Dead Girl Walking (33 page)

‘I’m so sorry. Keith, you have to believe me, I—’

He talked over me. It was like he hadn’t heard me, like he was in a state of numb shock.

‘She made out like she was doing a general piece on you as a musician. She asked me about us. I told her I’d known you since we were kids. I told her we were getting married.’

I could feel tears run down my face as I held the phone to my cheek. I had done this to him. That sneaky cow of a reporter had conned him, but I had done this.

I expected him to be angry. Instead he just sounded hurt, his voice weak, his words confused and defeated.

He had more questions than accusations, and they were the questions of someone who already knew that the answers wouldn’t help.

This was just as well, as I didn’t have any.

‘Why did I have to find out like this?’

‘Have you any idea how humiliated I am?’

‘How am I going to face people?’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Is this why you joined the band?’

‘Have you always had these feelings, for women?’

‘Are you sleeping with her?’

‘Are you in love with her?’

I had nothing to give him, other than apologies, which I knew were worthless.

‘It just happened,’ was as much of an explanation as I could manage.

I was about to add that ‘it meant nothing’, but caught myself.

It was the title of Heike’s song about betrayal, one that nailed how this statement was never true.

It didn’t mean nothing. It meant I didn’t love him.

If I loved him, I wouldn’t have been in that bar telling Heike: ‘I won’t run away.’ I’d have thanked her, said I understood, accepted it as a compliment, a sign of a strong and treasured friendship. But I didn’t. I kissed her. That meant everything.

I knew there was no making this right, even if he’d let me, even if he wanted me to. The girl who left to go on this tour was never coming back. The girl he had become engaged to didn’t exist any more.

Mairi opened her bedroom door and flung her arms around him before he could even step inside, let alone castigate her for almost giving him a coronary.

‘What’s that for?’

‘I’m so glad you’re back safe.’

‘And I’d be safe with clean underpants if you hadn’t had your wee joke.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she told him, closing the door. ‘It’s just, I lived and died a hundred times watching you over there, sitting a few feet from the guy, and you seemed perfectly comfortable, to the point of smug. I mean, I know you were the one with your head in the noose, but…’

‘I understand. Any football manager will tell you it’s hell to be watching from the sidelines, kicking every ball in your head. And if I seemed pleased with myself, it was purely relief at having got away with it.’

‘You haven’t got away with it yet,’ she cautioned. ‘When will we know if it’s worked?’

He tried very, very hard not to look self-satisfied.

‘It worked five minutes ago. I received the code before I even made it down the stairs.’

He held up Bodo’s iPad, already unlocked and the security disabled.

‘It’s a simple act of legerdemain,’ he had told Mairi a few hours back as he installed the software on to his newly purchased iPad. ‘It worked with Anthony Mead and it will work with Boris too. What’s crucial is that the wallpaper is the same, and so are any icons partially overlapped by the password interface. The hardest part with Mead was precisely matching the make and model of laptop, right down to the stickers detailing the spec. That’s not a problem with something as standardised and generic as an iPad, especially when you’re swapping it into the same case.’

‘So you swapped Mead’s laptop for one of your own?’

‘Kind of. In Mead’s case he was under the impression it had been lost and then found.’

‘But the important thing is that he thought it was the same machine.’

‘Correct. This software fakes a sleep or hibernation mode: it can even imitate the boot sequence if you want it to look like the device has been off altogether. Then it presents the user with the usual familiar password screen in order to log on properly. The user keys in his password, but it tells him it’s incorrect. He keys it again, helpfully giving us confirmation, but it’s never going to let him in because that would give the game away. Meantime this programme logs the passwords that were input and immediately sends them to an email account I can access from my phone. The real beauty of it is that he won’t know anything is wrong until he’s given us what we need.’

Mairi ran a finger almost reverently across the screen, like she had never seen a data tablet before.

‘All right,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘You’re entitled to look pretty chuffed with yourself now.’

She was looking into his eyes, their faces only inches apart. The smell of her was all around him, and the warmth of her body seemed so close that in his mind he could already feel it pressed against him. He understood that if he moved forward slightly, if he gave even the merest inclination of his head, they would kiss.

