Dead Girl Walking (46 page)

She seemed restless and anxious as we waited in the reception area. I was nervous too, and not only on her behalf. I found McLeod quite scary. She wasn’t brusque or unpleasant, but nor was she going to be mistaken for anybody’s favourite auntie.

We were escorted up to McLeod’s office by the male cop who’d been with her on Islay, DI Thompson. He was good-looking in a boyish and easy-going way, not striking me as somebody who took himself at all seriously. I could see myself going for him under other circumstances, but that aspect of my life was too much of a mess right then to think about complicating it.

Once McLeod started talking I felt much more at ease than I had thought I would, and I could tell Heike was less on edge too. I had been expecting McLeod to be all business and very direct, like she had been a few days ago, but she was calm and compassionate. I noticed a photograph of two young boys on her desk, and guessed she must be their mother. She understood fear and vulnerability, but it wasn’t just about what she already understood: it was what she was
wanting
to understand.

She talked to Heike for a long time about what it had done to her to have believed she had killed somebody.

‘I knew I didn’t have a choice,’ Heike told her. ‘And I knew what he’d just done. But that didn’t make it any better. I barely slept in days, and when I did I kept having dreams about it. Even in daytime I kept imagining there was blood on my hands. I felt like Lady Macbeth.’

‘You need to forgive yourself,’ McLeod told her. ‘Not merely tell yourself it doesn’t matter because it was all fake: you need to forgive yourself for what you
believed
you’d done. There have been times in all our lives when we wish we could turn back the clock and find that something awful was no longer true. You’ve been given that chance, but it doesn’t work unless you can wipe away what it did to you.’

It sounded so much more convincing coming from her than if I or anyone else had said it. She had gravitas or authority or something. It didn’t just come across as well-intentioned advice: it was like she’d lived it.

So we were both in a much more relaxed and thoughtful frame of mind by the time she started filling us in on the investigation. I guessed this was intentional, as nothing she told us was easy to hear.

‘Our colleagues in Germany have been moving on this with great speed and … well, I’d love to avoid using the word “efficiency”, but it is what it is. They believe they’ve identified the suspect photographed by Jack Parlabane in Alexanderplatz. Can you confirm that this is the man you saw in Madrid and later believed you had shot in Berlin?’

McLeod spun her laptop around to face us. She must have seen it in our expressions, though she still needed us to say it. There was no question but that we were looking at the coked-up psycho we’d seen stab Hannah in that basement.

‘I can reassure you that not only is he not dead, he’s not a cop either. His name is Gerd Augenthaler. He’s officially a Bad Candy employee and unofficially one of Bodo’s gangmasters, managing groups of girls on tour at expos and conventions. He was last known to be in Cologne, where he is now believed to be lying low since word got back that his boss’s trip to Scotland was a bit of a disappointment.’

McLeod turned the laptop again and worked the keyboard.

‘If you don’t mind, Heike, I’d like you to look at some more pictures they’ve sent us and tell me if you see the man who accompanied Bodo Hoefner to Islay.’

McLeod went through several mugshots, getting no response until the fourth one, at which point Heike said: ‘That’s him. The oily prick.’

‘Jackpot,’ McLeod confirmed. ‘The other shots were control pictures, so the Germans will be pleased you picked him out so unequivocally. This man actually
is
a cop. He isn’t from the unit he claimed, but he is a serving officer in Berlin. They have long believed that the reason they’ve struggled with monitoring Bodo’s activities is because he had a man on the inside, feeding back information. They just didn’t know who or from where.’

‘Well, they do now,’ Heike said, bitterness mixing with some satisfaction.

‘The UK Border Agency can confirm that he entered and left Glasgow on the appropriate dates, plus Caledonian MacBrayne are supplying CCTV footage that should, we hope, put him on the ferry to Islay, but the German police may require you to give evidence in Berlin.’

‘If it’s to bring down this sex-trafficking operation, they can name the day and I’m there. I don’t care where I have to fly from.’

McLeod shifted a little in her chair and cleared her throat. It wasn’t like some obvious calling-to-order moment, the conductor rapping his baton on the stand, but it definitely sounded like an overture to something.

