by Harper Fox
“James!”
He turned. He’d never heard that deep, warm voice with a break in it. Toby was holding out an arm to him, the one not wrapped round his wriggling child. Grace too was reaching out for him, leaning so far she was ready to fall.
“Gracie!” He ran to catch. He grabbed the girl, and Toby grabbed him, pulling them both close and tight. “Oh God, Toby. Thank you. Thank you.” Grace’s arms clamped round his neck, a scrabbling, strangling-monkey embrace, the sweetest pain he’d ever felt. “Grace, you wee tick. Are you all right?”
“Aye! Toby promised he’d no’ let them hurt me!”
“I wouldn’t have, James. Not with a breath left in my body.”
McBride raised his head to meet Toby’s eyes. “I know,” he said wonderingly. “God. Why?”
“Because I—”
The double doors banged suddenly wide. McBride and Toby reacted as one—coming shoulder to shoulder, dropping Grace to the floor behind them, closing ranks tight. The bloodstained figure falling into the room did not look dangerous, but McBride’s nerves were wound hair-trigger tight, and his gun was in his hand and cocked before he knew what he was doing. “No!” Toby snapped, bearing his arm down. “It’s Barclay!”
“Jesus Christ!” McBride dropped the gun, reflexively snapping the safety back on before he let it go. He took a couple of strides forward and stood staring down at his poor partner, who had crashed to his knees a yard away and was staring up at him, propped on one hand, the other clasped to his stomach. “Andy, you bastard—I couldn’t find your pulse.”
“Well, you couldn’t have looked very bloody hard!” Andrew bellowed. Then his supporting arm gave, and he crumpled facedown onto the carpet. “Oh, Jim. Help me…”
Chapter Eleven
Harle Street, an hour before midnight. Plenty of late shifts McBride had worked here: it should have felt ordinary to him, dull. He sat at his desk. From here he could see and hear—glass walls, open doors—a handful of small dramas playing themselves out. Half a dozen tableaux. McBride cared about all the people in them, but he wasn’t wanted onstage just for now.
He rested his chin on his hands. Over in the corner, the two sound techs were crowing and high-fiving each other, so presumably the tapes from Toby’s wire were good. Royston, Davies, McKay and the others were grabbing their coats, waving at him distractedly as they scurried for the door: he nodded and lifted a hand in return. Outside Lila’s old office—and axes fell hard around here; even her nameplate had been stripped from the door—Amanda Campbell was pinned down under fire, making small placating gestures at her partner, Jennifer, who’d been waiting for them on their return. Enough of Jenny’s tirade drifted through for him to piece together the whole. “You swore to me it was a desk job! Then I phone to find out why you’ve not come home, and they tell me you’re on an armed siege in the Cowgate!”
He repressed a smile. All sorts of lives finding their balance again. Andrew Barclay getting a bullet dug out of him in the Royal, expected to be fine. In an office over the hall, Toby Leitner with the duty sergeant, who was respectfully taking down his report.
And right in front of him, Libby, clutching her daughter as if she would squeeze the marrow from her bones. She’d been waiting at Harle Street too, hand in white-knuckled hand with Jennifer. Libby had Grace on her lap. Her face was buried in her hair. The child’s limbs were sticking out at awkward angles with the force of her embrace. Her voice came, small and winded, out of Libby’s jumper: “Ma, I cannae breathe.”
“I dinnae bloody care!”
Two Glaswegian guttersnipes. McBride watched them in satisfaction. He would take to his grave with him the memory of carrying Grace up the steps of Harle Street and into Libby’s outstretched, frantic arms. He said, “She’s not been hurt. At least—I’ve asked her, and I think she’s old enough to know what I…”
“McBride!”
That was his daughter, blushing furiously, mortified by both her parents. “McBride?” he said. “You called me Daddy on those tapes.”
“Aye, wi’ a gun to my head.”
“Gracie! He did not have…”
“No. It’s a figure of speech.” She gave him the shadow of her old wicked smile. “He just told me to make it sound good.”
McBride shivered. That was familiar. He could hardly bear to think of Carlyle near her: he’d kill him again if he could. And debonair and bright with mischief or not, she’d been at his mercy for two nights and three days. “I think she’s all right, Libs. But I don’t know if she understands.”
