Dead Girl Walking (6 page)

It went to voicemail after a few rings. He didn’t leave a message: that would betray that he had no pretext for calling.

Three of them pitched up at the same time, piling out of a cab. It was the three males, Damien paying the driver while the other two lingered on the pavement, making no move towards the building. Parlabane read the dynamic right away: Damien was in charge, and they weren’t proceeding without the reassurance of his presence. He’d probably been the one who rounded the others up so that they made it here at all.

Mairi called just as they were sauntering through the car park.

‘Your flight late?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sorry. Boarded on time, then there was a problem on the runway, so my phone’s been off. Are they there?’

‘Just arrived. The guys, anyway.’

‘No Monica?’

‘Not so far.’

‘Shit.’

She didn’t sound surprised.

‘Problem?’

‘I’ve left her messages telling her the when and where, but she hasn’t called me back.’

‘She’s blanking you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘I think she might be in the huff. She called me on the tour a couple of times and I gave her short shrift. She was being needy when I didn’t have time to indulge her, and I thought learning to toughen up would be more valuable to her in the long term. I’m guessing this is payback.’

Or maybe she had reasons why she didn’t want to talk about what had happened in Germany, especially not to a journalist.

For one thing, there were the pictures Mairi had referred to, his laptop screen having filled up with nothing else simply by using ‘Savage Earth Heart’ as a search string. Clearly relations between the
Tatler
cover’s two warrior women were likely to have been strained in the wake of this intrusion, and another few seconds’ browsing illustrated the extent of the fallout plume. Monica Halcrow had been engaged to one Keith Jamieson when she set off on tour, but it was safe to say she was free and single by the time she returned home.

Parlabane had been planning to interview them all together as a group and then one by one. He knew they would be particularly guarded during the latter exercise, but he wanted to suss the group dynamics, the body language, who responded to what, the subtle signals that might betray fault lines and allegiances. The absence of the one other female in the line-up was going to alter those dynamics immeasurably.

He listened to their chatter and found it disarming to observe how young they seemed, apart from Damien, who was like the veteran footballer brought in to steady a team of raw and inexperienced talent. The rest were in their early- to mid-twenties, which made it seem incredible that they could be on their third album. That was until he remembered how far
he
had come by that age, once upon a time.

He recalled that Sarah had thought he was in his mid-thirties when they first met. He had actually just turned twenty-seven. He had joked that his career up until then gave a new meaning to the term ‘tough paper round’, but it didn’t help that he was not long off a plane from Los Angeles, his jet lag accentuated by having spent some of the intervening time in police custody.

Looking back, it was perhaps the first signal that she saw someone else whenever she looked at him. She had certainly endeavoured to shape and modify him thereafter, so perhaps there was an idealised image that she always had in mind. If he ever had a son, that would be one of the most valuable pieces of advice he could impart: beware the woman who sees you as a work in progress.

‘How’s Jack?’

‘Let me show you the blueprints.’

If he ever had a son
. He still caught himself speculating like that. There had been a time when it had seemed like an eventuality he didn’t need to hurry towards. Then, just like that, it became something he had to accept was never going to happen.

‘So, a successful tour,’ Parlabane said to them. ‘Sold-out shows all across Europe. Hit single playing everywhere, new album,
Smuggler’s Soul
, ready for release. Sounds like days of wine and roses. You guys must feel like your ship’s come in and you’re living the dream. Or at least, that’s what everybody will assume. I’m guessing the reality feels less glam and more knackering, would I be right?’

He was laying down his markers, letting them know he wasn’t here to do a puff piece and inviting them to talk about the day-to-day.

‘More beer and vomit than wine and roses,’ Scott suggested with a self-conscious grin, identifying himself as the joker in the pack.

‘And if our ship came in,’ added Rory with a little more steel in his tone, ‘then its journey was fuelled by several years of slog and sacrifice.’

This was where he wanted this to go: not the encores and the plaudits, but the toil, the grudges, the divisions and the resentments.

