Dead Girl Walking (37 page)

‘They were about to embark on a big US tour in support of their third album. The first track is called “Yes”, and it’s all about how you have to sell yourself in this business, become someone you’re not. He couldn’t face it.’

She stared into her drink: Bowmore, distilled on Islay, a long way from the world she found herself in now.

‘Part of me wants to disappear. Walk away on the verge of this album’s release and never be seen again. Let a myth grow up around me instead: the real version can only disappoint.’

Her words made me remember other late-night conversations we’d had on this tour, and I began to wonder if I’d heard what she was really telling me.

‘Did you know that suicide rates actually go down during times of war and crisis?’ she had said to me in Zagreb. We were talking about the Balkan conflict of the early nineties, about what some of the people we had met that day might have seen and done. I should have realised that Heike was really talking about herself.

‘Some people create chaos around themselves, make their lives seemingly impossible, and we ask ourselves why. The truth is that they do it because they need the outside world to reflect what’s going on inside their heads. War and crisis does that for them. Suddenly, for once, the world makes sense.

‘It’s why I’m addicted to this,’ she went on, meaning her music, her lifestyle, the band, touring. ‘Even though it’s chaotic and out of control and it threatens to overwhelm me, I need it, and I’m afraid of what would happen if I didn’t have it any more.’

She poured herself another worryingly big measure of malt and swigged back about a third of it in one go. It must have burned, but there were harder things to swallow.

‘We’re already booked to play Letterman, did you know that?’

I didn’t. And now that she’d told me, I was already crapping myself.

‘I’m on the verge of this massive exposure, this major breakthrough, and I just feel adrift. I’m not sure I can face what’s in front of me, but I do know that once I’ve had it, losing it again would be unbearable.’

Looking back, that’s when I should have said, ‘Catch on to yourself, Heike.’ I didn’t feel such a thing was any more my right. I didn’t think she would listen, and I was cowardly, afraid she’d kick off or even storm out.

That was when I failed her, because maybe that was my cue. Maybe she needed me to risk her anger because I cared enough to do so. Maybe that would have made things different. Maybe she’d have let me in again.

Maybe she’d still today be here.

Mairi told the driver the name of their hotel, but Parlabane advised her to alter the destination.

‘We can’t go back there until we’re sure we’re not being observed.’

‘How can we be sure? I was pretty bloody sure when we jumped in that last cab, and then they appeared inside the dome. How the hell did they find us?’

Parlabane thought of Bodo’s nonchalant lack of urgency, seeming as interested in his phone as he was in his quarry.

He swiped the iPad to waken it, looking for a list of all active programs.

‘Remember you said there had to be something else on this thing? Well, I suspect there is: a secondary tracking app. Talk about belt and braces: he
really
didn’t want this thing stolen. His default Find My iPad app was essentially functioning as a decoy, because it’s the first thing a thief would disable.’

‘Can you disable this other one?’

‘No. I can’t even switch the iPad off: the tracking app must be designed to keep it running.’

‘So throw it out the window.’

‘Not yet. I want to copy the database, Bodo’s emails and the hotel room hidden-camera files to an iFlash drive.’

‘Then we need to get underground,’ Mairi said, instructing the driver to hang a left on Friedrichstrasse and take them to the U-Bahn station.

They ran down the stairs to the U6 line, Mairi stepping carefully in her bare feet.

Parlabane glanced at the progress of the transfer to his memory stick as they waited on the platform. It was getting there, but taking far longer than it should, given the sizes of the files. Something else was draining resources and busying the memory.

Mairi was staring in consternation at her phone.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Checking my location. Successfully, I’m afraid. We’re not deep enough. If I can get a GPS signal down here, then so can that thing.’

‘We need to keep moving. I just need a little more time.’

They boarded the first train, heading south, both of them casting anxious glances back along the platform until the doors closed.

Parlabane took a seat and returned his attention to the iPad. He didn’t like what he saw. The transfer was complete, but he now knew what had been slowing it down.

