Her Nightly Embrace Read online

  At two o’ clock, Holcomb arrived with McLeish and a man and woman who were either assistants or handlers. They weren’t happy when I insisted I spoke only to Holcomb and McLeish. With the glass door closed, the boardroom was soundproof. I had Benjamin sweep it for listening devices half an hour before their arrival, per our usual protocol with sensitive cases.

  Roger and Cheryl joined us, of course.

  I told Holcomb everything. I started slow, walked him through Louise’s history, emphasized that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body who tried to correct that as much as she could, until she got too sick to complete her transition. I laid out how she had sex with him and saw his whole world drop away from his eyes. Things only got worse when I got to the part about Louise’s surrogate. Of course, he asked who it was. I explained who and most of all, why.

  I told him that Louise loved him.

  Have you ever seen a man completely lose his shit? Trust me, you don’t want to. This was a full-on wobbly. This was the Premier League of wobblies.

  It was a gradual process, started with his lower lip trembling. I thought he might just burst into tears. If that was all that happened, it wouldn’t have been so bad. No, next came an awful keening sound from his mouth, escalating into a banshee howl of despair. He leapt from his chair like a jackrabbit, grabbed the vase on the table, and threw it at the wall, where it exploded like a grenade. He threw himself on top of the table and began to writhe like a man on fire, clawing at his shirt and face. This was beyond rational, all reason and restraint falling away from him, leaving only impulse and unfocused emotion. Every regret, every disappointment, every loss had he ever suffered was working its way through him. He was all gesture without control now.

  McLeish was taken aback, but gathered himself into a single expression of impatient disappointment. Roger had a look of mild fascination on his face, then nodded to Cheryl. Cheryl stayed perfectly calm, walked to the door, and asked Ken and Clive to come in and help hold him down. The two handlers rushed in, stopped, and looked on in horror.

  “For God’s sake,” LcLeish said. “Can’t you do something? It’s not as if he’s contagious!”

  The man made a halfhearted move to reach for Holcomb, then hastily withdrew. Nobody wanted to touch a writhing, raving man. Ken and Clive rolled their eyes and strolled over to the table. They grabbed Holcomb by the ankles and pulled him off, took his arms, and proceeded to hold him down.

  The rest of the gang just watched from the door with a look of gleeful Schadenfreude on their faces. Benjamin was all set to film it on his phone if Cheryl hadn’t come back from Roger’s office and hissed at him to put it away. She had a first aid kit in her hands that Roger took, thanking her gingerly for bringing it.

  Roger produced a syringe and loaded it up with sedative from a small vial in the kit.

  “Christ, he ain’t half-slippery,” Ken muttered as he struggled with the squirming Holcomb.

  David sidled up to me.

  “Jesus, you broke him,” he whispered. “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth.”

  “Somehow,” Marcie said, “I don’t think it’s setting him free.”

  “Hold him steady, lads,” Roger said as he approached Holcomb with the syringe.

  Ken and Clive had him bend over the table and, with one hand, yanked Holcomb’s trousers down just enough to expose the top fleshy bit of his bum. With one deft move, Roger plunged the syringe into Holcomb and injected him with the sedative. I had a feeling this wasn’t the first time Roger had done that here in the office. That he knew to keep a syringe and sedative in the first aid kit spoke volumes.

  It took about a minute for the drugs to take effect, and Holcomb gradually stopped screaming and struggling. Ken and Clive carried him to the sofa in Roger’s office while Roger conferred with McLeish.

  “Do you have a private ambulance service you like to use?” Roger said.

  “Whose is more discreet?” McLeish asked back. “Yours or mine?”

  “Mine.”

  “We’ll use yours.”

  Roger turned to Cheryl.

  “Be a dear and give Charles a call, will you?”

  The ambulance arrived in fifteen minutes. They knew not to use the siren, and they brought the gurney up via the building’s service entrance.

  As they strapped Holcomb in, I spoke to him.

  “Remember that place? That green and pleasant land? Go there now, and stay there as long as you like.”

  Through his haze, Holcomb nodded, and the medics carted him off.

  “Well,” McLeish said. “That could have gone better.”

  “Did you know he was this . . . unstable?” I asked.

  “We hoped he was made of sterner stuff. When we vetted him for the leadership position, we were just relieved that there was no pig-fucking in his background.”

  “Well,” Roger said, “better to find out now than after you put him up at the next general election, eh?”

  “Indeed,” McLeish muttered. “Oh well, back to the drawing board. Next one we pick will be married. And to a real woman.”

  You transphobic prick. Thanks for reminding me why I’ll never vote for you lot.

  “God willing.” Roger smiled.

  McLeish shook Roger’s hand.

  “Thank you for your work,” McLeish said. “They were right about you. Certainly earned your reputation.”

  “Best of the best, that’s us,” Roger said. “And absolute discretion.”

  “Do bill us for the damage today.”

  I could tell Cheryl was already adding up the broken vase and the other repairs from Holcomb’s rampage, mentally laying out the invoice.

  McLeish shook my hand, as well—respect for a job well done.

  And with that, he and the handlers were gone.

  My karma was going down the drain again.

