Fire Stairs
Lyra
The fire stairs at Northlight Records smelled of bleach and old cigarettes, and they were the only part of the building nobody had ever tried to brand.
No neon logo. No framed platinum discs. No life-size cardboard cut-out of me in the silver catsuit from the Glasshouse video, smiling like a woman who had never once wanted to scream into a pillow. Just grey concrete, a handrail sticky with forty years of hands, and a green running-man sign at the bottom promising an exit.
I took the steps two at a time in my socks, trainers hooked on two fingers, hood up.
Four floors above me, in a glass meeting room with a view of King’s Cross and a bowl of fruit nobody ever ate, eight people were deciding what to do with me. My manager. My label. My assistant. A man from an insurance company. A woman from legal who kept saying exposure as if I were a roof. They had been at it for two hours, and in two hours not one of them had asked what I wanted, so I’d said I needed the loo and walked straight past it.
I was twenty-seven years old and I had not bought my own chips in four years.
That was the plan. Chips. Salt, vinegar, a wooden fork, a wall to sit on. Ten minutes of being a woman in a hoodie instead of a quarterly projection. There was a place on York Way that stayed open till midnight, and the man behind the counter had never once looked at me like he recognised me, which was the sexiest thing a man had done for me in years.
Ground floor. I dropped my trainers, shoved my feet in, didn’t bother with the laces, and reached for the push bar.
A hand was already on it.
I hadn’t seen him. That was the first thing, and later it would turn out to be the most important thing, but in the moment it only felt like the stairwell had grown a man out of its shadows. He was leaning against the exit door with his arms folded and one palm flat across the bar, as if he’d been waiting there for a bus that was running late and he didn’t much mind.
Big. Not gym-big, not the swollen, vein-mapped kind of big the label usually sent me, the lads who called me babe and filmed themselves on my tour bus. This was a different build entirely, long and dense, like something made for carrying weight a long way without complaining. Grey jumper, dark trousers, boots. Dark hair cut close, silver coming in at the temples. A nose that had been broken at least once and set by someone in a hurry.
“Alarm’s live on that door,” he said.
Scottish. Low and unhurried, the vowels rolled flat and soft.
“It’s a fire door,” I said. “It’s meant to open.”
“Aye. And when it does, it’ll ring in the security office, the fire brigade will get an automated call, and the two lads with long lenses who’ve been sitting in a silver Astra across the road since six will get a lovely picture of you running out into York Way in your socks.”
“I’m wearing shoes.”
He looked down at my trainers. The laces trailed on the concrete like a toddler’s.
“Technically,” he allowed.
I pushed my hood back. Most people did something when they saw my face properly: a blink, a double take, a little sharp breath that meant they’d placed me. He did nothing. His eyes were grey-green and steady and they went over me once, top to bottom, with the attention of someone reading a map. Not a man looking at a woman. A man looking at a problem.
It was the first time in years anyone had looked at me as if I were a logistics question, and I hated how much it made me want to stand up straighter.
“You’re building security,” I said.
“Something like that.”
“Right. Well.” I dug into my pocket. I had exactly one twenty-pound note, folded small, which I’d been hiding from my assistant since Tuesday. “I’ll give you twenty quid to go and look at the lift for ten minutes.”
“No.”
“Thirty if you come with me and carry the chips.”
“You’ve only got twenty.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How do you know that?”
“Because you’d have opened with thirty.” He hadn’t moved. The hand on the push bar hadn’t moved. “Put your money away, Miss Sinclair.”
So he knew who I was. Of course he did. Everyone knew who I was; I’d had a number one in eleven countries and a face on the side of every bus in London for a month. But the way he said it, flat and patient, made my name sound less like a brand and more like a person he’d been warned about.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Reid.”
“Is that a first name or a last name?”
“Yes.”
I laughed despite myself, a short ugly bark of a thing that bounced around the stairwell. Something moved at the corner of his mouth, too quick to catch.
“Fine, Reid. Here’s the thing. I’ve been in a room upstairs for two hours being discussed like a burst pipe, and I would like, very much, to go and eat something fried while nobody discusses me. I’m a grown woman. I’m not under arrest. You can’t actually stop me opening that door.”
“No,” he agreed. “I can’t.”
He took his hand off the bar.
Just like that. He straightened off the door, stepped one pace to the side, and waited. The green running man glowed over his head. The door was right there. All I had to do was lean on it.
I didn’t.
I stood with my hand an inch from the metal and my heart going strangely fast, and I understood that he’d done it on purpose. That he’d known the second he gave me the choice, I’d have to actually make it, and making it meant picturing the Astra and the lenses and tomorrow’s front page, LYRA’S LATE-NIGHT RUNNER, and Owen’s face, and Dana’s face, and the meeting starting all over again with a fresh agenda item called me.
“That’s a cheap trick,” I said.
“It’s not a trick. It’s a door.” He tipped his head toward the stairs. “Chips can come to you. I’ll have someone go.”
“It’s not about the chips.”
“I know.”
He said it so simply that for a second I didn’t have anything to throw back. The stairwell hummed. Somewhere above us a door banged and voices drifted down the shaft, Owen’s among them, warm and carrying, calling my name in the tone he’d been using since I was nineteen: half father, half lion tamer.
“Lyra? Lyra, love, you’ve not fallen in, have you?“
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, Reid was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, and his voice came quieter than before.
“After you,” he said.
