Nine Lights Over Edinburgh

by Harper Fox

  “James.”

  He looked up. Toby was gesturing to the computer. “Hang on just one second. What is it?”

  “My Tel Aviv contact found a noise on that CD upload—a howl, like somebody fooling around, maybe pretending to be a ghost. But recorded, mechanised. Then people screaming and laughing. Do you know what that is?”

  McBride stared at him. He’d sat in another of Sim Carlyle’s clubs in the Cowgate, night after hard-drinking night, hearing that racket with distant pity for poor tourist fools. Half ten on the dot. “The Black Cat,” he said. “Backs onto the town’s oldest graveyard. They guide groups in there on haunted-city walks. Then they leave them alone, switch the floodlights off and play a stupid bloody ghost howl.”

  Toby almost smiled. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Right. Then he’s had all his chances, the bastard. To hell with cooperation. He knows you, but he doesn’t know me. May I speak with Libby?”

  “You want to…” McBride hesitated for a second. Then, as if hypnotised, he held out the receiver.

  Toby took it gently. He put one hand on McBride’s shoulder. “Ma’am? My name is Tobias Leitner. I’m a special agent working with James on the case of your daughter’s abduction. I’m sorry we failed to retrieve her last night. But we know now where she’s being held, and it’s my intention to enter that place undercover and get her back.”

  He sounded so calm. For a moment McBride allowed the assurance in his voice to wash over him. He closed his eyes and heard Libby too falling under the spell, the edge of hysteria fading from her voice. McBride drifted away from her half-heard questions, Toby’s measured, steady answers. He remembered his dreams—searing nightmares about Grace woven through with flashes of how it would have been if Toby had followed him to bed.

  “James?”

  He jolted upright. Toby had hung up the phone and was crouching in front of him. “Yes,” he said roughly. “Sorry. Is she all right?”

  “She’s surviving. Are you?”

  “I’m not sure. Toby, what the hell type of undercover are you going to pull in the Black Cat?”

  Toby shrugged. “That’s easy. If Carlyle has a buyer, I can be a better one. I’ll break any deal he’s made. I’ll do better than that—I’ll wear a wire and get enough evidence to bring the whole lot of them down.”

  “For that we’ll need a surveillance van and—”

  “Yes. A team to intercept and raid if anything goes wrong. I can take a handful of men off the Zvi op to help out, but we do have to involve your department too. Are there people there you can trust?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. Toby, if Carlyle’s lot make you, they’ll skin you alive.”

  “They won’t. I’m a dark-eyed, dark-skinned foreigner with more dirty cash pouring out of my pockets than they’ve ever seen in their lives. They won’t look any further. Now, I’m going to make the calls I have to, and you’re about to take a shower. I meant what I said last night, James—you’re bloody gorgeous—but you look like you slept in a hedge.”

  Chapter Nine

  McBride and Leitner made their way into the Harle Street squad room almost unnoticed. No mean feat in an office with glass walls, but everyone from the duty sergeant to the most recent temp was clustered round the bank of video monitors at the far end of the room.

  McBride stopped and felt Toby come to a halt just off his shoulder. He was not used to having backup. Andrew had been so much his junior, and he himself over the years had become so fiercely—so bitterly—independent, he hadn’t allowed any such assistance near him.

  Toby said, very quietly, “Want me to do the talking?”

  McBride smiled. “While I go and hide in the gents’? Very tempting. Better not, though.” He cleared his throat. “Morning, everybody.”

  They all swung round like meerkats. Andrew Barclay was in the back row. His arms were folded over his chest, his handsome face pale. When he saw McBride, he made a brief, truncated gesture, as if he would somehow shoo him out of the room. But it was too late for that—Lila Stone was straightening from her hunched pose over one monitor, a bleach-blonde Aphrodite rising from her foam. “Detective Inspector McBride,” she spat. Her lips were actually blue round the edges with rage: McBride could hazard a guess that James was dead and gone forever. “I was about to issue a warrant for your arrest. What in God’s name have you done?”

