Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “I know. You’re an open book. But you haven’t really read yourself, have you? You’re not ordinary, my old son. Otherwise you would have found a normal job. I don’t hire ‘normal.’ ”

  “So what’s not normal about me?”

  “You have the makings of a superb bringer of chaos. That’s your special talent.”

  “You think that’s a good thing for the firm?”

  “Could be. I suggest you get used to it. Embrace it.”

  I had a mental flash of myself as an emissary of the goddess Kali, bringer of death and rebirth. Then I thought of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and discord. Discordia. This was not how people tended to think of themselves. The scary thing was that the idea didn’t scare me. That couldn’t be good. It was good for Roger, though. Chaos was his business model, his opportunity, his world. His love.

  “Why are you bringing this up now?” I asked.

  “Because you’re about to move up a notch, Ravi. I’m making you the primary on a high-profile case we’re getting today, and I want you on point.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Who’s the client?”

  “Technically, the client is the Tory Party. Mucho moolah. They’re paying us from the party coffers, so don’t be afraid to go all out. We’re going to charge them top rate. Rupert Holcomb is in a spot of bother and needs our help.”

  Blimey. Our next prime minister, or so the papers would have had us believe. Rupert Holcomb, conservative MP for the London borough of Haddock West, one of the safest Tory seats in the universe. The party’s latest Great White Hope. No scandals, no skeletons in his closet, no sex with farm animals (or at least, no photos of the deed), the very picture of a pleasant blandness that every party tried to find in their brightest stars these days. The one thing that gave his public image an edge was his relationship with the late supermodel and “It Girl” Louise Fowler. Everyone envied the lucky bastard for pulling her. By all accounts they were genuinely in love. Then she died from cancer, diagnosed too late. That added some pathos to his profile. He nursed her to the very end, and that won him a load of sympathy from female voters. All the market research proved it.

  “So what does he need our help for?” I asked.

  “I’ll leave him to tell you about it. Now, I already pumped you up as one of our brightest young stars in the agency, so don’t cock this up.”

  “Right. No pressure.”

  Just my job on the line, that was all.

  Holcomb came into the office with his party whip, Hugh McLeish, and a couple of minders. It was McLeish who made the decision to hire us. He was obviously the real power here, grooming Holcomb and keeping him on the straight and narrow in preparation for declaring his candidacy for prime minister at the next general election. McLeish, hatchet man and inquisitor of the party, was the one who strong-armed Holcomb into coming in, and was here to hold his hand. We escorted them into the conference room. Cheryl served tea and sat down to take notes.

  As soon as Holcomb sat down, the smooth, media-trained façade slipped. His body language changed. His shoulders sagged and he slumped in the chair. He looked small, haunted, and desperate.

  I wondered what Holcomb’s dilemma was. Someone blackmailing him? Compromising photos to track down? A missing person he needed to find? Background check on someone in his life to see if they were who they claimed to be? I reckoned it would fall into the usual range of problems a public figure like him would encounter, and it would be up to me to help him find the answer and keep it out of the papers. This would be another of those things that the general public would never hear about, if we did our job properly.

  “My dead girlfriend is having sex with me in my sleep!”

  . . . Ah.

  Thanks a lot, Roger!

  I stayed composed, allowing nothing stronger than mild surprise to show on my face.

  “We already told Roger . . . Mr. Golden . . . ,” stammered Holcomb.

  “Yes.” I put on my most reassuring smile. “But tell me, from the top. Take your time. You might recall certain details you missed the last time.”

  “It’s Louise,” the client said. “For the past month, she has been coming to my bed at night, and . . .”

  He choked again.

  “So your dead girlfriend has been coming to your bed at night.”

  I had to say it out loud just to see how it sounded. Nope, it didn’t make me feel any less out of my depth.

  “Yes, yes. It sounds mad, but it’s true. She’s been coming to me at night and—and, well, she has been, er, making love to me.”

