
Q
underneath, and possibly
Tatler
at the foot of the pile. This last immediately made Parlabane think Mairi must be doing very well for herself, as in his experience the only people who read it were women of her age who fitted that description, or much younger ones hoping to marry men who fitted that description.

They traded small talk, which mainly consisted of Parlabane asking Mairi sufficient questions about herself as to prevent her from reciprocating. He felt acutely conscious of it
being
small talk, and yet it felt all the more necessary in order to paper over the weirdness. This wasn’t merely two people who hadn’t spoken in fifteen years, but two people whose cumulative conversation prior to that could comfortably have been transcribed on a Sinclair ZX80.

‘So what is it you do with yourself?’ he asked, not having gleaned much data from his brief transit through her home. A glance at her left hand established the absence of any significant rings, but although that didn’t preclude the existence of a significant other, this really wasn’t an area he wanted to get into.

‘I’m in the music business. I’ve got my own management company.’

‘Oh, wow,’ he said, pitching at impressed but not surprised, hoping not to sound patronising. ‘What’s it called?’

‘LAF-M. As in Lafferty, Mairi, but pronounced like
la femme
.’

‘Which acts do you manage?’ he asked, hoping to hell he had heard of one of them and that it wasn’t some
X-Factor
maggot he wanted to machine-gun.

‘I started off managing Cassidy. Remember them?’

Parlabane did. They were an all-girl vocal group who had enjoyed a number-one hit around 2002. They had been indistinguishable from their peers and would have barely stuck in his memory but for the fact that they had also hit the top ten with an utterly unlikely cover of ‘She Knows’ by Balaam and the Angel.

Now, more than a decade later, Parlabane finally worked out why.

‘“She Knows”,’ he said. ‘That was your idea.’

Mairi nodded but didn’t elaborate. They both knew she didn’t have to. Donald had been a big Balaam fan, spending hours back-combing those goth-locks of his before a police regulation shearing saw them gone for ever.

‘And what about these days?’ he asked.

‘We’ll get to that,’ she replied. ‘It’s why I’m here. I want to offer you a job.’

‘In music management?’ he asked, laughing.

‘No. Something a little closer to your normal beat. I’m prepared to pay you a daily rate of three hundred pounds, plus expenses.’

Parlabane tried to remain impassive, but there was little point in pretending it didn’t sound generous. However, it did also sound temporary, so he didn’t reckon she was about to pitch him a gig as a press officer.

‘My normal beat? Investigative reporter?’

‘Investigative, yes. Reporting not so much. In fact, you might say it was the opposite of journalism, because the point is to keep it quiet.’

‘I thought the opposite of journalism was royal correspondent, but I’m listening. What is it you want me to look into?’

She winced rather apologetically, picking at the foil on the neck of her beer bottle.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you until you agree to do it. This is something that would be a big story if anyone found out, and I need to prevent that from happening. Discretion is everything here. I’m sorry.’

‘So let me get this clear: you want me to look into something that would be a big story, but I’m not allowed to tell anybody?’

‘I know it goes against the grain, Jack, but that’s why I’m prepared to pay.’

‘So why not hire a private investigator?’

‘It’s delicate. I need someone who can investigate people without them realising they’re being investigated. A journalist asking questions would be perfectly normal, and you’ve got a plausible pedigree.’

So she knew about all the soft-soap stuff he’d written for the music glossies. It had been during a time post-Leveson when he still had friends in the industry and his hard-bitten reputation was actually a plus point for the magazines when they were pitching to bands for an interview. Even then he had regarded it as a form of selling out, but that was
before
. These days he’d bite your hand off if you offered a gig interviewing One Direction for
Hello!
.

‘Why don’t you just tell me, Mairi?’ he reasoned. ‘There’s something redundant about demanding a non-disclosure agreement from a guy that nobody would listen to even if he did disclose it. Which I won’t, by the way. You’ve come to me in confidence.’

Mairi sighed and gave her head a tiny shake.

