Nine Lights Over Edinburgh

by Harper Fox

  “What?” McBride roared into his face. “Fuck it, let me go! I heard her! She’s fine. I—”

  “You heard a recording.” The door was open wide. Toby’s eyes were terrible on his—bleak, remorseless. “They taped her. She’s not there.”

  McBride almost laughed. Then, from the car’s dark interior, came the thin, high voice, the same as before—“Daddy, Daddy! Take me home!”

  The same as before. Exactly the same. McBride heaved his weight forward again, and this time Toby let him go. McBride knew very well you had to, with some of the bereaved. They wouldn’t take dead for an answer; you had to let them into the morgue. He leaned into the car, grabbing at the far side of the passenger seat to keep from falling.

  Anyway Toby was wrong. It was a CD, not a tape. Nice touch, something in McBride observed, the part of his good copper’s mind that never shut down, that always had time to admire the Edinburgh criminal and all his works. On a tape or an MP3, anything analogue or through the radio, he might have heard the hiss. He might have known. But this was perfect—crystal clear. The take me home phrase played again. Then there was a tiny gap—not jerky at all, just enough for a scared child to draw a breath before going on—“Daddy, come and get me. They’ve no’ hurt me, but I’m frightened!” Then there was a series of sobs.

  McBride straightened and eased out of the car. He might have heard more—Carlyle’s man might have let the disc play on—if he hadn’t fallen, like a slab of bloody granite, for the very first phrase. He was hearing more now.

  Toby moved him gently aside. He reached into the car, found the right button and stopped the CD. He ejected it neatly, took a beautifully clean white handkerchief from his coat’s breast pocket and wrapped the disc. “I…I saw,” he said, tucking it away. “From where I was, back behind the pillars. I thought I saw the car was empty, but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t tell you.”

  No. He wouldn’t have been able to; it hadn’t been his call. It had been McBride’s—on the ground, not twenty feet away. McBride had given away their bargaining chip, their one chance. He’d sold Grace out—for the second fucking time, he’d thrown away his child.

  The wind changed direction and found a new chill. The sleet had thinned out to nothing. Too late for a white Christmas now—there was nothing but cold and the wolf’s-tooth wind and emptiness.

  Toby stepped around him. Why? What was he doing? Did he think the world would be any less vacant for McBride, that McBride would be to himself any less of a failure, a thing, a bloody abomination, if a man stood in one place rather than another and held his shoulders—even a man with tears of shared feeling in his wide dark eyes? “I’m sorry,” Toby said. “Oh, James.”

  He was trying to shield McBride from the wind. That was why he’d moved. It took McBride a moment to work this out, and when he did, it broke him. As no words could have done—no, not even that grated-out sorry, not even tears. That sheltering move was instinctive. McBride did it with Grace when they were out, automatically shepherding her to his leeward side. Edinburgh was a wind-whipped town. When she’d been tiny, he’d chosen which hip to carry her on according to which of the four quarters was howling that day.

  McBride burst into tears. Toby stepped forward and seized him. McBride crashed into his arms, clutching everything he could get of him, crushing the fabric of his coat. Toby’s hand found the back of his skull and spread there, stroking, pressing it down. “Ah, James! It’s all right, it’s all right!” It wasn’t, but McBride lost all hope of saying so as his mouth found dark wool on Toby’s shoulder and opened wide in a gut-wrenching sob. Scents of lanolin and rich, assuring male body rushed into his lungs. No! He tried to fight, but Toby’s arms had gone round him like cables, one round his waist and the other across his back. Libby doesn’t have this comfort, Grace doesn’t have it and I, least deserving—I can’t…

  But he had no choice. Toby held him fast, sheltering him from the wind, and after a moment McBride buried his face tight against his shoulder, grasped him as hard as he was being held and gave up and wept.

  ***

  The CD deck in the BMW was state-of-the-art, better than anything McBride had at his flat. And parked up in this wasteland, he wouldn’t disturb the neighbours with his daughter’s cries for help, played and replayed at maximum volume while he tried to recognise a background noise. There was something, eight seconds or so into the third clip—a kind of whistling, followed by a rumble. He played it again and again. It was easy to find. It fell right after “Daddy, please help me” and right before a sobbed “Oh, Daddy, please take me home.”