‘I think we just got proof positive that there
is
something else on here that Bodo doesn’t want us to see. The problem is that he’s taken the zero option now that he knows for sure who’s got it. The tracking app is going into emergency mode and performing a remote wipe of the files. In a little while the only thing it will leave running is the shell of the OS and anything it needs to keep sending out its GPS signature.’

‘Did you copy the files you need?’

‘Yes.’

‘So let’s get off at the next stop and leave it on the train.’

‘Two more stops,’ he countered, frantically navigating through folders.

‘Are you suicidal?’

‘The app is deleting automatically, so at least Bodo hasn’t been able to specify what gets wiped first. There might still be time to find something else.’

‘Like what?’

He didn’t know. Almost everything on it was in German, so there was no way of knowing what terms to search for, never mind knowing what files were worth copying before the digital axe fell. He had to triage rapidly. The only material worth the effort of saving right now would be files in English: anything German was a stab in the dark. Files were being annihilated by the millisecond and he didn’t want the last thing he salvaged to turn out to be Bodo’s iTunes playlist.

‘I need search terms,’ he said. ‘Words that might quickly identify that a file or part of a document is in English.’

‘You mean like “the” or “and”?’

‘Too general. We’d get a load of EULAs and manuals.’

Mairi sighed in exasperation.

‘Well, how about searching for Heike Gunn? Or would that be too obvious?’

Parlabane gawped.

‘I’d slap myself on the forehead but I need both hands to type.’

He keyed in the words and hit return, holding his breath as he awaited the response. About a dozen results filled the window, referencing emails in Bodo’s legit Bad Candy account. He scrolled down, hoping to find one from the alias account, but he found a more conspicuous outlier: a text file named ‘MHTB’. He pasted a copy onto the iFlash drive, then opened the original.

The screen filled with text.

I will always associate the sound of the fiddle with my grandfather.

It was the sound I heard whenever I went to his house, and whenever he came over to ours. I mean, it wasn’t like he carried the thing about with him all the time, just that I have a more vivid recollection of those visits when he had his violin with him.

Parlabane looked to Mairi, who was reading over his shoulder, her eyes almost on stalks.

‘MHTB,’ she said in a stunned whisper. ‘Monica Halcrow’s Tour Blog.’

There were times when, despite your best efforts and your most cherished principles, you still ended up having to act as much of a sleazy prick as any Dacre disciple or Murdoch minion. There was no sugar-coating it. Sure, he had been pushed in front of a train and chased all across Berlin; the stakes were undoubtedly high, with a bright young woman still inexplicably missing. But what he was perusing right now was not the hacked laptop of some spoiled Tory or the incriminating data files of a thuggish sex trafficker. He was reading the candid and intimate private journal of a vulnerable girl half his age.

They sat in Parlabane’s hotel room like two wretched reviewers speed-reading a Harry Potter novel so that they could fire out a pointless five hundred words in the next day’s paper.
Monica Halcrow and the Fiddle of Sappho
was light on spells and boarding schools, heavy on jealousy and sexual tension.

Parlabane was scrolling through it on his Ultrabook, Mairi on her iPad. Every so often one of them would look up and tantalisingly ask ‘Have you got to the bit where…?’ but ultimately it offered precious little insight. The blog just seemed to flesh out details of what they already knew, with the only revelation to carry genuine shock value being that an innocent abroad on her first tour had taken a remarkably short time to plumb the true depths of rock depravity in shagging a drummer.

Both reviewers also felt compelled to conclude that the ending was a bummer.

‘It looks like Heike was in a very bad way, psychologically,’ Mairi observed, concern bordering on dread creeping into her tone.

‘No shit,’ Parlabane agreed. ‘She’s talking about disappearing and letting a myth grow up around her.’

‘I can’t help thinking this can’t be the whole story, though. Or am I looking for something that isn’t there because I don’t want to accept what is?’

‘It’s not the whole story,’ Parlabane stated. ‘For one thing, it ends in Rostock, with several dates still to play. And look at
how
it ends: with Monica beating herself up that she didn’t do enough to intervene in Heike’s downward spiral, like she’s writing this after the fact.’

