Dead Girl Walking (30 page)

I flipped it over and read the name:
Christiane F
. I hadn’t heard of it.

I took the card and showed it to the woman at the till, asking if she knew this movie. Maybe she didn’t speak much English, as she came out from the counter and led me to the back of the shop and a tall cabinet of DVDs. She ran a finger across the spines two shelves from the top and then handed me a case. The cover showed the same girl, but this image wasn’t one for decorating your bedroom. She sat slumped against what looked like a toilet wall, her pink hair draped either side of the home-made tourniquet she was using to shoot up.

The title read
Christiane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo
.

‘You can select English subtitles,’ the woman said, proving she did speak English after all.

‘Can you tell me what this means?’ I asked, pointing to the title.

‘It means “We Children of Zoo Station”. You don’t know this movie?’

Zoo Child. How had I missed this? I started running the lyrics through my head, hearing them anew. It was a song about junkies, and I had never thought it was any more significant than that.

‘No. I have a friend who is … interested in it.’

‘It was a big deal when I was growing up: we all watched it a dozen times on videocassette. It was based on a book by some journalists published in the late seventies, a true story. This girl, Christiane, became a heroin addict when she was just thirteen.’

I could think of only one reason why Heike had adopted this look. I recalled the Polaroid of her mother, looking so young; maybe even younger than I had supposed.

‘Thirteen. Jesus.’

‘It’s more shocking than that: she became a prostitute to pay for her habit. Nor was she unique. She had friends younger than her who were turning tricks, and friends younger than her who died. Bahnhof Zoo was the heart of a big heroin scene, big prostitution scene too. In the old days it was the main station, before they built their big new Hauptbahnhof.’

I realised how stupid I’d been not to see it sooner.

Now I understood why Heike had been on her crusade. I knew why she had shaved her hair back and dyed it blonde again too. To her mind, Jan had offered her a choice, and she had chosen rock star. She could no longer make her tribute to Christiane F, someone whom she probably knew more about than her real mother.

Because of her accent, I thought the woman had said ‘old days’. She’d said ‘Wall days’.

Zoo Station.

Dark Station.

Berlin.

‘Let me just run through my script again,’ Mairi said as they neared the pharmacy.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Parlabane assured her. ‘It’ll sound more natural if you’re not word-perfect.’

‘Yeah, but I’m scared I’ll forget the major details. My father’s feeling ill back at our hotel and he’s forgotten his heart medicine – was that it?’

‘Precisely. And the stuff he normally takes is…?’

‘Fruzamode.’

‘Close enough. Furosemide. They’ll know what you’re talking about.’

‘But will they give me it over the counter?’

‘They will if you’re convincingly gormless, and I have to say I’ve every faith in you on that score.’

‘Why ever would somebody try to push you under a train, Jack?’

His mobile rang, cutting off Mairi’s chance for procrastination. He beckoned her to head off inside, indicating that he had to take this call, which was no lie.

‘I need it in Mac iOS 7,’ Parlabane told the caller.

‘It shouldn’t take too long to port,’ came the reply, relayed in a modified female sat-nav voice. It would be quite an understatement to observe that the speaker was protective of his identity. ‘There’s already an iOS 5 version for the first-gen iPad.’

‘Yeah, but the crucial part is it has to be in German.’

‘I know someone who can translate.’

‘No, it can’t be a translation: it has to be the precise German wording on the interface.’

‘Understood. When do you want it? At a pinch I could probably manage Friday, long as nothing comes up the rest of this week.’

‘I need it by tomorrow lunchtime.’

‘You never disappoint, Jack.’

‘Just make sure you don’t either.’

He disconnected the call and glanced through the window. The pharmacist was holding out a small white cardboard box and Mairi was nodding with anxious gratitude.

It was on.

They stayed in that night, cautiously opting to remain inconspicuous and to reap the benefits of an early bed after the previous evening’s trials and exertions. They dined together in the hotel’s small and cosy restaurant, Mairi remaining wigged up as a precaution, the large windows affording passers-by a clear view of the diners from the street. She insisted Parlabane reciprocate by wearing the glasses he had bought for further obscuring his face the next day.