He climbed behind me, not in front. I noticed that. I noticed the way he took the stairs in silence, the way he paused at each landing for half a beat to glance up the shaft before following. I noticed that I couldn’t hear him breathing even after four flights, while I was puffing like a pensioner, and I noticed, with real irritation, how aware I was of exactly how far behind me he was the entire way up.
The meeting room had got hotter in my absence, and someone had finally eaten a banana.
Owen met me at the door with a hand on each of my shoulders. He was forty-nine and wore it the way expensive men do, silver at the sides, cashmere in October, reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He’d found me at an open mic in a Leeds pub when I was nineteen and singing other people’s songs badly, and for eight years he had been my manager, my compass, the voice in my ear at every award show telling me which camera to find.
“There she is,” he said. “Thought we’d lost you.”
“I needed air.”
“You needed chips.” He smiled and tapped my nose like I was six. “I can always tell. Mina, love, get someone to run to the place on York Way.”
My assistant was already typing. Mina was twenty-four, ferociously organised, and the only person on my team who’d ever told me I looked tired without following it with a schedule.
“Lyra,” said Dana Okafor from the head of the table, “come and sit down. You’ve met Mr Reid.”
I turned. He’d come in behind me and taken up a position by the wall, not at the table. Near the door. Near the window. Somewhere he could see both.
“We’ve met,” I said slowly.
“Callum Reid,” Dana said, “will be leading your close protection for the duration of the tour and until further notice. Malcolm?”
An older man at her elbow stood. Sixties, grey moustache, a regimental tie, the posture of someone who’d spent decades shouting at young men across wet fields. “Malcolm Harrow. Kestrel Protective. Callum is the best operator I’ve got, Miss Sinclair. Twelve years in the Regiment before he came to me. He’s run protection on two heads of state and a Formula One driver who was considerably more trouble than you.”
“You haven’t met me,” I said.
“I’ve read your file,” said Harrow. “I stand by it.”
Owen laughed, the big generous laugh he used in rooms that needed warming. “She eats bodyguards for breakfast, Malcolm. Three last year. One of them quit in Berlin after she locked him in a hotel laundry.”
“He was filming me in the lift,” I said. “For his followers.”
“Even so.”
I sat. Reid didn’t. Dana slid a folder across the table, though I didn’t need to open it. I knew what was inside. I’d been carrying it around in my head for six weeks.
The first letter had come in August, left with security at the stage door of a festival outside Bristol. Cream paper, heavy and expensive. Block capitals in black ink, pressed so hard the pen had nearly gone through. YOU SANG IT FOR ME TONIGHT. I KNOW YOU DID. We’d laughed about it, actually. Owen had framed it as a sort of dark compliment. You’ve made it, love. You’ve got a weirdo.
The second came three weeks later in a sack of fan mail. I SEE HOW THEY HANDLE YOU. THEY DON’T DESERVE YOU. Nobody laughed that time.
The third was why we were here. Last Thursday, at the launch party for the album, I’d gone back to my dressing room after the set and found it propped against my mirror, sitting on my make-up brushes like a place card.
I KEEP THE LIGHT ON FOR YOU. YOU’LL COME HOME TO ME.
“That’s a lyric,” Reid said.
Everyone looked at him. He’d been silent so long I think half the room had forgotten he was there. I hadn’t. I’d known where he was every second. It was like having a radiator at my back.
“It’s from ‘Lighthouse Hours’,” I said. “It’s not on the album.”
“Has it been performed?”
“No. It’s a demo. We cut it in LA in March. It’s for the next record, if there is one.”
“Who’s heard it?”
“Me. Teddy, my producer. The band, four of them. Owen. Mina. Dana.” I thought. “Maybe the engineer. That’s it.”
“Christ.” Owen sat back. “You’re not seriously suggesting it’s one of us.”
“I’m not suggesting anything.” Reid’s voice didn’t change. “I’m counting.”
The temperature in the room did something. Dana’s pen stopped moving. Mina’s thumbs went still over her phone. Owen’s smile stayed exactly where it was, but it took on the slightly glazed quality of a smile someone has forgotten to switch off.
“Files get shared,” Owen said. “Teddy’s studio has interns. Demos leak. Half the songs I’ve ever managed ended up on some forum before release. It’s a crank, Mr Reid. A well-read crank, granted.”
“Could be,” said Reid. “Either way, I’ll want a list of everyone with access to the demo and to the dressing room on Thursday night. Names, roles, where they were.”
“You’ll have it by morning,” said Dana.
Then he finally looked at me directly, and the whole room seemed to shrink to the narrow line between us.
“There are two things you should know about how I work,” he said. “I’ll keep it short.”
“Please do.”
“One. When you’re not behind a locked door I’ve checked myself, you’re in my sight. Stage, bus, hotel corridor, car, toilet queue. If I can’t see you, I’m not doing my job. You don’t go anywhere I haven’t been first, and you don’t go anywhere without telling me.”
“And two?”
“I don’t touch my principals.” He said it plainly, without any weight, the way you’d tell someone you didn’t take sugar. “Except to move you out of the way of something. I’m not your friend, Miss Sinclair, and I’m not your mate, and I’m not your boyfriend for the cameras. You’ve plenty of people for all that. I’m the man between you and whatever’s out there. That’s all.”
It should have been reassuring. Dana was nodding. Harrow was nodding. The insurance man had actually written something down.
All I heard was a dare.
“Rule two,” I said, “sounds a lot like a challenge.”
“It’s a rule.”
