How We Smashed Johari's Window (part six), by halotolerant Brown Cortina, Gene/Sam
Title: How We Smashed Johari's Window (part six - chapter 11) Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five
Rating: Brown Cortina overall
Pairing: Gene/Sam
Words: ~4000 (this part)
Notes: Thank you to everyone who's been feeding back as this goes along, and those who've let me know they'll read when tis done - it all makes me happy! We're getting near the end at last, hope there hasn't been too much flist spammage, I've tried to post at the right kind of intervals...
A Johari window is a psychological tool that divides personality into: things we know and others know about us; things we know and others don't; things others know about us but we don't and; things we and others do not know about ourselves.
Summary (this part): Sam gives his version of events in Hyde, but can Gene really believe him?
In the end, and feeling every inch the bastard doing it, Gene had repeated to Annie everything that the agent had said.
He’d been unsure whether it was kinder to her to tell the truth or not to tell the truth, and been equally unsure whether being kind was something he could do or that she wanted.
In the end he’d been too tired to fabricate another layer of lies, and too sick of second-guessing his own tongue.
She was sitting, now, in Chris’ chair, staring at the floor ahead of her and swinging gently from side to side. Gene was back at her desk, smoking the last cigarette in his packet and making it last. He watched the white smoke ascend to the ceiling, thinking of his teacher quoting at her class:
‘Mankind is born to wickedness, as surely as smoke moves upwards’
Today, in all honesty, he wouldn’t now be surprised if the smoke had drifted away towards the floor. Nothing was certain any more.
Chris and Ray he’d sent with the CI5 men, mostly so that they wouldn’t have to hear the story from him, or more accurately so that he wouldn’t have to tell them. Everyone else had an unexpected afternoon off.
The fewer people knew about all this, the better.
The captain of a sinking ship still has to be a bloody captain.
“Would you like some tea, Sir?” Annie asked, half-heartedly.
“No, thank you Cartwright.” He took one last drag at the butt and pushed it into the edge of her metal inbox, then turned to look at her.
“You do know that this isn’t cut and dried?” he said, trying to read her expression. “I mean, those men in Sam’s flat - we don’t know who they were. I was so sure they were to do with this Bodie and his lot, but he’s assured me that’s not so. And Sam attacked them. Sam saved me, which there can’t possibly be any purpose to if he’s a cold blooded killer. And I swear, Annie, when I first went to Hyde he didn’t know who I was.”
She gazed at him for a moment, then sighed and rolled the chair across the floor to sweep the ash he’d left on her desk onto a piece of paper, pouring it subsequently into the waste bin.
“I think he was a lot of things” she said softly, “But he wasn’t a bad man. He thought he was, sometimes, but only because he tried to be everything to everyone, and he couldn’t. That’s no crime.”
With a harsh trill, the phone in Gene’s office rang. He sprinted to it, spoke briefly, and then walked far more slowly back to Annie’s side.
“Well, it’s not good.” He folded his arms. “Apparently those men yesterday did a thorough job. There’s not a trace of anything wrong in that flat - they say it still looks awful and as though it hasn’t see the business end of a broom in a while, but no holes, no graffiti, it’s all gone. And the neighbour has gone all ‘see no evil’ and won’t talk to them.” Sitting on the chair again, Gene ran a hand distractedly through his hair. “And that was the best chance we had of any kind of evidence that... that Sam at least wasn’t in control of himself.”
He would be, could be, objective. He could be a policeman. After everything he’d lost or altered to get here, he could bloody well do his bloody job.
Annie didn’t answer for a while, drumming her fingers on Chris’ desk.
“Sir” she said eventually, in a low voice, “We could always…that is, my mother has her Diphenhydramine. I could break some window glass.” She looked at him, wide eyed and still so innocent. “We could say we took it from the flat when we were there, for testing.”
Gene regarded her over steepled hands. “Do you trust him that much?”
“Yes. Yes I do. He’s saved my life, and yours, Sir.”
She held his gaze.
