Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  “I hope you remembered to erase your digital footprints, darling!” Cheryl said.

  “Yes, Cheryl!” Olivia said, rolling her eyes.

  “Always, Cheryl!”

  “There’s a good girl,” Cheryl said, and walked back to her desk.

  Olivia had a problem with Cheryl. Olivia had a problem with any woman who had authority over her, because as far as she was concerned, she was the one with authority, and the sooner the world knew that, the better.

  “She’s been with Roger since the beginning,” whispered Mark. “Back when they were a little office off Fleet Street in the late eighties.”

  “They only had Ken and Clive in the old days,” whispered Marcie. “And went from that rinky-dink little shithole to this place.”

  “So she knows where all the bodies are buried,” Mark said.

  “Wait, do you mean that literally?” Now even I couldn’t help whispering.

  “All the bodies,” Mark and Marcie said in unison.

  We glanced at Cheryl in awe and perhaps a little healthy fear.

  She didn’t look up.

  Had she heard us?

  She didn’t let on.

  “Do not. Ever. Piss her off,” Marcie whispered.

  “ ’Ere, mate, what are you doing on the stakeout front?” asked Benjamin, who had been conspicuously silent up till that point.

  “I haven’t thought about that yet.”

  “Got you sorted there.” He grinned. “Just got the latest model surveillance gear. Gagging to try them out. How about we visit Maison Holcomb?”

  Holcomb had given me permission to look over his flat in Pimlico for clues. The porter let us in, and Benjamin immediately started scoping out the best places to hide his new sound-activated webcams and microphones. Holcomb was away in Surrey canvassing and staying in the local Holiday Inn. I was still not inclined to treat this case as a ghost story but more as a locked-room mystery. Was this Phantom Louise only coming to fuck Holcomb in his flat, or was it following him around? If it was just in this flat, then it wasn’t a haunting so much as someone who could only count on getting away with raping him here. Too many unknown factors in a strange hotel room, too many chances of getting caught.

  I got a look at Holcomb’s medicine cabinet. It was an addict’s treasure chest, huge selection of prescription medications, all downers and sleep aids, Opiate City. My former students would have nicked all of this and sold it in school for a small fortune, and also kept a bit of it to use themselves.

  Benjamin’s cams and mikes were tiny, barely the size of a fingernail.

  “The video uploads straight to our server at the office, so we can just review the footage on the computers,” Benjamin said. “Bang! Bob’s yer uncle. We stay on the case and get to keep our social lives.”

  Benjamin was our tech and surveillance expert, a snarky Chinese lad from Peckham. Oil and water in contrast with Olivia. He was hardware. She was software. GCHQ had tried to recruit him, but he preferred the private sector. “Can’t be arsed to sign the Official Secrets Act,” he said. He was like James Bond’s Q—if Q had the soul of a juvenile delinquent. He wasn’t malicious, per se, but he loved mischief, especially the types of mischief you could get up to with the latest tech. And he loved his new, flashy tech, always upgrading, always ordering new gear with the expense account Cheryl allowed him because he always got results. I hate to admit it, but he was like my evil twin brother. Out of everyone at the agency, he was the one I had the most fun with, definitely a bad influence.

  “Ken and Clive would call us soft for not spending all night freezing our bollocks off watching the flat from across the street,” I said.

  “Sod ’em! This is the twenty-first century!”

  Benjamin hid another webcam up on the ceiling light.

  “Clients want the old familiar stuff with newfangled bells and whistles,” he said. “It’s like buying a new car. Everyone likes a New Car Smell.”

  He opened his laptop to check the stream. There we were in 4K, standing in Holcomb’s bedroom from the HDTV’s point of view.

  “We are the New Car Smell,” he said.

  Julia Fowler had been waiting over an hour in reception when Benjamin and I got back to the agency. Benjamin went back to helping Olivia with her embezzlement case. I escorted Julia into the conference room for privacy. She showed me an old video of Louise on her phone, dressed in a tight flowery dress and slow dancing and laughing with Holcomb at a birthday party.