“So’s don’t open the fire door.”
“You didn’t open it.”
The silence that followed was the precise length of a dropped glass. Somebody coughed. Owen laughed again, but there was a new, careful edge in it, and his hand landed on the back of my chair.
“Well,” he said. “Sounds like you two will get on famously.”
The meeting broke up a little after ten. While Dana walked Harrow to the lifts, Owen drew me into the corridor by the elbow, the way he’d steered me through red carpets since I was a kid who didn’t know which way to face.
“You all right, love? Honestly?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You’ve got that look.” He brushed a strand of hair off my cheek. “Listen. This tour, we get through it. Head down. Let Mr Personality in there do his thing. And after, when it’s all calmer, you and I sit down and talk about the renewal properly. A long lunch. Somewhere nice.”
My stomach turned over. I’d told him in September. I’d sat across a kitchen table from him and said, as kindly as I knew how, I want to try it on my own after this one, Owen. I want to see if I can. He had listened, and nodded, and squeezed my hand, and since then had behaved exactly as though I’d said nothing at all.
“Owen, I told you what I want.”
“I know, I know.” He smiled. “And we’ll talk.”
He held the smile a second too long. Then he kissed my forehead and went back into the room for his coat, and I stood there with my arms crossed against a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
When I turned, Reid was ten feet down the corridor, looking out of the window at nothing.
He hadn’t been listening. He’d made it very clear he hadn’t been listening. And I knew, with total certainty, that he had heard every word.
He drove me home himself, in a black Range Rover with tinted rear windows. I got in the front, purely to annoy him. It didn’t seem to annoy him. He just adjusted the mirror and pulled out, and the silver Astra across the road slid into traffic two cars behind us.
“They follow me home most nights,” I said.
“Not tonight.”
He took three turns I didn’t expect, ran an amber light so smoothly I barely noticed, and cut through a mews behind Angel I hadn’t known existed. When I looked back, the Astra was gone.
“Show-off,” I said.
“Efficient.”
“Do you ever say more than two words in a row?”
“When it’s useful.”
I put my feet up on his dashboard. He looked at my feet, then at the road, and said nothing at all, which was somehow more pointed than anything he could have said. I took them down.
My flat was the top floor of a converted chapel in Canonbury, all arched windows and white walls and a grand piano I’d bought with my first royalty cheque and still didn’t feel I deserved. The concierge, Femi, buzzed us up with a nod. At my door, Reid held out his hand for my keys.
“I can open my own door.”
“I know you can. I’d rather go in first.”
I handed them over. He opened the door, put me against the wall of the landing with one look, and went in. I listened to him move through my home: the soft click of every light, the scrape of a wardrobe, the bathroom, the spare room, the little roof terrace, the windows checked one by one. It took him four minutes. It felt like an hour. When he came back to the doorway, something had changed in his face, a stillness that hadn’t been there in the car.
“Did you leave anything on your piano before you went out today?”
My mouth went dry. “No.”
“Stay there.”
I didn’t stay there. I followed him in, because it was my flat and my piano and my life, and because the alternative was standing alone on a landing with my heart in my throat.
The envelope sat on the music stand, propped against my open notebook of half-finished lyrics. Cream. Heavy. My name across the front in black block capitals.
He didn’t let me touch it. He opened it with a pen from my own desk, by the corners, and held the single card up to the lamp so I could read it without moving any closer.
YOU LOOK SO TIRED, LITTLE LIGHTHOUSE. LET ME CARRY YOU.
The flat was very quiet. I could hear the fridge. I could hear the night buses on the main road, and my own pulse, and nothing else.
“Who has keys?” Reid asked.
“Me.” My voice came out thin. “Mina. Owen, for emergencies. Femi downstairs. My cleaner, Mrs Adeyemi, Tuesdays and Fridays.”
“Today’s Monday.”
“I know what day it is.”
He slid the card back into its envelope and set it down. Then he turned and looked at me, and I saw him take in all of it: my hands, which I’d wrapped round my own elbows; my face, which I could feel had gone white; the way I was standing in the middle of my own living room as though the floor might give way.
“Right,” he said. “Pack a bag. You’re sleeping at a hotel tonight and I’m—”
“No.”
“Miss Sinclair—”
“No. This is my home.” It came out of me hot and shaking. “I’ve been moved around my whole adult life. Hotels, buses, green rooms, flats the label rents. This is the one place that’s mine. I’m not letting some freak with a fountain pen take it off me.”
He studied me for a long moment.
“Then I’m sleeping on your sofa,” he said. “Until the tour starts and the locks are changed and I’ve had a proper look at everyone with a key. That’s not up for discussion.”
I looked at my sofa. It was a pale linen thing, deep and soft, three metres from my bedroom door.
Something lifted in my chest, light and wicked, rising through the fear like a bubble through water. It was the first good feeling I’d had all day.
“Well,” I said. “That’s going to make breaking rule two very convenient.”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t flush, or look away, or do any of the things men usually did when I said something designed to make them uncomfortable. He just held my eyes until I was the one who felt the heat crawling up my neck.
“Go to bed, Miss Sinclair.”
I went. I lay in the dark under my own ceiling and listened to him move through my flat, checking the windows a second time, testing the lock on the terrace door, setting a chair under the handle of the front door. The sofa creaked once when he lay down on it. Then nothing.
I’d had six bodyguards in three years. I’d shaken off every one of them inside a week.
