Dead Girl Walking (21 page)

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked, before realising I already knew the answer. I suddenly saw the tightrope Heike had to walk whenever she felt a connection with someone, the tightrope on which she had temporarily lost her balance with me.

‘I tried to kiss her,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘I felt so close to her, there seemed to be so much chemistry, but it’s as easy as it is perilous to misread the signs. I just thought, at least, that she must know
I’m
gay, so if she was sending me these sorts of signals…’

Heike stared out of the window again, biting a fingernail. She looked so vulnerable, such a contrast to the person who commanded the stage or stared out from album covers. It was just so horrible to watch her suffer. I wanted to hug her, let her feel some comfort, let her feel I was there for her, but that was the last thing that was going to happen, and possibly the worst thing I could do.

‘What happened?’ I asked, as there seemed to be more, but I felt slightly bad about asking. ‘I mean, I can’t begin to imagine what that felt like. I’m guessing awkward doesn’t really cover it.’

‘Awkward I can handle. I’ve dealt with it plenty of times before,’ she added, deliberately looking me in the eye. ‘I’ve retrieved more than a few misread situations, and I’ve been bloody generous when some bi-curious girl gets freaked and decides she’s not so curious any more. But I never got the chance to smooth it with Hannah.’

‘She bolted?’

‘Like a startled deer. She said something like “No, this is wrong, I’m sorry,” and hared off. I went after her, but when I hit the street, she had vanished.’

The bus ate up the miles, but there were a lot of miles to eat, and after looking out of the window with her headphones on for about an hour, Heike asked if I wouldn’t mind working with her.

‘I just need to get my head somewhere else for a few hours, and it’s often the best way.’

I was delighted. Before going on tour with the band, I’d had visions of us all jamming to while away the journeys, and when such things failed to happen, I was secretly a bit embarrassed at having had such a notion.

The hours really did melt away once we took up where we’d left off in Barcelona: tinkering, repeating and improvising, each of us happy both to lead and to follow, the journey often taking us somewhere barely recognisable from our starting point. Most were dead ends, meaning we had to go back to where we started, but every so often we would play a sequence that excited us both, and caught glimpses of the song that was trying to be born.

The chord structure was becoming all but cemented; we’d practically ruled out all the possible wrong turns before we found the right path. Then I suggested Heike switch to arpeggios on alternate phrases and let me drive the melody.

She lit up like a flare, her energy warming me.

‘That’s perfect,’ she said, explaining that the lyric she was working on was essentially an exchange between two parties, a god and a mortal, but the song was about how they were each more alike than the other assumed.

‘The chords and the arpeggios are constructed of the same notes, but take different forms.’

I felt quite elated. The last hour dragged as we got caught in traffic, but the journey was ending in a far better place than it had begun. Heike was scribbling lyric notes, still tired but calmer, the angst of last night’s encounter gone, or maybe turned into something else.

But Jan had noticed Heike’s earlier manner and expressed his concern.

‘You should try and grab a nap before soundcheck,’ he suggested. ‘And maybe I’ll look into getting you a flight from Madrid to Milan on Friday instead of the bus.’

I was touched by his kindness, but then I guessed this was the sort of thing a tour manager had to be aware of. It wouldn’t do to have the main attraction burned-out and exhausted with more than a dozen dates left to play. Then I remembered the last time Jan had arranged to spare Heike the bus journey, and wondered if we would have some extra passengers again.

They proceeded briskly but didn’t run, Parlabane aware that doing so would only make them more conspicuous as they moved through the crowds and down inside the station.

‘How can you be sure it was the same guy?’ Mairi asked.

‘I took his picture,’ Parlabane explained, trying not to sound
too
vindicated.

Mairi rolled her eyes. He couldn’t decide whether this was in disdain at his weirdness or in irritation that his weirdness had just proven justified.

They joined a short queue at a ticket machine, both of them rifling through their pockets for coins as they waited for the old punter at the front to finish his purchase. Parlabane was glancing over his shoulder, checking his six, and seriously thinking of offering the bloke some of his own change if it would get him moving.