  “I see,” I said, struggling to maintain my poker face. “Could this be a recurring dream? I mean, wouldn’t it be better to consult a psychiatrist? Or, if you believe it’s . . . something else, an exorcist?”

  “It’s real, damn it!” he cried. “I know it’s been happening while I’m asleep. It’s . . . how do I put this . . . When you’ve been with someone long enough, you come to know their habits, their touch, their perfume . . .”

  His face went tomato red as he stammered, and finally his ability to talk shut down. He probably would have been a lot less embarrassed if he were talking about getting mugged or blackmailed, but this was way out of his league.

  And mine, too, but I wasn’t about to admit that. It was my job to reassure him and tell him I was going to solve his problem. The best I could do here was pretend that I would.

  “I can vaguely recall it happening, just on the edge of sleep! I never woke up! And there’s—there’s physical proof the morning after, when I wake up!”

  “Physical proof.”

  “Yes, there’s—the sheets are sticky when I wake up, and I can even smell her perfume, the brand that Louise always wore. It’s always the same!”

  “So how many times have these . . . incidents occurred so far?”

  Holcomb looked to McLeish for support. McLeish only shot him a look like a serpent about to strike.

  “Over five months now. They started two months after Louise’s funeral.”

  “And how often do they occur?” I asked.

  “On average once a week, sometimes twice. I never know when it might happen, some nights pass without incident, and I’m worrying myself sick wondering whether it might happen or not!”

  “And you’re always semiconscious when they happen?”

  “You have to understand, my work is very tiring. I usually have to take medication in order to have a good night’s sleep.”

  “What kind of medication?”

  “Sleeping pills, over-the-counter stuff. Sometimes I need something stronger, like Valium.”

  “Anything else?”

  Holcomb clammed up, embarrassed.

  “Rupert has also taken Rohypnol on occasion,” said McLeish.

  “I know people call it a date-rape drug. It’s prescribed by my doctor,” Holcomb said, defensive. “I only use it for myself. It doesn’t give me a headache like zolpidem does. I have all of them, and all prescribed by my doctor.”

  “No one’s accusing you of anything, Mr. Holcomb,” I said. “When was the last time you had an incident?”

  “A week ago.”

  “Have you thought of hiring bodyguards? You know, to watch over your flat at night, make sure no one’s breaking in?”

  “My life isn’t being threatened!” Holcomb said.

  “But your sanity is,” I said.

  “Rupert’s image depends on his accessibility and availability to the general public,” McLeish said. “If the press find out that he has to have bodyguards with him, if they just get one photo, they can make him out to look snobbish, self-important, standoffish—at worst, insecure and paranoid.”

  I had to stop myself from agreeing too much that those last two qualities were already true.

  “I need you to get to the bottom of this,” Holcomb said. “I mean, it can’t be true, can it? It can’t be happening, and yet it is!”

  “I don’
t think any of us in this room genuinely thinks it’s a ghost,” McLeish said. “So either someone has been playing tricks on Rupert, either to blackmail or humiliate him, or Rupert has been working too hard and having strange dreams. We want to resolve this quietly, but first we need to know exactly what’s happening.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “Leave it with me. I’d like a list of people you think might have it in for you, Mr. Holcomb, and we’ll start from there. Before you go, Cheryl will draw up a contract, a client agreement, for use of our services. I’ll contact you the moment I find anything.”

  Roger and I walked them out. We shook hands, made more reassuring sounds, and watched them leave. Then Roger winked at me and went back into his office. Cheryl went back to her desk like this was just another day at the office.

  Seriously. What the fuck?

  Walking back to my desk felt like a death march.

  Granted, it was as pleasant a death march as you could get, with our open-space design where everyone was encouraged to share information and the latest designer ergonomic furniture. You’d think we were a tech start-up or PR firm rather than a detective agency.