‘Wait, you’re saying it isn’t all first-class travel and topless groupies peeling grapes?’

‘I’m not going to whine about it,’ Rory replied. ‘It’s the best job in the world. But it’s not the easiest job in the world. We’ve all come a long way to get here.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Scott. ‘Damien especially: they hadn’t even invented the electric guitar when he was in his first band.’

Damien laughed indulgently. Parlabane saw an act of solidarity rather than a genuine response to what had to be a very long-running and probably decreasingly funny joke.

‘Rory’s right, though,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long journey and the results of our hard work are all there to be seen and heard. We’re amazingly proud of
Smuggler’s Soul
: it’s an album you could have played us five years ago and we’d never have believed we were capable of producing it. I mean, it’s a way more layered sound than its predecessors: less raw, but not less bold. It’s more confident. More polished.’

‘Aye, polished like a coffee table,’ said Scott, laughing.

Damien clouted him gently on the back of the head. Parlabane looked for a hint that there had been divisions over a shift towards the mainstream, but there was nothing: no hint that Scott had a serious point beneath his joke nor that Damien was annoyed by his indiscretion. Clearly they had talked about what the critics and the fans might say.

‘It’s more commercial than before,’ Damien admitted, ‘but that’s been more about us learning what we’re capable of. These soaring, sweeping soundscapes aren’t something you can do after a few jam sessions.’

Parlabane quickly sussed that Damien had assumed the PR role. Even if he believed this journalist was offering a vent for their gripes and a chance to talk about life at the coalface, he was determined to finesse Parlabane’s impression of the band. He was talking everything up and steering the conversation away from dangerous areas.

Parlabane’s job was to steer them right back there.

‘I suppose the other thing that must have affected your sound is the replacement of Alistair Maxwell with Monica Halcrow. Has that been a smooth transition?’

Rory and Scott said nothing, conspicuously deferring to Damien. The pause only lasted half a second, but it was enough.

‘Well, Monica’s been a breath of fresh air,’ Damien responded, clutching at a cliché to fill the gap while he thought of what he ought to say.

‘Literally,’ added Scott, ‘considering how much Maxi used to smoke.’

‘Maxi was a big part of Savage Earth Heart getting where we are today,’ Damien went on, his efforts to manage the message extending to the band’s history now. ‘But Monica’s a class apart. She’s schooled in both classical and traditional music, and she’s managed to bridge both styles within our new sound.’

‘It can’t have been easy for her, though,’ Parlabane suggested. ‘First-ever tour, wee quiet girl from Shetland dragged around half of Europe. How did you all get along?’

‘She’s not that quiet,’ said Scott. ‘’Specially if you’re through the wall from her room.’

Rory tried to stifle a smirk. Damien shook his head and gave Parlabane an apologetic grin, as if to say: ‘What can you do?’

‘So did she come out … of her shell?’ he suggested.

‘Touring is a very demanding business, physically and mentally,’ Damien said, back in the role of spokesman and thus charged with speaking while saying as little as possible.

Parlabane was happy to let him get on with it. He had spent more than twenty years interviewing people who thought they were telling him nothing. Consequently he was adept at seeing the shapes cast by the shadows where they were determined no light would fall. And if that didn’t work, there was always the hacking and burglary route.

‘Monica handled it well,’ Damien went on. ‘I think it helped both her and Heike to have another woman around. They were pretty close.’

Damien seemed to be leaving it there, then evidently decided not to ignore the elephant.

‘Things got a bit strained for a while after the photos, but what would you expect? They were all pals again soon enough. She realised it was just collateral damage from the press’s obsession with Heike.’

‘And does that collateral damage not get to the rest of you sometimes too?’

‘I’ve thought about lamping a few photographers,’ Rory admitted. ‘Just to remind them that if they want to get to her, they have to go through us first.’

Damien nodded sagely at this, Parlabane unable to miss the warning that was being aimed at him.