‘In a certain light you look like Colin Firth,’ she told him. ‘That being the light you get in the abyssal plains under the ocean, where the angler fish hang out.’

‘Thanks. Now that we’re into the cloak-and-dagger stuff, I’m thinking your blonde-wig look is more Kate Mara in
Shooter
.’

‘Kate O’Mara? I hope this was an eighties crush you’re harking back to, and you don’t mean I look like her now. She’s dead.’

‘Wrong one. No O. Just Mara. And let’s not talk about eighties crushes.’

Shit. That had slipped out, like an in-joke he had momentarily forgotten she wasn’t party to.

‘Why not?’ she asked, swooping on it with a falcon’s speed and alacrity.

‘If I told you, we’d be talking about it.’

He managed to conceal the specific nature of his embarrassment, selling her the notion that this was merely a general area of cringe.

‘Okay,’ she conceded. ‘So let’s talk about cloak and dagger. This Westercruik business you’re being investigated for. Let me get this straight: there’s this laptop that belonged to Sir Crusty Tofftrouser.’

‘Sir Anthony Mead.’

‘Right. And you, shall we say, acquired it by undisclosed means.’

‘I didn’t say I stole it.’

‘Okay, you didn’t steal it.’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t steal it.’

‘Jesus,’ she laughed, her spoon splashing down into her soup. ‘Regardless, however you came by it, it had top-secret MoD stuff on it, right?’

‘I thought it did, anyway.’

‘Like what?’

‘Evidence of a false-flag conspiracy, though that’s putting it rather broadly. It doesn’t matter, because that’s not what was on there. It was a trap. The conspiracy thing was just the bait.’

‘But presumably the laptop was password-protected? Military-level encryption.’

‘Of course. Yes. If something’s too easy to access, it’s not convincing enough to make good bait.’

‘So you broke the encryption? You can
do
that?’

‘No. But the software encryption level doesn’t matter because it still comes down to the meatware: ultimately any security measure is hostage to the intelligence and integrity of the human being setting a password. In the UK, that frequently means over-privileged and extremely over-promoted Etonian fuckwits like Sir Anthony Mead.’

‘What, was his password his mother’s maiden name or something? Is that why he’s under investigation? Oh no, that’s right: he had an affair. Did he tell it to his mistress? I read that she was being investigated as well.’

Parlabane shook his head.

‘Westercruik is a hydra, with all of its heads looking in different places. They’re trying to find out who’s a leak and who’s just a liability. I was suckered in and used like a plaque-disclosing tablet to show up what’s rotten. They know what I did, but they’re still lost as to how.’

He swallowed, finishing off a scallop.

‘People always concentrate on the wrong areas when they’re trying to work out how a trick is done. They’ve got theories that I broke into Mead’s home, or that I broke into his mistress’s place, that I used blackmail, that I hacked their mobiles, that I placed hidden recording devices. It’s none of the above.’

‘And would I be right in assuming you’re not going to tell
me
how you did it, sitting here over dinner.’

Parlabane nodded.

‘You would indeed. I’m going to tell you tomorrow, when we crack Boris’s iPad using the same method.’

There was a ghost at the feast that evening: Maxi showed up in the hotel bar as Heike and Mairi returned from the shoot. It was all the more unsettling him being here in Berlin, where Heike must have felt she’d left him far behind.

‘The curse of fucking easyJet,’ she muttered to me.

But she was wrong. This time, instead of a writ, he claimed to be bearing gifts, though my old Latin teacher could tell you that wasn’t a guarantee of good intentions. Maxi was here, he said, because he was playing in Muse’s expanded tour line-up and they were at the Arena Berlin tonight. As we were in town as well we were all invited to an after-show party they were throwing.

God, don’t ever make an enemy of this guy, I thought, aware of the sleekit way he had just undermined Heike. Not only had he set her off balance by pitching up before the show, but he had blown a dog-whistle to call everyone away from any plans she might have had for later. And to hurt her even more, he had subtly underlined the fact that hers wasn’t the biggest band in town that night. (If you wanted to give the knife a twist, we were not even the biggest
British
band.)