  Toby, who had been listening too, chin propped on his hands on the wheel, reached over and snapped the player off. McBride turned on him with something between a sob and a snarl. “What are you doing?”

  “Enough, James. It’s enough for now.”

  “You wait until it’s your kid. Then you can tell me what’s damn well enough!” In answer Toby only passed him the handkerchief he’d wrapped the disc in. McBride caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview and took it, shuddering. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t have a child. I can’t feel what you’re feeling. But if you don’t go home now and get some sleep, you’ll be useless to her. Have you got a laptop with a CD drive? Broadband?”

  “I… Yes, I do.”

  “Right. I’ll get this uploaded and sent to my contacts in Tel Aviv. And we should go back to your flat anyway. He’s been communicating with you via your answer phone, and—”

  “Why would he leave me any more messages? I gave him what he wanted.”

  “A man like Carlyle won’t stop there, James. He won’t waste what he’s got, not now he’s seen how far you’ll go to retrieve it.”

  ***

  But in the flat, the answer phone was silent. Something in the blackness of its lights, its dumb, smug silence, warped McBride’s grief into rage. He took his sleet-soaked coat off and threw it onto the sofa. Take your guest’s, a tiny voice of long-ago home training tried to instruct him, but he ignored it. Ignored Toby, who had followed him up the stairs and was standing, just as wet and chilly as he was, looking around the living room. McBride gestured to the laptop on the table, then turned and walked away.

  He stood in the kitchen. He knew why he’d come here, of course. He might have elected not to put a bullet into his brain the night before, but still he had his escapes. Not so radical, but bloody effective, and—he smiled, uncorking a bottle of Cutty—a damn sight quieter.

  Toby appeared in the kitchen doorway. McBride saw him only as a reflection in the sleet-flecked window and didn’t turn round. He picked up a glass from the draining board: might as well impress his guest and not drink from the bottle. “Thought you were busy…uploading that disc to Yahweh, or whoever your Israeli contact might be.”

  The ghost in the window glass shrugged. Even from here McBride could see its eyes were full of compassion, shared pain. He didn’t need either. “It’s done,” Toby said. “I cc’d the Mossad acoustics lab too, just in case. Why was it so easy for your boss to believe you were drunk throughout your Carlyle case?”

  McBride stepped aside, just far enough so Toby could see, then poured himself a good, theatrical treble, bottle held high. He’d faked his confession for Lila that morning, but it was real enough now, the hunger inside him, the desire to numb his senses even in full knowledge that he needed them all razor-sharp, giving his words a terrible authenticity. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m a bloody alcoholic. That’s why. Oh, I’m sorry. Would you like one?”

  “No, thank you. I…”

  “Of course not. What would a nice, prim, clean-living Jew know about—”

  Toby seized his arm. It was the one McBride was using to lift his glass. Something strange happened to it—all the strength went out of McBride’s grip, and the tumbler fell and shattered on the kitchen floor. “What the fuck, man?” Jerking his head up, he tried to square off to Toby, who was no longer a ghost, but a big, angry, real human bein
g, dark eyes blazing into his. “Let me go.”

  “Oh, I will.” Releasing his grasp, he gave McBride a contemptuous shove and stepped back. McBride rubbed at his numb hand. He noticed distantly that Toby had taken off his coat uninvited. The cuffs of the fine black sweater he wore underneath were damp: he had pushed the sleeves back, exposing tanned, sculpted forearms. “I told you, McBride. I’m not a religious Jew—I’m a thoroughly secular one, and I’ve drowned my sorrows in ways that would make your hair stand on end.” Involuntarily McBride looked at the skin exposed between Toby’s wrists and his elbows. Toby wasn’t showing it to him—his hands were down by his sides, fists clenching—but McBride, after fifteen years dealing with junkies on Auld Reekie’s streets, could spot track marks, even ones as ancient and near-faded as these. “I’ve done undercovers that turned me into as desperate a crackhead as the bastards I was after. And when my Avi died, I…didn’t want to know anymore. I took what bloody comfort I could.”

