Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  Not only did I have my own overdraft to pay off, but there was also the bill for my sister’s fuck-off extravagant wedding. My parents just had to plan a big sodding traditional wedding for my sister so they could show off to friends and the family who flew in from India just how right they’d done by Little Sanjita. Dad was semiretired from academia, Mum was long retired from teaching, so as the oldest son, I couldn’t not take up that burden. And now Mum’s gambling debts, as well.

  Do you see why I needed this job at the agency now? Why I couldn’t afford to fail this case and get the sack? Digging up secrets, helping the rich and powerful with their dirty laundry, finding leverage against their enemies—a far cry from teaching secondary school in North London. A completely new life and career, the old one left behind like a burned bridge and somehow I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. Two, three cases, and I could pay off all those debts with my bonuses. Now another twenty grand I had to pay off.

  I just hoped I had enough of a soul left by the end of it. With luck, there might be some enlightenment, too. That would be nice.

  I got out of the cab at Westminster—smart suit, notebook, briefcase, the picture of a serious junior political correspondent doing a profile on Rupert Holcomb. The secret to good social engineering was to look the part and walk the walk. Interview Holcomb’s colleagues. McLeish had told them I was a sympathetic writer for a regional party paper and that they should afford me every courtesy. No one would ever assume you weren’t what you claimed to be. By the end of the meeting, they wouldn’t remember who you were, and you were home free.

  Gentle softball questions about Rupert Holcomb’s character. What’s he like? Anything weird about him? Who hates him? His overall personality. His reputation among his peers. His haters called him “an empty suit,” “bereft of any ideas of his own,” “soulless.” The usual stuff. Nothing that stood out at all. After the pedophile scandals, the years of media training and paranoia, it was typical that they would choose a candidate who was as bland as ever, as he expounded the usual party line about privatizing the entire country into oblivion, killing the welfare state and gutting the NHS, privatizing the educational system and everything you expect of a party that was dead set on turning Britain back into a Dickensian dystopia. Of course he didn’t have the vision to think up those policies himself; they were obviously the work of the think tanks the party was into at the time. He was just the prompter monkey and thus was selected for his sheer dullness. I imagine his enemies in the party were just sucking sour grapes that he was picked to be poster boy over them.

  At the end of the day, I could only come to one conclusion about Holcomb:

  Christ, what a boring bastard.

  He was too boring to have any truly interesting enemies. It was as if they couldn’t be bothered to make the effort. Politicians are notoriously lacking in imagination, and there wasn’t a single one of them I met who could possibly dream up a way to fuck Holcomb up with a plot involving a sexy ghost in his bedroom at night.

  A whole day in the seat of government talking to everyone who mattered and I’d gotten precisely nowhere.

  Pretty much like the government, really.

  Since I could eliminate Holcomb’s peers in Westminster from the suspect list, I had to consider the celebrity scandal angle. What if whoever was out to stitch up Holcomb was jealous that he had landed someone as fit as Louise and not them. An obsessed fan like one of Marcie’s cases, perhaps? This seemed unlikely, though, since that kind of perp would be actively stalking Holcomb and sending him threatening notes. Alas, there were no threats against Holcomb, or we would have been hired to track those down. I had to start looking at Louise Fowler.

  I hated interviewing grieving family members. It was almost impossible not to look like an opportunistic dickhead, especially if the deceased was famous.

  A cursory Web search on Louise’s career and tabloid exploits in the cab ride to her parents’ house turned up a surprisingly mild record of antics and scandals. Her raciest photo shoots never veered beyond the tasteful side (but were still enough to be voted prime wank material for boys and men across the land). She had had a brief tryst with a Premier League footballer that ended when he couldn’t take other blokes eyeing her and he got suspended for lamping some poor sod in a club over her. She had worked her way through an entire boy band, though they all ended it amicably and she stayed mates with the lot of them, even appearing in several of their music videos. Hints of mild drug dependency with stays in rehab. She hosted a few shows on fashion and lifestyle for satellite television, never starred in reality shows despite loads of offers. Lots of chatter expressing bewilderment when she began to go out with Holcomb and they announced their engagement.

  Might as well get this bit over with.

  Parents’ house. Talk to them to get a picture of what Louise was like.

  Nobody in.

  Two minutes ringing the doorbell when her voice came up behind me.

  “Hello? Can I help you?”

  You could tell she was Louise’s sister. Twenties. Graduate student in Literature. Similar lips and cheekbones, though without the smoothing-out from the plastic surgeon, same blond hair and sharp, intense blue eyes. Even in just jeans and a black jacket, she stopped the world.

  “I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Fowler?”

  “They’re away on holiday. What’s this about?”

  “You’re Julia, right? I’d like to talk to you about your sister.”

  “Oh, Christ, just piss off. We said we didn’t want the press coming round.”

  “I’m not a journalist. I’m a private investigator.”

  I handed her my card. No lies, no cover story, no social engineering with her. Best to be honest here. She looked the type who could smell bullshit coming a mile off.