  Tailing adulterous spouses I could handle. Going through someone’s trash to retrieve shredded documents and taping them back together I could handle. Distracting a target in a public place while Benjamin cloned his phone, I could handle. Interviewing people in search of lies and motive I could handle—Ken and Clive had trained me in that. But this? This was gonzo bullshit. Frankly, Holcomb needed psychiatric help more than a private investigator. I could tell from his demeanor he was clearly an addict. He should be in rehab. Instead his party was paying us—me—a ridiculous amount of money to track down a ghost. A sexy ghost. A ghost that fucked him in his sleep.

  Of course it wasn’t a ghost. It had to be someone fucking with him. (Pun intended.) I just had to find out who would have it in for him to come up with such a ridiculous scheme, simply to mess with his head. They would have to know how unstable he was to start with.

  Time to start researching him while I waited for McLeish’s office to email me the list of people I could interview. Research here often meant typing a search on the Internet. You’d be surprised how much of our work involves just looking up information online these days. Most of the time you could find most of the information you needed on someone that way. We often told prospective clients about that to give them a chance to save their money.

  Everyone in the office was going to give me shit about this. Cheryl had quietly warned me that my number was up and Roger was going to throw me into the deep end of a fucked-up case. The rest of the gang had been there longer than I had and had all gone through that trial by fire. The ones that didn’t get a result were let go, which opened up room for me.

  Fortunately, the gang was busy. Even as I was looking up Holcomb’s background, Olivia Wong and my evil brother-in-arms Benjamin Lee were at their desks double-teaming on an embezzlement case, tracking some missing finances to a shell company in the Isle of Wight using a bot Olivia had written that tracked their transactions. David Okri was out doing whatever it was Roger always had him out doing, which often involved wining and dining the rich and powerful. Mark Oldham was out recovering a stolen Frida Kahlo painting for the Mexican ambassador to London. Mark was quite brilliant when you got him to stop smoking weed for ten minutes. He seemed to breeze through every case handed to him as if it were just a game or distraction from his next joint and game of FIFA on the PlayStation when he got home.

  “Take not my meager pleasures from me,” he would say. “Lest I succumb to eternal despair.”

  Only Marcie Holder was idle, reading the old copy of The Art of Being and Becoming I’d lent her. Given how existential this job was, I assumed she was taking comfort in Sufi enlightenment as a respite from dealing with her long list of celebrity clients.

  “I’m waiting for Ken and Clive to report in,” she said. “Till then, I got nothing to do.”

  Marcie was our token American in the agency. She was one of those ex-pats who moved to London and liked it here so much she went semi-native, adopted many of our characteristics and ways but holding on to her American accent and identity. She originally had a cushy gig in PR, but some disastrous campaign whose details she still won’t fill us in on cost her that job and she wound up here. All in all, she seemed to be one of those eternally cheerful people who always landed upwards as if that was their natural progress in life. Maybe it’s an American thing.

  Marcie handled celebrities. She brought along her contact list when Roger hired her, and her job was to protect the clients from scandals, clean up their dirty laundry. Every now and then the rest of us would partner up with her to help out. I can tell you that whatever notions of glamour we had about celebrities washed away very quickly once we were on a couple of Marcie’s cases. I often came away from them with the urge to shower. Celebrities had way too much to hide, and for Marcie—and the agency—business was booming.

  But there had to be more to her than this. Roger didn’t hire cream puffs. If there was one thing that I had learned about my coworkers, it was that everyone here was a brilliant fuckup with nowhere else to go. And fuckups are dark, dark people. We’re all good at smiling, wearing a smart suit we got from our clothing allowance and presenting a cool front, but the clients should never see how we get our results, or how we behave off-hours.

  Marcie was on a stalking case. A singer had hired her to find and stop the guy who was casing her social media accounts, camping outside the clubs she went to, leaving decapitated Barbie dolls and sliced-up photos of her on her doorstep. Marcie and Olivia found the guy through his email and Facebook page within a day. Marcie sent Ken and Clive out to his address to give him a talking-to that morning.

  “So what’s our next PM like?”

  “Frankly, I’m not impressed. If he’s the best and brightest there is in the political landscape, we are in deep shit.”