  McBride looked with interest at the monitor screens. On each of them, his fuzzy image was frozen, in various attitudes of breaking into his own HQ. Last night had been a last-ditch raid. Toby had taken out the alarms between them and their goal, but that had been all—no time to disable the CCTV. It hadn’t mattered then.

  It didn’t now. McBride stepped forward. “What I’ve done,” he said, to Lila and to all of them, “is stolen as much of the evidence as I could in the case of Sim Carlyle. I took it, and I handed it over to him last night. He’s got my daughter. That was meant to be her ransom, but it didn’t work.”

  Lila Stone gaped. It was Andrew who broke the dead silence that had fallen. “Jim,” he said hoarsely. “Carlyle’s got Gracie?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Andy. I’ve just been—”

  But McBride got no further. Andrew strode across to him. He gripped McBride’s shoulders for a second, then hauled him into a rib-cracking bear hug. “Jesus Christ! What can we do?”

  “Detective Sergeant!” Lila barked. “McBride is under arrest. I need two of you—Davies, Royston—to escort him downstairs immediately and confine him while I decide what to do.”

  McBride pushed Andrew gently back. He looked at the floor. There was no reason, he knew, for his former teammates to do anything other than obey. He’d walked away from them, pursued a solitary path. Abandoned them… But after a long moment, Lenny Royston said, incredulity painting his Ormiston burr, “Your bairn’s been abducted, McBride?”

  “Yes. He snatched her to punish me for trying to bust his Grassmarket op.”

  “How long?”

  How long? McBride fought the urge to close his eyes. Forever. Since Arthur’s Seat was live and blasting lava into the heavens. “Two nights. Three days.”

  The silence that followed was not dead at all. McBride hadn’t heard it in a long, long time, and he got his head up to listen. Lenny was looking across at his partner, Davies, and Davies in his turn leaned forward to glance first at Andrew and then the others. This was the electric hush of a good team deciding—not what to do, but how to do it. Of widely disparate men drawing together, coming to agreement.

  Because, apart from Lila, everybody in this room knew Grace. Things had been different with McBride back then. His colleagues had followed the progress of Libby’s pregnancy with the usual jokes and dire warnings. And when he’d brought the child in for the first time, a huge-eyed scrap in her white woollen blanket, every one of them had gathered around, even the tough bastards, awkward and grinning. “I need…” he began, and then his voice died.

  A hand pressed the small of his back. Even through his thick coat, McBride felt the strength of it, the comfort. “We need to set up a sting,” Toby went on for him, and again McBride was aware of that group consensus, the ripple of energy as attention shifted and refocused. Something else too—the clicking of a door, although no one spared the newcomer a glance. “We think Carlyle will try to traffic Grace tonight. I will go in as a buyer with a better offer, try to get her out quietly that way.”

  “What, just…buy her?”

  That was Royston. Toby nodded and received an approving grunt. An economical lot, these Scots, although not in the way of their national reputation. They just liked to do their jobs as simply and directly as they could and with as little drama. “If I fail,” Toby continued, “we can’t risk leaving the child with him any longer. We need a team to monitor the body mic I’ll be wearing and another to keep surveillance all round the building. He’s holding her somewhere in the Black Cat club’s premises in
Cowgate. If he or anyone else tries to leave with her—”

  “Excuse me.”

  McBride jumped. He saw his reflex echoed in a few bodies around the room: they’d almost forgotten Lila Stone. In that room of northern brogues, where Toby’s softly accented English blended too, her knife-blade vowels carved a chilly track for themselves. She was on her feet but looked ready to drop, as if the last recognisable sands of her world were running out. “May I ask who the devil are you?”

  Toby frowned. “I’m sorry, Superintendent? I believe we were introduced to each other at—”

  “No. I mean who the devil are you to walk into my offices, take over my team and start to set out some half-baked plan for an operation I haven’t even sanctioned, let alone—”

  A new voice rang out. Calm. Female. No, not new at all—utterly familiar. “Oh, now, Lila. I hate to disagree with you in public, but it’s not a half-baked plan. I think it’s quite a decent one myself.”