I lay awake until three, furious, and safer than I’d felt since August, and I promised myself I’d break him in less.
Rule One
Cal
By Thursday I knew four things about Lyra Sinclair that weren’t in her file.
She did her scales at seven every morning in the shower, and the bathroom tiles turned them into something that sounded like a choir. She ate cereal standing up at the kitchen counter, straight out of the box, and lied about it when asked. She talked to her piano. Not to herself, to the piano, low and coaxing, the way you’d talk to a horse that didn’t trust you yet. And she slept badly. I heard her through the bedroom door at two, at three, at half four. The creak of the mattress. The sigh. Once, very softly, a few bars of something that wasn’t on any album, sung to the ceiling.
None of that was my business. I wrote none of it down.
What I did write down was everything else.
The locks were changed on Tuesday by a man Harrow had used for fifteen years. Mrs Adeyemi, the cleaner, had spent Monday at her daughter’s in Croydon with a new grandson and seventy photos on her phone to prove it. Femi’s logbook at the front desk showed exactly one visitor to the top floor on Monday: Mina Shah, at 2.14 p.m., dropping off dry cleaning. Mina said she’d hung it in the wardrobe and left within five minutes. Owen Garrick said he hadn’t been inside the flat since a dinner party in July. The building’s rear service door, the one the bins went out through, had a camera above it that had been broken since the second week of September.
Everyone had a reason. Everyone had a story. Every story held up.
That was what bothered me.
On the Wednesday night, at ten past three, her bedroom door opened.
I was awake. I was always awake at ten past three on a job; it’s the hour people choose when they want not to be seen. I lay still on the sofa with my eyes half closed and watched her come out in a long grey dressing gown, barefoot, her hair in a rope over one shoulder. She didn’t turn on a light. She crossed the room in the orange glow from the street and sat down at the piano and lifted the lid without a sound.
“I know you’re awake,” she said, without turning round.
“I know you know.”
“Do you mind?”
“It’s your piano.”
She played very softly. Not one of her own songs, not at first. Something old and slow that I half recognised from a church in Inverness a long time ago, her left hand walking down the bass notes like someone going carefully down a dark stair. Then, without a pause, it turned into something else. A little rising figure in the right hand, over and over, like a light turning.
I knew it before she’d sung a word. I’d read it in block capitals on a cream card.
She stopped after eight bars and sat with her hands in her lap.
“I wrote it about my mum,” she said to the keys. “We lived in a terrace up the hill from the front in Saltburn, and she used to leave the porch light on when I was out. Every night, till I got in, no matter how late. Even when I was seventeen and being a cow about it.” A pause. “She died that winter. My dad switched the porch light off the week after the funeral and I screamed at him till the neighbours came round.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything worth saying.
“It’s the truest thing I’ve ever written. I’ve never played it for anyone outside that studio. And now some freak has got hold of it and turned it into—” Her voice caught, steadied. “I keep the light on for you. Like it’s his. Like she was his.”
“Who else knows that story?”
She turned on the stool then, and looked at me across the dark room. “That’s a horrible question.”
“It’s my job to ask horrible questions.”
“Owen. Teddy, because he produced it. Mina, I think. I told it in an interview once when I was twenty, but they cut it.” She pulled the dressing gown tighter. “Do you ever stop?”
“No.”
She got up and came across the room. I thought she’d go past me, back to bed. Instead she sat down at the far end of the sofa, by my feet, and tucked her own feet up under her, and looked at me in the half-light with an expression I couldn’t read.
“What’s your first name, Reid? Your real one.”
“Callum.”
“Does anyone call you that?”
“My gran did. She’s been dead nine years.”
“So nobody, then.” She considered it. “I won’t either. Not yet. I’ll save it.”
“For what?”
“For when you’ve earned it.”
Her foot had slid out from under her. It lay against the side of my thigh on top of the blanket, bare and warm through the wool. I looked down at it. She looked down at it. Neither of us moved.
“Rule two,” I said.
“My foot touched you. You didn’t touch my foot. Read the small print.”
I picked her foot up by the ankle, gently, the way you’d lift a bird off a windowsill, and set it back down on the cushion six inches away. My hand was on her for perhaps a second. Her skin was cold. Her pulse was going in the hollow under the ankle bone, quick as a sparrow’s.
“There,” I said. “Now I’ve touched your foot. Happy?”
She stared at me. Then she laughed, low and helpless, and pressed her face into the back of the sofa so I wouldn’t see her do it, and got up and went to bed without another word.
Her door closed. I lay looking at the ceiling with the feel of that ankle still in the palm of my hand, and did not sleep at all.
The tour opened in Manchester on the Friday.
I’d done stadiums before. I’d stood behind a president at a rally while thirty thousand people chanted, and behind a racing driver on a grid in Monza while the noise of the engines came up through my boots. I knew crowds. I knew how they moved, how they swelled toward a stage like a tide toward a wall, how one idiot with a lanyard he shouldn’t have could turn a sea of happy faces into a crush.
What I hadn’t done was stand in the wings and watch a woman I’d seen eating Shreddies out of a box at seven that morning walk out in front of twenty-one thousand people and own every one of them.
She didn’t swagger. That was what surprised me. I’d expected the catsuit and the strut, all the pop-star choreography I’d seen on the side of buses. Instead she walked to the front of the stage in a plain black dress and boots, stood still with her hands at her sides, and waited until the screaming broke against her and fell quiet of its own accord. Then she opened her mouth.
