Dead Girl Walking (2 page)

Mitchell spoke with a very measured pronunciation, like he savoured his own elocution. There were trace elements of Brummie in there, but mainly his accent spoke of good schooling and attention to detail. He seemed dynamic and determined, a permanent searching seriousness about his expression.

Mitchell looked a good bit younger than Pine, but was clearly the one in the driving seat. Probably highly ambitious and dexterously political too, to have got himself a gig on this inquiry. His suit looked good on him as well, the bastard.

Oh, Christ.

He winced inside as the import of the moment struck home. Comes to us all, sure enough: he had just told himself the polis were looking younger.

Somebody shoot me in the fucking head, he thought.

‘Does it mention anywhere in your documentation that I was completely exonerated?’ he asked, trying not to sound rattled but succeeding only in alerting Mitchell to the fact that he was.

Mitchell responded by stepping things up.

‘Did you break into an apartment in Knightsbridge while it was being used for sexual liaisons by Sir Anthony Mead?’

He responded with a blank look, then wondered if that appeared more guilty than an outright denial. Acting like you don’t know who Anthony Mead is: yeah, that’ll fox him.

‘Did you break into Anthony Mead’s home?’

‘I couldn’t even tell you where that might be. Home Counties are all the one to me.’

That was payback for Pine saying London, Los Angeles and Scotland. Really sticking it to them here.

‘So you know his house is in the Home Counties.’

Shit.

‘Did you plant a bug or a DVR to record him?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hack his mobile phone?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hack Angela Goldman’s phone?’

‘No.’

‘Did you break into Angela Goldman’s flat?’

‘No.’

‘Were you aware that Angela Goldman was having an affair with Anthony Mead? Did you use this information to blackmail either of them into revealing his encryption password?’

Round and round they went, back over the same ground several times. He figured it couldn’t be to see whether he contradicted himself, as it’s hard to contradict one-word answers, especially when the answer is almost invariably no. He couldn’t be sure what the endgame was, what agendas were at work, but he did know there was one thing they would definitely be seeking, sooner or later. He was also sure they wouldn’t be getting it. It was one of the few things he
could
consider himself sure of these days.

‘How did you feel during the Leveson Inquiry?’ Pine asked.

‘I wasn’t watching it through my fingers, if that’s what you think. I wasn’t watching it with a bucket of popcorn either, though if I was I’d have been throwing it at the screen. It was like Glastonbury for humbug and hypocrisy. An all-time-great line-up of self-serving wankers.’

‘Not your profession’s finest hour.’

‘Look who’s talking. Met, did you say?’

He’d have given them points if one of them had said touché. They just stared back, that cop thing where you don’t know whether they’re playing the humourless bastard angle to keep you uncomfortable or whether they simply are humourless bastards.

‘The real damage came after Leveson for you, though, didn’t it?’ asked Mitchell. ‘You used the phrase “sacrificial goat”.’

‘Yes. Kind of like the “one bad apple” defence synonymous with accusations of police brutality or corruption.’

Mitchell didn’t bite.

‘It seemed expedient for a lot of your former employers to distance themselves from you.’

‘Aye, but give them credit for an impressive exercise in having their cake and eating it. They denied they knew how I operated, but made me the totem of everything they now considered verboten.’

‘But the bottom line was that you were effectively unemployable. Was that when you started using the name Alec Forman?’

He said nothing. They knew this shit. It was written down in front of them. Were they trying to get him to relive the moment? Start blubbing right there at the table and open up to them when they offered a hanky?

‘It was also around this time that your marriage broke up, wasn’t it?’ asked Pine; though again, she wasn’t really asking.

Still he said nothing, but this time because he really didn’t want to go there.

‘You’re divorced now?’ Mitchell enquired casually, like he needed to dot an i.

‘Separated.’

Christ. He had got a lump in his throat there, and he hoped it hadn’t been detectable in his voice. What the hell? He hadn’t felt like this in ages. Why was it threatening to surface now, in front of these bloodless stiffs? And where were they going with this?

Well, he knew the ultimate destination, but was starting to get confused by the route, like a tourist being gypped by an unscrupulous cab-driver.

‘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 to 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.’

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.