‘Why did you photograph him on Islay?’ Mairi asked.

‘It wasn’t actually on Islay, it was on the ferry to Port Askaig. I thought he was a cop. He’d been following my car all the way from Inveraray. It’s happened a few times recently: low-level harassment from the Westercruik Inquiry.’

Mairi collected their tickets from the machine and they rejoined the human flow through the entrance hall and down towards the U5 platforms.

‘That’s the business with the stolen laptop.’

‘Yes,’ Parlabane confirmed, unsure whether Mairi was taking the piss. There was something unnervingly guileless about the way she so succinctly referred to the situation that was currently ripping apart his career and might yet see him back in jail, making it sound trivial or incidental.

‘So had you assumed he was a Brit?’

‘Right up until I heard him talking on the ferry. I clocked the accent, and given he was asking somebody about distillery tours I assumed I’d read it all wrong. Sneaky bastard must have been trying to throw me off the scent, cover up the fact that he was following me.’

‘Can I see?’

‘Sure.’

Parlabane took out his phone and swiped through the gallery until it showed the image he had taken in the ferry’s forward lounge. She took the phone in her left hand, pausing to punch their tickets at a validation post on the westbound platform.

Mairi looked at the shot from the ferry, then verified Parlabane’s identification when she scrolled forward to the most recent pic.

‘You photographed the receptionists at our hotel?’ she asked with fading incredulity. ‘The bellhop too?’

‘That hotel was one of the last places Heike was seen. Somebody there might know something. I asked if they still had CCTV footage of the lobby from that time and the receptionist said she’d look into it.’

‘Actually
look into it
look into it, or
yeah, that’ll be right
look into it?’

‘That remains to be seen. I was quite charming and tried not to come over as a goggle-eyed paranoid freak, but who knows what’s in the eye of the beholder.’

An eastbound train rumbled into the station, a pale yellow lozenge cutting off his view of the opposite platform and its wall of glossy green tiles. The two tracks ran side by side in the centre, divided by a row of matching green-painted steel columns. Up above, the chamber was lit by parallel rows of semi-spheres, the bulbs of which he imagined must be a bugger to change. Underfoot was a black line of floor tiles two feet back from the edge, but he and Mairi seemed to be among the few treating it as an imaginary barrier. The locals were polite, though, it had to be said. The platform was fairly filling up, and in London he’d have been getting nudged forward at this point, black line or no black line.

‘What if he
is
a cop?’ Mairi said, handing him back the phone. ‘I mean a German cop, looking for Heike.’

‘He bailed the moment he realised I’d recognised him. Cops don’t do that, especially if they’re en route to hearing what someone with a phone-in tip might have to tell them about a missing person.’

Parlabane felt a hand on his back as the westbound train came clattering in from the tunnel. He assumed it was someone steadying themselves as the throng on the platform moved forward in response, but then he was driven sharply from behind and found himself tripping over a foot that had been placed in front of his own.

He sprawled headlong over the edge as the train bore down on him. There was no way to correct his balance, only air to push against. He heard Mairi scream, then her voice was lost in the sound of steel on steel and a shriek of brakes. Even as he tumbled, his mind was making calculations, too fast to be rendered in conscious thought. Decisions drove his limbs via altogether more ancient neural circuitry. There would be no time to climb back up. He needed a survival space. Unlike London or even Glasgow, there was no channel beneath the middle of the tracks, and thus no option to lie flat. Dead ahead, the eastbound train was only just beginning to move, so there was no route clear of the westbound track.

The central pillars. They were his only chance.

He sprung to his feet and righted himself side-on against one. The westbound train screeched to an emergency stop, the metal of its carriages inches from his face. Behind him, the accelerating eastbound service was so close it jetted air up his shirt. He was grateful for Sarah’s years of insisting on healthy eating: a few too many haggis suppers and he’d have been getting spun and shredded right then.

He stared through the windows towards the platform from which he had fallen, looking for who had pushed him. His view was obscured by shocked faces staring back from inside the train, mere inches away. Beyond them was a further host of onlookers: curious, frightened, anxious, confused. He wondered whether there was at least one who was disappointed.

