"Actually, I think he's a policeman, too." [28/???] [Midsomer Murders]
"Actually, I think he's a policeman, too."
Chapter 27: Whiteout
The squad room of Causton CID was sometimes cramped and noisy, particularly when a large case commandeered the interest of the entire force. Men and women milled about, elbowing one another-sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully-and shouting over the din of other raised voices. Copies of reports and crime scene photographs were handed out and reviewed. Thoughts were shared, considered, dismissed, and taken under advisement. A week ago, Troy recalled, it had all gone on without them. He and Barnaby had spent those days either in Midsomer Magna or driving there and back again, the chaos breaking out after they left and wrapping up before they returned. Only a few snippets of it had played out for their observation. This morning, though, CID had returned to its usual state of quiet focus, with the occasional burst of excitement, at last calm again.
Taking another sip of his tea, fortified with milk and several sugars, Troy turned his attention to the next page on his desk. The findings were unsurprising: the footprints left at the most recent crime scene were too smeared to match to any shoe. Every report today-he had lost count of how many footprint analyses he had struggled to make sense of-acknowledged that same fact. Lucky bastard, he thought, pushing his mug forward and reaching for the stack of fingerprint reports.
Perhaps "lack of fingerprints reports" was a better term. After more than fifteen break-ins, their suspect-whoever he was-had still left fingerprints at only two scenes. SOCO had spent most of their time identifying prints left by the householders and their close friends and relations. "He's getting better," Troy muttered, shuffling the pages together. And they were just left chasing their tails, hoping to find anything in the handful of clues he-
"Better is not the right word for it, Troy."
Troy glanced up from the text, his gaze drifting across the room. At his own desk, Barnaby was peering at a pile of reports as well. All those leads going nowhere, Troy thought, finally sitting straight again and lifting his shoulders. It was hardly gone ten, but his neck and spine already ached after reviewing details and notes for more than two hours. Whenever a case loomed large-particularly in the chief inspector's mind-the work day began early and concluded late, no arguments accepted.
Another rustle of paper drew him back to his boss. "There's still nothing here," Barnaby said, shoving his chair back and rising to his feet.
"There must be something," Troy said as he reached for his mug, the ceramic still warm to the touch. "You can't commit this many burglaries without leaving something behind. There's those fingerprints."
Turning to the file cabinet behind his desk, Barnaby shook his head. "Useless without something to compare them to."
"It's someplace to start-"
Metal squealed as Barnaby yanked a drawer open, his fingers running over the manila folders and pushing them toward the back as he decided they were unimportant. "We've started there a few times already, Troy. And we're still nowhere."
We've just wasted a lot of time, Troy thought, finishing most of his tea in a single swallow to conceal his frown. The past week had been a blur of interviews, task force meetings-at the beginning, anyway-and endless hours of reading reports. The task force had convened the week before whilst they were chasing poisonous mushrooms and vile puppets and conspirators all around Midsomer Bloody Magna. The Detective Chief Superintendent, at last thoroughly disgusted by the lack of progress, had assigned all available officers to the case. Troy suspected the man had regretted his choice to give the murder investigation to Barnaby; in all their years working together, only a handful of Barnaby's cases had been relegated to the status of unsolved, and several had been reopened and solved at a later date.
Sergeant Brierley and the DI with whom she was partnered-Troy never remembered his name, only that he was an annoying git-had led for several days, but with their final open case only requiring the final paperwork, Barnaby and he had been reassigned to its helm. Must really think he can solve anything, Troy said to himself. Not that it matters. The task force disbanded three days afterward, leaving only the pair of them to sift through the material and find nothing.
Picking up a yellow marker pen, Troy ran it over a pair of dates on the list of incidents he had made, the letters smudging slightly. The fingerprints had appeared at those two break-ins near the start all those weeks ago, never again. "Then what else is there to look at, sir?" he asked, pressing the cap of the pen on again. The plastic left a brief impression on his thumb.
"These break-ins happen in clusters." Barnaby's voice was muffled, almost echoing back from the file cabinet. "Never just one-always several. What question should you ask?"