“What you want to say to me” Gene told her calmly, with something falling together in his brain even as he spoke, “is that I’ve planted evidence before now, haven’t I? You want to ask me, WDC, if I can’t decide guilt and innocence for myself one more time. You want to ask if I won’t do this one thing for Sam.”
Still she didn’t move, didn’t blink. Looked directly at him, not breathing even.
“But you see, Annie, Sam hated that. Our Sam. Whoever he… The man we knew. The only time he was ever proud of us, of our team, was when we did things right. And that wouldn’t be right.”
He could see tears forming in her eyes, but she didn’t make a sound.
“If we only have one part of Sam left” Gene continued, spelling it out for her because it felt important that she understood, that he turned her right now away from any example he’d given before, “If we only have one way to remember him, let it be that I did the right thing, just once.”
Something was twisting in his chest, scratching the back of his eyes, and telling him he hadn’t slept well, telling him hadn’t slept well in a month, telling him he wasn’t eating properly, telling him he was deficient, missing, lacking, mourning.
Annie opened her mouth to breathe. He saw her chest rise and fall heavily, and she bit the inside of her lip.
“Guv, look behind you.”
Jumping, Gene spun in his chair.
There was a dark shadow in the doorway, leaning against the wall.
Sam.
Sam, who stood up straight and coughed, then, and said “Annie…” with a low tender recognition. “Annie. How are you?”
She ran to him, because to her - Gene thought - that was that easy.
Sam looked over her shoulder even as he hugged her tightly. He looked over her shoulder with such an expression - haunted, hunted, horrified - and Gene felt something in his stomach like how it must feel to leap from an aeroplane, or maybe to be in a lift when the cable breaks.
“Sam…” somebody said.
There was no reply, Sam’s mouth was grimaced, almost like he was crying, but his eyes were dry and feverish with life and pain, and just…Sam.
It was Sam.
The real, fake, imaginary and proper man, in the flesh.
And you see people, sometimes, in an airport or a train station, who are just running at each other, just desperate to grab hold of someone and say ‘You’re back, you’re here, you’re real again’ with every sinew they have and every breath they draw in of that person’s scent, with every handful they can grasp and every piece of skin they can contact.
That’s a fucking dangerous feeling, Gene knew that well enough.
He sat back in his chair because if he was seated he couldn’t…
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms and just stared as Sam said “I’m so sorry, Gene” and moved Annie’s arms from round himself. “I’m so…Oh Gene.”
“What for, Sammy boy?” Gene replied, in a voice that aimed for light and sarcastic and fell short and broken well shy of that target.
“You don’t think I did it” Sam replied, wasting no time, some of the confidence, of the instinctual attitude that Gene had witnessed in the last few days creeping into his more familiar apologetic air. “If you thought I could do that, you’d be calling them right now; you’d be knocking me over. You wouldn’t…honour me.”
“Yes, well, you weren’t meant to hear that, were you?”
“I suppose not.” Sam looked round the mess of the floor. “They’re here then, I take it?”
“Round at yours, well, your old place, trying to rouse up evidence of what I was telling you about last night - the drugs and that. Bloody hell, Sam” he continued, taking a deep breath, “So you remember this now? And it’s you. I mean. It wasn’t you before.”
“It’s me” Sam confirmed, as if he actually had been able to understand what Gene had meant. His gaze flicked to Gene’s and then away again with a shiver Gene couldn’t comprehend.
Sam swallowed, throat moving, and then coughed. “If they’re not here” he said, purposefully, “Then I’ve got time to explain. I was afraid I wouldn’t.” Taking off his overcoat he threw it over the back of Ray’s chair, next to Gene’s. Then he looked at Gene again.
“Do you still trust me?” he asked.
Gene stood up abruptly, unsure what he meant to do.
“You said, remember?” Sam reiterated, with the kind of crazed assurance that was all too familiar in him. “When you were framed for murder? You said I had to trust you like you trusted me, and, well, do you still, Gene? I need to talk to you. We could use Lost and Found, like always, yes? Do you still trust me, Gene?”
