Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Did Leveson and the resulting fallout contribute to the break-up of your marriage?’

  ‘We’re still married,’ he replied.

  Aye, right, said another voice.

  ‘That kind of exposure must have put an intolerable strain on your relationship,’ Pine suggested.

  ‘We were having problems before that. It certainly didn’t help,’ he conceded, hoping the acknowledgement would get them off the subject.

  Fat chance. Mitchell had good sense for this stuff. He knew when to press home.

  ‘Was your ex-wife aware of your methods?’

  Fuck you.

  ‘Or was she appalled to learn of them through the same channels as her friends, her colleagues, her family?’

  Fuck you.

  ‘Did she feel ashamed? Was she angry with you? Did you feel shame for what you put her through?’

  Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

  (Yes. Yes. Yes.)

  ‘She’s not my ex-wife,’ he managed to state.

  Mitchell consulted the documents again.

  ‘You haven’t lived together for some time. More than a year, I believe.’

  ‘What’s it to you?

  ‘Listen, I’m not some automated vessel of the state on a bureaucratic errand. I’ve a task to carry out, but I’m not without sympathy. We deal in human emotions here in this job: when you strip away the extraneous detail, that’s where the answers usually lie. I’m trying to develop a picture of your state of mind, post-Leveson, post your separation, when you began working on this story.’

  ‘I had been working on it before either of those things. The time-frame isn’t as simple as you think. Proper investigative journalism can be a very long game. It’s about cultivating contacts, following up small possibilities, keeping track of things that might not immediately appear significant.’

  ‘And yet you stepped up the pace rather precipitously, didn’t you? In a manner displaying an impatience and a failure of judgement quite out of keeping with your previous record. That’s what I’m getting at. You were trying to get back in the game with one swing: prove everybody wrong about you being washed up; show the world – show Sarah – that there was a massive, moral, public-interest justification for the methods over which you’d been vilified.’

  He said nothing, trying to remain impassive, but he was struggling. Especially when Mitchell spoke her name. That wasn’t the worst part, though: the worst part was that the fucker was right on the money.

  ‘A conspiracy orchestrated by British and US intelligence and security forces to blame terrorist organisations for atrocities they themselves carried out. That’s real tinfoil-hat stuff.’

  ‘The story I was working on was a little more nuanced than that, but I know how it looks. We all know how it looks.’

  ‘Well, on the plus side, on this occasion we are prepared to believe that you got the crucial evidence from an unnamed source.’

  Finally. Fucking finally. Let’s get to it, then.

  ‘Who gave you the laptop?’ Mitchell asked.

  He sighed, slumping a little in his chair, assuming the posture of a broken man. It wasn’t a tough sell. He was a broken man.

  ‘I have this friend who’s a keen golfer,’ he told them with an air of surrender. ‘I mean, really keen. He’ll play in a hurricane, torrential rain, freezing winds, anything. One day I saw him heading to the links with his clubs when there was snow on the ground.’

  It was the turn of Mitchell and Pine to look like they weren’t sure where this was going, but having worked so long to get him to open up, they were prepared to be patient.

  ‘I asked him what the hell he was doing and he said he had this new ball with a GPS tracker. Even in the snow, he could locate it anywhere. Amazing. So I asked him what you just asked me: Where did you get it? His answer was the same as mine.’

  ‘What?’ Mitchell asked, intrigued.

  ‘I found it.’

  They didn’t like that. He knew he was bringing down upon himself the full pompocalypse of criminal law and cop-grade self-importance, but it was always going to come to this anyway.

  ‘Did you enjoy prison?’ Mitchell asked.

  When they started asking really stupid questions was when you knew you’d truly pissed them off.

  ‘Do you want to go back there?’

  ‘To be honest, if it was between prison and connecting in Terminal Five at Heathrow, I’d choose T5. Just. So no.’

  ‘You are far from being the focus of this inquiry, but if you obstruct it you will feel the full force that it can bring to bear.’