  Fury rose in McBride. What did Toby want? Okay, so you know how it feels to have an addiction? He was clean now—McBride could be in no doubt over that; he could almost smell the man’s cleanliness, the strength boiling off him in waves. He didn’t need this shining example standing over him, this fiery sword, making him feel smaller and meaner and dirtier even than he knew himself to be… “Screw you,” he choked out. “You don’t know anything. Your lad died, and I’m fucking sorry, but it wasn’t your fault.”

  “No more is the loss of your daughter yours.”

  “Och, the devil it isn’t! Libby tried to tell me. Lila Stone tried to drag me in off the streets. Even Sim Carlyle gave me warning—had his heavy boy tell me the trouble was going to follow me home.” He turned back to the kitchen bench. If Toby was going to make him smash his glassware, he would just have to watch him swig from the damn bottle after all…

  A hand closed on his shoulder. “James. Please don’t.”

  “Ah, fuck off!” McBride wrenched round on reflex. His anger peaked, and he threw one wild, blind punch, not caring where he connected or how much damage he would do.

  Not that it mattered. Toby picked his fist out of the air as if it had been a bunch of roses. Effortless. McBride felt his blow’s force turned against him and spun away, staggering to crash into the kitchen table.

  The impact somehow steadied him. Knocked a demon out of him, maybe—he was glad, in the instant between hitting the table and grabbing its edge for support, that he’d been so easily thwarted.

  So what the hell was Toby doing on the floor? McBride got his balance. “Toby?”

  “I’m all right. Stay back.”

  Belatedly it struck McBride that Toby had arrived that night minus his sling. Well, he couldn’t have done much with one arm strapped up like that, could he? Couldn’t have driven, or tapped a symphony of magic and technology out of the Harle Street computer boards. Couldn’t have wrapped a fearless, lifesaving embrace around that thankless bastard James McBride when his world had tried to end in a freezing car park half an hour before.

  “Oh God,” McBride whispered and stumbled over to drop to his knees in front of him. Blocking that punch must have wrenched every muscle round the bullet wound. “Sit up a bit. Let me see.”

  “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

  But the rich voice was squeezed to a shadow of itself. Toby’s head was down, his fringe concealing his expression. Tenderly McBride brushed back the dark hair. “Did I make you bleed again? Here…” Evading Toby’s deflecting hands, he reached to dab at the black cashmere over his heart. It didn’t feel wet, but he had to be sure, and he grabbed the jumper’s hem and lifted. “All right. No, your dressings look okay, thank God. Shit, Toby—I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I shouldn’t interfere with your…God-given right to get pissed…”

  “Ssh. I’m not going to. Come here—let me help you up.”

  But neither of them moved. McBride did not let go the edge of Toby’s jumper, nor did he lower it. Below the hospital bandages, the broad chest was brown and smooth as the wet, hard-packed sand at Forvie dunes. And so bloody warm—McBride’s thumb brushed the skin by accident, and then, unable to help himself, he spread his left hand flat on the uninjured shoulder, on the pad of pectoral muscle just above the nipple.

  Toby flinched. “Your hands are cold.”

  “Everything’s cold,” McBride rasped. To his astonishment, Toby placed a warm, lifting touch on his jaw. God, if he looked up—if he let Toby raise his chin—they were so close that their mouths would meet, and that would at best be a crippling embarrassment, and at worst…

  A kiss. He closed his eyes. For a wild, flashing instant, he was twenty-four years and fifty miles away, lying in the birch grove that gave Loch Beithe its name. Then he thudded back into his flesh—his own dark here and now, where the only light, the only heat, was the press of Toby Leitner’s mouth to his. It was impossible. It was so fucking wrong. It was all and everything McBride had ever wanted, and he seized him, wrapping both arms round his neck.

  He didn’t know which of them put the effort into hoisting the other off the floor. He was only aware of Toby’s embrace—the heat of it closing around him once more, driving the cold from his bones. He gasped as his spine hit the kitchen wall, making china rattle in the cupboards. Toby’s grip closed in the fabric of his shirt, tugging upwards, and suddenly there was that sunlight touch direct on his skin. “Oh, don’t. Don’t, I’m not…”

  “What?”

  “Not toned and nice like you. I spend too long at a desk. I—”

  “What? You’re lovely.” McBride twitched in astonishment: Toby sounded genuine, genuinely surprised. “Solid. Real. Please let me touch you.”