Troy drummed his fingers on his desk, running the rhythm from his little finger to his thumb. "Why not just the one at a time?"
Two or three break-ins had occurred as they were searching for the culprit in the disappearance of Gregory Chambers and everything that had passed in its wake. One had even been committed the evening the case at Midsomer Magna had at last been put to rest, in one of the posher neighborhoods of Causton. There, crime was only read about, never experienced. Until that late night call only an hour after he finally arrived home-further interviews with Woody and Clarice and the first pieces of the endless stream of paperwork had held him at CID until after nine-he had so briefly entertained the thought that his time might soon be his own again. Or rather, his and Cully's; that hope had dissipated quickly. "It'd be less obvious," Troy added, gritting his teeth as he ran his eyes over dates once more. By now, he could almost list them from memory.
"An excellent thing to ask."
"Thank you-"
"But that's not the one I meant. We'll know that when we answer the question you still haven't asked," Barnaby said, slamming the drawer without removing a thing. Troy cringed as the metal screamed again. "Why do these episodes have clear beginnings and endings?"
"Sir?"
Barnaby set his elbow on the edge of the filing cabinet, gazing at the wall for a moment. "We know he had a reason to begin-money, thrill, any number of possibilities."
"So that's why he started."
Barnaby nodded. "Yes. What's the next logical thing to ask?"
"You mean why would he stop, sir?" Troy's skin still crawled, the sound seared into his skull.
"As you should know by now, they never do on their own."
"It must be possible he is-"
"Possible," the chief inspector said, sitting in his chair once more and reaching for his coffee mug, "but unlikely. The best way to stop a criminal is to put him in prison."
"I suppose."
"But"-Barnaby paused, taking a large drink of his coffee-"we know he can't be, because those fingerprints are still unidentified."
"Be too easy, wouldn't it?" Troy asked, swallowing as the foul taste of the station's coffee bubbled back through his memory. How the chief inspector drank it without anything added was beyond him. The stuff was vile even with enough sugar for Cully to worry his teeth would crack.
Pushing the mug across his desk, Barnaby folded his fingers together and set his chin atop his knuckles. "It's what they pay us for." A hiss of disgust escaped from Troy's throat. "You might not like it, but it's true."
The pay might not be worth it, Troy thought, shoving the remaining unread reports beneath his list of incidents. Though the workdays had begun to shorten again, they still lasted nearly twelve hours on average. For the past week, talking to Cully had been rare and seeing her had transformed into an impossible task. Each afternoon, she rang with the same query. Sometimes, he took the call; more often, he was unable to do so. And whenever he answered-basked in the warmth of her voice-his response was inevitable. "Cully, I can't." The first time, he had prefaced it with "I'm sorry", but she reminded him never to say it again. Afterward, he only added that word in his own mind. Her response was always quiet, simply, "Then I'll see you tomorrow?" He never answered affirmatively, making a promise he doubted he could keep. "If I can" was all he ever offered. At least that much was true.
"Then what's your idea? Why does he start and stop?"
Troy swallowed, clearing the last of the tea's bitterness from his mouth as a new idea entered his head. "What if-sir, what-" He paused, flattening his fingers against the top of his desk. An officer whose name he didn't know passed between him and Barnaby, the weight of the chief inspector's stare lessening as it was broken. The new possibility spun faster, almost out of control as it coalesced into a single thought. "What if-even if he's not in prison, sir-he can't keep on with it?" Troy asked as the officer reached the corridor at the other side of the squad room, allowing his boss's gaze to return. "At least sometimes."
Barnaby's chair creaked as he leaned back, his elbows coming away from his desk. "How so?"
"What if he's just not here?"
His eyes narrowing, the chief inspector pressed a hand to his mouth. "Where would he be?"
Troy blinked as the threads weaving themselves together shuddered and ceased to move, the thought paralyzed. "I-have no idea, sir."
"'No idea' is not the right answer," Barnaby said, sitting straight again and reaching for a pen, "particularly to your own question."
"But why else would he start and stop and start again?"