  He folded his arms and sat back in his seat.

  ‘I’m not naming my source. I don’t care what you threaten me with.’

  ‘I’m not bluffing here. When I report back, there is every chance they’ll escalate this. This inquiry is going to need heads on spikes by the end, and it’ll get them one way or another. One of them doesn’t have to be yours. They’re after bigger game here. Who gave you the laptop?’

  ‘I’m not naming my source.’

  They sat in silence for a long couple of minutes, Mitchell and Pine staring at him every time he glanced up. They were like disappointed parents waiting for a huffy kid to apologise.

  ‘It doesn’t have to go this way,’ Mitchell said eventually. ‘You could still have a career again. There is a lot of unseen influence at play in these things. If you were to cooperate, then who knows what doors might open…’

  Mitchell said this with a shrug, trailing the bait, saying let’s negotiate, if that’s what it takes.

  He just shook his head.

  ‘You’re right. I’ve been desperate. But not that desperate.’

  ‘Then you’re finished,’ Mitchell said.

  ‘I can leave?’

  ‘I mean in journalism. Under any byline.’

  He gave the cops a wry, humourless chuckle.

  ‘That was already true when I walked in here,’ he told them. ‘You haven’t taken anything away from me, officer. In fact, you’ve already proven things aren’t quite as bad as some people made out: after Leveson, there were those who said I couldn’t get arrested.’

  Mitchell looked at him with almost pitying disgust.

  ‘You haven’t been arrested, Mr Parlabane.’

  The mixture of bravado, anxiety and defiance was already turning into something cold and sour in his gut before he left the building. He had stood his ground and made it through his first tangle with the Westercruik Inquiry, but when he walked back outside, the same reality would be waiting for him: one in which he was a disgraced and disparaged hack nobody in the business would ever go near again.

  And it wasn’t because of burglary or computer hacking or any of the other shit that came out in the wash. He hadn’t hacked any murder victim’s phone, or pursued any illegal activity just to find out whether two D-list celebutards were shagging. He had nothing to be ashamed of there.

  There were plenty of guys who had done horrible shit and walked back into jobs as soon as their jail time was over. In the perverse and hypocritical world of journalism, the Leveson Inquiry had merely proven their mettle regarding how far they’d go to get a story; not to mention how they could keep their mouths shut to protect the cowardly pricks upstairs.

  It wasn’t even that he had broken a golden rule and become the story. That was consequence rather than cause.

  His sin was far worse than that.

  It was that he’d been played.

  He got scapegoated. He got screwed over. He got angry. Fair enough. But then he got desperate, and then he got played. There was just a memorial plaque now where his reputation used to stand. His judgement would be forever suspect.

  In the past it was at times such as this that he would have sat down with Sarah and talked things through. Then, everything would look brighter after two hours of blethers and a bottle of wine.

  Now that was over too.

  He filled out some paperwork and then went for a slash, trying not t
o catch his reflection in the mirror as he washed his hands.

  He saw Pine on the steps just outside the main entrance, smoking a roll-up. It looked oddly studenty; he’d figured her for Marlies or B&H.

  ‘I can see why your wife left you,’ she said.

  Disarmingly, it didn’t sound like a dig. It was like she was concerned.

  ‘There’s stubborn, and then there’s pointlessly self-destructive,’ she added.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, I don’t get why you’re prepared to take the fall for someone who burned you. You were set up and your source left you twisting in the wind. Whoever he is, he ruined any chance you had of resurrecting your career. You could go to prison and yet you still won’t name him.’

  ‘As someone smarter than me once said, principles only mean something if you stand by them when they’re inconvenient.’

  ‘Principles strike me as a luxury you can’t afford any more, especially when they’re the principles of a profession that’s chewed you up and spat you out. Why would you stand by them now?’

  ‘Because they’re all I’ve got left.’

