Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  I looked at the rumpled bed, the drying wet patches.

  “Can you smell it? The sex? The perfume?”

  He hadn’t done this to himself. I’d been through his medicine cabinet and all the cupboards in the flat when I was last over with Benjamin. He didn’t keep any women’s perfume here.

  “I didn’t do this to myself! I don’t sleepwalk! Someone is doing this to me!”

  “Mr. Holcomb, I believe you. We will get to the bottom of this.”

  “When? You can’t imagine the shame! The humiliation! The . . . not knowing! I can’t endure this much longer!”

  I looked at him. Started to really see him for the first time. Not the bland, empty suit on the telly or the papers, not the focus group–tested mannequin spouting platitudes and policies that were going to help the rich get richer and fuck up the young, the handicapped and the vulnerable, but the man. Or rather, the little boy who always did what everyone wanted, who didn’t know anything better, who was desperate to be accepted. I’d assumed he was going to be party leader by name anyway, that he was just the front man pushing the policies the party committee had decided upon. They tended to pick not the most charismatic, but the most anodyne these days, the most market-tested, generic, faceless, inoffensive figure who could serve as a receptacle for sound bites and policy declarations. If the main parties could run androids, they probably would. But now I was seeing all the artifice stripped away and the victim underneath.

  Oh, God, was I starting to feel sorry for him?

  “Mr. Holcomb, you’re not exactly cut out for this line of work are you?”

  “Eh? What—what are you saying?”

  “Do you really want to be prime minister?”

  “Well, of course! Every MP dreams of that.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. Some of them just want to serve their constituents.”

  The confusion on his face was painful to behold.

  “No, no,” he muttered. “That was always the endgame. I was always going to be party leader, then PM. That was the trajectory. We had this all planned out. Do you see how all . . . all this can ruin those plans? Why won’t you help me?”

  “Mr. Holcomb, close your eyes.”

  “What—?”

  “Just close your eyes and take a deep breath. There. And another. In. Out. In. Out.”

  The air in the room began to let up a bit.

  “Better?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “When you closed your eyes, what did you see in your mind?”

  “A green field stretching far in the distance. England’s green and pleasant land.”

  “How did you feel when you saw that?”

  “Happy. I wish I could just sit in that field forever.”

  “No work, no worries, no stress. No meetings. No voters.”

  “Yes. I wish I could be here forever.”

  With that, his eyes snapped open. He tensed again, as if he’d been caught doing something shameful. I really wished someone would talk him into getting some therapy.

  “What did you do to me?”

  “I didn’t do anything. Why? Do you think you did something wrong?”

  “No, but—it’s just—”

  “Why would I judge you? Everyone needs that place you just found.”

  He relaxed, but only slightly.

  “Can you hang on to that feeling?”

  “I—I think so.”

  “Try to remember it. Do you have any appointments today?”

  “Yes. A budget meeting, then canvassing in the afternoon.”

  “All right. Go about your day as you normally do. Can you manage that?”

  I told Holcomb not to come home that night, that he should get a room at his club and sleep there. If he didn’t get any nocturnal sexing there, we would at least know that it was a living person and not a ghost.

  “All my life, I did what everyone told me I should do,” Holcomb said as he left. “Louise, she was the only decision I made on my own. For myself.”

  Time to stop fucking about. I should have done this in the first place. I got back to the office to look up Louise’s Facebook page and went through her friends list, cross-referenced their names with her interviews, and found another old boyfriend in Munich. His name was Gunter. Munich was a period of her life she didn’t talk about, brushing it off in interviews as paying her dues, going where the work was, even if it wasn’t high profile, before anyone heard of her, where she did rudimentary catalogue work.

  I phoned Gunter up. He agreed to meet. He was nursing an expensive heroin addiction, so my call was serendipitous. He happened to be holding some old papers and records of hers. That I was asking for them meant they had to be worth some clobber, so he immediately demanded payment for them. I had to ask Cheryl for a thousand euros to pay him, but that was going to be part of the expenses, so she was kosher with it. Then a taxi to Luton Airport, an easyJet to Munich.

  I met Gunter at the airport bar and handed him the money. He wanted to make small talk and have a beer, so I quizzed him about Louise as I read through the medical records he’d given me. They confirmed Louise’s compromised immune system, the risks to her health that the treatments posed, her hormonal imbalance that exacerbated her condition that may have lead to her illness later. And Gunter was the boyfriend who was loyal enough to stick with her through this period. He even kept these records to protect her. Unfortunately, everyone had their price, and Gunter’s was the increasingly expensive heroin addiction he needed to feed, so it was fortuitous that I happened to get in touch with him just when he needed to pay off his dealer and stock up on his stash.

  “I loved her,” he said. “But deep down I knew it wasn’t to last. She was going to move on to great things and I would hold her back.”

  I questioned Gunter long enough to get all the answers I needed before I got on the next plane back to London.

  Only seven hours had passed since I had flown out of London. It wasn’t even late when I got back. There was actually a chance to wrap this case up.