Gene took Sam in, in that moment. From wind-blown hair to the shirt that only hours ago Gene had peeled off him, in the dark and hidden tangle of each other. The bare neck, glistening with the sweat of his run to the station and bereft of the St Christopher that Gene had managed to go a full year and resist asking about. The eyes, darting about, always seeming to see something he couldn’t.
Gene didn’t know why he felt Sam deserved the truth - maybe as payment for being all those things - but in any case Gene gave it:
“No. I don’t. I don’t trust you.”
Letting go of Sam’s hand, he got up by himself. “I don’t trust you any more, Sam. I don’t know you.” He spoke not loudly, but clear, staring Sam straight in the eye and watching the effect of his words. “I suppose never did.”
And then, because he was a self-confessed fool, he told the whole truth: “But I want to trust you. And I will.”
He looked away before he finished speaking, not wanting to know how Sam took it, not hearing if Sam said anything or if Annie called out after them as they strode from the room, because all could hear was the echo of himself a month and life ago, tempting fate.
(“Like you could hurt me.”)
- - -
Lost and Found was a misleading title. Things that resided there were never found, merely moved from place to place in their lost state. And so the room looked much as it always had, and that familiarity when everything else was in uproar grated enough to make Gene realise that no day in his life had ever been so tumultuous.
He got another packet of fags from his pocket and fumbled for a lighter.
Sam was standing amongst the lost things, the umbrellas, wallets, handbags, unpublished novels and false teeth, the unwanted, unused and unclaimed.
He could be dangerous, said Gene’s voice of reason. You have every reason to think he could kill you.
You don’t know anything about him. Other than what he did, what he was. Your gut instinct.
Your feelings.
Folding his arms across himself, Gene leant back on the shelves behind him. Lit the cigarette and waited.
“We could sit down.” Sam said, at length. He also seemed to feel the constraint of the room, the place of interrogation, where once boundaries between them and us, copper and not-copper, had been so fiercely delineated.
Gene didn’t move, only looked at him through narrowed eyes, and tapped off the end of his ash. “Just tell me, Sam. No bullshit.”
There was a rag-doll on the shelf by Sam’s head, and Sam reached it down before he spoke, seemingly to have something to twist about in his hands.
“’S’funny. After all this, I don’t know how to begin.”
The cigarette trembled so hard the ash spilt off, and Gene took a long angry drag at it before snapping out:
“Well, genius, what do you think is the most important?”
Sam looked at him then; a flash of pure, familiar, Sam, eyes raking at him like he wanted to see each thought in his mind. But his answer came quickly.
“I didn’t mean to leave you, after…in September. I just went out to buy us some breakfast. I meant it to be the best morning you’d ever had.”
In the silence that followed, Gene realised that he had started gripping the shelf behind, and so hard that it was hurting him, the sharp edge cutting into his fingers. He let go, taking great care over keeping his breathing steady.
He seemed to have dropped his cigarette, but he stamped on it, the slap of his sole on the floor echoing eerily, and brought out another, cupping his hand around it and over his eyes as he lit it, a moment of privacy before he could speak again.
His voice was almost toneless as he pushed on: “You still haven’t told me what happened.”
Sam’s mouth gaped at that, his fingers digging into the soft body of the doll, but when Gene raised his eyebrows in unspoken challenge, Sam only resumed speaking, staying over on the other side of the room.
“I wasn’t lying to you that day at the train shoot-out when I said I didn’t know why I came here. I didn’t have a clue. All I knew, from the moment I had that car crash and walked in the doors of this place, was what I found here.” Sam pointed at the ground in emphasis, his words clipped and precise in their sincerity. “I thought I knew who I was, but…what I thought, Oh god, Gene, what I thought…. Well, let’s just say it didn’t make any sense, so then I thought I was mad, and then Morgan - Victor, really, but I thought he was Morgan - convinced me I had amnesia. But, as you know, it wasn’t me at all, making me how I was.”
The doll was shaking in Sam’s hands, right to the ends of its trembling strands of hair.
Gene nodded, “You were being drugged.”
“More than drugged. Interrogated. Not by anyone I could see, but by my own mind, my own attempts to figure out what in the hell was going on.”