"Why wouldn't he go on with it wherever he is?" Barnaby scribbled something on a piece of paper.
Troy shrugged his shoulders, the ache at the joints loosening then spreading through his muscles. "Maybe he is-"
"You can't really believe that."
"But why not?"
Barnaby slammed his hand against the desk, the pen rattling against the wood as Troy's heart raced at the clatter. "It doesn't make any sense. If he's as careless elsewhere, those fingerprints would come back to us."
"Yes-"
"And we both know those prints are useless right now."
Troy glanced to his list of incidents once more, his eyes lingering on the two marked in yellow at the top. Fingerprints had appeared right at the start, like their burglar wasn't yet certain what to do and how to do it. "He hasn't left them every time, sir, just twice. And at the beginning."
"Which proves we aren't dealing with a criminal mastermind," the chief inspector said, scratching another note on the page. "Masterminds aren't very common, Troy, criminal or otherwise."
"Yes-"
"Surely you know that by now."
Barnaby said nothing else, instead returning his attention to his mug of coffee. And really, he had said very little over the past week, to Troy's surprise and relief. Probably because now he knows exactly what's going on, Troy thought, crumpling his list of incidents. They were both either at CID, bent over their desks with increasingly bleary eyes despite numerous cups of coffee and tea, or leaving at the end of another interminable day. He suspected Barnaby awaited Cully's phone call each afternoon as much as he did, eager to be certain that she would find her own way home. With their desks only a few feet apart, Troy never attempted to conceal who was on the other end of each phone conversation; it was an impossible task.
Not that the chief inspector had let things go. Over the past week, in the midst of the paperwork to conclude the case at Midsomer Magna and the new mass of burglary inquiries, Troy had found himself in the morgue more times than he had imagined possible, interrogating Bullard about the smallest details.
The precise saw marks on what remained of Gregory Chambers' body.
The exact dosage of medication Evelyn Pope had taken to end her life.
The extent of the damage to Tristan Goodfellow's liver; the man had died two days after Evelyn's suicide.
The actual quantity of blood Kenneth Gooders had lost, though Bullard was unable to answer this question.
Every note in the file required further information from the pathologist, Barnaby seemed to have decided, and a phone call simply would not do, no matter how it aggravated Bullard. The last time Barnaby had sent him on a useless quest for information, the pathologist had turned him around and sent him right back without an answer, just an irritated demand for the chief inspector to stop interrupting his work. That respite Troy had welcomed, for the morgue was always home to a dozen or more things that threatened to nauseate him. Whether it was the smells the disinfectant could not conquer, the grinding of the saw as Bullard or one of his assistants sliced through a breastbone, or the stains on the pathologist's gloves when he had just stepped away from an examination, the experience clung like a fog that wanted hours to dissipate. But it was easier not to argue with Barnaby and, at the very least, it gave him a moment away from the uneasy silence now so often lying between them.
And sometimes, when reception returned to his mobile as he mounted the stairs from the morgue to the squad room, Troy sent Cully a message. It was never much. "How are you today?" "Anything going on this evening?" "Has your director changed his mind again?" Most often, if the chief inspector was not glaring at him when his mobile rang, Cully could offer an answer before she asked her own question. But on those days when he expected Barnaby to tap his watch impatiently and prepare to send him to the morgue another time-Troy knew another trip awaited him today, despite Bullard's protests-there was no time for her to answer a question before or after asking her own.
A phone in the squad room blared and Troy sat straight up in his chair, his pulse racing anew as his mind returned to CID and the investigation before them. "Maybe-" He stopped, drawing a deeper breath as he went over his thoughts again. "Maybe he doesn't have a choice-maybe there's something keeping him from continuing, wherever he is."
Barnaby drained the dregs of his coffee before he said, "That's a little fanciful again, Troy."
"But think about it, sir!" Troy grabbed his wadded up list of incidents, peeling apart the edges and wrinkles before flattening it atop his desk. Three or four at a time, then nothing, just as he remembered. "That idiot who got himself stuck on a pitchfork*, he'd have kept at it until we arrested him. There was nothing else stopping him."