  “Louise became really girly. She loved dresses, frocks, high heels, all those trappings more than me. That was why she loved modeling. And I guess her brand of femininity was the type that men like Rupert fell hard for. And she just wanted to marry a nice bloke who treated her right.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “To show you that Louise and Rupert were the real deal. But she had a past.”

  “Go on.”

  “Dodgy boyfriend. Utter sleazebag. Photographer she lived with in Paris for a while. He has photos she was afraid would get out. He keeps them in a safe in his flat in Paris. Look, I know you’re busy, but I need your help.”

  This could be my first lead. A shithead who might be out to mess with Holcomb for taking Louise away from him, perhaps?

  I looked at Julia.

  “Would you like to go to Paris with me?”

  FOUR

  Off to St. Pancras Station, taxi receipt to give to Cheryl. Two tickets on the company credit card, receipt for Cheryl for an expenses claim as part of the bill to the Tory Party later. And we were off.

  You might think the three hours it took to get to Paris—three hours in a dark tunnel—were filled with awkward silences, but this wasn’t the case.

  “Sorry,” said Julia.

  “For what?”

  “Using you like this.”

  “It’s my job.” I shrugged. “I want to know more about Louise and see if anyone from her past might be out to get Holcomb. You need backup. Win-win for us both.”

  God knows I was desperate for a bad guy in this case to focus on. One that preferably had a pulse.

  “I Googled you,” Julia said.

  Here we go.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Julia must have vetted me before she decided I could be trusted. Anyone could look me up if they wanted, even if not all the facts were out there. They never are.

  “Is there something you need to ask?”

  “How did you find out that girl was sleeping with the teacher in the first place?”

  “She was one of my students. She had trouble at home, and the bastard took advantage. The usual grooming, made her feel special, like he was looking out for her when no one else was. Thing is, she was smart, knew it was wrong deep down. I must have told all my students this kind of thing was wrong in passing, and she remembered it. After a few months, she came and told me what was happening with her. I told the principal and authorities immediately.”

  “Were you friends with that teacher?” she asked.

  “Phil and I were friendly. Had the occasional drink. Never knew he was sleeping with a student. It’s not something teachers generally spilled to each other.”

  “Would you have reported him if you were friends?”

  “In a flash. I wouldn’t have tried to have a friendly chat with him. That kind of thing is non-negotiable in my book.”

  “So how did it go from something as straightforward as reporting it to him trying to stitch you up?”

  “I cocked up. Before Social Services came to take her away, she ran off. The police were called. They were looking for her. Then she turned up on my doorstep in the middle of the night. I let her sleep on my sofa before taking her to school the next day. When Phil saw me go to school with her, he accused me of being the one who was sleeping with her to muddy the waters. I ended up being investigated as his accomplice. Weeks of testimonies, had to get my own solicitor. That was when it hit the papers. The student insisted I wasn’t part of it. In the end, her
testimony saved me from getting arrested. Phil had his lawyer muddy the waters, as well. In the end, the student and her parents opted not to press charges, and they left the country. By then, I was tainted as much as Phil was, and the school used the excuse of budget cuts to sack me as well as Phil.”

  “To be accused of something monstrous,” Julia said. “That changes you, doesn’t it?”

  “My mother was a teacher. It seemed like a good idea when I left university. I thought about going into publishing with my English degree, work towards becoming an editor, but in the end, I decided to go into teacher training, be of service. I reckoned the students would keep me on my toes. I was good at it.”

  “Are you bitter?”

  “More angry than bitter. I felt like I failed my student. We didn’t protect her properly. And she had to come out and protect me.”

  “What was it like, suddenly cast adrift?”

  “Weird. I realized that I didn’t really feel as if being a teacher defined me. I made some halfhearted attempts to find a new teaching position, but deep down, I knew I would never teach again. I was burnt-out.”

