Dead Girl Walking

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Mairi sighed, doing little to suppress her exasperation.

  ‘When?’ she asked. ‘Please tell me tomorrow morning, at least.’

  ‘She said one hour. And she will only speak with you,’ he added, indicating Mairi. ‘No men. You wait for her where she said, on one of the curved benches. If she sees anyone else she walks away.’

  Face in the Crowd

  After the Lisbon show I stayed on stage as the crew and venue staff stripped the place around me. I loved the venue so much I didn’t want to leave. The acoustics were beautiful, even our foldback wedges sounding pretty good. The Coliseu dos Recreios was how I imagined a Viennese or Parisian opera house would be, the kind of place I grew up dreaming of playing.

  ‘Do It to Julia’ had been really successful in Portugal, thanks to a dance remix by Iz-Ma, one of the country’s biggest DJs. The show wasn’t a sell-out, but Jan said that it would have been if downstairs had been an all-seated audience. By leaving it clear for standing, the capacity went up to four thousand, but Jan assured us that ticket sales weren’t far off that anyway.

  I gazed out at the auditorium, listening to the crash of plastic glasses being swept across the wooden floor. It was a sound familiar to this part of my evenings, and it always surprised me how loud it was, emphasising the emptiness once the audience was gone.

  I heard my name and looked up to see Heike coming towards me looking anxious and impatient. She had her phone in her hand, holding it like it was weighing her down.

  ‘I got a text from Hannah,’ she said.

  She handed me the phone, like she couldn’t bring herself to read it aloud.

  Heike, I’m so sorry I ran out on you like that. It wasn’t what it looked like. You have to let me explain. Can you meet me in Madrid? I’ll be at the Museo Reina Sofia from four. I know you’re playing the Palacio Siroco – it’s only five minutes away. Please be there, it’s really important we talk.

  Hannah

  ‘Well, that’s good news, right?’ I said, but she seemed reluctant to see it like that.

  ‘Maybe. Would you mind coming with me? I’m feeling a bit vulnerable about this and I could do with some moral support.’

  ‘Sure. I’ve got your back,’ I told her, though I was already wondering at what point the role of wing-woman would transform into that of gooseberry.

  The bus got us into Madrid before three, about six hours after setting off from Lisbon. We weren’t due on stage until ten, so the soundcheck was scheduled for five. The museum was a short walk from the hotel, though a glance at the map showed that the ‘five minutes’ of Hannah’s text must have meant a car ride. On foot it was a good twenty minutes away along Ronda de Atocha, and it was hot.

  The Museo towered above us as we walked towards it, the exterior scary-looking and industrial. It turned out that this was because we were approaching from the rear, though the front wasn’t much more welcoming. It was like a well-maintained prison.

  Heike had said almost nothing all the way there. I don’t think I’d ever seen her this nervous, not even last night, before singing to nearly four thousand people. When she went on-stage she always appeared calm, even impatiently eager to play, but there was still a real apprehension about her if you looked closely: an edge, which she fed off. We all did. Anybody who ever says they’re not nervous about going on stage is either lying or about to give a phoned-in apology of a performance.

  This Hannah was obviously some girl. I wondered what Heike saw in her that I didn’t, and then I remembered: herself.

  I had felt a pang of jealousy when I first saw the text and realised she was back in the picture. Then I remembered I was the one Heike had come to for support, on something so intimate, so personal. This was trust, and I would do anything to prove myself worthy of it.

  We strode into a covered courtyard where modern and traditional architecture seemed locked in a battle to swallow each other. Light poured through plunging grey wells in a huge red ceiling, beneath which more big red plates and grilles faced off against massive older walls of pale stone. I was getting a queasy claustrophobic feeling about being here, despite the vastness of the space. I’d have hated to walk through it alone.

  The great concourse was full of people, as though it were a town square. Heike was craning her neck, almost walking on tiptoe as she peered over the faces for the one she wanted.