‘You’re right. I mean, I’ve not spoken to her in a while, but as far as I know, Monica isn’t even aware that Heike’s missing. And yet the final thoughts on her blog imply she’s guilt-ridden, saying if she’d done things differently, Heike would still be here today.’

Parlabane pointed to the last paragraph on Mairi’s iPad.

‘Specifically it says: “Maybe she’d still today be here”. And that wee bit of Yoda-speak follows on from “I didn’t feel such a thing was any more my right”. These last few paragraphs Monica’s writing are not.’

‘It’s been edited,’ Mairi said, shaking her head in mild irritation at how obvious this should have been. ‘Of course it’s been edited. But why would you censor someone’s private journal?’

Parlabane knew a reason, and it wasn’t reassuring.

‘I think Monica Halcrow is in a lot of trouble. Bodo leaks this blog and the whole world has a poignant and compelling portrait of Heike Gunn’s potentially suicidal state of mind, including her stated intention to pull a vanishing act and never be seen again. It would be the perfect cover for them having killed her and disappeared the body.’

‘But as soon as it appeared on the web,’ Mairi reasoned, ‘Monica would be able to tell everyone the whole story.’

‘That’s why she’s in a lot of trouble.’

Mairi stared at Parlabane with an expression he had seen too often down the years: that look of distress at having discovered precisely how deep the rabbit-hole goes, and what darkness lay at its end. It hadn’t been him who had brought her to this place, although he had been her guide on the descent. He felt guilty, but knew that wasn’t right. Responsible, then. Responsible for what she was going through now, and responsible for getting her through whatever happened thereafter.

By her own admission, Mairi had come out to Berlin expecting a peaceful and satisfactory resolution: they would track down her missing singer, clear up whatever mess had been left and move on towards the album launch and the US tour. Instead it now looked like one of Mairi’s young charges was dead and the other in imminent danger of following her.

At this point her response was still in the denial phase.

‘Damien said Monica was always tapping away on her laptop, on the bus and in the dressing room. Everyone must have been aware of that. So this document must have been copied by Jan or another of Bodo’s Bad Candy crew while she was on stage, presumably post-Rostock. But if these people suddenly made Monica disappear, surely the police or her family would check her computer and find the original? Then the discrepancies between the full account and the edited one would only draw attention to Bodo.’

‘I don’t think they copied it from her laptop,’ Parlabane replied. ‘She calls it a blog. That implies web-based.’

‘That could just be a modern term. She mentions how “diary” sounds too old-fashioned.’

‘This wasn’t written on Word. There’s weird line-breaks all over the place. It was copy-pasted from another source, like WordPress or Movable Type. I think somebody – on the bus or in the dressing room – surreptitiously watched her log in and clocked her password.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘It means it’s stored online and they can access it at any time, from anywhere. Bodo can erase the original from his office desk in Berlin, replacing it with this version as the definitive. Then suddenly you don’t only have an explanation for Heike vanishing, you’ve got a guilt-racked suicide note from Monica as well.’

Mairi closed the document on her iPad and opened up her browser.

‘I’m booking us on the first flight home. We need to reach Monica and find out what’s missing from that blog. I doubt she’ll spill anything over the phone because she did a very good butter-wouldn’t-melt act the last time I spoke to her, but we can prove that it’s in her best interests to tell the truth.’

‘Plus we can threaten to leak scuddy photos of her if she doesn’t play ball,’ Parlabane suggested. ‘Just saying.’

Mairi glared at him in momentary incredulity, then laughed with exasperated relief. It had taken her a while to decide he was joking, but to be fair, Parlabane couldn’t have said for certain that he was.

‘Oh, Jack.’

She rested her head on his shoulder as the tension of the last few minutes gave way to a moment of welcome levity. This in turn precipitated a few gentle tears, but she was more determined than upset.

She selected flights for the next morning, leaving Tegel early and changing at Heathrow for Glasgow. He watched her book them on her iPad, saying nothing to remind her that there was a good chance he’d be arrested once he was back in the UK. He’d known there was no avoiding that: it wasn’t like he was planning to flee to a non-extradition country. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. He just hoped it didn’t happen before they found Monica, and saw no need to further worry Mairi.