"Yes..."
"And there's something stopping this one."
"Let's allow that you're right," Barnaby said, dropping his pen. "What's the point in coming and going so often?"
"It's a small county, sir."
"True, but what's that got to do with the price of fish?"
Troy sifted through his reports and lists, shoving aside SOCO's findings and the disappointing results offered by the forensic lab. "Whatever he's stolen, he doesn't have a lot of choice about what he does with it."
"Go on," Barnaby said, leaning forward again.
"Wherever he's going, maybe he's selling it there," Troy said, his hand at last falling on the folder of inventory lists. "Look at it all, sir."
The shuffling of paper floated across the room as the chief inspector searched through his folders. He lifted one after a moment, opening it and removing a page. "I am, Troy."
Paintings of great sentimental but little monetary value, figurines, antique silverware, expensive bottles of scotch...Dozens of such items appeared time and again. "It would catch attention in Midsomer-because we know to look for it-but nothing is so unique that it would send up red flags a few counties over. Especially if he's careful about it."
"Careful enough not to sell everything at once or near to where he stole it, but not careful enough to avoid leaving fingerprints anywhere?" Barnaby asked, his eyebrows rising.
"He could have taken a lot of other things-more expensive-"
"He's getting the best times for caution confused."
Troy released a breath in a slow hiss. Why did he even bother sharing his ideas? "Didn't you say I shouldn't try to understand them, sir?"
"Indeed, I did." Barnaby ran a hand over his face, still peering at the list on his desk. "Coming and going like that will put up its own red flags, Troy."
"Maybe he has a legitimate reason for it," Troy said. Returning his marker pen to the tidy pile in front of him, he took a Biro, writing Why? at the top of his wrinkled list. "A job or something like that."
"It's an interesting possibility."
Troy did not attempt to conceal the smile growing on his face. "Thank you-"
"Any idea how you'll prove it?" Barnaby asked, and Troy's smile vanished. "And, really-how careful do you think he would be if he's been fool enough to leave his fingerprints at all?"
Troy scratched the word on the paper again. "But you just said he's no criminal master-"
"He isn't," Barnaby said, shaking his head. "So why would he be so cautious in the aftermath?"
"I don't know, sir," Troy said, his pen nearly breaking through the paper as he wrote Why? a third time.
"That's another question you have to answer before you go any further." Barnaby lifted his coffee mug, scowling as he did. Bully for you, Troy thought. "People are either cautious or careless," Barnaby continued. "They tend not to be a mixture of both. I trust you understand that from personal experience."
God, he's not going to let it alone, Troy thought, capping his pen and returning it to the pile as well. "Some," he said quietly.
Barnaby picked up his reading glasses, setting them on his nose as he brought the report he was reading closer. "More than just some, I dare say."
The chief inspector was right, though Troy swallowed an angry sigh at the realization. His mind was hardly his own at times, like something was pulling it apart, driving him into happy madness. When he spent even a few minutes with Cully, he more than forgot himself. The world itself was in flux, forgetting what should be and what was best. Laid out before them both, the future was in question as well, circling around from the past. There was a world with her in his life, a world without her, and one in which they wandered between those possibilities, uncertain of even the next day. And with each moment that caution and sense wavered before disappearing completely, Troy knew-feared?-that they were another step closer to hurtling down the path from the present confusion to a firm answer.
Even though Barnaby's desk was several feet from his, Troy did not lift his gaze from the tidy stacks of folders and papers and the neat pile of pens. If he looked up, he might not say anything at all. "Sir, about last-"
"Coffee, Troy." Now Troy's face rose to see Barnaby lifting his coffee mug, nodding at it. "If this is the state of your thoughts right now, you could probably do with some, too."
"I don't-"
Setting his mug down again, the chief inspector returned to his reports. "Black, no sugar."
"Sir-"
"No sugar," Barnaby said, turning to the next page.
Pushing back his chair and standing slowly, Troy let his protests remain silent even as a few vertebrae in his spine cracked. "Yes, sir."