  “So the other guy, Phil—”

  “He’s still out there, but I don’t think he’ll land another teaching job, either.”

  “So how did you become a private investigator?”

  “My friend David from uni. He’d been working a few years as the lawyer at Golden Sentinels. When he saw I’d been unemployed for six months and moping about, he talked me into going for an interview. Said it paid crazy-good money. Since I was in debt, I thought why not? I still wonder why they hired me.”

  She smiled. Like she knew something I didn’t.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Banging on like that.”

  “It’s fine. I had to ask.”

  She was still vetting me. I had no problems with that. I sensed her sister sitting there with us, beside her as she listened to my sob story, deciding that I could be trusted to help. Julia would protect Louise, even in death.

  FIVE

  Got off at the Gare du Nord, headed for the Metro. Got out at the 6th Arrondissement, the Saint Germain-des-Prés area. Louise’s ex kept a flat he had inherited from his family here, the only way anyone could possibly have a place in this part of town. His name was Loïc Bazennec, probably the most French name ever. D-list fashion photographer who made a decent living on magazine shoots; he wanted to be Annie Leibovitz.

  “Only more misogynist,” Julia added.

  His flat was in a backstreet on the way to Saint-Michel. The entrance to the building opened to a cobblestoned courtyard.

  “Loïc isn’t home this week. He’s off for Fashion Week in Berlin,” Julia said.

  Social engineering is the art of subtly manipulating people into thinking that giving you what you want was the most sensible thing in the world. It’s really a fancy way of saying “con job.” The trick to social engineering is to always act with total confidence, like you’re supposed to be there. That was what Julia and I did. We walked up to the front entrance of Loïc Bazannec’s building like a couple coming home. Julia pressed the bell, and the door buzzed open for us.

  Julia had a set of spare keys that Louise had held on to after she and Loïc had broken up. We climbed the stairs to his front door. I put on a pair of surgical gloves and gave Julia a pair so we didn’t leave our fingerprints anywhere.

  Swish flat. Old photos on the bookshelves of Louise with a lanky, jowly bloke that I presumed was Loïc.

  “He was domineering. Abusive.”

  The walls of his flat were lined with oversize photos of nude models he had obviously taken great pride in shooting. He had a particular fixation on crotches and bums.

  I hated this guy already.

  Julia headed for the office area in the living room. She’d been here before, back when Louise was living with Loïc. How long had she been planning to do this? The safe was sitting under the desk. I recognized it as one of those common commercial models, barely larger than a shoe box, with a keypad and seven-pin tubular lock.

  “Louise always meant to sneak back here to get those photos.”

  She entered a code on the keypad.

  “Shit! He’s changed the code.”

  “Let me have a go,” I said.

  When I was training for the job, Benjamin walked me through the gamut of safecracking: listening for the tumblers on combination locks, cutting another model open from the soft metal back, brute-force cracking the bigger models with a crowbar if you had the time. Then there were the cheap, crap ones with keypads.

  Of course I carried a small lock-pick kit with me as part of the job. That didn’t include a crowbar for brute-forcing a safe, though. The question, then, was which tactic to use.

  I pulled out the safe from the desk, entered a random code to hear the beep of the error message, and then smacked the top of the safe with my palm.

  Sure enough, the door flipped open. Design flaw in the spring.

  Luckily for us, Loïc’s mediocrity extended to his choice of safety appliances.

  Julia pulled out a large manila envelope. Negatives and prints of Louise and some other women in handcuffs and leather straps and smeared in filth. They didn’t all look consensual.

  “His fetish was bondage and poo. He insisted his girls ‘play’ with him. Lou always regretted these.”

  She left the small wad of cash alone in the safe. I reached behind the safe door and pressed a little red button on the side near the hinge and heard a beep, resetting the passcode. Louise entered a new random code. Loïc would come back from Berlin to find he couldn’t open his safe the next time he wanted to take out the photos for a wank. He probably didn’t know how easy it was to open the safe, since if he knew how rubbish these safes were, he probably wouldn’t have bought one. Julia was happy to let him stew.