‘At the German end it’s looking like a very complex case, but the web is starting to unravel. With a sudden collapse at the top of the management structure the police in Berlin are getting the sense that some of the girls may be feeling emboldened to give evidence. One in particular has already come forward.’

‘If it’s that bitch Kabka, you can’t trust her,’ said Heike. ‘She’ll lie to save her own skin. She was in on the con. She brought the gun along and all but put it in my hands.’

‘Heike’s right,’ I added. ‘She’s a liar, and a convincing one too. Back in Rostock she was the one who spun Heike the whole story. I guess they played it that way because it’s harder to press someone for details when it’s second hand.’

‘It isn’t Kabka,’ McLeod told us. ‘She’s in the wind, and she’s left fewer traces than your man Gerd. From what we’ve learned about her, that’s not surprising. She’s a survivor. She wasn’t lying about most of her own story. She was a prostitute, but what she neglected to tell you was that she has moved up to management, shall we say. She’s manipulative and resourceful, but to be honest I’m finding it difficult to judge her too harshly, given what she’s been through.’

Heike gave a small nod, her rage partly derailed by this thought. I didn’t have a lot of charitable feelings in my heart for Kabka either, but I felt the gas get turned down a notch on my anger too.

‘The girl who’s been speaking to the police is called Lenka. She was close to Hannah, or Anezka as she knew her. They were both Slovakian, and they shared digs. Anezka had confided in Lenka about what she was involved with. She had been offered a deal for the return of her passport and the cancelling of her debt if she carried off this deception. However, according to Lenka, she became very conflicted.’

McLeod gave Heike a sympathetic look, but somehow I could tell not all of it was for her.

‘She had to listen to all of your music and learn everything she could about you, and according to Lenka she became genuinely fixated.’

‘A method performance,’ Heike suggested, her voice sad and quiet.

‘To say the least. Anezka began to feel that there truly was a connection between you as a result of the time you’d spent together, so she felt awful about what she was involved in. Then, perhaps unsurprisingly, once the charade was over Bodo reneged on his end of the deal. According to Lenka, he genuinely did mean to make more money from Anezka by trading off her resemblance to you. Bodo confiscated her phone, in case she tried to double cross him by calling you to prove she was alive. That was when she decided to run away and find you. Ironically, she thought you could save her for real. If she tracked you down and told you the truth, blowing the lid off the scam, you would help her escape her life in Berlin.’

‘Jesus,’ said Heike, no trace of anger now, all passion spent.

‘We know she travelled to Hamburg. She was hoping to stow away, get across to the UK; get to Scotland, then find you somehow. That was as far as she got. Police in Hamburg have been interviewing freight terminal staff ever since this body showed up at our end and we discovered the container’s port of origin. They traced the guy who was handling the bookings for that particular shipping, and he admitted he had caught her sneaking into the terminal. Initially he said he had been moved by her story and therefore turned a blind eye, but under pressure he admitted she had sex with him in order to secure her passage.’

‘Fucking bastard,’ said a voice that I was surprised to discover was my own.

‘But having allowed her to sneak into a shipping container bound for Glasgow the next morning, he spotted one of those flyers Mairi showed us.They’d been distributed at ports, railway stations and bus terminals. He figured there might be a reward, so he phoned the number and told them where she could be found. Someone arrived within the hour, which shows the reach this operation has. He admitted he took a pay-off to say which container she was in, but swears that’s all he saw. He said a man showed up claiming to be a worried relative, and he assumed he would just be taking her away.’

‘How did they know she was a threat?’ Heike asked.

McLeod looked regretful, almost apologetic. None of this was easy. None of this was good.

‘Lenka told them. When Anezka went missing, they threatened her, knowing the two of them were close.’

‘That’s how they work,’ muttered Heike.

‘She’s crushed,’ McLeod said. ‘That’s why she came forward. She blames herself for what happened to Anezka.’

Heike gave a sharp sigh.

‘The wrong people always feel the guilt,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about the
right
people. Tell me about Maxi.’

McLeod made a face, wincing. It made me tense instantly. This wasn’t going to be good news.

‘You’d best prepare yourself,’ she told Heike. ‘You’re likely to find what I’m about to tell you upsetting.’

