Dead Girl Walking (18 page)

Actually, I could have had an even more brutal hangover after Brixton. It should have been truly horrific, given how much neat whisky I drank, but it didn’t work out like that. Sure, I felt a bit fragile on the bus to Dover, but the headache and the quease were weirdly anaesthetised by knowing just how much worse I
might
have felt.

I woke up in my own room, with little recollection of having got there from Heike’s, and before the first sign of après-whisky could strike I was overwhelmed by this vast sense of relief at what hadn’t happened. Between the overcharged emotions in that room and the malt, there was plenty to explain what did happen, and it was easy to imagine how I would have been feeling if things continued along that path. It wouldn’t have been a hangover, it would have been an emotional holocaust.

Heike and I were okay after London. I think we both knew we couldn’t pretend nothing had happened, but we also knew it didn’t have to mean anything. Or at least it didn’t have to mean everything. We were closer, I felt.

The French morning sun sent me limping for the shade, and I abandoned my thoughts of a walk around the block. I settled for sitting on the edge of a planter and sipping mineral water. The bus was in the car park and the driver had the engine running, but I wasn’t cooping myself up in there until the last possible moment.

I looked around for Heike, which was when I realised that, on top of everything, I had slept in. I was supposed to have left two hours ago.

Shit.

Heike wouldn’t be travelling with us that morning. She had gone on ahead by train to do an interview for Spanish TV. It had been a late change to the schedule, Jan only springing it on her yesterday evening, and he had asked if I wanted to go along to keep her company. It had sounded good at six o’clock yesterday evening, not so much twelve hours later when my alarm went off.

Oh well. She had ended up travelling alone after all, but at least going by rail she wouldn’t have to spend another six hours on the bus. Whereas we’d be relying on the faulty air-con to save us all from heat exhaustion and death by fart poisoning.

And just what you need when you’re feeling and looking as bad as I was is for a gaggle of sprightly and attractive girls to rock up and join your tour party.

They climbed out of two taxis in the car park, seven of them in matching T-shirts and hot pants, and queued up to collect matching rucksacks from the boots of the two vehicles. They looked made-up and manicured within an inch of their lives. Not a brain cell between them, I thought to myself in my admittedly grouchy, hungover condition. At first I assumed they were part of some kind of marketing or publicity operation, headed for the hotel, until I noticed Jan get out of the second taxi and pay both drivers. That was also when I noticed that the matching T-shirts all had the Savage Earth Heart logo.

‘The hell is this?’ Damien asked, bleary-eyed as he stepped from the lobby, chewing on a croissant. ‘Are we on a reality show now?’

‘Shh,’ said Rory next to him, staring in disbelief. ‘Don’t make too much noise or you’ll wake me up. I’m having this dream that seven porny-looking burds are getting onto our tour bus.’

Jan wandered over to where we were all stood in the shade, our bags at our feet.

‘Everybody ready to hit the road?’ he asked, like all the other stuff wasn’t happening, and let’s all pretend we see nothing please kthxbai.

‘Ehm, what the hell?’ I asked, as Heike wasn’t here to do it.

Jan laughed self-consciously.

‘Crazy rock ’n’ roll, huh? These are the merchandising girls on the Serpent tour. It starts tonight in Barcelona, and as it is also being promoted by Bad Candy I’ve been asked to give them a lift.’

Jan over-enunciated when he was feeling uncomfortable, like he was playing the dumb foreigner: English is my second language, please don’t give me a hard time.

‘That’s Serpent’s merch team?’ Damien asked. ‘I’m in the wrong band.’

‘Serpent are a big deal,’ Jan said apologetically, not realising Damien wasn’t serious. ‘They are playing the Palau Sant Jordi: all arena venues.’

‘So why are they all wearing Savage Earth Heart T-shirts?’ I asked.

Jan shrugged.

‘Kind of a favour for a favour. A lot of people will be looking at those T-shirts at the Palau, you know?’

I started to wonder how convenient it was that Heike wasn’t here to witness this, but it wasn’t my place to make a fuss. Plus I wasn’t exactly feeling up for a fight. I just wanted to curl up and go back to sleep, but I’d settle for getting to Barcelona without being sick.