I’d heard her in the shower. It was not the same thing.
I kept my eyes on the crowd. That was the job. Front barrier, side aisles, the pit, the security lads in their yellow vests. Hands, faces, anything moving the wrong way. I didn’t watch her.
I didn’t need to. I knew where she was at every second by the shape of the light on the faces in front of me.
After the encore, the green room filled up with radio people and local promoters and a footballer’s wife who wanted a photo. I stood by the door and watched Lyra perform a second, quieter show for them: the laugh, the hand on the arm, the head tilt. Owen worked the room beside her with a glass of champagne, steering, introducing, a hand at the small of her back.
Every time he touched her, her shoulders came up half an inch.
At 23.20 she said she was going to change and slipped behind the screen at the back of the room. At 23.21 I was already walking. There was a catering corridor behind that screen, and at the end of it a door to the loading bay, and beyond the loading bay a stretch of steel barrier where three hundred fans had been standing in the cold since the doors closed, hoping for exactly what she was about to give them.
She came round the corner of the loading bay in a hoodie and stopped dead.
I was leaning on the barrier gate.
“How,” she said.
“You looked at the screen twice in the last ten minutes. Nobody looks at a screen that often unless they’re planning to go behind it.”
“Do you ever get tired of being smug?”
“Not yet.”
Beyond me, the crowd had seen her. A noise went up, high and ragged, and phones lifted in a ripple of white light. She looked past my shoulder at them, then back at me, and I watched her brace for the argument.
I stepped aside.
“Two minutes,” I said. “You stay on this side of the steel. Nobody gets an arm round your neck, nobody gets your phone, and when I say we’re done, we’re done.”
She blinked. Whatever she’d been ready to fight, it wasn’t this.
“You’re letting me?”
“They’ve been standing in the cold for you for two hours.” I nodded at the barrier. “Clock’s running, Sinclair.”
She went. I stood at her right shoulder, a half-step back, and watched hands. She signed tickets, phone cases, a cast on a man’s arm, a woman’s homemade T-shirt with her face painted on it slightly wrong. She took selfies. She remembered a name from a meet-and-greet in Leeds two years ago and the woman burst into tears. Every few seconds her eyes flicked to me, and away, and back.
At two minutes I said, “Time.”
She kept signing.
At three minutes I said, “Lyra.”
It was the first time I’d used her first name. She heard it. Her pen stopped mid-signature for half a heartbeat, and then she finished it, gave the woman a smile, and turned and walked back toward the loading bay without another word.
Four minutes and ten seconds. I counted. I’d count it against her later, I told myself, though I didn’t know yet what I meant by that.
The bus left for Glasgow at one in the morning.
It was a double-decker sleeper, black with tinted windows, and I’d been over every inch of it twice before we left London: the front lounge with its leather banquettes and a television nobody watched, the galley, the toilet the size of a confessional, and then the bunk corridor, twelve coffins stacked three high on each side behind blackout curtains, and at the back a second lounge where the band played cards and smoked out of the roof vent when they thought nobody could smell it.
Lyra had the bottom bunk on the left, two-thirds of the way down. Mina had the one above her. The tour manager, a Welshman called Huw with the face of a disappointed bloodhound, had been quietly persuaded to move to the top deck so I could have the bunk opposite hers.
Six feet of carpet between us. Two curtains.
The band were in the back: Kit on guitar, Sol on drums, Ange on bass, Rory on keys, all of them somewhere between thirty and forty and wearing the hollow-eyed calm of people who’d done this a hundred times. Owen had come along for the opening night, for luck, and was holding court on the top deck with Huw and a bottle of red. The driver, Bernie, had been driving bands round Britain since before Lyra was born and wanted only for nobody to touch his radio.
Nine people. One bus. I’d run every name past Harrow’s office. Not one of them had so much as a parking ticket.
By half one the bus was quiet except for the engine and the long low hiss of the M6 under the wheels. I went to the toilet to brush my teeth and came out to find her in the corridor.
She’d just come up from the back lounge. Oversized T-shirt, some band I’d never heard of. Shorts. Bare legs. Hair pulled up in a knot that was coming down on one side, make-up scrubbed off so her face looked younger and more tired and more like the woman at the kitchen counter than the one under the lights.
The corridor was narrower than my shoulders. One of us was going to have to turn sideways.
“Excuse me,” she said, and didn’t move.
“After you.”
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep standing in doorways.”
She smiled, slow, and started to edge past me, her back to the bunks, her front to my front. She took her time about it. There was a half inch of air between us, maybe less, and she looked up at me the whole way, and I stood with my arms at my sides and looked at the curtain over her head.
Bernie took the roundabout at Tebay at speed.
The bus swung hard to the left. She lost her footing and came into me, full length, palms on my chest, and my hands went to her waist before I’d decided anything at all. Instinct. Training. The same reflex that would have put my body over hers if a window came in.
For a second we just stayed there.
She was warm through the thin cotton. I could feel the line of her ribs under my thumbs, and the quick shallow lift of her breathing, and the slow heat of her where she was pressed against me from chest to knee. She smelled of make-up remover and the oranges she’d been eating in the back lounge. Her heart was going hard; I could feel it against my own.
Mine, I noted with professional detachment, was not doing much better.
“Does that count?” she whispered.
“No.”
“Your hands are on me.”
“That’s physics.” I set her upright, carefully, and took my hands back. “Rule two has an exception for gravity.”
“Convenient.”