A selfish part of me was happy, though. I knew Heike would retreat away from him, and I was the natural sanctuary. Everyone else would go to the party, and I would get her to myself.

I wore the dress again. I had gone back to being comfortably covered in Zagreb, but the Brauereihallen, with its mix of the industrial and the classical, had a kind of steampunk elegance that complemented my costume, so I wore it for the video. Heike hadn’t asked me to: it just seemed right. I felt I was playing a part on stage, same as I’d done during the
Tatler
photoshoot. Later on, though, during the free show, I was wearing it for her.

When we played ‘Smuggler’s Soul’ Heike and I threw ourselves into our dance with abandon, a true connection isolating us from everyone else on stage, our alliance celebrating its own survival.

As I had predicted, she said she didn’t fancy the Muse after-show. Heike asked me quietly if I’d like to come with her to a place she knew, saying she’d understand if I wanted to go with Mairi and the guys.

‘I’m sure it’ll be a great party,’ she said.

‘So am I,’ I replied. ‘And the best thing about it is that we’ll know where everyone else will be: and where they
won’t
.’

She smiled almost shyly, understanding what I was hinting at.

‘Oh, that wasn’t going to be a problem tonight,’ she said, though I didn’t follow why.

We took a cab to a place called Frauen Frei, which turned out to be a bar rather than a club. It had a mellow late-night vibe, low lights and slow jazz. It looked like somewhere we could talk.

Heike went to the bar to get us some drinks, and when she put them down she found that I had placed a
Christiane F
postcard on the table.

She nodded, saying nothing, maybe not able to at that point, as her eyes were brimming. I reached out my left hand and she took it in her right, resting both in her lap.

Heike took a sip from her bottle, blinking away tears. She gave a self-mocking smile, rolling her eyes to heaven, or maybe just to her hair.

‘You worked it out? When?’

‘I only found this today, in a bookshop. I’d never heard of it before.’

‘You’re too young. So am I, really. I dyed my hair because … I don’t know. A gesture of affinity or something. Whatever it was, it didn’t feel right after Milan.’

She ran a hand over her blonde hair.

‘This is just as much of a gesture of affinity. Symbolises the fact that I’m a whore too.’

I took a drink of my beer as it let me swallow back my instinctive response. Having had time to think it over, I decided to say it anyway. If I couldn’t tell her what I thought, what I felt, then I was kidding myself about what was going on here.

‘Bollocks. Catch on to yourself, Heike. You’re living the dream.’

Her eyes opened wide in surprise, then she started laughing.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘Bursting that bubble. Calling me on my bullshit.’

‘You’re welcome. It’s true, though. You’re a role model, a heroine. You can do a lot more good that way than, you know…’

I didn’t need to elaborate.

‘
Your
star is on the rise too,’ she said with a grin. ‘I looked online, and half the shots from our Milan show are of you in that dress. The
Tatler
cover will be out soon too. You’re on your way to bona fide rock chick status.’

‘Yeah, so treat me right or I’m going solo, bitch.’

‘Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself. You had any Twitter rape threats? Because believe me, you’re nobody in this business unless you’re getting those.’

‘No, but if I wanted to boost my profile, I know some guys who could leak some nudie pictures of me.’

Even as it was passing my lips, I couldn’t believe I was saying that.

Heike gasped, but it was out of delight. We both broke down in hysterics, the threat of the photos finally disempowered by my joking about them.

When we had both recovered she took a long, slow drink of her beer, looking me in the eye as she did so. She put the bottle down on the table and sat up straight, ready to make a pronouncement.

‘I want to kiss you,’ she said, her tone matter of fact, almost businesslike.

She held up a hand before I could say anything.

‘Just to be clear, I’m not making a pass, I’m making a statement, so no need to panic. I just want you to know that it’s how you make me feel. Consider it, I don’t know, a compliment. A way of saying, if things were different … You know?’

I squeezed her hand, holding her gaze.

‘I won’t run away,’ I said.

A moment passed in silence, her eyes slightly scared.

I leaned into her and we kissed: softly, as though there was something fragile here that we both needed to protect.