The new arrivals all piled on board and sat together towards the front. I got a closer look as I shuffled along the aisle, feeling self-conscious about keeping my shades on, but knowing I’d feel worse if they could see what I looked like without them. I felt really hacket.

At first I thought they looked early twenties, but seeing past the make-up I realised that was stretching it. More like late teens, the lot of them. They didn’t say much, not even to each other: maybe they had been touring together even longer than us. They didn’t look French or Spanish. I’d have said Eastern European, maybe Romanian or Bulgarian. I wondered how they’d ended up doing promotion work for a Scandinavian metal band on tour.

I did get off to sleep on the bus, but was woken when it got pulled over past Puigcerda on the Spanish side of the border. I had a horrible moment when I thought I’d lost my passport, before finding it under my bag on the seat, where it had fallen as I moved my book, laptop, purse and phone out of the way to look for it.

We all had to get off while the police checked our documents. I noticed that Jan had a thick stack of passports, which he handed over while waving towards the merchandise girls. I didn’t understand the Spanish he spoke to the cops, but he seemed cheery and relaxed. None of this was new to him. Or to the others, it turned out.

‘The whole open borders thing doesn’t really apply quite so much when you’re in a band,’ Damien explained, eyeing the two sniffer dogs that were so far being kept back on a leash. ‘It’s not so much random checks as a wee bonus if we cross a border and
don’t
get stopped.’

‘Maybe they think we’re the mules for Serpent’s stash,’ suggested Scott. He was kidding, but his joke did make me worry where Dean was keeping his.

In the event, they gave us the all-clear and waved us on our way without the dogs getting involved.

‘I think that was just to let us know they’re watching,’ Scott said.

I saw Jan standing by the door, collecting passports from our seven guests as they filed silently back on board.

Definitely, I thought. But watching what?

Parlabane stood looking out for Mairi in front of the Brandenburg Gate. She was running late, but at least he didn’t need to worry that he was waiting for her in the wrong place. It wasn’t as though there was another one just like it.

He gazed up at the quadriga and found it both beautiful and intimidating: a bit like Heike Gunn, to be honest. The goddess thundering forward on her chariot unavoidably brought to mind that image on the cover of
Tatler
.

She was Victoria, goddess of Victory, but was also interpreted to be Eirene, goddess of peace. Conquest and affirmation; contrition and reconciliation. These were the two sides to Heike’s songs: the combative and crusading, ever ready to fight someone else’s battles; and the gently ameliorative, seeking tender connection and offering a balm to emotional wounds. Which side, he wondered, had led her to become lost?

‘Jack.’

He heard her voice and turned to see that Mairi had crept up behind him. She had flown in from London, he from Glasgow. She got in first, and had already headed out by the time he checked in to their hotel, so she’d texted him to meet up here.

She was carrying a Starbucks coffee, purchased from a place nearby on Unter den Linden.

Parlabane couldn’t recall when he last bought one. Even after they had generously ‘volunteered’ to pay some tax, he had thought: No, fuck you for ever. And yet the sight of Mairi was a timely reminder that any such principled stance would always be an exercise in farting into thunder while the majority of folk remained blithely disengaged.

Mairi had a pair of sunglasses on top of her head, and was dressed in linen trousers and a grey T-shirt that could easily have been a nondescript combo on most other women, but on her looked like it cost more than Parlabane’s entire wardrobe. While his thoughts were turning to where he could get something cold down his neck, the coffee she was toting just seemed to further underline her natural cool.

He had come on foot, eschewing a taxi in order to get his bearings and establish a feel for the place. The hotel was on Tiergartenstrasse in the diplomatic quarter, all embassies and electronic security gates. It had inevitably turned his thoughts to Sir Anthony Mead and that honeytrap laptop, but he could put all that to the back of his mind for now. He wasn’t sure how soon the Met were likely to be granted their warrant, but he’d left the country within only a few hours of speaking to Jenny.

Mairi stared at the jacket he had slung over his shoulder, an unnecessarily heavy-duty affair. Indeed, any jacket was a garment too far on a day like this.

‘Yeah,’ he confessed bashfully. ‘For some reason, I thought it would be chilly.’

‘It’s June, Jack.’