  The Opposite of Journalism

  Parlabane took another sip of his coffee and wondered how long he could spin out the process of drinking it: a delicate balancing act between having no plausible justification for remaining seated in this café and discovering just how lukewarm a latte his palate could tolerate. He had just missed a train back to Edinburgh and now had a couple of hours to wait before the next one. Time was, he’d have seized the opportunity to take a wander around a gallery or browse a few record shops, but he was low on funds and lower on motivation.

  Sitting in a railway station café seemed appropriate: a neutral space, transitory, temporary. He didn’t belong anywhere right now. He wanted out of London, but there wasn’t much waiting for him back in Edinburgh either.

  Since he returned from his disastrously vainglorious quest to ‘get back in the game with one swing’, as Officer Mitchell astutely put it, he had spent recent weeks crashing in spare rooms and on settees while he tried to sort out something more permanent. He was not so much reaping a dividend of long-standing goodwill on the part of old friends as feeling like a charity case. They all wanted to help him out because they felt sorry for him, but though they were prepared to offer him a berth, it was horribly awkward. Christ, it wasn’t like anybody wanted to sit up late with a couple of bottles, blethering like they used to. How could they?

  ‘Well, Jack, what will we talk about first: the break-up of your marriage or the death of your career?’

  He wasn’t enjoying the coffee, or the joyless atmosphere of the café, but nor was he in a hurry to get on that train. He knew he wouldn’t be travelling hopefully and he wasn’t looking forward to what awaited him when he arrived. At least sitting in this place he had an excuse for doing nothing.

  There was a line between reasonably describing one’s status as freelance and more honestly calling it unemployed. He had crossed it a while back and was now wandering the hazy borderlands of the next such marker: the one that lay between the terms ‘unemployed journalist’ and ‘former journalist’.

  It was busy on the other side of that line, the arse having fallen out of the industry as it struggled to accept that we were effectively in the post-print era. There were still jobs to be had, filling up the content-ravenous beasts that roamed the new digital landscape, but not for journalists. Parlabane’s problem was not so much that nobody would hire him: it was that the job he did no longer existed.

  He felt the buzz of his mobile from his jacket pocket. The absence of a ringtone was a legacy of times when it went off so often that the noise was as irritating as it was unnecessary, and the device seldom off his person anyway. Nowadays the fact that it was still only on vibrate was mildly embarrassing: on the rare occasions that it sounded, it merely served to tell him he was kidding himself.

  The screen showed a number rather than a name. He sighed. That most likely meant he was dealing with a misdial or about to hear some recorded spam. He answered anyway.

  ‘Hello. Is that … Jack?’ asked a female voice.

  ‘Depends,’ he replied, instantly regretting it for both its pitiful defensiveness and the fact that it made him sound like a twat. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Mairi,’ she said.

  ‘Mairi who?’ he replied, thinking it was turning into a knock-knock joke. Punchline: ‘Mairi whoever you like, Sarah’s divorcing you, arsehole.’

  ‘Mairi Lafferty. Do you remember me? Donald’s sister.’

  Donald. Jesus.

  It was a sledgehammer to the psyche when he realised his old friend had been dead longer than he ever knew him. And to that Parlabane could add the survivor’s guilt of realising how long it had been since he’d even thought of the guy.

  ‘Mairi. Sure. I haven’t seen you…’

  (… since the funeral.)

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, not wanting to go there either. ‘You’re in Edinburgh now, is that right?’

  ‘Not this second. I’m actually at King’s Cross, waiting for a train.’

  ‘Don’t get on it. I need to talk to you about something. In person.’

  Parlabane hadn’t seen Mairi in fifteen years, but they had clearly been kind to her. She stood in the doorway of a Hoxton flat dressed in black designer jeans and a leather jacket, her hair in a tinted black bob that looked expensively tasteful, matching her skin tone so as not to draw attention to the dye-job. He knew she had to be forty-one or forty-two, so she was maybe on the cusp of dressing a little young for her age, but she was carrying it off.