  TWELVE

  She came at three in the morning, glided into his bedroom in the dark without a sound, muscle memory told her where everything was without needing to see. Her clothes slid off her like shed skin as she climbed into the bed and onto the man sleeping in it.

  But this time, he wasn’t asleep.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” I said.

  “Ravi?! What are you doing here?” Julia Fowler nearly threw herself off the bed in panic, but I grabbed her wrists and pulled her back before she toppled over and bashed her head on the carpet. I let her settle back on the bed.

  “Don’t run. I just want to talk.”

  In hindsight, Benjamin and I probably could have solved this case much sooner if we’d kept the cameras in place or, to go old-school, parked ourselves in the cupboard, and waited for her to show up, but I didn’t really believe someone was actually coming in and fucking Holcomb in his sleep, so I concentrated on every other angle before coming back to this bloody obvious one. Chalk that up to experience, I suppose.

  Eventually Julia stopped resisting and sat back on the bed. She pulled her shirt back on.

  “Where’s Rupert?” she asked.

  “Sleeping at his club in town.”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “You and Louise used the same perfume. Remember when we were talking about ‘The Miller’s Tale,’ the bit about the wife sneaking someone else’s bum for the poor sod to kiss? That came back to me when I smelled your perfume in this room yesterday morning.”

  “After I—”

  “Your last visit, yes. I also remembered there were no photos of Louise when she was little in your living room. I looked into Louise’s medical history. No records going back more than three years, but there were plenty of records for Lewis Fowler, who had the same date of birth as Louise.”

  “How did you suss all this out?”

  “I found an old boyfriend of Louise’
s in Germany from Facebook.”

  “Gunter.” Julia’s face darkened.

  “He helped her get gender reassignment surgery there, away from the tabloids. The fights she had with your dad were about her being trans. Gunter kept her medical records from the clinic in Munich. I’m amazed he kept her secret that long.”

  “Gunter can actually be loyal, when he’s not chasing his next high. Lou had the plastic surgery to sort out her face, her Adam’s apple, but her health deteriorated. She couldn’t go through with the genital reconstruction.”

  “She was going to go through with the complete transition? She passed the psychological assessment?”

  “She wanted it badly. Needed it. Not all trans women do,” Julia said. “Wow. Who would have thought Chaucer could be used for detective work. Too bad I can’t write about that in my paper.”

  “So that was why Louise couldn’t marry Rupert,” I said. “She would have had to submit her birth certificate, and he would have found out.”

  “She loved him,” Julia said. “I think the strain of putting off the marriage helped kill her in the end.”

  “But they had sex, didn’t they? How could he not know she had a penis? She could hide her status in her job, but . . .”

  “They always did it in the dark,” Julia said. “So he never realized.”

  “Come on, how could he not notice?”

  “Do you really want to know all the details?”

  She picked up her phone and typed in a Google search, showed me the results. Some of them included pictures and diagrams. A lot more information than I needed.

  “All right. I believe you.”

  “Eventually, she got too ill to have sex with him. That was when she had the idea that I could sneak in and take her place. She gave me the spare key when she knew they were coming back for sex. She planned which rooms he wouldn’t be in, so he never saw me. Once they were in the dark, she would excuse herself, leave the bedroom, and let me in. I would do the rest.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get. I know you’d do anything for her, but why go this far? Why have sex with a man you don’t even like?”

  “I’m a sex addict.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ve been diagnosed. No joke. You might think it’s all fun and games, but it’s not. When I was young, I was abused by my uncle, and it fucked me up right and proper. I don’t have sex on impulse because I like it. It’s because I hate myself. And I do it to stop hating myself, but I hate myself even more after I do it.”

  “I know. It’s a compulsion.”

  “She was my best friend,” Julia said. “She’d suffered so much, and I wanted her to be happy. And I didn’t mind Rupert. It was convenient. I didn’t have to talk to him afterwards. I didn’t have to pick up some grubby sod from a club. It kept my addiction under control, and I even got to cut down on my therapy sessions.”

  “But you were still in your addiction. You shouldn’t cut down on the sessions.”

  She looked at me, surprised.

  “I’ve known a few addicts. Not sex addicts, but I get how it works.”

  She relaxed a bit.

  “So why did you start doing it again after she died? You don’t even like Holcomb.”

  “I could control myself for a while, but college started to get to me. Therapy wasn’t helping. And I missed Louise. Doing it again felt like I was being close to her again, you know?”

  “You could have talked to Rupert about it.”

  “You must be joking! You’ve seen how he is! He’s beyond old-fashioned about sex! He’s bloody clueless! I didn’t want to have to deal with him being clingy and whinging. And if his handlers got wind of it, they might put pressure on me to marry him! Yuck! I knew Rupert took enough roofies to drop a rhino before he could sleep, so that worked in my favor. No muss, no fuss. I didn’t think he’d notice in the morning.”

  “Well, he did. That’s why he hired us to find out what was going on.”

  “I didn’t think it was me you were after.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “I was going to stop. Really. I thought I was doing pretty well for the past week when I left him alone, just concentrated on my coursework, went to therapy.”