  We both saw Hannah at the same time, standing against the pale stone at the far end, searching the crowd as eagerly as Heike had been doing, then waving when she saw us. She still seemed distracted by her surroundings, though, glancing anxiously everywhere as if there was someone else she was looking for.

  Or, as it turned out, someone else she had seen.

  We were maybe fifty feet away when they seemed to sweep in from nowhere, like undercover cops during a raid. There were two of them, burly men in grey business suits, one of them squat, shaven-headed and jowly, the other tall and muscular with jet-black, obviously dyed hair.

  Hannah looked like she was trying to appeal to them, but whatever she said cut no ice as they began escorting her away. She didn’t struggle or cry out, just let herself be led, glancing back once towards Heike with longing and regret.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ Heike asked, looking at me in outrage.

  I opened my mouth uselessly, then followed Heike as she started off in pursuit.

  The shaven-headed one must have noticed, because he stopped and turned, pushing his companion towards us while he kept Hannah moving away.

  The giant thug blocked our path with a huge beefy hand, like a traffic cop. There were rings on each of his thick sausage fingers; rings and scars.

  ‘Where are you taking our friend?’ Heike asked him.

  He gave a tiny but firm shake of the head. Over his shoulder, Hannah was disappearing around the corner and out of sight.

  ‘Anezka is not your friend. She our friend, okay? You stay away.’

  ‘Her name is Hannah,’ Heike insisted. ‘I need to speak to her.’

  He gave her a sneering grin, amused by what she had said.

  ‘You want time with Anezka, we can make arrangement, but you pay, okay? You pay, same everybody else.’

  I stared into his hard red face. He didn’t look Spanish, and he didn’t sound it either.

  I’d have said Eastern European, maybe Romanian or Bulgarian.

  Tourists

  The taxi dropped them off in front of the Humboldt Box, a structure that more closely resembled a video games console than the video games console it was currently whoring itself out to advertise. Its vertical proportion and futuristic design could not have been more of a contrast with the classicism of the Berliner Dom and the Altes Museum across the street on Museumsinsel, and its gaudy lighting shone like a warning beacon in comparison to the gloom that was enveloping the site of their destination.

  ‘Do you think if she’d put her mind to it she could have maybe chosen somewhere a bit creepier?’ Mairi asked, as they walked through the Lustgarten and deeper into shadow. There was no moon, and the street lighting around the museums was both sparse and dim, possibly due to the building works that seemed to be enveloping the island.

  Parlabane knew it wasn’t just the darkness that was spooking her. He felt dwarfed by the scale of the architecture, and there was an august gravity about the place that probably seemed reassuringly timeless during the day, but felt desolately unmodern at night. Great old buildings, witness to history, but coldly indifferent to it too.

  ‘I hear you,’ he agreed. ‘Never thought I’d be grateful for the sight of two dozen American teenagers in backpacks, but if a busload pitched up right now, that would be just dandy.’

  It was about to get worse, because they had to split up. After what had happened earlier Parlabane wasn’t ready to take a faceless stranger at her word by staying away from the rendezvous, but Karl had only stipulated that she would walk if she saw anyone else.

  She wouldn’t see him.

  They had go
t there early for precisely this purpose. Parlabane raced ahead towards the Alte Nationalgalerie, climbing the left of the twin staircases. When he reached the first platform, where the staircase returned, he found the second flight barred off by steel gates. They were only shoulder height, so he all but vaulted them with a practised move, then ascended to where a huge statue of a man on horseback towered above the apex, looking south across the Lustgarten.

  Parlabane didn’t need the bronze equestrian’s elevation to find a vantage point, tucking himself in against the wall and peeking over the balustrade. From here, he had a view of Mairi sitting as instructed on one of the semi-circular stone benches, but more importantly he could see all of the approaches beyond the covered walkway that ran around the square. Am Lustgarten was dead ahead, leading back towards the main road, perpendicular to Bodestrasse, which ran east–west, crossing both channels of the Spree. The route from the east was closed to cars due to construction work, which meant that anyone approaching on foot would be obscured by plastic sheeting until they reached the corner of the walkway.

