Dead Girl Walking
Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General
QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING
COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
ONE FINE DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
BOILING A FROG
A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY
THE SACRED ART OF STEALING
BE MY ENEMY
ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEBODY LOSES AN EYE
A TALE ETCHED IN BLOOD AND HARD BLACK PENCIL
ATTACK OF THE UNSINKABLE RUBBER DUCKS
A SNOWBALL IN HELL
PANDAEMONIUM
WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED
WHEN THE DEVIL DRIVES
BEDLAM
FLESH WOUNDS
COPYRIGHT
Published by Little, Brown
ISBN: 9781408705605
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Christopher Brookmyre
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
Down in the U-Bahnhof at Midnight
For Marisa
Her world collapsed around a single moment. A single act. That was all it took for what she understood as reality to be altered for ever.
She watched the blood splatter from the girl’s open mouth like vomit, engulfing and uncontainable. The knife must have gone in right to the hilt, driven as it was by so much force, like he had been trying to punch right through her. She tried and failed to apprehend her thoughts before they turned to the massive organ damage necessary to have precipitated such an eruption. The girl would bleed out in a matter of minutes, maybe seconds.
There was no numbing moment of disbelief to anaesthetise her fear. This was real. This was now. She was better wired than most people to fundamentally understand this.
Just as she had learned that dreams can come true, that things you have merely fantasised about can suddenly become everyday reality, so was she starkly aware that the darkest dreads could be made manifest too. Most people’s dreams didn’t come true. Most people didn’t get to play their music to thousands of people in city after city, night after night. Most people didn’t see a human being murdered before their very eyes and know that they were next.
The girl now slumped to the ground, collapsing in stages; one hand clutching her stomach, the other extended to steady herself, as though a fear of toppling over were the chief of her concerns. Then she flopped forward on to her face, folded up like a doll.
The attacker barely cast a glance towards his victim. Now that she had been dealt with, and was no longer of value to him, the girl ceased to merit his consideration.
In those brief seconds, she thought of the years she had lived, and of all the time and effort it had taken to reach this stage in her career. The doors that were opening. The places she was yet to go. It seemed so unfair that all of it could be gone in the blink of an eye. Yet she knew just how sudden, how arbitrary and capricious fate could be.
Watching the blood pour from a scared, astonished mouth, she had just as immediately grasped the implications for anyone who could testify to having seen it happen.
He was moving forward, simmering with an aggression he could tap into at will. Those muscular arms, that body honed and sculpted to brutal purpose.
Killing machine.
She thought she saw movement from the floor, but it was just the blood pooling around the girl’s waist.
She felt a cold, iron paralysis, a crippling fear of flight that fear of death could not overcome. She was petrified. She was powerless.
She was next.
The payment was gone, the only leverage, and it had bought nothing.
That thought seemed almost random, flashing past like just another piece of debris in the vortex of this tornado. Once upon a time, the notion of losing that much money would have been catastrophic. Right now it was barely relevant.
It didn’t look like she would be needing it.
They didn’t look like cops. Not at first, when he walked to his seat on the other side of the table. More like lawyers, surrounded as they were by piles of notes and stacks of folders, binders and hard-bound volumes. They seemed a little swamped, a little distracted, referring to various loose sheets and plastic-wrapped documents as he sat down, as though they had to remind themselves of who he was and why he was there.
It wasn’t like any interview room he’d been in before either. It was a bright and airy upstairs office, lots of windows, a couple of framed prints and the walls covered in a recently painted soothing shade of light blue. All very neutral, very non-threatening.
This was in marked contrast to the language and tone of the missives by which he had been compelled to come to London. They had made it clear that if he didn’t cooperate by travelling voluntarily, he’d be doing so in the back of a van. Yet now they were acting like it was at his own convenience. He even had an appointment. It was like visiting the proctologist; all very polite, respectful and professional, but ultimately you knew that the point of the exercise was for someone to ram their finger up your arse.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Ben Mitchell; this is Detective Constable Audrey Pine. We are both with Metropolitan Police Specialist Operations, operating under the auspices of the Westercruik Inquiry, whose full powers we are at liberty to command.’