Libby raised her head. She said, her voice muffled with tears, “Och, we’ve had the talk.” McBride’s eyebrows went up. “Well, if we’d waited for you to do it, she’d have been at university.”
He sighed. “Fair enough. Listen—Amanda’s asked Dr. Taylor to come up here. She’s one of the Royal’s top paediatricians. She can check Gracie over here so she doesn’t have to go to hospital, and then if everything’s all right, you can take her home.” He glanced up at movement outside. “Good. That’s her now. I…I’ll close these blinds for you, and I’ll clear out. Then—”
“Jimmy.” He turned round from trying to unfasten the tangled cord. Libby was looking at him—not oddly, but in a way McBride hadn’t seen for a long time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry for a lot of things.”
“Jesus, Libs—you’re sorry…”
“I know. A lot of blood’s gone under our bridge. But…when you get done here, if you want to come back to the house, you’d be welcome. You could come back for Christmas. Just if you want.”
He stared at her. His mouth had dried out. His heart was pounding in his chest like something trapped and tearing at its bars.
He loved her. He loved their child and would set down his life for either of them at a second’s notice. But there was nothing in him that responded to that look of hers, that smile. Family life had been a dream for him, a ready-measured suit he had struggled all his life to grow into. What had he wanted from it? Love, he supposed—and he’d got that, as a father, in the companionship he and Libby had achieved at their very best. But as for passion—the fire he had once been young enough to think would spring up and fill his whole life, revealing its point and its purpose—the nearest he had ever come to that was in a gunfight in the Freemason’s Hall and tonight in a seedy club’s upper room, defending Toby Leitner.
The man who had taken a bullet for him. Who had thought he was good enough to save.
A light rap sounded at the door, and Amanda ushered in Dr. Taylor, a small, sweet-faced woman who endeared herself to Grace straightaway by ignoring all the adults in the room, crouching and shaking her hand. She would be all right for now, wouldn’t she? McBride would never abdicate his duties toward her again, but…
“Are you going to see Toby?”
Grace was looking straight at him—brightly, sweetly, without judgement. Libby was watching too, her expression not so sure. “Yes,” he said honestly. “If I can find him.”
“Well, if you do, give him this.” She reached into her sleeve and pulled off a plaited bracelet from her wrist.
“Your friendship bangle? From your boyfriend in France? Are you sure?”
“He is no’ my boyfriend. And Toby said he liked it.”
McBride took the bracelet. Grace was surrounded by women now. There was half an hour left of Christmas Eve. Backing out of the room, he saw the office where Toby had been giving his report was empty. The duty sergeant was gathering up papers, putting files into drawers. He glanced up when McBride pushed open the door. “Looking for Agent Leitner, Jim?”
“Yes. Is he still here?”
“He got a phone call. Said he had to go. I don’t know where, but I think they’re taking the Israeli ambassador back home tonight. He might have gone straight to the airport.”
***
Even the most desperate of last-minute shoppers had long since gone home. Most of the revellers too—Auld Reekie was putting on her white coat, and those wh
o knew her well took cover when that ermine descended more than four inches deep. A city of culture she might be, a city of lights, but she was the ancient hill fort still, Dùn Èideann, fifty-six degrees north, a stern and icebound place in winter’s heart.
Princes Street was almost deserted. The snow had stopped, but the sky was still laden with it, orange clouds brushing Arthur’s Seat with their swollen bellies, parting in scraps to show vistas of diamond-hard stars. Oh God, it was cold. McBride pulled his coat collar tight over his chest, blew into his hands but couldn’t begin to ward off the all-consuming chill, the hunger of the night. Anyone left out here would be eaten alive. At Turnhouse, the runways would freeze. Flights would be cancelled: Ambassador Zvi might not be able to leave.