  “So why did you suddenly start up again last night?”

  “Because of you, Ravi.”

  “Me?!”

  “I like you, all right? I didn’t expect that to happen. I didn’t want to fuck you, because that would ruin it! I couldn’t handle it, and I needed to get back to something familiar.”

  Christ. I’d become the case. That one ethical line I should never cross, and I’d ended up on the other end of it without even knowing.

  “I didn’t think Rupert would notice.” Julia hugged herself. “I thought he would just wake up and vaguely think he had a wet dream, then get on with his day.”

  “He’s been losing his rag over it. He thought he was going mad. He was going spare, enough to hire me to find out.”

  “Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” She was like a little girl who’d discovered she’d done something really bad.

  “You were just using him as a fuck doll. It didn’t occur to you that this was a crime?”

  “It’s—I’ve been all fucked-up in my head. You were the first really good bloke I’d met for a long time. Then all those memories of Louise when we went to Paris together, all these mad feelings like I’m going to burst, just filling up and spilling over like I would explode if I didn’t do anything about it. I was going to stop coming, but I couldn’t help myself . . .”

  She paused.

  “Even now I still feel like Louise is sitting in the living room waiting for me to finish.”

  “I’m really glad she isn’t,” I muttered. That would have really freaked me out.

  “So where does that leave us? I mean, I like you. Not just for a fuck. I really like you.”

  “Julia . . .”

  “Are you going to tell him everything?”

  “He hired me. He has a right to know. He thought he was going mad.”

  “I deserve that, I suppose.”

  We both knew what was at stake. Julia could be arrested and tried for assault. She and her family would be smeared all over the news—not to mention that Holcomb would be, too.

  She put her arms around me, and we fell back on the bed.

  “Can we just lie here like this for tonight? No sex.”

  “We can do that, yeah.”

  I was running on fumes, but we spent most of the night talking. We told each other our pasts and our traumas. We lay there until we fell asleep. Holcomb wouldn’t be back in the morning. We would be long gone by then. This mess wasn’t going away by any stretch of the imagination, though.

  THIRTEEN

  You hear all kinds of stories about private investigators overstepping their mark, especially if you’re in the business. This is industry gossip. Some investigators talk about sticking to the law lest they get brought up on charges. Some of them have affairs with clients. Some of them take bribes to keep evidence from clients. Some of them get caught breaking the law for their clients and sent to jail, like the one who hacked phones for the tabloids. I say “them” when I really mean “us.” Me. I was one of them. I’m no different, with the same moral and ethical temptations as the rest of them, no matter how much work I did back when I was pursuing my degree in religious studies. This was no abstract spiritual journey for pondering Enlightenment. This was a job where people’s lives were at stake. In all likelihood, Julia would be arrested and charged. I didn’t want to think about the impact on her family, especially if it hit the media. The impact on Holcomb and his career was beyond my imagination. But that wasn’t my brief. Ethics demanded I did my job and disclosed my findings.

  I reported everything to Roger and Cheryl at morning briefing. Nobody expected the answer to the Ghost Seducer case. Even Mark, who could be expected to reach the most gonzo flights of fancy, was impressed. Benjamin, typically, thought it w
as hilarious. Marcie was amused. Olivia was bemused. Ken and Clive just quietly shook their heads, as if something unpleasant about humanity had been reaffirmed to them yet again. Most interesting of all, Cheryl didn’t seem to react as she just jotted this all down in the minutes. Roger, not surprisingly, was delighted. He did love a result.

  Julia had decided to go home that morning, shower, and go to class as she normally went about her life, and wait for the bomb to drop. I said I would call her and tell her Holcomb’s decision once I met with him and McLeish.

  I could massage what I told Holcomb, hide Julia’s identity, simply told him Louise hired a call girl to have sex with him in the dark. Should I do that? That would only throw up more questions: Now that Louise was dead, why would this woman continue to come and bonk him in the dead of night? I doubted Holcomb or McLeish would understand the impulses and pathology of addiction, let alone sex addiction. They would likely be out for blood. What good would that do anyone? Prison wasn’t going to help Julia. What she needed was treatment. Or maybe prison was the rock bottom she needed to hit before she committed fully to treatment.

  “None of this is your problem, old son,” Roger said.

  He called McLeish and told them we had solved the case. Shortly after, McLeish called back and said Holcomb insisted on coming in that afternoon to hear what I had found.

  “What did you say to Holcomb when you last saw him?” asked Roger when he hung up.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “He trusts you, thinks you’re a straight shooter who’ll do right by him.”

  Now how could I betray him, after trying to ease his pain that morning? Because I couldn’t let him suffer.

  Roger could read it all on my face.

  “What I said about having a mensch in my firm.” He smiled.

  FOURTEEN

  I had no appetite for lunch, no Pret A Manger sandwich for me. I just sat at my desk brooding, but covered it up by typing up my notes and fact-checking on the Internet. Even though no one had brought it up or given me shit about it, everybody in the office was waiting to see how the meeting with Holcomb was going to play out.