  I really hoped I would never land a case where a client thought he was getting fucked by his dead girlfriend again. But in this office, who could be sure?

  FIFTEEN

  Am I out of a job, then?” I asked as I closed the door to Roger’s office.

  “Why on earth would you think that?” he asked.

  “Well, I— You saw what happened. I just blew up that man’s life.”

  “That was going to happen with or without us.”

  He handed a glass of whiskey to me and clinked it with his own.

  “What you got,” continued Roger, “was a good result. We’re the party’s new best friend. And we can charge them extra. Bottoms up.”

  Roger was well happy. Another feather in his cap. Another notch on his list of important friends, a list from which he fully intended to call in favors when the time came.

  The next few days were a holding pattern. Julia waited anxiously to see if there would be a police investigation. McLeish chose not to report anything to the authorities, with Holcomb’s approval. The embarrassment not only to Holcomb but to the party for choosing someone who had been duped to that extent was just not worth it. Holcomb announced that he was stepping down from the party leadership race due to ill health and checked himself into the Priory in Roehampton. The official press statement was that he was suffering from stress and anxiety, which wasn’t far from the truth. The stresses of his work as an MP and campaigning and all that. They mentioned grief and bereavement counseling, as well—that he hadn’t had the proper time to mourn Louise—which was long overdue. As part of our service, we monitored the records and the press to make sure nothing of what I told Holcomb and McLeish was leaked. Discretion was what Roger charged for as much as investigations, and why he paid us so much. Eventually the press, who generally found Holcomb rather dull to start with, would lose interest in him and move on to the next politico who popped his head up in the publicity game.

  Holcomb sent word that he would not be pressing charges and bore Julia no anger or ill will.

  “I should go see him,” Julia said.

  “Is that such a good idea?” I
asked.

  “I need to make amends.”

  “He might not want to see you.”

  To my surprise, he agreed.

  I took her over one afternoon and watched from a distance as they sat together in the garden. He looked smaller, diminished in his pajamas and slippers, but all the tension had drained from his body. This was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him. They spoke for a few hours, remembering Louise, and wept together. It looked rather therapeutic for them both. I didn’t need to hear what they were saying to read the scene. She doubled over in shame and remorse for what she had done to him in his sleep. He was amazingly calm as he held her hand and forgave her. It might have been the drugs he was on. I didn’t detect any rage or indignation coming off him. Maybe this was the real him, after all, underneath the awful policies he was espousing on the campaign trail. I had never been convinced that they were actual policies he thought up on his own, anyway. He really wasn’t cut out to be a mouthpiece for the financial sector and the neoliberal lobbyists who had the party’s ear. They’d just have to find the next candidate, probably one that was even more plastic, generic, and free from past and future scandal—double down on the blandness.

  “Just because he forgives me doesn’t let me off the hook,” Julia said as we drove back into town.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “For starters, stop raping sleeping MPs and stop having compulsive one-night stands that make me hate myself.”

  “At the very least. Yes.”

  “You’ve awfully calm about all this,” she said. “How do you know about addiction, anyway?”

  “Runs in my family. I had an uncle who died from alcoholism. I sussed out early on it wasn’t the addiction, per se, but what triggered it. In his case, it was a broken heart after a lifetime of emotional pain.”

  “If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t have stopped, and it probably would have ended up going someplace really bad.”

  “I agree.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  “Is this just a job for you?” she asked. “Are you doing all this out of some sense of professional and moral obligation?”

  “I think it’s more than that.”

  “Then it wasn’t my imagination.”

  “Julia, I think it’s obvious that I fancy you, and maybe you fancy me, but is there any future in an ‘us’?”

  “You saved me,” she said. “You saved Rupert.”

  “So what are you saying? You want us to be official? You want us to be together?”

  “Yes.”

  Against my better judgment, yes. Was it her chaos I was drawn to? Was it that she was clever? That she was unusually direct? That she was funny? Was I getting sucked into a vortex that might drown us both?

  “You know, Julia, in my experience, you thinking I’m good for you may not last. In six months, a year, you might think I was holding you back, that I’m too clingy, too controlling.”

  “Are you controlling, Ravi?”

  “I wouldn’t be happy with you going off and bonking other people. That’s not a relationship. That’s just friends with benefits plus your addiction. I don’t want to be your safe go-to shag.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be,” she said. “The addict shouldn’t be the one to set the boundaries. The sane one is.”

  “What makes you think I’m the sane one?”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Ravi.”

  “If I’m going to be your reason, your incentive to get better, eventually I’m going to become your ball and chain, and you’re going to kick against it.”

  “God, listen to us,” Julia laughed through tears. “We’re painting with our dysfunctions here. What if I say I don’t think of you just as a shag doll? What if I want the rest of you as well? I want your ambivalence about how fucked up this world is, I want your conscience that never stops nagging you. I want the eyes that you see me and this fucked-up world with, not just your cock and your hands. I want your reason and your kindness.”

  “Julia, you’re crazy and you’re clever, and you’re ridiculously sexy in that English Rose kind of way that drives me round the bend. You’re the very chaos that defines my life. This is a terrible idea that we’ll both regret.”