“Necessary.” I stepped into the gap by my bunk to let her pass. “Get some sleep.”
She didn’t get some sleep. She climbed into her bunk and lay on her side facing out and left her curtain open a hand’s width, and in the blue glow of the corridor night-lights I could see the shine of her eyes watching me as I got into mine.
I left my curtain open too. That was procedure. I needed sight lines.
That was what I told myself.
“Reid,” she said, very quietly, after a while.
“Go to sleep.”
“Tell me something true.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Something small, then. Not about the job. Not about me.” Her voice was a thread, barely louder than the tyres. “Everyone on this bus is paid to tell me things. Set times, interview slots, which side my good side is. Just once, tell me something that’s nobody’s business.”
I lay on my back and looked at the underside of the bunk above me. The bus rocked. Somewhere up top, Owen laughed at something Huw had said.
“My gran had a house,” I said. “In the Highlands. End of a single-track road in Glen Arrach. Stone walls three feet thick and a peat fire and no phone signal for eleven miles. She left it to me. I go up when I can. Nobody can find you there unless you tell them how.”
The silence went on long enough that I thought she’d fallen asleep.
“What’s it like,” she said, “the quiet?”
I thought about it. The burn going past the gable end. The wind in the rowans. Stars so thick on a clear night they looked like spilled sugar.
“Loud,” I said. “At first. You’ve got so much noise in your head you can’t hear anything else. Then it goes, and it’s just you.”
“Take me there sometime.”
“No.”
“Rude.”
I heard the smile in it. A minute later her breathing slowed and evened, and her hand slid out from behind the curtain and hung over the edge of the bunk, fingers loose and curled, a few inches above the carpet.
Six feet away. I could have reached it without getting up.
I lay there and watched that hand until Carlisle. I didn’t touch it. I’d made that rule nine years ago, in the back of a car on the Croisette in Cannes with my hands pressed into a woman’s side and her blood coming through my fingers, while the man who was supposed to be watching the lobby sat in the front seat weeping. He’d been in love with her. He’d been looking at her mouth when the man with the knife walked in. She lived. He never worked again.
You touch them, you start guarding the wrong thing.
I knew that like I knew my own blood group. It had never once been hard.
We crossed the border a little after four. Bernie pulled into the services at Abington for his break, and the bus sat ticking in the orange dark of the lorry park while he smoked and drank tea from a flask. I got up and walked the length of the bus, front to back, because I always did. Bunks closed. Curtains still. Kit snoring like a chainsaw. The back lounge empty, a pack of cards fanned on the table, Lyra’s make-up case on the seat where it had been since Manchester.
The top deck, dark. Owen’s door closed. Huw’s closed.
Nothing out of place.
We rolled into Glasgow at six with the sky going pale over the Clyde. The bus was waking up in stages: coughing, the toilet flushing, the smell of somebody’s instant coffee. Lyra came out of her bunk with her hair in her face and gave me a look that dared me to say good morning.
I didn’t. I said, “Hotel in twenty minutes. Stay on the bus till I’ve walked the entrance.”
She rolled her eyes and went into the back lounge to find a hairbrush.
Mina had gone ahead of her. She was standing at the table with Lyra’s make-up case open in front of her, and she wasn’t moving.
“Lyra,” she said, in a voice I didn’t like. “Don’t—”
Too late. Lyra was already at her shoulder, looking down. I was moving before I’d fully seen it, the corridor a blur, my hand on Lyra’s arm, pulling her back.
Rule two. Exception. I didn’t care.
Inside the case, laid neatly across her brushes and palettes like a pressed flower, was a cream envelope. It had been opened for us. The card inside was propped up so we couldn’t miss it.
HE SLEEPS SIX FEET FROM YOU. I SLEEP CLOSER.
Mina made a small sound and pressed her hand to her mouth. Behind me, I heard footsteps on the stairs from the top deck, Owen’s voice, what’s going on, what’s happened, and Huw’s after it, and Kit’s sleepy what the fuck from his bunk.
The bus hadn’t stopped anywhere except a locked lorry park where I’d walked every inch of it at four in the morning. The doors had been sealed. Bernie had been sitting in his cab the whole time.
Nobody had got on.
Which meant whoever had put that envelope in her case hadn’t needed to.
I looked down the length of the corridor at the faces crowding into it, sleep-creased and frightened and curious, every one of them someone she trusted, and I felt Lyra’s arm go rigid under my hand as she understood it too.
Whoever was writing to her was standing right here.
The Connecting Door
Lyra
Police Scotland sent a detective sergeant called Moira Kane, who had a voice like gravel in a tumble dryer and asked me the same eleven questions four different ways in the hotel’s business centre while the rest of my team gave statements next door.
When had I last opened the make-up case? Manchester, before the show. Who’d carried it to the bus? Mina. Who’d been in the back lounge between Manchester and Glasgow? Everyone, at some point. Had anyone on my team ever behaved inappropriately toward me? Expressed feelings? Made me uncomfortable?
I thought about Kit, who’d once tried to kiss me at a wrap party in 2021 and apologised so hard the next morning he’d nearly cried. I thought about Owen’s hand on my back at every party, steering. I thought about Rory, who called me kiddo even though he was only six years older. I thought about every man who’d ever told me how lucky I was.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
Moira Kane looked at me over her reading glasses for a long moment and wrote something down.