He knew it was what she wanted. He wanted it too, but there was something, still, that wouldn’t let him.

‘I think we should hold off on the self-congratulation until we’ve seen whether it tells us anything useful,’ he said, turning his gaze to the iPad.

Mairi sighed, venting a frustration that he didn’t flatter himself by interpreting as being entirely about what had almost just happened.

‘I need to get out of this place,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve been cooped up in this hotel for days. I need air, I need space.’

Parlabane refrained from pointing out that she had just spent the past few hours outdoors, albeit on a roof. He understood what she was feeling. The tension of not only the last few hours but the last few days was making her feel trapped.

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘Dinner. And a view of something other than that place across the road.’

They booked a taxi from reception, in order to minimise their on-street exposure. Having gone to such efforts of disguise and subterfuge, Parlabane anticipated the twisted irony of Bodo walking out of his building just in time to recognise Mairi and his recent visitor standing on the pavement opposite, trying to hail a cab.

The taxi turned up after a couple of minutes and they hurried across the pavement, heads down like it was raining.

Mairi gave the driver their destination, while Parlabane was getting busy with the fruit of his day’s labours. He had already changed the operating system language to English for ease of navigating through the architecture, though that wasn’t going to help in making sense of Bodo’s files.

‘What’s German for needle?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘In case I happen upon it inside this digital haystack.’

Parlabane scrolled through Bodo’s emails, scanning principally for names, as they were the same in any language. Most were to his primary address at the Bad Candy domain, but roughly a third were addressed to an alias account. Parlabane separated them so that each account displayed in a separate window, concentrating first on the unofficial business.

‘Oops,’ he said pointedly, directing Mairi’s gaze towards the screen.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Something familiar.’

She stared at the iPad, Parlabane taking a moment to look at her while her attention was so intently fixed on the screen. The taxi glided towards Unter den Linden, passing the Humboldt Box on the left and Museumsinsel on the right. He recalled stealing such glances back in another age. She was no less beguiling now, and yet seemed no less forbidden to him. He just couldn’t work out why.

‘Jan,’ she stated, spotting it. ‘This is his email address. But this is Bad Candy business: from what I can gather, it’s something to do with truck hire for Prelude to the Slaughter’s gigs in Poland next month. Why oops?’

Parlabane pointed to the other window.

‘Because he’s forgotten to switch log-ins when he sent this email to Bodo’s other account. This proves he’s in on whatever else is going on. A whole raft of this correspondence could well be from him, when he’s remembered to use his own unofficial account.’

‘Yeah. Just wish we had the first clue what they’re chatting about.’

The taxi dropped them off at the Reichstag. Mairi had expressed her intention to dine somewhere that was in marked contrast to last night’s rather cloistered repast. It was after six and neither of them had eaten anything substantial since breakfast. They made their way up to the Käfer restaurant, on the roof alongside Norman Foster’s gigantic glass dome.

Parlabane didn’t appreciate how hungry he was until the food was presented to him, wolfing down mouthfuls with an undignified haste that was further exacerbated by his impatience to turn his attention back to the iPad.

It felt like a perfect tableau of why all his relationships were ultimately doomed: a spectacular setting, a beautiful meal, an ideal companion, and him unable to truly appreciate any of those things as his focus was fixed upon an object he had just stolen so that he could work out why somebody had been trying to kill him.

On the plus side, he was at least getting somewhere with that.

‘There’s an email here in English,’ he reported. ‘Looks like it must have been the common language for an exchange with a Danish guy who doesn’t speak German.’

‘Danish?’

‘Yeah. Bodo appears to be chartering a boat. Tomorrow, in fact. From Esbjerg.’

‘Anything else in English? Or Spanish? I speak a bit of that.’

‘Not so far. That’s why I’m switching my efforts to the non-textual.’

‘Images? Do you reckon Bodo and his people may have had a hand in tipping off whoever took those
Daily Mail
pictures?’