  Both falling, both of us, hand in hand and round and round into a whirlpool of everything we want and everything we fear.

  Looking back, I’m amazed that I didn’t lose control of the car as we drove through the light rain up the M25, cruising in limbo on the London Orbital.

  “This is a really terrible idea,” I said, once again trying to convince myself more than her.

  “I know, right?” She laughed as she wiped her tears and blew her nose into a tissue.

  SIXTEEN

  The day the payment for the case came in, Roger gave me a bonus as well as a bit of something for everyone else in the office who had helped out. The gang took me to the local tapas bar that evening for a celebratory drink.

  “One of us!” they toasted. “One of us!”

  My colleagues were the most cheerful sociopaths I’d ever met—and I used to teach secondary school.

  “It just hit me,” I said. “We’re fucking dangerous.”

  “Wa-hey!” Benjamin said. “He finally gets it!”

  “Respect!” David said.

  “Ravi mate,” Mark said. “We’re all of us dangerous. Some people are just in denial about it.”

  “Too right,” Clive said. “And some of us choose how to use that part of us when there’s a call for it.”

  “Just don’t lose your compass, old son,” Ken said. “That’s what sets us apart.”

  “Darling,” Olivia said. “You’re not a proper Golden Sentinels investigator until you leave one client’s life a smoldering ruin.”

  “So I’ve been blooded now,” I muttered. “Brilliant.”

  “What’s that?” Benjamin asked over the din.

  “I’m a bringer of chaos. A bloody bringer of chaos.”

  “To chaos!” the gang toasted.

  My phone buzzed.

  Julia was waiting outside.

  I went out to her. The gang knew, of course, and they weren’t going to judge her, but it would take time before she could hang out with us.

  She put her arms around me as we walked.

  “Are you all right?”

  “My mother was right all along,” I said. “I’m a child of Kali.”

  “I suppose.” She kissed me. “That makes me a bride of Kali.”

  “I’ll say it again. We’re probably really bad for each other.”

  “Well, cosmic jokes are usually ironic.”

  That night, we celebrated said cosmic joke with a long night of lovemaking. It was the most appropriate move, after all.

  And unlike her last partner, I was wide awake.

  ONE

  Sunday lunch at my parents’, my weekly ritual of dread and delight. Julia was off to lunch with her parents. I’m sure they had their own unique brand of angst and dysfunction, not to mention the air of loss and grief still hanging over them. I don’t think she’d even told them about her condition. It was still too early for us to introduce the other to our parents. We still weren’t sure what our relationship was beyond the mutual decision to have one.

  I brought a bag of my dirty laundry for Mum. Yes, I could afford to wash them myself or pay a service, but she insisted on it, since she had little enough to do with her time since she retired from teaching.

  “How’s work been?” she asked.

  “Mad,” I said, without going into any details.

  “Your sister and Vivek are here already.”

  “Did Dad’s test results come back?”

  “They’re positive. He has prostate cancer. Early stages.”

  I felt the bottom of my gut fall out. I was almost light-headed, but I kept it together.

  My mother was quite relieved since I’d paid Mrs. Dhewan a visit the day before. She treated me
to tea and desserts the way she used to when my mother brought me over as a kid for coffee and gossip. The ladies would sit behind us on the sofa chatting away while us kids played video games on the floor. Mrs. Dhewan was the picture of a Matriarch Who Must Be Obeyed Lest She Had Your Legs Broken, all smiles and feminine graciousness that hid her utter ruthlessness. She liked to play the Grande Dame in her gold and purple sari and gold rings. I presented the five hundred quid my mother owed her in an envelope. She didn’t even need to open or count it.

  “You are such a good son, Ravi.”

  “Can you not let her play cards with you and the aunties from now on, please?”

  “She is cut off. She will have to settle for just tea and gossip.”

  “I think she’ll survive.”

  Ironic that the neighborhood loan shark was nicer to me than my parents were.

  Dad was on his sofa in the living room. I hugged him from behind. He patted my arm and broke it off.

  “I worry about you,” he said.

  “No need.”

  “I’d like to die knowing my children are in a good place.”

  “Dad, you’re not dying. Prostate cancer is treatable.”

  He just grunted. He was already melancholy enough most of the time without a cancer diagnosis.

  We settled down and watched football in silence, but I was unmoored, in shock.

  That was when I heard the humming.

  It started out low, then got louder, until it threatened to drown out the football. Neither Dad nor Vivek seemed to hear it, and when I turned back to the TV, Lord Vishnu was standing next to it, quietly glancing at me with a look of mild bemusement. He was in a modern suit and tie, a lotus in one hand, a mace in another, his third hand on his hip, and a phone in his fourth hand. He started looking at his phone and tapping on it.

  No. No, no, no, no.

  I excused myself and stumbled out to the hallway.

  “Mum? Do you still have any of my pills, the mood stabilizers I left here?”

  “In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, dear,” she said from the kitchen.

  I locked the door to the bathroom and found the plastic bottle in the cabinet over the sink. There were only four pills left, and they hadn’t passed their expiration date yet, thank God.