  I found nothing that would tie Loïc to Holcomb. Julia said Louise never told Holcomb about him, and they never met. We left the flat with the photos and walked over to the Pont des Arts. Louise took out a lighter and set the negatives and photos on fire, letting them flutter into the Seine. We watched the wind take them as they dwindled into embers before they hit the water. The lovers and tourists who passed us didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “I have to turn in a paper about The Canterbury Tales next week. It’s stressing me out a bit.”

  “And you’re not stressed about committing burglary?”

  “I’ll do anything to protect my sister,” she said. “I’m going to write about ‘The Miller’s Tale.’ Laughed my arse off at that one.”

  “The Miller’s Tale.” Story about a carpenter whose wife was cheating on him with a local scholar, and a second scholar also fancied her. When the second scholar pestered her for a kiss, she told him to close his eyes, then stuck her bum out the window. She and her lover had a good laugh when the second bloke kissed her arse instead of her mouth. The second scholar got pissed off and grabbed a hot poker to punish her, but it was her lover who stuck his arse out the window this time for a laugh, and he got the poker up his bum instead, screaming bloody murder and waking up the town.

  “It’s always the ‘poker up the bum’ story that everyone remembers,” I said.

  We laughed, trying to shake off the adrenaline rush from the breaking and entering we just pulled off.

  Suddenly she kissed me, taking me by surprise.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Just doing my job. I wanted to see if Loîc might have been the one out to get Roger. Now I can rule him out.”

  She kissed me again.

  “When this is over, we should go out properly,” she said.

  As first dates went, this was pretty good. Nothing like a bit of breaking and entering for a bonding experience. I was probably crossing an ethical line here somewhere, but Julia wasn’t a client, so I didn’t feel any dings on my conscience.

  In the corner of my eye, at the other side of the bridge, stood Kali. Goddess of death and rebirth, what was she doing here? Was I do
ing something that was about to change my life? I ignored her, a blur in the distance.

  We took the Eurostar back to London. It was dark when we came out at St. Pancras. I put Julia in a cab, since she had to go home to write her paper. I headed home, still abuzz from our kiss, and passed out from exhaustion—exhaustion mixed with excitement.

  SIX

  What have you got?” I asked Benjamin.

  “Only the most boring nature documentary ever.”

  We watched the cam footage that Benjamin had recorded overnight. Benjamin speeded up the video so we didn’t have to endure in real time the scene of Holcomb coming into his bedroom the night before.

  “Observe,” said Benjamin, “Torius parliamentus in his natural habitat.”

  Holcomb changed into his pajamas, swallowed some pills that had to be the Rohypnol I had found in his medicine cabinet, and climbed into bed. When he switched off the lights, the footage went to infrared. He slept like a log. No one entered his bedroom throughout the night.

  “I am distinctly disappointed in the lack of ghostly sexy times,” said Benjamin.

  “Did you get our clients’ permission to put surveillance cameras in his flat?”

  “Er, no,” I said.

  We didn’t realize Roger had been standing behind us watching the footage all along. His face was a shade of beet red, like a blood vessel might pop any second, and his teeth were grinding as if he was trying very hard to keep his head from exploding. Benjamin and I couldn’t answer. I let my gaze wander to Olivia talking to a pair of Buddhist monks in the boardroom. New clients who wanted her to secure their IT network from hackers.

  “Tell me you’re going to delete this footage and you’ve removed the cameras from that flat,” Roger said.

  “But didn’t you say we should pull every trick in the book to crack this case?”

  “This poor sod might be our next prime minister, and I don’t want Special Branch knocking on our door if they find out we bugged his flat,” said Roger. “You haven’t answered me about the cameras.”

  “Err,” muttered Benjamin.