  “I’m looking into whether someone might use your sister to hurt Rupert Holcomb and his reputation.”

  Fortunately for me, “private investigator” turned out to be a couple of rungs higher up in her estimation than “journalist.”

  “I suppose you’d better come in,” she said.

  Julia poured tea as we sat in the living room. She let me flip through a scrapbook of Louise’s modeling photos. There was a progression of more punk, rock-and-roll fashions when she was young, moving to more upmarket designer labels as she became mainstream. There were framed photos of some of her magazine covers and shoots on the wall, including the swimsuit photos, all taking pride of place.

  “Rupert has someone that hates him that much?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Unless he finally grew a personality, I can’t imagine,” she said.

  “Did Louise have any ex-boyfriends or people who might have wanted to hurt her or her reputation?”

  “No, she was on good terms with everybody. That’s why people liked working with her. She was a real sweetheart.”

  “I can see why Holcomb fell for her. Then again, who wouldn’t?”

  “That’s charisma for you. Lou had dollops of it.”

  “What do you think she saw in him?

  “The heart wants what it wants.” She shrugged.

  “There don’t seem to be any photos of Louise as a kid here.”

  “The baby and childhood photos are in the master bedroom. Dad prefers to remember her before she declared war on him. That really kicked off when she first became a model. Sex, drugs, unsuitable boyfriends . . .”

  “Yeah, I remember seeing those stories in the papers and Popbitch.”

  Julia laughed.

  I imagined Louise hovering behind Julia, watching intently as her sister answered my questions. Louise was dead but far from gone, her presence all over this house. Julia was still protecting Louise. Holcomb certainly believed this was a literal ghost story.

  “We were dead surprised when she landed Rupert and calmed down. They met at some book launch party. He worshipped the ground she walked on. She had that effect on people.”

/>   “So why didn’t she marry him? He certainly wanted to.”

  “She used to say that marriage was an institution used to control women. I think on a certain level she was afraid that, well, marrying him might hurt his career.”

  “Really? I would think marrying a supermodel would have done wonders for his career.”

  “All right, the truth is, she was already dying. Her cancer was at a late stage, and she didn’t want to burden him by making him a widower.”

  “She really did love him.”

  “For all the good it did her,” Julia said. “No, he made her happy. Can’t ask more than that, can we?”

  Once Julia believed I meant her and her family no harm, she warmed up and leaned in close as we spoke. Flirting seemed to be second nature to her.

  “Glad you didn’t think I was here to rob the place.”

  “What, a nice English boy like you?”

  “Don’t think anyone’s called me an English boy before.”

  “Why not? We’re all children of the Empire.”

  That smile, the type of smile that men in medieval times would slay dragons just to be blessed with.

  “Well, thanks for your time,” I said.

  “No problem. I’m not a huge fan of Rupert’s, but I don’t want him to get hurt. It’s already bad enough that he’s such a . . . a . . .”

  “Boring bastard?”

  “Yes!” she laughed. “We are awful.”

  “That we are,” I said.

  As I walked away, I thought I felt her eyes still on me. I turned and saw her still at the door, waiting for me to look back at her.

  She smiled, that smile again, and went inside.

  THREE

  The next morning, I got back to the office to log my notes. Ken and Clive were back from Marcie’s errand.

  “Sorted that stalker out, then?” I asked.

  “He won’t be stalking anyone for a very long time,” said Ken, rubbing his bruised knuckles.

  “Or using a computer,” Clive said.

  “Or eating solid food,” Ken said.

  “Shouldn’t you put some ice on those knuckles?” I asked.

  “Nah,” Ken sneered. “He was like a fucking pillow.”

  Ken and Clive were brick shithouses. You definitely did not want them laying a hand on you. If you ever saw them coming after you, you’d run. But that would only piss them off and make them chase you, and their years as coppers meant they had a really good chance of catching you. And when they caught you, they would really want to lay their hands on you. You couldn’t win if Ken and Clive ever set their sights on you. The lesson was never to give them a reason to come after you. I made it a point to live by that rule.

  I walked over to Marcie’s desk.

  “What are you watching?” I asked.

  “It’s a Literary Terror flash mob.”

  On her computer, a video uploaded from a phone. About a dozen young men descended on a Central London bookshop and trashed the cardboard standee of Delia McCarthy, the talk show host. They proceeded to attack the table that held copies of Delia’s latest lifestyle book, howling and singing as they ripped the pages up and tossed them into the air. Then just as suddenly, they ran out of the shop before the police arrived.

  “Literary terror. Huh,” I said.

  “A troll threatened Delia on Twitter that this was going to happen. He also doxxed her last week and she had to move to a hotel,” Marcie said.

  “Have you asked Olivia to help tracking him?”

  “She’s still busy on her case. Dude, I could use a hand on this. You were a teacher: you know the literary world better than me.”

  “Once I get some traction on Holcomb, I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  As I typed my interview notes into my computer, David came running up like I’d eaten the last Jammie Dodger in the pantry.