* "Judgment Day", S03E03
Chapter 27: Whiteout
The squad room of Causton CID was sometimes cramped and noisy, particularly when a large case commandeered the interest of the entire force. Men and women milled about, elbowing one another-sometimes accidentally, sometimes purposefully-and shouting over the din of other raised voices. Copies of reports and crime scene photographs were handed out and reviewed. Thoughts were shared, considered, dismissed, and taken under advisement. A week ago, Troy recalled, it had all gone on without them. He and Barnaby had spent those days either in Midsomer Magna or driving there and back again, the chaos breaking out after they left and wrapping up before they returned. Only a few snippets of it had played out for their observation. This morning, though, CID had returned to its usual state of quiet focus, with the occasional burst of excitement, at last calm again.
Taking another sip of his tea, fortified with milk and several sugars, Troy turned his attention to the next page on his desk. The findings were unsurprising: the footprints left at the most recent crime scene were too smeared to match to any shoe. Every report today-he had lost count of how many footprint analyses he had struggled to make sense of-acknowledged that same fact. Lucky bastard, he thought, pushing his mug forward and reaching for the stack of fingerprint reports.
Perhaps "lack of fingerprints reports" was a better term. After more than fifteen break-ins, their suspect-whoever he was-had still left fingerprints at only two scenes. SOCO had spent most of their time identifying prints left by the householders and their close friends and relations. "He's getting better," Troy muttered, shuffling the pages together. And they were just left chasing their tails, hoping to find anything in the handful of clues he-
"Better is not the right word for it, Troy."
Troy glanced up from the text, his gaze drifting across the room. At his own desk, Barnaby was peering at a pile of reports as well. All those leads going nowhere, Troy thought, finally sitting straight again and lifting his shoulders. It was hardly gone ten, but his neck and spine already ached after reviewing details and notes for more than two hours. Whenever a case loomed large-particularly in the chief inspector's mind-the work day began early and concluded late, no arguments accepted.
Another rustle of paper drew him back to his boss. "There's still nothing here," Barnaby said, shoving his chair back and rising to his feet.
"There must be something," Troy said as he reached for his mug, the ceramic still warm to the touch. "You can't commit this many burglaries without leaving something behind. There's those fingerprints."
Turning to the file cabinet behind his desk, Barnaby shook his head. "Useless without something to compare them to."
"It's someplace to start-"
Metal squealed as Barnaby yanked a drawer open, his fingers running over the manila folders and pushing them toward the back as he decided they were unimportant. "We've started there a few times already, Troy. And we're still nowhere."
We've just wasted a lot of time, Troy thought, finishing most of his tea in a single swallow to conceal his frown. The past week had been a blur of interviews, task force meetings-at the beginning, anyway-and endless hours of reading reports. The task force had convened the week before whilst they were chasing poisonous mushrooms and vile puppets and conspirators all around Midsomer Bloody Magna. The Detective Chief Superintendent, at last thoroughly disgusted by the lack of progress, had assigned all available officers to the case. Troy suspected the man had regretted his choice to give the murder investigation to Barnaby; in all their years working together, only a handful of Barnaby's cases had been relegated to the status of unsolved, and several had been reopened and solved at a later date.
Sergeant Brierley and the DI with whom she was partnered-Troy never remembered his name, only that he was an annoying git-had led for several days, but with their final open case only requiring the final paperwork, Barnaby and he had been reassigned to its helm. Must really think he can solve anything, Troy said to himself. Not that it matters. The task force disbanded three days afterward, leaving only the pair of them to sift through the material and find nothing.
Picking up a yellow marker pen, Troy ran it over a pair of dates on the list of incidents he had made, the letters smudging slightly. The fingerprints had appeared at those two break-ins near the start all those weeks ago, never again. "Then what else is there to look at, sir?" he asked, pressing the cap of the pen on again. The plastic left a brief impression on his thumb.
"These break-ins happen in clusters." Barnaby's voice was muffled, almost echoing back from the file cabinet. "Never just one-always several. What question should you ask?"
