Dead Girl Walking Read online

  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 side
show.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘It would be like wanking to a Picasso,’ Scott said.

  ‘The media claim she wants to have her cake and eat it,’ said Damien, once again grabbing the reins. ‘They say she’s partly selling her music on her image, while at the same time condemning sexism in the media. It’s impossible to describe just how much they don’t get it. And it’s not about an image: it’s about who and what Heike is. There’s a million beautiful women out there, a million singers, a million songwriters. It’s about the whole package. It’s that unquantifiable but unmistakable thing: star quality. Whatever it is, we all know Heike’s got it. She’s touched by magic, and everybody wants some of the stardust to sprinkle on them.’

  When the last of his interviews was over, Mairi was waiting for him in the reception area, sipping a coffee she must have bought from the greasy spoon he’d passed on the way in.

  ‘Well?’ she asked expectantly. ‘Did you find out anything?’

  ‘Yeah. That they’re all lying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘By omission, at least. I’ve been speaking to them for two hours, and in all that time, nobody told me one thing that wasn’t already in the public domain. On a certain level it’s pretty impressive. It takes a degree of concentration to filter out anything, even an innocuous detail, that might have come from your own memory rather than reportage.’

  ‘Like I said, what happens on tour … So what’s next?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I should talk to the road crew: they might be a little less guarded.’

  Mairi looked confused.

  ‘But what about the band? Is there not more you can find out from them?’

  ‘Your ground rules make it kind of tricky. I could press harder if they knew Heike was missing, but you don’t want that. I’ll have to come back to them when I’ve got more information from elsewhere. Right now I’ve got no leverage.’

  Confusion was giving way to undisguised disappointment. Parlabane didn’t know what she was expecting, but he hadn’t delivered it.

  ‘No leverage? Don’t you have other means of finding out what they might know?’

  ‘Like what?’ he asked, adding an admonitory sternness to his tone.

  ‘I thought you were the kind of guy who would stop at nothing to get to the story.’

  ‘For one thing, I’m not allowed to tell the story, so maybe that’s taking my edge off. But that aside, these days I stop at the stuff that’s liable to get me the jail.’

  ‘I just thought…’

  Mairi sighed.

  This was when he realised why she hired him.

  ‘You just thought what? That I could maybe hack their phones or pull some black-arts shit you heard about during the Coulson and Brooks trial?’

  ‘But you said it yourself: it wouldn’t be for publication, and there’s someone missing who I’m worried about. Wouldn’t the end justify the means?’

  Parlabane laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He thought about the blueprints, the modifications Sarah had been so determined to make. She had been the driving force in getting him to clean up his act, to cut out the practices that were going to see him ‘end up dead or in prison again’, as she often put it. And he had done so, more or less. That was the biggest irony about how he had been hung out to dry by some of his former employers: he had long since stopped doing most of the things he was being scapegoated for.

  He wasn’t the same man any more, but whoever he’d become, it seemed Sarah didn’t think much of that bloke either. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t think much of that bloke. He couldn’t blame Sarah for not loving someone who didn’t much like himself.

  Now it appeared the only gig he could get was working for somebody who thought they had hired the old Parlabane. Unfortunately, he wasn’t coming back. He had tried being his former self again: that was how he’d ended up with Pine and Mitchell up his arse.

  ‘Have you heard of the Westercruik Inquiry?’ he asked her,
realising he’d probably been mistaken in his assumption the other day that she must have done.

  ‘Vaguely. Remind me.’

  ‘It’s looking into the Anthony Mead scandal. The MoD leaks. The “intelligence services conspiracy” story that turned out to be the biggest riddie for a UK newspaper since the Hitler diaries.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Something about a stolen laptop that was actually bait to find the source of the leaks. I realise it must have turned up the heat on journalists, but this isn’t state secrets I’m asking you to—’

  ‘I’m Alec Forman,’ he interrupted. ‘I was the one who hacked the laptop. I’ve got the Met all over me trying to find out how it came to be in my possession. So not only am I a busted flush, but even if I’m a very good boy I’m going to be doing very well to stay out of the clink.’

  ‘Alec Forman? I thought your pseudonym was John Lapsley.’

  ‘Needed a new one. It’s an anagram of roman à clef. John Lapsley’s gone. I’m sorry, Mairi. I’m not the guy who found out the truth about Donald, any more than I’m the guy who used to come round your parents’ house when I was seventeen.’

  Mairi said nothing for a few moments, then emitted a small tut.

  ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘I quite liked both of those. I’ll take what I can get, though.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  Our Thing

  The period after the soundcheck felt like an eternity of waiting. I knew I would have to learn to occupy myself, somehow make use of the time, as it was going to happen every night we performed. Practice would be one option, but I didn’t feel like even touching my violin until I was ready to take the stage.

  We dined together; or rather we sat down to food together. I barely ate anything for fear of not keeping it down.

  I felt very alone in the dressing room. I sat at one end of the mirrored wall, conscious of not being entitled to join any particular conversation.