  The echo of a thousand mornings here in this very room. Turning, McBride saw Royston, McKay, Davies, all of them—hearing it too, and with the same thoughts, the same surmise dawning. My God. Yes—there was Amanda Campbell, leaning on the wall by the whiteboard as if she’d never been gone. He blinked and rubbed a hand over his eyes. Superintendent Campbell, or ex, except that…

  She was in uniform.

  “Aye,” Campbell said, returning McBride’s openmouthed stare with a half-apologetic little shrug. “Assistant Chief Constable now, I’m afraid. I’m very sorry, Lila—they more or less drafted me, after this business with Ambassador Zvi.”

  Lila gulped audibly. “I don’t… Ma’am, I don’t understand.”

  “I know. I’ll speak to you privately in just a minute, once I’ve sorted out this matter of—”

  “No.” Lila was shaking her head. “You have no business sorting out anything in here. This is my department.”

  “Where you’ve been so busy kicking backsides, you probably haven’t had time to check your inbox and voice mails. Some mornings are like that around here. You’ve been suspended, Superintendent. Now do us both a favour and don’t make me go into details in front of this mob.”

  For a moment McBride was afraid Lila would fall down in a fit. “You have no authority—” she began, then broke off, visibly remembering that ACC Campbell had. “This operation Leitner’s proposing—I’ve heard nothing about it from General Sharot. It hasn’t been sanctioned by Lothian and Borders either, as far as I know.”

  “That’s right. As far as you know. But since you’ve been taken off duty, pending the outcome of General Sharot’s investigation, you have to consider the possibility that there are things your superiors may not wish to tell you at present.”

  Lila’s mouth dropped open. Then she gathered herself and, with more composure than McBride would have given her credit for, surged through her surrounding officers and left the room.

  Amanda watched her go. Her expression was almost regretful, as if she’d just witnessed the circus leave town. “There goes trouble,” she said thoughtfully. She turned to face her men. “If any of you enjoyed that, stop. She’s right. I am in charge now, and she has been suspended—but as for official sanction, you only have mine. If anyone here’s uncomfortable with that, he’s free to leave now.”

  No one moved. McBride, breathing shallowly, vibrantly aware of Toby’s steady presence behind him, felt as if tides of time had closed over his head. He wanted to let them—to be back in that old world where his colleagues still liked him and Superintendent Campbell ruled Harle Street. Amanda looked utterly at home in her old place by the whiteboard. Her eyes were serene and determined. “Very well,” she said at length. “In that case I suggest we go out and find this bastard that’s taken my goddaughter.”

  ***

  Gearing up for an op. McBride had forgotten how that felt. Not pulling on fancy-dress tartans, but Kevlar vests, and no longer in proud solitude, but as part of a unit whose acceptance had once given him equal pride. Dark had come down outside the bright Harle Street windows. The squad room was mutedly buzzing with voices and life—equipment being checked, strategies run through once, twice, a third time to be sure. Toby had gone to meet with General Sharot and get clearance for his part in the night’s activities. McBride, if he couldn’t be there at his shoulder in Sim Carlyle’s club, would do the next best thing and listen to every word and breath of him from the surveillance van. He went to join Amanda at the table where she was studying spread-out floor plans of the Black Cat’s premises. “You got hold of those fast.”

  She nodded. “Guy at the Land Registry owes me a favour or two. Couriered them over on a bike.”

  That was the difference, McBride thought, scanning the plans for himself. An officer like Campbell had men and women all over the city who owed her a favour or two, and not only that but they liked her enough to act fast when she called them in. Not looking at her, he said, “Is this permanent, then? The honour of your presence?”

  “I don’t know.” She traced the line of a wall with one finger. “Whether it is or it isn’t, James, you’re going to have to accustom yourself. Bosses like Lila Stone—not Lila herself, I don’t think. She’s made the kind of mistake they don’t forgive—but her breed… They are the future for this police force. Not me.”

  “Christ.”