  Parlabane glanced up and saw that he was crouched at the metal feet of a robed woman clutching a cross like she thought someone might steal it. Christ, even the statues seemed on edge.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket, giving him a jolt. Mairi.

  ‘Speak to me,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m getting freaked out. Starting to get what you meant about a Cold War movie: waiting on a bloody bench at midnight.’

  ‘It’s not midnight, it’s only half-eleven.’

  ‘Thanks. That makes me feel so much better. Can you see anything yet?’

  ‘No, but stay on the line. I’ll give you a commentary as soon as there’s anything to comment on.’

  Parlabane squinted through the gloom, peering out towards the light beyond. Trees blocked the view to the left of the cathedral, while off to the right, his sight of the road was partially obscured by blue pipes erupting from the ground in front of the covered walkway, a surreal parody of its Roman columns. They routed water to and from the building works, snaking around the island like a partially exposed vascular system that broke the surface in places then plunged out of sight elsewhere. The building work cutting off Bodestrasse was effectively making a horseshoe of the road, with the section of it that ran between the Altes and Neues museums hidden from view.

  Fast access in and out by car, out of sight of the main road, low lights, trees, pipes, columns. It suddenly struck Parlabane that if he had been asked to come up with an ideal spot for a hit or an abduction he’d have been pushed to do better than this.

  ‘You know what I don’t like about this?’ he said into his phone.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Absolutely everything. I say we walk. Right now.’

  ‘But if this girl can tell us who that guy was, it…’

  ‘Mairi, we’ve seen this picture already today. The Cold War movie. Us waiting for information from a girl we’ve never seen, who isn’t coming, because … Oh shit.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Mairi, get out of there. Now.’

  They appeared at the same time, a carefully synchronised operation. Parlabane saw two men running from the pedestrian-only bridge to the east, emerging from the cover of the building works at the same time as a black Audi came speeding in from the west. Mairi got up and began to run towards Am Lustgarten, and would have been caught in a pincer movement had it not been that the pincers weren’t there to close in on her.

  The two men on foot did not divert from their course as she made her exit. They were heading towards the museum steps, sprinting across the grass only yards from where Mairi was escaping.

  Eejit. He realised he had been wrong-footed by a simple bluff. The instruction had been to isolate Mairi, knowing that Parlabane would be close by, his vigilance entirely concentrated on her safety. It was him they really wanted, and he’d cornered himself for them. Bastards had probably been close by the whole time, watching him take position.

  They didn’t have him yet, however.

  His two pursuers began to diverge as they approached, intending to take one staircase each so that both routes down were blocked. One had dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and was wearing a white vest, all the better to show off his muscles. The other was dressed all in black, his peroxide crop reminding Parlabane of Spike, Joss Whedon’s punk-refugee vampire.

  They both looked younger than him, as well as taller, better built and undoubtedly more schooled in the noble art of punching fuck out of people. Nonetheless, younger didn’t necessarily mean faster or fitter, and Parlabane was highly schooled in the arguably less noble art of running away.

  He raced back down the top flight and vaulted over the gates on to the return landing. As he swung his feet clear of the steel bars he could hear Spike’s footfalls thumping on the stone just yards away. The thought of them thumping on his ribcage gave his heels that extra spring. He scrambled over the balustrade and on to the little ledge on the other side of it. From there it was a drop of ten or twelve feet, which he reduced by draping down and finding toeholds to take his weight before that last freefall.

  He spun around in the air and landed with a practised crouch, bending his knees like a suspension system. After a tiny moment’s recovery time, he was sprinting away from the foot of the wall towards the covered walkway where it turned the corner at the rear of the Neues Museum. He had never been here before, but from the map he’d looked at on his phone back at the Brauereihallen, he recalled that there was a narrow channel between the Neues and the Pergamon. This led to a pedestrian bridge across the Spree and off the island.