‘Sorry, Jack. I can’t do that. No offence, and I appreciate how it must sound, me not taking you at your word after all you did for Donald, but that’s just how this has to be.’

Christ, he thought: how big must this story be if she’s prepared to walk away, after admitting she was low on alternatives?

Even as he asked himself this, consumed by the eager curiosity he had been addicted to for decades, he realised that she
wasn’t
prepared to walk away, and not because she was bluffing. She had known before she called him at King’s Cross that it wouldn’t come to this, because he would be the one to fold.

‘Okay,’ he told her. ‘I’m not fighting off alternative employment offers with a shitty stick, but then I think you probably knew that.’

Just to underline that she did, Mairi produced the pre-prepared NDA from inside the blue folder.

Parlabane paused only a moment over the document before applying his pen, pondering whether being paid
not
to write a story marked a new low.

‘At least I don’t need to sweat that this is some Mephistophelean deal. I sold my soul so long ago I’d need to ring my accountant to find out who bought it.’

Mairi didn’t laugh, nor even smile.

‘If that were true, I wouldn’t have asked you here.’

‘So why
have
you asked me here?’ he enquired, having signed for the right to do so.

Mairi slid her copies of
Q
and
Mojo
out of the way and pointed, rather unexpectedly, to
Tatler
, which she spun around so that it was facing Parlabane the right way up. He scanned the tag lines, picking up on the words ‘Savage Earth Heart’s warrior women’, which was when he realised that one of the two figures posed in ancient battle dress on the cover was Heike Gunn. He hadn’t recognised her at first, not so much because of the Roman costume, but due to her signature porcelain-blonde curls having been replaced by flowing locks dyed a cheap-looking shade of pink.

‘You manage Savage Earth Heart?’ he asked, impressed, but this time unable to conceal the surprise in his tone.

‘For the past two years, just about.’

‘I gather Ms Gunn’s a bit of a control freak.’

This was the polite version. ‘Manipulative psycho bitch’ was the phrase that best suited the accounts he’d heard.

‘She takes on too many burdens,’ Mairi replied, with what sounded like dutiful neutrality. There was something else there too, but he couldn’t pinpoint what.

‘She emptied one of the founding members, if I recall. Who’s playing fiddle for them now?’

Mairi pointed to
Tatler
again, indicating the other cover girl. Parlabane belatedly noticed that the object she was balletically thrusting towards Heike was not in fact a sword, but a violin bow.

‘Monica Halcrow,’ Mairi said, slightly incredulous, slightly irritated. ‘You telling me you didn’t see the photos?’

Parlabane realised he was a few pages behind and haemorrhaging ‘down with the kids’ points.

‘What photos? Safe to say I’ve been focused on other stuff recently.’

‘Never mind. What’s more pertinent is that the third album –
Smuggler’s Soul
– is due for release in just over a fortnight, coinciding with a thirty-five-date US tour. It’s the first major-label release of a three-album deal with Sentinel, who are putting serious marketing muscle behind this. The band have just completed a sell-out tour of Europe and the new single, “Stolen Glances”, is currently top ten in seventeen territories. The world is at Heike’s feet.’

‘It certainly sounds like it. So what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t know where the fuck she is.’

Maria glanced down briefly at the NDA then back at Parlabane, all having become clear.

‘I take it this isn’t simply a case of not taking your calls? I mean, if she’s just finished a European tour and she’s got all this action coming up, is it feasible she’s on an islet in the Maldives where she knows there’s no mobile reception?’

‘She’s missing, Jack, and you are now one of a very exclusive number of people who knows this. She went missing in Berlin, final day of the tour. The last person to see her was Monica, that morning. Heike’s final words to her were: “See you at the soundcheck”, but she never showed up for it. They had to cancel the show: tour manager told the venue she had a throat infection so that it didn’t become a story. Nobody’s seen her since. She didn’t turn up for the flight home and her neighbours say she hasn’t been back to her flat in Glasgow. There’s been no answer on her phone, no reply to emails, no tweets. It’s like one minute the eyes of the world were upon her and the next she’s vanished from the face of the Earth.’