  So McBride did: clutching Toby’s shoulders, pressing rough kisses to his mouth and the side of his neck, he let the warm hands untuck his shirt tails, slide up and under to caress his chilly skin. The curve of his spine, the place just over the waistband of his trousers where he’d begun, unaware of it even himself until this moment, to be a bit shy of his body and its ageing, a bit ashamed. “Solid. Real.” A shudder of pleasure ran through him, and he rolled his hips against Toby’s, erection surging up hot and hard and straightaway, racking a moan of embarrassment out of him until he felt Toby’s returning thrust, and everything about it was perfect—so good, like coming home, a refuge even in McBride’s bleakest midwinter night. “Ah, stop! We can’t do this!”

  “I know. I know.” Toby shoved himself back to arm’s length and stood panting. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you…” McBride ran shaky, regretful fingertips down Toby’s chest. “What the hell must you think of me—doing this, when my girl is… When I don’t even know if she’s alive or—”

  “No.” Toby captured his wrists, held them hard. “She’s alive. And you were just reaching for life, James. We both were. If it makes you feel any better, I…swore I’d never touch anyone again, not after Avrom.” He hesitated and gave McBride a look that went through him like a hot knife into butter, sweeter than a summer wind. “I never thought I’d want to.”

  “Toby…”

  “Ssh. It isn’t for now, is it? Not for now. For now I want you to go to bed and try at least to rest for a couple of hours. I’ll watch the phone.”

  McBride nodded mutely. The hormonal surge dying back in his system, he was worn to cobwebs, swaying on his feet. “All right. Do you reckon… Should I call Libs?”

  “Do you think she’ll have been able to get to sleep?”

  “I dunno. If she’s as tired as I am, maybe.”

  “Then don’t. Not with news like this. We’ll wait till morning.”

  “He’ll have called by then, won’t he? Carlyle?”

  Toby frowned. He rubbed the backs of McBride’s wrists with his thumbs, making the little bones crackle. The gesture was intimate, undemanding. “He values Grace. And he hasn’t got full price for her out of you yet. He’ll call.”

  ***

&nbs
p; And yet, three hours later, stumbling out of his bedroom into a dead-grey Edinburgh dawn, McBride understood at once that the phone had stayed silent. He also knew without a second glance that a different version of Toby Leitner was pacing his living room to the ones he’d met so far. This wasn’t the cool, professional Mossad agent or the passionate lover of this morning’s small hours. This man was bitterly furious. “He didn’t ring,” McBride said, taking firm hold of the back of an armchair.

  Toby swung round at the end of his lap. He strode back down the track he’d almost worn in the carpet and stopped in front of McBride. In this light, McBride could see—and even in this desolation, it touched him and brought him an odd sense of relief and satisfaction—that this powerful man, whom he’d thought to be in his mid-thirties at most, was about the same age he was. Fine lines marked his brow. The pale light revealed flecks of silver in his hair. “No, he did not,” Toby declared grimly, “and now I know why.”

  McBride nodded. He had woken with the same thought running through his mind. “He’s a trafficker,” he said. “He’s got the evidence he wanted, and he knows I’ve got my copper’s salary and bugger-all else than that. He’s not after a ransom. He’s found a…” His throat dried, and he choked, letting his aching head drop forward into his hands.

  “He’s found a buyer for her.” Toby’s words fell like stones into the quiet room. “I’m sorry, James. That’s why he’s gone silent on us.”

  The phone rang. Somehow McBride pushed himself upright, exchanged one grim look with Toby, and went to pick up. Covered the receiver and mouthed across the room to him, “No. Only Libby,” then folded down into the alcove and listened while his child’s poor mother let go a night’s worth of fear and grief down the line. Peripherally he noticed Toby going to the computer—his movement more of a pounce, as if he’d heard something. Then he shook his head, running a hand into his hair. “Libs. Libby, no. I know you’re scared, but I’ve told you why we can’t involve other coppers in this. I…I know she’s not back.” He pressed his brow against the glass, praying its coolness might enter his brain. “Christ, I know what I promised, but if you blow everything now, we’re gonna lose her, Libs! I’m begging you—”