Cal stood by the door through all of it, silent. I’d started thinking of him as Cal somewhere around Carlisle, when I’d woken at three and seen him lying awake in the bunk opposite, eyes open in the blue light, watching the corridor. I hadn’t said it out loud yet. It felt like something that would cost me.
Owen wanted to cancel Glasgow.
He said it in my suite at lunchtime, pacing in front of the window with his phone in his hand. Two nights at the arena by the Clyde, twenty-six thousand tickets, and he wanted to pull them and fly me home to London and keep me in his house in the Cotswolds “until the police get a grip on this, love, just a week or two, I’ll get Margaret to make up the blue room.”
“No,” I said.
“Lyra—”
“If I cancel, whoever it is wins. They get to decide where I go and what I do. I’ve got enough people doing that already.”
Owen stopped pacing. For a second something passed over his face that I couldn’t name, a flicker, there and gone. Then he softened, the way he always did, and crossed the room and cupped my face in his hands.
“You’re braver than me,” he said. “You always were. All right. We play. But I’m staying on the tour till this is done, and if Mr Reid can’t keep you safe, I’ll find someone who can.”
Cal, by the door, said nothing. He didn’t need to. I watched Owen’s eyes slide to him and away, and I felt the air in the room change pressure, the way it does before thunder.
The suite Kestrel had chosen was on the ninth floor, at the end of a corridor with one lift and one stairwell, and it had a door in the wall beside my bed.
A connecting door. Two doors, actually, one on my side and one on his, set back to back in the same frame with an inch of dead air between them. Mine had a brass bolt and a lock with a little turn-key. When I’d gone to check it, the door on his side had already been standing open, so that if I turned the key, there’d be nothing between my room and his but my own decision.
“Standard,” he’d said when I raised an eyebrow. “If something comes through your front door, I come through that one. Lock it if you want. I’d rather you didn’t.”
“And if I come through it?”
He’d looked at me the way he’d looked at me in the stairwell, like I was a route he’d already walked twice.
“Then you knock,” he said. “Like a civilised person.”
I sang the first Glasgow show like someone trying to set herself on fire.
I couldn’t help it. Every face in that arena looked like a stranger, and every stranger looked like someone who might have a cream envelope in their pocket, and I had nowhere to put that except into my voice. I tore through “Salt” so hard my throat burned. I sat on the lip of the stage for “Nobody’s Girl” and sang the last chorus without a mic, and twenty-six thousand people went so silent I could hear the hum of the lighting rig.
Every time I came offstage, he was there. Stage left, in the dark, between the monitor desk and the quick-change booth, hands loose at his sides, eyes on the wings and the crew and the black corners of the backstage maze. He never looked at me. I swear he never once looked at me.
But when I tripped on a cable coming off after the encore, his hand was under my elbow before I’d even started to fall.
Gravity, I thought. Fucking gravity.
Back at the hotel, he walked my suite the way he walked every room, lights on, wardrobes, bathroom, under the bed, the windows, the bolt on the connecting door. I stood in the middle of the carpet in my coat and watched him do it and felt something in me fray right through.
“Why do you do that?” I said.
“Do what?”
“Never look at me. On stage. In the car. You look at everything else in the world. You look at my bins. You never look at me.”
He finished checking the window latch and turned around.
“I look at you,” he said. “I just don’t stare.”
“What’s the difference?”
“About six feet and a man with a knife.” He came back across the room and stopped well short of me. “If I’m watching you, I’m not watching the people watching you. That’s the difference.”
There was something under it. I’d heard enough men lie to me to know when one was telling the truth and leaving most of it out.
“Something happened,” I said. “Before. That’s why you’ve got the rule.”
His face didn’t change. I’d started to learn that it wouldn’t, that the only part of him that ever gave anything away was his hands, and even those only rarely. Right now they were loose at his sides, and the thumb of his left one was pressed hard against the side of his forefinger.
“Somebody got hurt,” he said.
“Because someone touched her?”
“Because someone wanted to.” He held my eyes. “Good night, Miss Sinclair.”
He went to the connecting door. I spoke before I could stop myself.
“Do you know what a brat is, Mr Reid?”
He stopped with his hand on the frame. He didn’t turn around. “I’ve met a few.”
“Not that kind.” My pulse was in my ears. I’d never said any of this out loud to anyone, not in eight years, not to the two boyfriends the label had approved, not to the one I’d chosen myself who’d sold a story about my snoring to a Sunday paper. “The kind who pushes. Who breaks the rules because she wants to see if anyone will actually stop her. Because everyone in her life handles her and manages her and steers her, and nobody, not once, has ever just—”
I didn’t know how to finish it.
He turned.
“Held her still,” he said quietly.
All the air went out of the room.
He didn’t move toward me. He stood in the frame of the connecting door with the lamp behind him throwing his shadow halfway across my carpet, and his voice came lower than I’d ever heard it.
“You don’t want handling, Lyra. You’ve been handled your whole life and you hate it. You want someone who’ll tell you no and mean it, and then make you glad he did.” A pause. “That’s not the same thing at all.”
I couldn’t speak. My whole body had gone hot and tight and strange, like I’d been plugged into the mains.
“How do you know that?” I managed.
“I’ve been watching you for a week,” he said. “It’s my job.”
Then he went through the door and closed his side of it, gently, and left me standing in the middle of my room with my coat still on and my heart trying to climb out through my throat.
I lasted forty minutes.
I showered. I put on the hotel robe. I lay on top of the bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the faint sounds from the other side of the wall: a tap, the creak of a chair, a phone call, his voice too low to make out. Then quiet.