‘I get that you’d need to be as tight a unit off stage as you are on it,’ he acknowledged. ‘But do you ever feel you don’t get your dues when the press makes it all about Heike? I don’t mean are you envious; I mean, is it frustrating that the media are obsessed with her for reasons that have nothing to do with your music?’

‘Aye,’ said Rory. ‘That’s another reason I want to lamp the photographers.’

‘They’re not there because Heike’s a singer,’ said Scott, finally sounding sincere. ‘They’re not even there because they see her as a person. They’re just interested in the next episode of “Heike the media persona”, like it’s her
band
that’s the sideshow.’

‘We have to take the rough with the smooth, though,’ added Damien, Parlabane taking quiet note of his use of the collective rather than the personal, like he was reminding the others of the official position. ‘As a band, the exposure we’re enjoying is undeniably greater because of Heike’s profile. That’s why we have to tolerate the media’s intrusions, but also why we do what we can to protect Heike from their excesses.’

Yes, Parlabane wondered, but did you all know that was what you were signing up for?

Heike Gunn was big news, fast becoming one of Britain’s most iconic musical figures. Too fast, Parlabane might have said. Being perfectly honest, before Mairi engaged his services and made her revelation, he would have regarded Heike Gunn going missing as a source of welcome relief from her ubiquity.

It wasn’t that she was over-exposed so much as
where
she was exposed. Her opinion – which she never seemed shy of giving – was solicited and splashed across the media on every subject, from fracking to twerking. A couple of years back, Savage Earth Heart were a moderately successful indie band (and one Parlabane admired), but nobody in the press thought that two highly regarded albums were a sound basis to go seeking Heike Gunn’s opinion on the pressing issues of the day. Then, shortly after ‘Do It to Julia’ became a worldwide hit – more than a year after being thoroughly ignored upon its initial release – suddenly she was an expert on everything from the environment to international relations. However, one song wasn’t enough to make anybody a superstar, even one given the considerable helping hand of being featured during a season-defining moment in a hit TV show.

The sad truth was that if Heike was four feet tall with a hump, she might still sell a few records, but she wouldn’t have the media chasing her all over Europe. She was attractive, she was stylish and she knew how to sell a carefully constructed image of herself. She courted controversy, baited the tabloids with an alacrity bordering on the reckless and she knew how to make any given story about her.

And, of course, there was the issue of her father. Ramsay Gunn had been among the most influential Scottish artists of his generation, one of those Bowie-like figures who always seemed to be tapping into a cultural seam before anyone else even noticed it. He had lived and worked in California in the late sixties, and was said to have been present at the birth of the modern green movement. He painted cover art for prog-rock classics in London in the early seventies, then pre-dated punk’s own rejection of the same when he lit out on an ultra-realism period, immersing himself in an almost documentary style of painting, from African war zones to the theatres of European leftist terrorism.

Coming on the back of this, of course, he spent the late seventies and early eighties in West Berlin, but returned to his native Islay before the Wall fell, in order to raise his German-born daughter.

It was said that Heike was born to be a cultural icon, but from what Parlabane had discovered about her upbringing, she wasn’t exactly groomed for the spotlight. Nothing was in the public domain about her mother, who had died in Heike’s infancy, resulting in Ramsay’s retreat to the island of his own youth and a more contemplative period of landscape work. He had raised his daughter largely on his own, a succession of muses, female artists and hippy flakes fulfilling motherly duties to highly varying degrees, according to the gossip.

‘On the whole, I think she’s played her hand well,’ Parlabane suggested. ‘She’s used the exposure to give herself a platform. But don’t you ever worry she’s riding a tiger?’

‘You worry, sure,’ said Scott. ‘She’s my big cousin, for God’s sake. But on the other hand, Heike’s smarter than the tabloids. They think they know what she’s about, but Heike’s always one step ahead of where you think.’

Rory let out a chuckle.

‘Yeah. I’ll never forget the
Sun
calling her a hypocrite for backing the No More Page Three campaign when she had done what they called topless modelling. She had posed nude for a painting by a woman who had won the fucking Turner Prize, and the result was hardly spank-bank material.’