  “There’s a lot of good in Lila. People of her sort—the cost-cutters, the politicians—will still be around when this scythe of a recession’s finally passed over us and gone. And so will their departments.” Amanda straightened and looked at him. “Part of Lila’s trouble was that she didn’t have a senior officer she could trust. She didn’t have the trust of her most senior DI.” McBride looked down. She didn’t damn well deserve it died on his lips. He’d hated her from day one, hadn’t he? Had never given her a chance. “God, James,” Amanda went on. “Was it because she’s a woman? You worked with me like a lamb for ten years.”

  “Aye, but you’re—”

  “What? Old-fashioned? A lesbian?” She was smiling at him a little, her narrow, clever mouth curling up at one corner. “Is that easier, for someone like you? I often did wonder.”

  “Someone…someone like me?”

  “Mm. Poor Libby. Poor you, if that’s the game you’ve had to play. Is it over now?”

  “Amanda, I’ve…absolutely no idea what it is that you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, right.” She nodded at him genially, then returned to her study of the maps. “Then you’ll no’ have noticed how grand of a shine that nice Israeli officer’s taken to you. And if you have, you’ll no’ care.”

  McBride drew a breath, though with very little idea what he would do with it when it came out. His heart was thudding hard. Images flashed around the edges of his terror for Grace: Toby, a reflection in his kitchen window, and then a reality breathing in his arms. Toby waiting for him when he’d stumbled out of bed that morning, all lit up with the beautiful fires of his rage. McBride had thought only he in all the world could see that shine…

  “Amanda,” he began, but got no further. The squad-room door opened wide. Campbell, McBride and all the other officers stopped what they were doing, and then after a small tense pause, a ripple of laughter went round. “Och, the pair of you,” Amanda said, her expression a mix of amusement and disgust. “I’d arrest you both on sight.”

  McBride couldn’t even find a smile. It was too unsettling, to see Toby like this. His disguise—Andrew Barclay’s too, though McBride had never noticed him leave—was hardly flamboyant. Incredibly subtle, rather, and depending for more than half its effect on the way Toby held himself, the new set of his shoulders and his head. He was wearing a suit finely calculated to imitate expense and miss the mark. His hair was oiled and slicked back. He was so dark his five-o’clock shadow had come in with piratical vigour. He looked…sleazy.

  And still McBride would have given his arm and a week’s pay to drag him off to bed. At this moment, in the middle of all this hell. What had Aman
da said? “Someone like you.” Someone queer, then. Homosexual. He shoved his own old word for it out of his mind, and then his father’s stone-cold, heart-killing label.

  Someone gay. It still wasn’t right, but it would do for McBride for now. It would do until better days. “Bloody hell, Toby,” he said in awe. “I’d have walked past you in the street.”

  “And kept right on going, if you’d any sense,” Toby returned, a sudden smile restoring him. “And your young colleague—is he sufficiently vile for you too?”

  McBride dragged his eyes off Toby. Andrew had on a similar uniform, except he’d transformed into the kind of flash young club lout McBride often found groaning and vomiting in the Harle Street holding cells of a Sunday morning. For the moment he was glancing around, too pleased with himself and his badness to carry it off, but when Toby gave him a tiny admonitory look, he dropped back into role. And now McBride did laugh—a snorting, almost painful rumble. “Aye. He’s horrendous. What the devil did you do to him?”

  “Very little. This lovely suit and a lesson in personal deportment.” Toby turned to Campbell. “With your permission, ma’am. I will need immediate backup inside the club, and DS Barclay volunteered. He hasn’t been seen with DI McBride during the Carlyle investigation, and—”

  “And I wanted to make it up to you, Jim,” Andrew interrupted him, blushing brick-red.

  What was McBride meant to say to that, in front of the whole squad? Eyebrows were on the rise, none more expressively than ACC Campbell’s.

  It didn’t matter. Not the audience, anyway. What mattered was the young man’s willingness to risk his life to rescue Grace. “There’s nothing to make up for,” McBride said quietly. “Nothing at all. But thank you, Andy.”