Dead Girl Walking (34 page)

‘I think I’ve found something,’ he said.

He placed the tablet back on the table between them, feeling the hairs on his neck stand up in anticipation of what he might be about to witness. His hand hovered over the screen, ready to shut the thing down. There was a waitress standing a few tables away, her next destination unclear, but it wasn’t only
her
eyes he was on standby to spare.

‘What is this?’ Mairi asked.

‘Secret filming. A planted device.’

‘Planted where?’

Mairi had no sooner asked than the image became brighter and sharper as a light was switched on in the previously gloomy bathroom. A figure passed in front of the camera, back to the viewer, leaning behind the curtain to start the shower running before undressing.

It was a woman, but they didn’t see her face because she stepped behind the curtain without turning around. They saw enough, though: dyed pink hair.

‘Heike,’ Mairi gasped.

She grabbed the iPad and ran her finger along the slider, forwarding the footage to the point when the subject emerged, facing the camera. It was Heike Gunn all right: standing upright and naked as she wrapped a towel around her head.

‘Somebody hid a camera in her hotel bathroom,’ she said. ‘Somebody working for these creeps. Fucking Jan.’

Mairi went to close the player but Parlabane stayed her hand.

‘There’s a second file. I need to know what else it shows.’

Mairi launched it then slid her finger along the play-line, causing a series of thumbnails to flash below the main display. Parlabane glimpsed another woman climbing in and out of a shower.

‘It’s Monica. The bastards snuck a camera into her bathroom too.’

‘This is the same bathroom,’ Parlabane corrected, indicating the blurred object to the right that proved the camera hadn’t moved. ‘They must have been sharing.’

‘No,’ Mairi insisted. ‘Heike’s contract guarantees she has her own room.’

‘Well, leaving aside the more prurient explanations, I think we can deduce which hotel this came from. Damien said that Heike and Monica had to share a room when they insisted on taking the bus to Milan rather than flying. This would have been the same day as the incident with the merchandise girls.’

Parlabane picked up the iPad again and ran a search for files made or modified on the same day as the two videos. The results took him to several enhanced screen-captures from each clip: naked stills of both Heike and Monica.

Mairi quickly grabbed the iPad to close the images as she noticed the previously hovering waitress move more deliberately towards their table.

‘Is everything all right?’ the waitress asked, casting an eye over the rather abandoned-looking dishes.

‘Yes, it’s fine,’ Mairi replied, that very British assurance offered identically to waiting staff amid dining circumstances ranging from culinary perfection to having been served oven-baked jobbie on a vomit and snotter compote.

‘Can I bring you something … different?’

‘No, just the bill,’ Mairi replied perfunctorily.

‘Was there something wrong with the food?’

‘No, we have to be somewhere else.’

‘I will bring it immediately.’

She was as good as her word, zipping back and forth from the desk in a matter of seconds.

‘I really do have to be somewhere else,’ Mairi told Parlabane. ‘I need to be on my feet. My mind’s going around in circles.’

‘At least we’ve come to the right place,’ he suggested, indicating the dome that lay a short distance across the rooftop. ‘Or do you need air?’

‘No, that seems like the ideal spot for the way I feel.’

When we reached Zurich I couldn’t wait to get off the bus, like stepping out into the fresh air would put an end to the suffocating tension and insecurity. Instead, those feelings ramped up the moment my feet hit concrete, as there were reporters waiting for us outside the hotel. There were four of them, all of whom came charging forward as we approached the hotel doors, like monsters in a video game. There was no stealth, just this automatic bounding into action that would have been funny had it been happening to anyone else.

Watching them do this on TV, I had always wondered why they shouted their questions at people who were never going to answer, even if they could make out a single query from the hubbub. But right then, I understood. A part of me wanted to stop and say something, anything, just so that the shouting would stop and the pressure of ignoring them could ease.

‘Heike, how long have you and Monica been having this affair?’

‘Is it causing any tensions within the band?’

‘Monica, what does your fiancé think about this?’