And if he couldn’t? What was McBride going to do—pursue the Israeli team out to the airport? Wait there like the end of a bad chick flick for Toby to reappear, in a rush of orchestral music, from passport control? He snorted faintly, aware he had given the scenario a few seconds’ serious thought. No. If Toby had gone, so be it. He had crossed McBride’s life like a meteor—that unexpected, that bright. If he’d chosen to vanish just as abruptly…
A pain went through McBride’s chest, so sharp and physical he had to stop and lean against a lamppost. For a moment he wondered if all the years of desk work, drink and bad diet were about to catch up with him. It was true he’d steered clear of fried Mars bars, but there wasn’t much else that was bad for him he’d turned away.
He realised his eyes were full of tears. Transiently they sharpened his vision. In the next parting of the clouds he saw, with stunning clarity, the hunter god Orion. McBride was too tired to smile, but the resemblance was good. Dashing, broad shouldered. Even a bright red bullet-wound star, though it was on the wrong side…
He stepped blindly into the middle of the road. It was one of the few times in the year when you could do so without being mown down instantly. He seldom looked up when making his way along Princes Street, always too busy threading his way through the crowds. He knew the ground-floor buildings well. Shops and restaurants and coffee bars. The upper storeys, though, with their balconies and pillars and other sombre fantasies of Gothic architecture—those were often given over to hotels. He was standing opposite one now. It was called the Sinclair, and its name meant something to McBride because this was where Harle Street recommended its political and diplomatic visitors to stay.
One high window was brilliant with candlelight. McBride didn’t know much about Jewish tradition or symbolism, but he’d chased enough skinheads away from the Salisbury Road synagogue to recognise the shape of a menorah. Odd, though—he’d always seen those with seven lights. This one had nine.
He climbed the steps to the reception, not allowing himself to think what he was doing. Inside, a muted chaos hit him. Red-faced businessmen, sherry glasses in hand, were lumbering about, roaring and laughing, someone’s idea of a traditional Christmas medley blasting from speakers in the lounge. McBride edged around the fringes of the party until he found the desk. “Hello. Is there a Tobias Leitner staying here?”
The girl on reception smiled at him too brightly. Maybe she’d been on the sherry too. She gave him Toby’s room number without a bat of an eyelid. And this was where Harle Street sent its diplomats. He thought about pulling his badge. At least ask who I am. But she had turned away to answer her next enquiry. McBride decided that, if the streams of life were for once running his way, he would let himself be carried.
Music being piped through the stairways and corridors too. The Sinclair had gone all-out this year to produce what looked like a Japanese tourist’s idea of a traditional Highland Christmas—plastic holly draped from every cornice, fibre-optic trees, light-up decals of sleighs and reindeer flashing. Normally McBride didn’t mind such excesses, or at any rate didn’t notice, but now the commercialism clamoured at him emptily. He was tired, his nerves frayed to thin bare wire. He found himself, before he knew it, in the top-floor corridor, and then—still unsure if he was going to knock or turn and walk back into the night—outside Toby Leitner’s door.
He raised his hand. He had barely brushed the woodwork with his knuckles when the door swung wide. Toby smiled at him, and he stepped into candlelit silence.
He stood in the middle of the room. It seemed to be rotating gently around him. Toby came up behind him, and the sense of vertigo increased.
“Let me take your coat.”
McBride surrendered it. Only when Toby lifted its weight off his shoulders did he realise how heavy and cold it had become. He said, unable to turn round, “I thought you’d gone.”
“I’m sorry. I had to take a phone call, and…when I looked back, you were with your family, with Libby and Grace. I thought you might stand a better chance if I wasn’t around.”
No. I never stood any chance there. “I mean…I thought you’d gone to the airport. With Zvi and the others.”
“Oh, did they leave?” Toby was still close behind him; McBride felt the brush of his chuckle on his nape. “They’ll be socked in till dawn. No, I’m not part of Zvi’s team anymore. The call was from my Mossad katsa. I was cleared of any wrongdoing at an enquiry board yesterday. I’ve been reinstated.”
McBride wasn’t sure what to say. Toby hardly sounded overjoyed. “I’m pleased for you,” he offered at length.
“Thank you. It doesn’t bring Avrom back. The only difference for now is that I get to travel first class on my way home, and…I don’t have to leave straightaway.” His voice tightened. “I’ve got one night, James.”