The preamble went on for a bit after that, like the terms and conditions you never read before clicking Yes to installing a piece of software: the details and the legalese weren’t important, as you both knew there was no option but to proceed. The appointment thing was a bit of paradoxical mummery to establish their credentials too. Its purpose was to underline that he was not even that important in the greater scheme of what they were about here and to remind him that this thing was a juggernaut, so step carefully lest you end up under the wheels.
It was Pine who spoke first.
‘Alec Forman,’ she stated matter-of-factly, like she was taking the register.
‘Present,’ he replied, eliciting a grimly weary look. She wasn’t in the mood for humour. That was fine, because neither was he.
Pine looked late thirties or early forties, pale and skinny with a dyed-blonde bob. She might have been younger: her impassive expression and a complexion betraying a committed smoking habit were probably putting a few years on her. She seemed all the more pallid next to Mitchell, who was brown of skin and jet black of hair.
‘You’ve been publishing under that byline for roughly the past three years.’
When I’ve been published at all, he thought.
‘You’ve been in journalism more than two decades. You’ve worked in London, Los Angeles and Scotland. You’ve largely been freelance since the mid-nineties. You started off in Glasgow then moved to London when you were hired as an investigative reporter on the…’
On and on she went, with the expression and the tone of voice that conveyed an indefatigable stamina for bureaucratic detail, far more than a mortal man like him could possibly endure. His only salvation might be her need to nip out for a fag. If she had Nicorette gum, he was doomed.
He wasn’t so sure about her strategy, it had to be said. She just kept telling him things about himself, which didn’t strike him as a likely means of tripping him up. There were a few hazy periods, granted, but he was generally accepted as the world authority on the subject of his own life.
These were mere overtures, however. They were circling, trying to make him wonder where they’d come from when they finally decided to attack. Either that or the plan was to remind him of just how far he had fallen in order to have made the desperate mistakes that had ultimately brought him to this room.
‘Your time in London, working for the Exposure team, you carved out a bit of a name for yourself. You were very much ahead of the curve.’
Mitchell was speaking, glancing back down at a document as he did so, like he hadn’t had enough time to prepare for this. Aye, right.
The journalist occasionally known but decreasingly published as Alec Forman still said nothing.
‘In fact, you were cited by name several times during the Leveson Inquiry and reference was made to quite a range of, shall we say, improvisational methods of procuring information. It was alleged that, in order to stand up your stories, you employed computer hacking, unauthorised, invasive and covert electronic surveillance, even burglary. This is going all the way back to the early nineties. You truly were a trailblazer for all that ultimately became rotten about modern journalism.’
No, they didn’t look like cops: not until they started asking questions, at which juncture the humourless condescension was unmistakable. They must teach it at Hendon.
He knew he was being goaded and he ought to deny the cop a response. Maybe three years ago he’d have been strong enough to resist. These days his skin had worn a lot thinner from being the whipping boy.
If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you wrong me, shall I not fuck your shit right up?
‘Those were allegations made by individuals and organisations bearing long-term grudges about having their own sharp practices exposed.’
‘Your editors at the time stated at the inquiry that highly sensitive documents and other evidence frequently came into your hands through unnamed sources: sometimes documents and evidence that had previously been quietly resting in a safe.’
‘Yes, and they were so uncomfortable about the provenance of my information that they said absolutely nothing about it until they were in front of an inquiry and needing to offer up a sacrificial goat.’
‘So where did all those documents come from?’
‘Unnamed sources. Many and various sources. That’s journalism, or at least it was, once upon a time. As far as I remember it, no specific evidence was produced to support these allegations.’
Mitchell glanced intently down at the fire hazard of loose leafs in front of him, like there might be a citation there that would refute this last statement. There wasn’t, but he had a pretty good comeback nonetheless.
‘In the year 2000 you were found guilty of breaking and entering, were you not? You were jailed and served a total of seven months.’
Mitchell ran a finger down the sheet he was looking at, like he was double-checking.
‘Oh, sorry, that’s not strictly true. Part of that prison time was while you were on remand for a charge of murder.’