‘Have you always swung both ways?’

It was one of the few occasions I was ever grateful for having Dean around. He and his crew created a human cordon and let us get to the reception desk, holding back the reporters while hotel security got their act together to chuck them out. Still they peered expectantly through the lobby’s floor-to-ceiling window. They were like predatory animals at the zoo: they’d pick our bones clean if it wasn’t for the security glass. Journalists really were the scum of the earth.

Jan put a hand on Heike’s shoulder as she waited at reception for the slick-haired man behind the desk to give us a key. His touch was delicate and polite; he had long since lost privileges for anything familiar.

‘Everybody okay?’ he asked. ‘I mean, we’re still good for tonight, yeah?’

He was worried Heike was going to pull out of the show, something I had been secretly hoping for all day. I tried and failed to stop myself looking expectantly at her, and she noticed.

‘Absolutely,’ she said.

She seemed almost offended at the idea.

‘It would take more than this to knock us off our game,’ she added, sending a hard glance my way in case I missed who the message was really aimed at.

The hacks were gone when we came back downstairs to head for the soundcheck, but only because they were waiting for us outside the gig; photographers too.

It was a place called Kaufleuten, a kind of super-venue combining a restaurant, bar and several club spaces as well as the large hall where we were playing. It had entrances and awnings along three sides of a grand six-storey building, but at this time of day they knew to lay their ambush at the double door where our truck was parked.

‘I’ll deal with this,’ Heike said.

I feared she would go off into an ill-advised harangue, but instead she struck a pose beneath an awning, making it look like a catwalk entrance. She had her game face on as they gathered on the other side of a gold rope, the photographers snapping and the hacks baying their same questions.

Heike didn’t answer any of them, but with a cold smile thanked them insincerely for their ‘sudden interest in music none of you gave a fuck about forty-eight hours ago’.

They barely looked at me as I hurried inside between Damien and Rory, the only two members of the band who were taller than me.

Scott allowed himself a wry smile as he watched her in action.

‘Taking one for the team,’ Damien said.

‘Aye,’ Scott agreed. ‘Though I suppose the silver lining is we’ll get plenty of press just in time for the new single coming out.’

Just changing one note can alter the sound of a chord or even the sense of a whole phrase. Major can become minor, harmony discord.

With Scott’s words, the events of the past days suddenly played back in my head and became totally different.

Nobody knew where we were going that night in Berlin, only Heike.

I saw her leading me into the bar, choosing from half a dozen empty tables the one right in front of that big window. I saw her sit up straight and look me in the eye; heard her say, ‘I want to kiss you.’

The first single was out next week, a few weeks ahead of the new album. It was called ‘Stolen Glances’. Can anybody think of a good image to illustrate that? You know, for promotional purposes? How about a lesbian clinch between two band members? Would that get us some play?

I heard Angus’s drunken warning, the one I didn’t listen to:

It’s when you think she’s not manipulating you that you’re truly in her control.

I thought of her supposedly significant dyed-pink hair, changed back to cream blonde in time for a video shoot.

She had planned this. She had made it all happen.

Heike will get wherever she wants to be, but she’ll leave bodies in her wake.

I had seen her this morning in Salzburg, throwing clothes at me from my suitcase. She was coldly pragmatic, treating me like a problem rather than a friend in trouble, my meltdown an irritation she couldn’t afford to indulge. I had served my purpose. Man up, she told me.

Finally, it was Dean’s voice I heard:

By the end of the tour … you’re gonna fucking despise her.

Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod looked at her notes again and grimaced as the car descended an off-ramp from the new M74 extension.

Her driver clocked her expression as they came to a halt at a set of traffic lights.

‘What?’ Beano asked.

‘I’m thinking this could be the jurisdictional nightmare they teach cops about for decades to come.’

They took a right turn beneath the flyover, heading into a light-industrial zone. Beano drove them past a printworks and an insurance firm’s sprawling car-repair depot, then turned into a horseshoe layout of low-rise units at the far end of the estate. A uniform waved them through, past a plastic cordon beyond which all of the premises sat closed for business, their owners and employees forming a human avenue on the other side of the tapes.