  He stole a glance back, mindful of the car that had been approaching when he first told Mairi to run. The bollards meant it couldn’t come into the courtyard, but he had been expecting it to have disgorged more personnel to chase him down. That he couldn’t see any was not reassuring. They could have headed around the other side of the Neues Museum in anticipation of precisely the route he was planning.

  There was a worse explanation, which was that they could be busy bundling Mairi into the Audi. If your target was likely to be a tricky capture, why not nab his companion for leverage?

  Spike hadn’t fancied the jump from the balustrade, and was only just rounding the staircase as Parlabane reached the corner. He didn’t seem to be going flat out, so maybe he wasn’t so fit and the stairs had knocked the wind out of him.

  Or maybe he’d been to Museumsinsel recently.

  Parlabane rounded the corner and discovered he’d been running towards a dead end. The passage was blocked beyond the entrance to the Pergamon museum, tall wooden panels bolted into place to mask off more building works. They looked too high for him to scramble a purchase on the top. Short of finding a ladder, the only way out of here was back the way he’d come.

  But as always, Parlabane’s perspective took in more than one vertical plane. Back the way he’d come didn’t necessarily mean retracing his steps. Against the rear wall of the Neues Museum the twin rows of broad Roman columns gave way to a single line of temporary modern beams. These were thin rectangular structures, sheathed in plywood to a height of two metres, holding up a concrete roof that extended halfway out across the passage.

  A quick haul to the top of that got him one third of the way in half a second. The next part would be tougher, and the final bit a real high-stakes test of whether he was still cut out for this shit.

  A glance to the side showed still no sight of Spike, though he could hear his footsteps, advancing at a brisk walking pace. No need to run when your prey is cornered. Spike was preserving his breath for the bit he did best: the punching fuck out of people part.

  Parlabane whipped off his belt and looped it around the column. He pushed away with his feet and gripped the makeshift climbing strap with both hands. He recalled getting screamed at by his mother when she caught him doing something similar up a telegraph pole when he was about nine.

  ‘You’ll end up killing yourse
lf,’ she had warned him.

  He reached the top as his pursuer stomped around the corner. He was out of the guy’s reach but far from in the clear, and it would all be moot if it turned out his muscles weren’t the only guns Spike was packing.

  Parlabane threw his left arm on to the overhang and dangled by just that for a moment as the tension in the belt was lost. This was when he found out whether it would still be worth a trip back to those Highland rockfaces, and more immediately whether he would have the option.

  The fingers on his right hand found purchase and he hauled himself over the edge. He silently thanked Sarah for the years of nagging that had kept him on the right side of the algorithms governing workouts and haggis suppers; specifically their corresponding relationships with weight and upper-body strength.

  He had a look towards the wooden fence. It was too far to clear with a running jump, and anyway he couldn’t see where he’d be landing on the other side. Even if he didn’t impale himself on the end of a rebar strip, the fall from this height would easily break his legs. There was only one way to go, and it was a bloody long way.

  He sprinted along the edge of the walkway’s roof, reluctant to test whether the glass covering the stone slabs would bear his full running weight. Down below he heard urgent shouts back and forth in German. He wished he spoke it. Maybe these guys had more idea than he did as to where and how he was planning to get down from this thing.

  He thought of those blue pipes on Bodestrasse. The ones rising up were feeding a horizontal tube running parallel to the walkway. The problem was, he didn’t have the head start for getting down that he had enjoyed for the ascent. Plus there was still the issue of the black Audi, which he could see parked behind the Altes Museum. Wherever he chose to come down, they’d be waiting for him.

  Unless, that was, he came down somewhere they couldn’t wait.

  He kept running, his pursuers doggedly following below. They still appeared to be in no particular hurry, content to keep him in sight in the knowledge that he was stuck up there. Then their voices became more urgent and their pace picked up as they realised that he wasn’t as contained as they assumed.