  “In the flesh, he looks like whatever charisma he has was bought in a can from the Harvey Nichols Men’s Care department,” Olivia said.

  “And now it’s my job to pull a thorn from his paw,” I muttered.

  “That just makes him owe us. Or rather, owe Roger,” Olivia said.

  “If Roger has his way, everyone who’s anyone would owe him.” Marcie winked.

  “Attention, everyone,” Cheryl said. “Roger is making Mr. Holcomb an A-1 priority, so if you’ve finished your current caseload or are at a loose end, he expects you to give Ravi any backup with your expertise when needed.”

  “Shouldn’t we just outsource this to the Ghostbusters?” Benjamin said.

  “Ha-bloody-ha,” I said. “Well, McLeish’s people just emailed me some credentials, so I’m off to interview Holcomb’s fellow politicians.”

  In the cab to Westminster, my mum called.

  “Ravi, darling, I hate to trouble you when you’re so busy, but Mrs. Dhewan is getting a bit aggressive.”

  “I warned you not to fuck with the Asian Housewife Mafia.” I sighed.

  Mrs. Dhewan was the neighborhood loan shark, middle class as they came, down to an ironclad set of rules to which she insisted everyone stick.

  “They’re my friends. It was just a few card games.”

  “A few card games? What about that loan for Sanjita’s wedding? We’re talking over twenty grand!”

  “Yes, Ravi, shout it out loud so I don’t forget.”

  “Mum—”

  “Shout it from the rooftops so everyone knows, just in case I’m not embarrassed enough already.”

  “Have you told Dad yet?”

  “Of course not. He’ll just give me the same grief you’re giving me, and God knows what he’ll do.”

  “He’d just say you made your bed, now lie in it, and thank God you two don’t have a joint bank account. You know I’m going to tell him, right?”

  “Oh, darling, can you not? Can’t we quietly sort this out?”

  “By ‘we’ you mean me.”


  “I’ve started seeing a counselor.”

  “Good. The way addiction runs in our family, we don’t need you becoming a full-on gambling addict. If Dad realizes that, he’ll probably buy you a one-way plane ticket to Las Vegas and be done with it.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  I sighed.

  “Has Mrs. Dhewan started threatening you outright? Threatening notes? Flaming dog shit through the letterbox?”

  “Not as such, but every conversation I’ve had with her has that little tinge, you know? She could kill my standing in the community with just a bit of nasty gossip. ‘That Mrs. Singh, she’s a gambling addict, terrible with money . . .’ ”

  “All right, tell Mrs. Dhewan I’ll go see her soon. No, better yet, tell her I’ll take her to tea at Fortnum’s.”

  “Oh, that will impress her.”

  “I’ll see if I can work out a deal.”

  “Let’s keep this between us for now,” Mum said. “We don’t want to worry your father, too.”

  “How is he? Did you finally get him to see the doctor?”

  “It was like pulling teeth, Ravi. I had to tell the doctor how tired he’d been and it hurt to pee. The doctor has ordered tests.”

  “All right. Keep me posted.”

  My mother was normally quite rational. She was a teacher, after all. I suppose I became one to follow her footsteps and also to appease her and my dad when they kept asking what I was going to do with my life when I had my breakdown and dropped the religious studies. When you’re Asian and middle class, you are expected to pick one of five white-collar careers: doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect, or banker. My father actually hoped I would pursue a PhD in religious studies and follow his footsteps as a religious scholar. Otherwise, my parents might have been happy with accountant, but I wasn’t that into money. With my interest in literature, Dad and Mum might have settled for my becoming a published author, if only so that Mum could brag to her friends. Much as I liked to study stories and narrative, I wasn’t really into writing fiction, so that was out. Getting my teaching qualifications and teaching secondary school was the compromise that suited me for a while; this allowed me to hide the craziness and dysfunctions at my core that I’d spent my years at university fully indulging. I did not see any gods during the years I was a teacher. Then I tried to protect a student from the teacher she was having sex with, handled it wrong, and ended up losing my job. That put me back to square one.