‘I just lost my balance,’ Parlabane said.

They were sitting in a small office off the ticket hall, the station manager unwilling to let them leave until she had ascertained that he was unharmed and, more importantly, that the police had logged the incident and a proper investigation was under way.

Mairi was looking wan, her natural grace finally failing her after she had rushed around to the eastbound platform, breathless and slightly teary with shock. She hadn’t seen what happened, and he wasn’t filling her in just yet.

An irritatingly young and even more irritatingly handsome uniformed police officer was standing opposite, asking questions in slow but precise English.

‘You were too close to the edge?’ he enquired.

Parlabane wasn’t sure whether there was a hint of accusation in this, or whether it was simply a projection of his own prejudices.

‘The platform became very busy,’ he answered. ‘I think I moved forward a little without realising.’

Eventually the young cop seemed happy that he could consider the incident dealt with, though the station manager still appeared far from content. Her English wasn’t great, but Parlabane guessed that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t seem satisfied with his answers. Accidents evidently weren’t allowed on her watch, so she wanted a better explanation for what happened than he’d been able or willing to give her.

‘Jeez, she was a bit intense,’ Mairi said after the station manager had personally escorted them safely aboard a westbound U5 train. ‘I think she must take it personally, like any accident impugns the integrity of her station-running protocols.’

‘No,’ Parlabane replied, ‘she just couldn’t see how my story added up. Which is understandable, seeing as it didn’t.’

‘How so?’

‘Someone pushed me, Mairi. Hard. Deliberate. Unmistakable.’

She gaped, uncomprehending.

‘Why did you tell them you tripped?’

‘Because it’s going to be a lot harder to find out what’s happened to Heike if we’ve got the German police all over us. If I made an accusation, the first thing they’d do is look into why someone would want me dead. It will take them one phone call and about five minutes to discover that I am currently being investigated regarding my role in a possible conspiracy to steal secrets from the MoD. There might be an arrest warrant for me by now, but even if there isn’t, from that moment on it will primarily be me the German cops are interested in. They’ll be watching my every step, and I’m not very comfortable with that.’

‘Are you comfortable with the fact that somebody just tried to kill you?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he told her, grinning. ‘There’s a rather perverse side of me, to whom that part feels like coming home.’

‘I’d heard you have a sick sense of humour. To be honest, I think the word “deranged” really sells it.’

‘You have to look at the evidence dispassionately. At least this means we’re on to something.’

‘That part isn’t reassuring,’ she replied, folding her arms.

Parlabane let her simmer.

He hadn’t told her the whole truth about why he didn’t want to involve the cops, as it entailed the possibility that what had happened wasn’t about Heike at all. As he was climbing back up on to the eastbound platform, his brain racing to analyse the implications, it had occurred to him that Mairi’s earlier suggestion that the thick-necked jowly bastard was a polisman might be right: just not a German one.

What if Bawjaws
was
following him, and it was nothing to do with Heike, but with the Anthony Mead business? It would be an effective cover for a British cop – or a British something darker – to pretend to be foreign on that ferry when he was concerned about having been made. Parlabane had dipped his toe in some very murky waters with that MoD thing, and he had no idea whose agendas he might have disturbed, or who might be moving against him.

Until he could at least find out what he was dealing with, it seemed wisest not to make himself the focus of a police investigation.

‘So what do you suggest?’ Mairi asked as the train arrived at Brandenburger Tor.

‘I’d liked to get an ID on Bawjaws back there.’

‘Where are you hoping to come by that?’

‘Same place we got his secretary’s phone number.’

The Valencia show that night felt special, maybe because I had feared Heike might be off-form and subdued. Her first few songs had borne this out before she came to life on ‘Who Do You Want Me to Be’, and started throwing everything into her performance. I used to think it was a song about coming out, but after what she had confided today I got that its darkly funny anxieties were saying something much more complicated. After that, she seemed to be pouring herself out into the microphone and into a joyous sweat-lashed thrashing of her chords.