Page 29 of Dirty Rotten Love

Brockie looks up then, briefly, with the expression of someone who has received information they don’t quite know what to do with. Then he looks back at his book. His ears are a bit pinker than usual.

Spanner looks at the side of Brockie’s face with that expression of his, the one that is almost impossible to read until suddenly it isn’t, and then he looks away again, calm and unhurried, and takes another drink from his mug.

I pull one headphone off my ear and look at them for a moment.

Then I put it back. Some things are not mine to witness, and I have enough going on in my own head without adding anyone else’s complications to the pile.

The door opens. I look up expecting Tam and Dazza.

It is MacLeod.

He is in his off-duty clothes. Dark jumper, the kind that looks like it has been washed approximately eight hundred times and has reached a perfect softness that no new jumper could ever achieve. He looks around the rec room and his gaze finds me with the directness it always has, as if I am simply where he expected me to be.

My heart does something extremely unprofessional.

“Gallacher,” he says. “A word.”

He gestures towards the corridor. His expression is its standard unreadable baseline and I have absolutely no way of knowing if I have done something wrong or if this is about something else entirely, which is extremely MacLeod of him, and I am pulling my headphones down around my neck and standing up before I have consciously decided to.

I follow him out. The corridor is quiet. He doesn’t speak, just walks, and I fall into step beside him and do not ask where we are going because with MacLeod you just go.

We take the stairs up. Then more stairs. Then a door I haven’t been through before that opens out onto the helipad, which is empty and enormous and swept by a wind that immediately tries to steal my soul.

I pull my jacket tighter and look at MacLeod. He is looking up.

“Weather’s been shite since you got here,” he says.

“Aye,” I say, because it has been relentlessly gray and choppy and aggressive in that particular North Sea way.

“Look up,” says MacLeod.

I look up.

The sky is clear. Completely, startlingly clear, and from horizon to horizon it is absolutely alive. Great ribbons of green are moving across the darkness, shifting and shimmering and folding back on themselves, impossibly vast and impossibly beautiful, and through them the stars are so thick and bright they look unreal, like something someone painted rather than something that simply exists.

The Northern Lights.

I have never seen them before. I have wanted to see them my entire life and I have never seen them before, and here they are, here they actually are, dancing directly over my head on a clear night in the North Sea.

My throat does something complicated.

“I’ve never.” I stop. Start again. “I’ve never seen them. I’ve always wanted to.” I suck in a breath. “You don’t often get them in Edinburgh, and my neighborhood is all built up. Lots of light pollution.” I can hear that I’m babbling and that my voice has gone slightly strange and I cannot fix it. “They’re. I mean. Look at them.”

I look at them. I cannot stop looking at them. I pull my phone out of my pocket with hands that are not quite steady and start taking pictures, knowing even as I do it that no picture is ever going to come close to capturing this, the scale of it, the movement, the feeling of standing underneath something so enormous and so indifferent to your existence and finding it beautiful rather than frightening.

“I wish there was signal,” I say, mostly to myself. “I’d send these to my mum. She’d lose her mind.”

I take seventeen pictures. None of them are good enough. I take three more anyway.

Then I realize something, and I turn to look at MacLeod.

He is standing a little apart from me with his arms crossed against the wind and his face tipped up towards the lights, and he is watching them with an expression that I am not sure I have words for. Something quiet and steady and private that he probably doesn’t know is visible.

“How did you know to bring me up here?” I say.

He looks at me. “Clear sky doesn’t last long out here. I checked the forecast.”

“But how did you know I’d never seen them?”