Troy drummed his fingers on his desk, running the rhythm from his little finger to his thumb. "Why not just the one at a time?"
Two or three break-ins had occurred as they were searching for the culprit in the disappearance of Gregory Chambers and everything that had passed in its wake. One had even been committed the evening the case at Midsomer Magna had at last been put to rest, in one of the posher neighborhoods of Causton. There, crime was only read about, never experienced. Until that late night call only an hour after he finally arrived home-further interviews with Woody and Clarice and the first pieces of the endless stream of paperwork had held him at CID until after nine-he had so briefly entertained the thought that his time might soon be his own again. Or rather, his and Cully's; that hope had dissipated quickly. "It'd be less obvious," Troy added, gritting his teeth as he ran his eyes over dates once more. By now, he could almost list them from memory.
"An excellent thing to ask."
"Thank you-"
"But that's not the one I meant. We'll know that when we answer the question you still haven't asked," Barnaby said, slamming the drawer without removing a thing. Troy cringed as the metal screamed again. "Why do these episodes have clear beginnings and endings?"
"Sir?"
Barnaby set his elbow on the edge of the filing cabinet, gazing at the wall for a moment. "We know he had a reason to begin-money, thrill, any number of possibilities."
"So that's why he started."
Barnaby nodded. "Yes. What's the next logical thing to ask?"
"You mean why would he stop, sir?" Troy's skin still crawled, the sound seared into his skull.
"As you should know by now, they never do on their own."
"It must be possible he is-"
"Possible," the chief inspector said, sitting in his chair once more and reaching for his coffee mug, "but unlikely. The best way to stop a criminal is to put him in prison."
"I suppose."
"But"-Barnaby paused, taking a large drink of his coffee-"we know he can't be, because those fingerprints are still unidentified."
"Be too easy, wouldn't it?" Troy asked, swallowing as the foul taste of the station's coffee bubbled back through his memory. How the chief inspector drank it without anything added was beyond him. The stuff was vile even with enough sugar for Cully to worry his teeth would crack.
Pushing the mug across his desk, Barnaby folded his fingers together and set his chin atop his knuckles. "It's what they pay us for." A hiss of disgust escaped from Troy's throat. "You might not like it, but it's true."
The pay might not be worth it, Troy thought, shoving the remaining unread reports beneath his list of incidents. Though the workdays had begun to shorten again, they still lasted nearly twelve hours on average. For the past week, talking to Cully had been rare and seeing her had transformed into an impossible task. Each afternoon, she rang with the same query. Sometimes, he took the call; more often, he was unable to do so. And whenever he answered-basked in the warmth of her voice-his response was inevitable. "Cully, I can't." The first time, he had prefaced it with "I'm sorry", but she reminded him never to say it again. Afterward, he only added that word in his own mind. Her response was always quiet, simply, "Then I'll see you tomorrow?" He never answered affirmatively, making a promise he doubted he could keep. "If I can" was all he ever offered. At least that much was true.
"Then what's your idea? Why does he start and stop?"
Troy swallowed, clearing the last of the tea's bitterness from his mouth as a new idea entered his head. "What if-sir, what-" He paused, flattening his fingers against the top of his desk. An officer whose name he didn't know passed between him and Barnaby, the weight of the chief inspector's stare lessening as it was broken. The new possibility spun faster, almost out of control as it coalesced into a single thought. "What if-even if he's not in prison, sir-he can't keep on with it?" Troy asked as the officer reached the corridor at the other side of the squad room, allowing his boss's gaze to return. "At least sometimes."
Barnaby's chair creaked as he leaned back, his elbows coming away from his desk. "How so?"
"What if he's just not here?"
His eyes narrowing, the chief inspector pressed a hand to his mouth. "Where would he be?"
Troy blinked as the threads weaving themselves together shuddered and ceased to move, the thought paralyzed. "I-have no idea, sir."
"'No idea' is not the right answer," Barnaby said, sitting straight again and reaching for a pen, "particularly to your own question."
"But why else would he start and stop and start again?"