I got up and knocked on the connecting door.
Like a civilised person.
There was a pause long enough to make me feel stupid. Then the lock clicked on his side, and the door opened, and he stood there in a white T-shirt and grey trousers, barefoot, his hair damp. I’d never seen his feet. It felt absurdly intimate, like I’d walked in on him naked.
“Something wrong?” he said.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You said something to me and then you left.”
“I said good night.”
“Before that.” I stepped up into the doorway, into the inch of dead space between his door and mine, so close I could smell the hotel soap on his skin. “You said I wanted someone to hold me still. And then you walked away. That’s—you can’t say that to someone and walk away.”
“I can. I did.” His eyes went over my face. “I’m working, Lyra.”
“You’re always working.”
“Aye. That’s the point.”
I put my hand flat on his chest.
I felt him go still under it, the way a big animal goes still when you touch it for the first time, not frightened, just deciding. His heart was hammering. That was the thing I hadn’t expected. All that calm on the outside, all those flat grey answers, and underneath my palm his heart was going like he’d run the stairs.
“Rule two,” he said, very low.
“I’m the one touching you. You didn’t make any rules about that.”
“That’s a technicality.”
“I’m good at technicalities.”
He looked down at my hand on his chest. Then up at my face. Then his hand came up and closed around my wrist, not pulling it away, just holding it there, his thumb pressed to the inside where my pulse was going wild.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“You’re not exactly steady yourself.”
Something cracked open in his face. It was the first time I’d seen it, the first real thing, and it was hungry and furious and very nearly helpless, and before I could say anything clever he bent his head and kissed me.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t polite. It was a week of six-foot gaps and open curtains and hands not touching in the dark, all at once, his mouth hard and hot and sure on mine, his fist still wrapped round my wrist pinning my palm to his heart. I made a sound I’d never heard myself make. I fisted my other hand in his T-shirt and rose up onto my toes and kissed him back like I’d been waiting my whole life to be allowed, and he backed me into the frame of the door so the wood bit into my shoulder blades and the whole length of him pressed against me, and I felt everything. Everything. The heat of him through the thin robe. The weight. The way he wanted me, and didn’t bother to hide it.
He tasted like toothpaste and whisky. His other hand was in my hair, tilting my head back, and I’d have let him do anything. I’d have let him take me down on the carpet between our two rooms.
He stopped.
He tore his mouth away and pressed his forehead to mine and stood there, breathing like a man pulled out of deep water, his eyes shut.
“No,” he said.
“Cal—”
It was the first time I’d said it. His eyes opened at the sound, and there was so much in them I nearly couldn’t bear it.
“Not like this,” he said roughly. “Not in a doorway at one in the morning because you’re frightened and I’m—” He stopped. “Not like this.”
He let go of my wrist. He stepped back into his own room, and I stood there in the gap between our doors with my mouth swollen and my robe half open and every nerve in my body screaming.
“Lock your side,” he said.
He closed his door. I heard him lean against it on the other side, heavily, his weight settling into the wood. He didn’t turn his lock.
Neither did I.
The second Glasgow show was better. I was calmer, or I’d burned the panic out the night before, and the crowd was rowdier, and the whole arena sang “Salt” back to me so loud I stopped singing and just let them. I came off after the encore soaked to the skin and giddy, and he was there in the dark stage left, and he looked at me.
Just once. For maybe half a second. But he looked.
Owen caught me in the corridor afterwards with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. “You were magic, love. Magic.” He poured. Then, lightly, not looking at me: “Malcolm tells me Reid’s got a bit of a reputation. Difficult. Doesn’t play well with management. If he’s making you uncomfortable, we can always find someone you get on with better.”
“I get on with him fine.”
Owen’s glass paused halfway to his mouth.
“Do you,” he said.
He smiled. He clinked his glass against mine. He went off to find Huw, and I stood there with champagne fizzing in my hand and the strangest chill crawling down the back of my neck.
It was ten past two when I gave up on sleep.
I’d lain in the dark for two hours listening to nothing. No phone calls through the wall tonight, no creak of the chair. Just a silence so total I’d started to think he’d gone out, except I knew he hadn’t. He wouldn’t. Rule one.
I got up. I didn’t put the robe on. I stood at the connecting door in the T-shirt I slept in, bare-legged, barefoot, my hand on the little brass key.
I turned it.
My door swung inward on silent hinges. His was already open.
He wasn’t in bed. He was sitting in the armchair in the corner of his room with every light off, facing the door. Facing me. Shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms on his knees, a glass of water on the floor by his foot. The light from the city came through a gap in the curtains and laid a stripe of silver across his shoulder and his throat and one side of his face.
He’d been sitting there in the dark. Waiting for the sound of that key.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
“You didn’t knock,” he said at last.
“No.”
“Lyra.” My name, rough as a hand. “If you come through that door, we do this my way.”
My mouth had gone completely dry. “What’s your way?”
“We talk first. You tell me exactly what you want and exactly what you don’t, and I tell you the same. And then you get what you can ask me for out loud.” His eyes held mine across the dark. “Not before. Not one thing more. And if you can’t say it, you go back to your side and lock it, and we never mention this again.”
I stood on the threshold. Behind me, my room, my bed, my locked life. In front of me, a man in the dark who had never once handled me.
I stepped through.
The door swung shut behind me with a soft, final click, and we were on the same side of it.