‘It’s possible. The video shoot and the free gig were both at the Brauereihallen, so it wouldn’t be a stretch for some Bad Candy apparatchik to have been tailing them that night.’

‘I think those photos are another reason Monica’s not best pleased with me,’ Mairi confessed.

‘How so?’

‘She called me up when they went viral, like she thought there was something I could do about it. I could have been more sympathetic, I guess, but I was angry about the situation myself. I had warned her when she joined the band: romantic relationships between band members on tour are a crawling horror. She told me I had nothing to worry about when it came to her: she was happily engaged. I guess reminding her of that conversation wasn’t the most sensitive thing I could have done at that point.’

Parlabane ran a search for images and video files, hoping that Bodo’s browser cache wasn’t about to reveal a scat-porn fetish that would have him spewing up his dinner.

It didn’t, but what it did disclose was no less sickening.

‘Look at this,’ he said, placing the iPad on the table where they could both see it.

The search had thrown up a number of similarly posed head-and-shoulder shots of girls, distinct from the hundreds of other thumbnails that had inevitably populated the results. Parlabane had gone to the file location on a random sample and been repeatedly taken to the same document.

‘It’s a database,’ he said. ‘Dozens of girls, each with a profile and several other fields. These numbers could be earnings – or debts.’

‘Jesus,’ Mairi said. ‘Ages. Physical measurements. I don’t want to even speculate as to what some of these other statistics might be. And that looks like … Oh my God.’

‘What?’

‘This stuff at the bottom of each profile. It’s in German, but I think I know what it is. I used to work in marketing, and this looks like feedback analysis data. We used a programme that collated…’

Mairi put her hand over her mouth. For a moment he thought she was going to gag. Her expression suggested it was still possible.

‘Collated what?’ he asked, bracing himself.

‘Satisfaction surveys.’

She pushed her plate to the side, like she could no longer bear to look at the food still sitting there, far less eat it.

‘I’m starting to wish I’d spiked his doughnut with something that would make him piss blood.’

‘Much as I’d agree, it wouldn’t help us any,’ Mairi replied, her voice slightly dry from bitterness. ‘This is nightmarish stuff, but I still don’t see how it links to Heike.’

‘Only insofar as it proves she was on the money regards what was really going on with the merchandising girls. Maybe the bus incident wasn’t her final attempt to throw a spanner in the works.’

Mairi stared at him across the table, wide-eyed and almost accusatory.

‘Are you saying he could have
killed
her, for getting in the way of his business?’

Parlabane knew he couldn’t sugar-coat this. She had to understand what they might be dealing with.

‘He had someone throw me under a train just for taking his photograph. I think we might need to prepare ourselves for the worst.’

Mairi put her hands to her temples, elbows on the table like her head suddenly weighed too much. It couldn’t have been the first time that this possibility had struck her, but that fine membrane between the hypothetical and the genuinely probable had finally ruptured.

‘Oh Jesus.’

Her eyes were filling up.

‘I’ve been kidding myself, haven’t I? Thinking I’m on some kind of adventure here with you, that’s going to end with us finding Heike safe and sound after some, I don’t know, silly misunderstanding; or us snatching her from the clutches of Eurotrash gangsters and laughing about it in a couple of months’ time backstage in LA. We’re looking for a dead person, aren’t we?’

‘Not yet,’ Parlabane told her.

He picked up the iPad again and closed the database, taking him back to the search results. He scrolled down the page some more, in case anything else leaped out at him. There was months’ worth of browsing data cached here, every last thumbnail, banner and logo on any site Bodo had visited. To narrow the sample he navigated to the folder where the database was stored, which was when he spotted two video files in there, their icons showing no preview images because they had been recorded in some non-native format.

He launched the clip, filling the screen with a grainy image it took him a moment to recognise as a shower curtain. The colour was rather washed-out and drab, but he could make out the horizontal line that denoted the rim of a bath, and to the left a vertical line that had to be the edge of an open door. There was an object in the foreground, dark and blurry, bleeding out of the right of the frame. It could have been a bag or a bottle. Immediately it told him what he was looking at. This was hidden-camera footage.