"Why wouldn't he go on with it wherever he is?" Barnaby scribbled something on a piece of paper.
Troy shrugged his shoulders, the ache at the joints loosening then spreading through his muscles. "Maybe he is-"
"You can't really believe that."
"But why not?"
Barnaby slammed his hand against the desk, the pen rattling against the wood as Troy's heart raced at the clatter. "It doesn't make any sense. If he's as careless elsewhere, those fingerprints would come back to us."
"Yes-"
"And we both know those prints are useless right now."
Troy glanced to his list of incidents once more, his eyes lingering on the two marked in yellow at the top. Fingerprints had appeared right at the start, like their burglar wasn't yet certain what to do and how to do it. "He hasn't left them every time, sir, just twice. And at the beginning."
"Which proves we aren't dealing with a criminal mastermind," the chief inspector said, scratching another note on the page. "Masterminds aren't very common, Troy, criminal or otherwise."
"Yes-"
"Surely you know that by now."
Barnaby said nothing else, instead returning his attention to his mug of coffee. And really, he had said very little over the past week, to Troy's surprise and relief. Probably because now he knows exactly what's going on, Troy thought, crumpling his list of incidents. They were both either at CID, bent over their desks with increasingly bleary eyes despite numerous cups of coffee and tea, or leaving at the end of another interminable day. He suspected Barnaby awaited Cully's phone call each afternoon as much as he did, eager to be certain that she would find her own way home. With their desks only a few feet apart, Troy never attempted to conceal who was on the other end of each phone conversation; it was an impossible task.
Not that the chief inspector had let things go. Over the past week, in the midst of the paperwork to conclude the case at Midsomer Magna and the new mass of burglary inquiries, Troy had found himself in the morgue more times than he had imagined possible, interrogating Bullard about the smallest details.
The precise saw marks on what remained of Gregory Chambers' body.
The exact dosage of medication Evelyn Pope had taken to end her life.
The extent of the damage to Tristan Goodfellow's liver; the man had died two days after Evelyn's suicide.
The actual quantity of blood Kenneth Gooders had lost, though Bullard was unable to answer this question.
Every note in the file required further information from the pathologist, Barnaby seemed to have decided, and a phone call simply would not do, no matter how it aggravated Bullard. The last time Barnaby had sent him on a useless quest for information, the pathologist had turned him around and sent him right back without an answer, just an irritated demand for the chief inspector to stop interrupting his work. That respite Troy had welcomed, for the morgue was always home to a dozen or more things that threatened to nauseate him. Whether it was the smells the disinfectant could not conquer, the grinding of the saw as Bullard or one of his assistants sliced through a breastbone, or the stains on the pathologist's gloves when he had just stepped away from an examination, the experience clung like a fog that wanted hours to dissipate. But it was easier not to argue with Barnaby and, at the very least, it gave him a moment away from the uneasy silence now so often lying between them.
And sometimes, when reception returned to his mobile as he mounted the stairs from the morgue to the squad room, Troy sent Cully a message. It was never much. "How are you today?" "Anything going on this evening?" "Has your director changed his mind again?" Most often, if the chief inspector was not glaring at him when his mobile rang, Cully could offer an answer before she asked her own question. But on those days when he expected Barnaby to tap his watch impatiently and prepare to send him to the morgue another time-Troy knew another trip awaited him today, despite Bullard's protests-there was no time for her to answer a question before or after asking her own.
A phone in the squad room blared and Troy sat straight up in his chair, his pulse racing anew as his mind returned to CID and the investigation before them. "Maybe-" He stopped, drawing a deeper breath as he went over his thoughts again. "Maybe he doesn't have a choice-maybe there's something keeping him from continuing, wherever he is."
Barnaby drained the dregs of his coffee before he said, "That's a little fanciful again, Troy."
"But think about it, sir!" Troy grabbed his wadded up list of incidents, peeling apart the edges and wrinkles before flattening it atop his desk. Three or four at a time, then nothing, just as he remembered. "That idiot who got himself stuck on a pitchfork*, he'd have kept at it until we arrested him. There was nothing else stopping him."