Finally McBride turned to face him. He was made for candlelight, McBride thought indistinctly, taking in the darkness and the brilliance of him. His hair—damp from the shower, tousled—was like raw black silk. He’d pulled a shirt on in a hurry: hadn’t finished fastening it, and it was clinging here and there to his skin. The elegant planes of his face were shadowed and fervent, and the insane thing was that he was looking at McBride as if he were the loveliest sight in the world. “I didn’t think you’d come,” he said. “Did you see my sign?”
“Was that…was that for me?” Toby nodded, and all McBride could think to say was, stupidly, “I thought it was seven lights. On a menorah.”
“It is, but that’s a chanukiah. One light for each of the eight nights of Chanukah, and the ninth to serve them. Maybe I’m not as faithless as I thought.” He paused. Very gently he brushed McBride’s snow-damped fringe back from his brow. “Tradition says they’re a reminder that miracles can happen. That we should place them in a window, to…to call wanderers home.”
***
Toby led him to the sofa. McBride had a moment of heart-stopping awkwardness: what should he do when they sat down together? Stick to his own end? Show Toby he wasn’t afraid or naïve by starting things off, putting an arm around him, or…
The problem didn’t arise. Leaving him there, Toby went to lean over the tray on the dressing table. McBride heard him switch the kettle on. “Oh, it’s all right. I don’t…”
“You’re freezing. I’m sorry it’s just instant. I’ll call up room service if you like.”
“No. Er, no thank you.”
“At least the milk is real.”
“Aye. I don’t know why they bother with those wee plastic pots. I think it must be just to change the colour.” McBride shook his head in bewilderment: was he really up here talking to Toby about coffee lightener? Toby seemed amused by the idea too. When he came back, he was smiling. McBride took the cup and knocked it back almost in one, realising only as he did so how much he needed it. It was scalding, absurdly good for hotel-room instant. Did Toby turn everything he touched into gold? The sudden heat set off shivers in McBride: the cup rattled in its saucer, and he couldn’t keep it still.
Toby took it from him and laid it on the floor. “There,” he said. “There, it’s all right.”
He sat on the sofa with McBride, and there wasn’t any awkwardness at all—not a second of it; no struggle over who would s
tart. They reached for each other with the same tired, hungry gesture. “Oh, Toby,” McBride gasped over his shoulder, shakily stroking his hair. “It’s been so long since I was with another fella—properly, I mean—I’m not sure I remember what to do…”
“Whereas I spend my entire time cutting a swathe through the gay population of Israel.” Toby kissed the angle between McBride’s neck and shoulder, a place he hadn’t even known was sensitive until the caress sent a kind of thunderbolt down through him, stiffening his cock. “When were you last with one…improperly, if I can ask?”
“You can.” McBride shuddered, putting both hands on Toby’s ribs and encouraging the movement that would bear them down onto the couch. “It was very improper. Andy Barclay sucking me off in the locker room at Harle Street. Lila told him to keep tabs on me, and…” He groaned and laughed, suddenly not minding that or anything else anymore in the wonderful press of Toby’s whole weight against him. “God help him, he thought that was the most direct route.”
“Ma pitom! No wonder he was so keen to walk the fire for you. For Grace, anyhow.”
“Is that what he did?”
“When Lila sent the balloon up—all those sirens—he stood off Carlyle’s men, stopped them coming up the stairs. He must have known he didn’t stand a chance, and I was busy with Grace. I couldn’t help him.”
“You saved her. You both did.” Fresh joy kindled in McBride at the knowledge of his girl safe at home, probably being tucked into bed with all Libby’s pent-up maternal ferocity. He grabbed Toby’s shoulders, bearing him down into a kiss. “God, I owe you everything—her life, my own. Why?”
“I was trying to tell you when DS Barclay fell through the door at the Black Cat. I don’t even know how to tell you now…”
“Don’t. Please just show me. Show me.”
Toby thrust his hips against him, a light rocking movement that made McBride cry out. All the cold was banished from him now, a fine sweat breaking. He dared to put his hands on Toby’s backside, on the strong curves of it, encouraged when Toby gasped and pushed harder. “James, let me feel you. Is it okay…”