Heike sat up a little straighter in her chair, her expression suddenly stony.

‘We’ve released him without charge.’

Heike’s mouth fell open.

‘Jesus Christ,
why
?’ I asked for her.

‘For one thing, we had no evidence against him. Maxwell did admit that he was the one who tipped off the photographer in Berlin, but as collaborating with the
Daily Mail
is unfortunately not against the law, we had no reason to hold him.’

I was more reeling with outrage on Heike’s behalf than she was herself. But she had been paying closer attention than me. She was calm, bracing herself for what was still to come.

‘That wasn’t the part that’s going to upset me, was it?’ she asked, her voice flat. ‘What else has come to light?’

McLeod looked her in the eye.

‘Someone else has confessed.’

McLeod said nothing more. I wondered why she was drawing it out, then I realised she was giving Heike time to get there by herself.

Heike responded with a slow, solemn nod, then spoke a single word.

‘Angus.’

‘Our mutual friend Mr Parlabane has an associate with whom I believe you might be familiar: a Mr Cameron Scott.’

‘Spammy,’ Heike said quietly.

‘Mr Scott informed Parlabane a couple of days ago that he had heard a rumour Angus had been caught dealing on the side while on tour with Shadowhawk a few months ago. We suspected this might have put him in a vulnerable position with certain of his Bad Candy colleagues, so we leaned on him. We didn’t have to lean very hard. He was weeping out a torrent.’

Heike looked away, like she needed a moment’s respite from facing anyone. When she turned back again, she seemed more sad than angry; disappointed rather than surprised.

I recalled that night in Valencia, when Heike had gone off to bed early: Angus drunk and railing with bitter envy about Heike’s good fortune.

‘He was jealous and resentful,’ McLeod said. ‘He hid it well, but he told us he found it very hard having a close-up view of your success given that you had started off together.’

I expected Heike to explain how her work ethic had a lot more to do with their different paths than luck, but she said nothing. She knew she didn’t need to justify herself to anyone over this.

‘He thought this up a long time ago as a kind of revenge fantasy, but he never really envisaged carrying it out. That was until he got greedy with his side-action on tour and suddenly Bodo Hoefner was threatening some truly savage stuff
pour encourager les autres
. Angus panicked and told them he could help them scam you on the forthcoming tour. He was painfully aware of how much you had been making, so he knew it would be well worth their while.’

‘I did everything I could to help Angus,’ Heike said, tears in the corners of her eyes. ‘I brought him on board as guitar roadie. I was the one who got him the opening slot as well.’

‘He said in his statement that he thought you were only doing all that in order to underline how far you had come compared to him.’

‘That’s bullshit,’ she protested.

‘He knows. As soon as you went missing, the scales fell and he saw how things really were. Up until then he’d told himself it was just about money, and that you’d be making plenty more. But after Berlin he was terrified that something awful would happen and he’d always know it was his fault. That’s why he tipped off Parlabane that you might be with Flora. He was trying to derail it, hoping the whole scam would fall apart without the sabotage being traced back to him.’

We sat quietly for a while, McLeod giving Heike time to take it all in.

‘What about Jan’s role in this?’ she eventually asked. ‘Have you interviewed him?’

‘According to Angus, Jan had nothing to do with it. He does what he’s told by Bodo, but he wasn’t in on the plan. He didn’t need to be, and the first rule of any conspiracy is that you don’t involve anyone unnecessarily.’

‘It was all Angus,’ Heike said with hollow resignation. ‘He had access to all our stuff every night.’

McLeod confirmed this with a nod.

‘He copied the picture of your mother from your phone and gave it to Bodo to have Photoshopped. He also said that he only hacked Monica’s blog so that he and Bodo could monitor how the charade with Hannah was playing out. He says he didn’t know what else Bodo planned to do with it, and to be honest I believe him. He’s wretched with remorse, which is not a sight you see that often in Govan nick.’

‘Rooting through our stuff while we were on stage was the least of his sins,’ said Heike. ‘He ransacked my memories. He knew all those things about me because I’d shared them when we were growing up. He got himself in trouble and did something desperate to save his skin: I can forgive him for that. But what I don’t think I can ever forgive is that he knew how much I would want Hannah’s story to be true.’