The reason for their temporary eviction sat taking up most of the available parking space. It was a flatbed lorry bearing a burgundy-coloured shipping container, the rear of which was slightly ajar, guarded by another uniformed officer.

Beano killed the engine and they both stepped out into the light drizzle.

‘What is it this outfit imports again?’ she asked him.

‘Old fridges. Soviet-era relics. These guys recondition them, give them a paint job and then flog them to over-remunerated wankers in London as a conversation piece for their kitchen.’

The lorry driver was sitting inside the premises he’d been delivering to, bearing the resigned look of someone who knew he wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Catherine could tell it hadn’t been him who had made the discovery. Rather, there was another bloke sitting nearby who had
the face
. He was the one who had gone inside the container with a pallet-lifter and been confronted with a sight he’d never forget.

It was a scary prospect for Catherine too, but not because there was a corpse involved. That was hardly enough to require a Detective Superintendent to come down and oversee matters. No, the reason this had the potential to turn into the nightmare she’d alluded to was that the container had been dispatched from Kiev, road-freighted all the way through Poland to Hamburg, shipped overseas to Grimsby and finally opened here in Glasgow, where the contents were discovered to be one item over the manifest.

Beano had a determined look as he climbed the ramp that ascended to the rear of the truck. She wasn’t sure whether the previously squeamish younger officer was getting better at dealing with this or just better at hiding it.

The uniform at the container’s split door stepped aside and held it open for them, telling them where they’d find what they were here for. Catherine didn’t recognise him. He looked bored and faintly resentful, like nobody at Tulliallan had told him about all the tedious standing-about stuff during his training.

They stepped inside the container.

The body was lying in a narrow channel between two rows of towering fridges, like upright steel coffins forming an oddly respectful guard of honour. The girl was face down with her head turned to one side, like she was sleeping. She wore a pair of tight black jeans and a white denim jacket, her hair a creamy blonde crop. It was instantly familiar, but Catherine couldn’t quite place where from. Someone on a DVD box set she and her husband had been watching, perhaps.

There was dried blood like a shadow on the floor around the body’s middle. What they could see of her face was grey, a hollow mask, smeared with more dried blood. Even her mother wouldn’t recognise her. She had been dead a few days.

‘Let me check for some ID,’ Beano volunteered, stepping ahead of Catherine and crouching down in the tight passage. God love him, she thought. If only they all tried as hard as him.

‘Whoa,’ he said, flipping open the denim jacket. ‘Check this.’

Catherine saw an adhesive patch stuck on the inside of the garment, flush with the seams about an inch from the buttons, positioned so that it could be quickly flashed at whoever needed to see it. She saw the letters AAA: access all areas. Beneath that, she could read the name of the venue and, more significantly, the name of the band.

Instead of searching her pockets as Catherine expected, Beano reached for her right sleeve. He rolled it up carefully but urgently, revealing the letter H tattooed on the inside of the corpse’s forearm.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, his tone indicating a specific fear confirmed. ‘Boss, I think this is Heike Gunn.’

They showed the security guard their passes and he waved them on through. They had registered downstairs on the way in, Parlabane remarking that it was the first time he had needed to give his passport details before being admitted to a restaurant.

‘To be fair, I’d feel more nervous if they’d wanted to check my blood group and my organ-donor card.’

They began to ascend the spiral walkway that wound its way around the inside of the glass walls atop the German parliament. The crowds were light, but they nonetheless felt part of a never-ending procession, like ants on Escher’s Möbius strip. Sound carried in the strangest way, like it was the world’s biggest whispering gallery; consequently passers-by spoke in quiet tones, and yet voices would suddenly meet Parlabane’s ears, their words incomprehensible and their sources impossible to discern. He hoped it was doing something for Mairi’s clarity, because to him it was like being inside the mind of a crazy person.