‘Too many Cold War movies, I guess. I need it to keep my stuff in, though.’

‘Get yourself a man-bag.’

‘I have my dignity.’

She looked him up and down, her verdict on his appearance indicating she was unconvinced by this last claim.

They made their way through the crowds of tour parties and proprietorially noisy gaggles of American teenagers, heading for the venue where Savage Earth Heart had failed to play the final night of their tour. It was a place called simply Palast, a two-thousand-capacity converted cinema just off Friedrichstrasse. The plan was to get talking to the venue staff and develop an objective version of events prior to Heike’s disappearance. Parlabane wanted to hear about the show that did go ahead, as well as some first-hand accounts of the behaviour of both band and crew in the lead-up to Jan’s announcement that the singer had a throat infection.

The place was shut. There was no show scheduled for that night, and no amount of ringing the doorbell or phoning the management office roused a response. They’d have to come back the next day.

‘Let’s got to the Brauereihallen,’ Mairi suggested.

‘I know almost no German, but that sounds enough like brewery hall as to strike me as a great idea.’

‘It’s where we made the video for “Zoo Child” – that’s the next single. I came over for the shoot. Heike chose it because they played there on the last tour. I came over for that too. It’s a big multi-use venue, different size halls for gigs and for clubs, chill-out spaces, decent food. I remember Heike was very keen on one of the bars: we’d hung out there before. We were there well into the night.’

‘I thought you weren’t managing them on the last tour.’

‘I wasn’t. But I knew what was in the wind and didn’t think it would hurt my chances if I “just happened” to be in town towards the end of what I knew to have been a very trying period.’

Parlabane gave her a slightly chiding look.

Mairi shrugged, unabashed.

‘Serendipity is often a one-way illusion that takes a hell of a lot of work and planning behind the scenes.’

‘And people say I’m cynical.’

The Brauereihallen was busier than Parlabane would have expected for late afternoon, a very mixed crowd thronging its central concourse, a courtyard once open to the elements that was now enclosed by a glass ceiling. Scruffy student-looking types lustily drank beer from steins at long tables, while a middle-aged arty clientele quaffed white wine outside a small salon housing an exhibition of paintings.

Parlabane tried not to hate all of them, but it was a big ask. He felt like one lot represented his irretrievable past and the other his unavoidable future.

Mairi led him to a place away from both constituencies, into an enticingly gloomy cavern from which he could hear Foals thumping from the sound system. It was the kind of retreat where the ambience, the lighting and the music would make it difficult to discern whether the hands on the clock indicated ten past four in the afternoon or the morning.

Parlabane got the drinks in while Mairi went to the ladies. He carried them to a table bolted to a wall covered in a panoply of overlapping flyers that looked six layers deep in places. There were ads for forthcoming gigs, albums, art shows, poetry readings and club nights layering over posters for events past like a fresh fall of leaves. He scanned the names and logos as he took a first sip of his beer, almost choking on it when his eye alighted on a recently pinned-up sheet of A5.

At just that moment Mairi came hurrying towards the table, clutching a copy of the same notice that she must have found in the toilets. It showed a black-and-white photograph of Heike, a classic shot of her with the curly blonde crop and white denim jacket. Underneath were three lines of text, the top of which consisted of a single word in a large, bold font: ‘VERMISST’.

The text meant little to either of them, apart from the name ‘Heike Gunn’ and the word ‘Kontakt’ next to a mobile phone number.

Mairi leaned over and snagged the attention of a waitress with a peace-sign tattoo on her neck, who was clearing glasses from an adjacent table.

‘Can you tell me what this means?’ she asked, pointing to the top line.

‘Yes, of course,’ she answered. ‘It means “missing”.’

Damien was right about touring. We played six dates in France, and from as much as I saw of it we could have been anywhere. The only sights we got to take in were through the bus windows, the only flavour of being somewhere different coming literally in the food.

And your day off will be in Gdansk
, he had said, but so far there had been no days off. However, sometimes the schedule threw us a bone. We were playing two nights in Barcelona because the first one sold out so fast (technically it was the second one, the extra show being added to what would have been a free date after Bordeaux). There was no night off, but it meant a day without travelling, so we got some time to see the place.