"Yes..."
"And there's something stopping this one."
"Let's allow that you're right," Barnaby said, dropping his pen. "What's the point in coming and going so often?"
"It's a small county, sir."
"True, but what's that got to do with the price of fish?"
Troy sifted through his reports and lists, shoving aside SOCO's findings and the disappointing results offered by the forensic lab. "Whatever he's stolen, he doesn't have a lot of choice about what he does with it."
"Go on," Barnaby said, leaning forward again.
"Wherever he's going, maybe he's selling it there," Troy said, his hand at last falling on the folder of inventory lists. "Look at it all, sir."
The shuffling of paper floated across the room as the chief inspector searched through his folders. He lifted one after a moment, opening it and removing a page. "I am, Troy."
Paintings of great sentimental but little monetary value, figurines, antique silverware, expensive bottles of scotch...Dozens of such items appeared time and again. "It would catch attention in Midsomer-because we know to look for it-but nothing is so unique that it would send up red flags a few counties over. Especially if he's careful about it."
"Careful enough not to sell everything at once or near to where he stole it, but not careful enough to avoid leaving fingerprints anywhere?" Barnaby asked, his eyebrows rising.
"He could have taken a lot of other things-more expensive-"
"He's getting the best times for caution confused."
Troy released a breath in a slow hiss. Why did he even bother sharing his ideas? "Didn't you say I shouldn't try to understand them, sir?"
"Indeed, I did." Barnaby ran a hand over his face, still peering at the list on his desk. "Coming and going like that will put up its own red flags, Troy."
"Maybe he has a legitimate reason for it," Troy said. Returning his marker pen to the tidy pile in front of him, he took a Biro, writing Why? at the top of his wrinkled list. "A job or something like that."
"It's an interesting possibility."
Troy did not attempt to conceal the smile growing on his face. "Thank you-"
"Any idea how you'll prove it?" Barnaby asked, and Troy's smile vanished. "And, really-how careful do you think he would be if he's been fool enough to leave his fingerprints at all?"
Troy scratched the word on the paper again. "But you just said he's no criminal master-"
"He isn't," Barnaby said, shaking his head. "So why would he be so cautious in the aftermath?"
"I don't know, sir," Troy said, his pen nearly breaking through the paper as he wrote Why? a third time.
"That's another question you have to answer before you go any further." Barnaby lifted his coffee mug, scowling as he did. Bully for you, Troy thought. "People are either cautious or careless," Barnaby continued. "They tend not to be a mixture of both. I trust you understand that from personal experience."
God, he's not going to let it alone, Troy thought, capping his pen and returning it to the pile as well. "Some," he said quietly.
Barnaby picked up his reading glasses, setting them on his nose as he brought the report he was reading closer. "More than just some, I dare say."
The chief inspector was right, though Troy swallowed an angry sigh at the realization. His mind was hardly his own at times, like something was pulling it apart, driving him into happy madness. When he spent even a few minutes with Cully, he more than forgot himself. The world itself was in flux, forgetting what should be and what was best. Laid out before them both, the future was in question as well, circling around from the past. There was a world with her in his life, a world without her, and one in which they wandered between those possibilities, uncertain of even the next day. And with each moment that caution and sense wavered before disappearing completely, Troy knew-feared?-that they were another step closer to hurtling down the path from the present confusion to a firm answer.
Even though Barnaby's desk was several feet from his, Troy did not lift his gaze from the tidy stacks of folders and papers and the neat pile of pens. If he looked up, he might not say anything at all. "Sir, about last-"
"Coffee, Troy." Now Troy's face rose to see Barnaby lifting his coffee mug, nodding at it. "If this is the state of your thoughts right now, you could probably do with some, too."
"I don't-"
Setting his mug down again, the chief inspector returned to his reports. "Black, no sugar."
"Sir-"
"No sugar," Barnaby said, turning to the next page.
Pushing back his chair and standing slowly, Troy let his protests remain silent even as a few vertebrae in his spine cracked. "Yes, sir."
* "Judgment Day", S03E03