  “I can’t believe Roger gave you the Holcomb case! You’re not even a Tory voter!”

  “And thank fuck for that,” I said.

  “It should have been me!”

  “David, you’re a lawyer. Investigations aren’t your specialty.”

  “But I know the ins and outs of the party!” he protested.

  Out of all of us, David was the one who was obviously using this job at the agency as a stepping-stone to a political career later down the line. He and I went way back to university. When I lost my teaching job, he was the one who hooked me up with Roger. His parents were from Nigeria and his family was well connected, so David was under pressure to go far. He had a law degree and was really more the agency’s legal advisor than an investigator, but Roger liked to mix everyone’s roles up. Roger knew David’s parents and hired him for the access to certain people with power and money—Roger’s two favorite things.

  “Really, you don’t want this one, mate,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? What is it? A leaked document? Compromising photos? Could be well tasty.”

  “Dead girlfriend having sex with him.”

  David did a double take.

  “What?”

  “Nocturnal emissions of the ghostly kind,” Mark said woozily from his desk.

  David tried to speak, but his brain short-circuited. He just walked back to his desk.

  “Still should have given it to me,” he muttered.

  Roger, who must have overheard David and me, since his door was open, decided to come out and grace us with his presence. His Majesty wanted a progress report.

  “I ran a theory that this might be some kind of honeytrap,” I said. “Russians might do that kind of thing, but normally they’d just throw a woman at a guy, none of this sneaking in while he’s unconscious stuff. The point is to have him hooked on the woman. So that’s out.”

  “Too right,” Roger said. “As convenient as it would be to have a future prime minister in your pocket, it’s too early to go for Holcomb. He hasn’t officially declared his candidacy yet, and the party can still decide not to run him if they decide he’s too unsafe or unstable.”

  “So the best angle is still a campaign to smear him or drive him mad, as McLeish thinks,” I said. “But if anyone wanted to discredit him, it’d be easier to set him up in public to say the wrong thing or fall over and look stupid, not in the privacy of his home at night where there are no witnesses.

  “All solid theories,” Roger said. “Where do they leave us?”

  I could only shrug.

  “Keep plugging,” Roger said, and went back to his office.

  Yeah. No pressure.

  Olivia came over and plopped a small pile of printouts on my desk.

  “Little prezzie, babes.”

  “What’s all this?”

  “Holcomb’s medical records. My fortune-teller said I should give you a hand. Hitch my wagon to your star, as it were.”

  “Fortune-teller? You believe in that?”

  “Not really. It’s more a habit.”

  “How did you get all this?”

  She shrugged, all coy. Whenever Olivia got coy, it meant she had just broken the law and gotten away with it. To the world, she looked like a respectable professional Chinese girl in librarian glasses, a Gucci dress, and designer heels, but when she was a teenager, she was one of the most notorious hackers in the world. She was so good that she never got caught, never bragged on forums, and always covered her tracks. Somehow, Roger sniffed her out—turned out he knew her parents, upper-middle-class bankers from Hong Kong who were early clients of his. He hired her when she graduated from LSE with the offer that he would let her use her bag of black-hat tricks to sniff out all kinds of financial and personal secrets that she might use on her way to becoming a power player in the business world.

  “I was online looking into some bank records for my client. Thought I’d root around for you while I was at it.”

  We studied Holcomb’s medical history together. No history of mental illness. Slight high blood pressure. High cholesterol. Some hypertension. Sleep apnea. He’d even had an MRI scan. N
o brain tumors. No neurological issues. Physically, he was normal.

  “He had referrals to a Harley Street psychiatrist but never went,” Olivia said.

  “Typical,” I said.

  That’s the sad thing about the British,” Mark said. “We all fucking need therapy, but very few of us go.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as mentally ill,” I said. “Addicted to meds, but not mad.”

  “Aside from being a politician, you mean?” Mark said. “That probably means some serious pathologies right there.”

  “Take a look at his prescriptions,” Olivia said with some glee.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “He roofies himself to sleep?” Marcie said. “This gets better and better.”

  “Does this firm ever get normal people for clients?” I mused.

  “The rich and powerful are not normal people,” Mark said. “Normal people can’t afford us.”

  I had a thought.

  “Marcie, put a call out to your tabloid contacts, Popbitch. See if they’re looking for dirt on Holcomb, or if anyone’s offering to sell any.”

  “On it.” She picked up her phone. “His star is on the rise. Now would be the time for a juicy scandal.”

  “Normally they’d be hiring us to dig up dirt,” Mark said.

  Cheryl walked over and looked at the printouts Olivia gave me.

  “You done with that, dear?”

  “Er, yeah.”

  “Good.”

  She snatched up the file, went over, and stuck it into the paper shredder.

  “Don’t want it hanging about to incriminate us, do we?” she said, and returned to her desk.

  “I looked at Holcomb’s financials,” Olivia said. “Nothing out of the ordinary there.”

  If there were any financial irregularities, Olivia would have sniffed it out.