  Back in another lifetime, Mairi had been Donald’s trendy little sister: brassy, stylish and constantly insinuating herself into her big brother’s world, where she wasn’t welcome; at least not in Donald’s view. There was one lurking in the background of every male adolescence: the mate’s younger sister who you secretly fancied but you knew it was wrong and anyway it was never going to happen. She was way too cool for you, and even if your seniority gave you some cachet, you didn’t want to be one of those creepy guys dating a girl three years younger.

  So how old did that make him feel, to recall a time when three years seemed like a major difference?

  She beckoned him inside and led him to the kitchen. On the way there, he had briefly wondered why she had a couch in her hall, before realising that the narrow passageway was actually her living room. She got a couple of beers from the fridge and placed them on the kitchen table alongside a blue folder and a small pile of magazines. Mojo was on top, Q underneath, and possibly Tatler at the foot of the pile. This last immediately made Parlabane think Mairi must be doing very well for herself, as in his experience the only people who read it were women of her age who fitted that description, or much younger ones hoping to marry men who fitted that description.

  They traded small talk, which mainly consisted of Parlabane asking Mairi sufficient questions about herself as to prevent her from reciprocating. He felt acutely conscious of it being small talk, and yet it felt all the more necessary in order to paper over the weirdness. This wasn’t merely two people who hadn’t spoken in fifteen years, but two people whose cumulative conversation prior to that could comfortably have been transcribed on a Sinclair ZX80.

  ‘So what is it you do with yourself?’ he asked, not having gleaned much data from his brief transit through her home. A glance at her left hand established the absence of any significant rings, but although that didn’t preclude the existence of a significant other, this really wasn’t an area he wanted to get into.

  ‘I’m in the music business. I’ve got my own management company.’

  ‘Oh, wow,’ he said, pitching at impressed but not surprised, hoping not to sound patronising. ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘LAF-M. As in Lafferty, Mairi, but pronounced like la femme.’

  ‘Which acts do you manage?’ he asked, hoping to hell he had heard of one of them and that it wasn’t s
ome X-Factor maggot he wanted to machine-gun.

  ‘I started off managing Cassidy. Remember them?’

  Parlabane did. They were an all-girl vocal group who had enjoyed a number-one hit around 2002. They had been indistinguishable from their peers and would have barely stuck in his memory but for the fact that they had also hit the top ten with an utterly unlikely cover of ‘She Knows’ by Balaam and the Angel.

  Now, more than a decade later, Parlabane finally worked out why.

  ‘“She Knows”,’ he said. ‘That was your idea.’

  Mairi nodded but didn’t elaborate. They both knew she didn’t have to. Donald had been a big Balaam fan, spending hours back-combing those goth-locks of his before a police regulation shearing saw them gone for ever.

  ‘And what about these days?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ she replied. ‘It’s why I’m here. I want to offer you a job.’

  ‘In music management?’ he asked, laughing.

  ‘No. Something a little closer to your normal beat. I’m prepared to pay you a daily rate of three hundred pounds, plus expenses.’

  Parlabane tried to remain impassive, but there was little point in pretending it didn’t sound generous. However, it did also sound temporary, so he didn’t reckon she was about to pitch him a gig as a press officer.

  ‘My normal beat? Investigative reporter?’

  ‘Investigative, yes. Reporting not so much. In fact, you might say it was the opposite of journalism, because the point is to keep it quiet.’

  ‘I thought the opposite of journalism was royal correspondent, but I’m listening. What is it you want me to look into?’

  She winced rather apologetically, picking at the foil on the neck of her beer bottle.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you until you agree to do it. This is something that would be a big story if anyone found out, and I need to prevent that from happening. Discretion is everything here. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So let me get this clear: you want me to look into something that would be a big story, but I’m not allowed to tell anybody?’