The hair was coming off the doll, as he fiddled with it. Ripping off and falling to the floor.
“The hilarious thing” Sam continued, a chuckle dry as dust under his voice, “Is that as it turns out, I did actually come from Hyde. Not originally - I’m from Bradford, actually, originally. But that’s not the point.” He sighed. “Point is, from December of 1972 I lived in Hyde. I had a job there.”
“So your friend tells me.”
Another strand of yarn hair fell, and Sam’s fingers moved, tugging at the doll’s unevenly stitched dress and button-eyed smile. “So you know I was spying on someone? DCI Morgan, in fact, the real one.” Sighing, Sam folded his arms around himself, the doll still clutched in one hand as if unnoticed as he continued.
“This man was - is - a traitor. He was selling police arms through a third party to terrorist groups, and creaming a good salary off the top. Of course, no one was questioning him because he was good old copper, an old boy, just like Harry Woolf.”
There - that smug rightness - that was Sam. “Leave Woolf out of this” Gene muttered, with quiet steel.
“Well, anyway by February we were really getting somewhere with the investigation. That was the problem.”
Gene cocked his head to one side as Sam looked up and continued.
“It turned out, you see, that this man wasn’t the only rotten apple in the barrel. Victor - my partner, for that job anyhow - he was actually Morgan’s handler. He’d been planning to fix the whole thing to get them both away scot-free, but when I showed up, it buggered the whole scheme. All the same, there was no evidence on Victor himself, he could have been fine and…and she could still be alive today.”
He paused, then spoke softly: “But she - Morgan’s daughter, this is, called Bethany - she went to say hello to Victor, recognised him from some cocktail party her parents had let her stay up for, years before, something she shouldn’t even have remembered.”
The doll was twisting over and over in his hand once more.
“I didn’t take in the significance. Not until we’d parted and he’d walked off in the same direction as her, and I’d sat in the surveillance booth a while with nothing but my thoughts and the bloody TV for company. And I reckon by the time I’d thought of it, even if I’d been able to bloody teleport like on Star Trek, even then it would’ve been too late. For her and for her mother.”
He was staring at a fixed point, just in front of his feet, seeing, as ever, something Gene could not.
“I arrived just as Victor was…finishing. Bethany had this long, long blond hair and they’d wear red, her and her Mum, and her Mum would dye her hair to match, and we thought it was so ridiculous, me and Vic, we’d sit taking those bloody surveillance photos and laugh about it. And there he was, my mate, and he’d…The things he’d… I gave her this nickname when we were doing the surveillance and we called her ‘Test Card Girl’ - you know? That kid on the BBC card? And there was Victor, standing over her, and he’s saying ‘where’s your fucking clown then?’”
The doll fell, limp, to the ground. “Every day, almost, I’ve seen her” Sam said softly and inexplicably. “I think she saved me. I know I had chemicals coming at me and all your bloody whiskey chasers on top of them, but I think when I saw her it was more than that, or I’d like to believe, or…” He raised a hand sharply to his eyes, “I’m sorry, I…this all came back to me so recently, with your TV, you know? And it’s hard to…”
Biting his lip, stiff with embarrassment, Gene waited for the next words.
Sam swallowed, gritted his teeth. “Victor had taken my gun to do it with. He’d said he’d clean it for me. It was my gun. And so I had nothing, I couldn’t do anything. Not that anything would have helped them then.”
That’s the second time you’ve said that, Gene thought - So you don’t believe it, or don’t want to.
He wanted to reach out. To say or do something not to comfort but to interrupt him and staunch the flow of recollection. Cease the intimacy of the moment before it became overwhelming. But he made himself grip the shelves again, made himself listen as Sam let it out.
“Victor didn’t see me. He’d taken them out of the back of Morgan’s house, you see, into this wilderness behind the gardens, and I was able to hide in the trees, out of sight. As soon as I was able to move, I ran back into the house. I was determined I’d find some evidence of what he’d been doing, something concrete that could make him rot in a cell until he died.” The vitriol in Sam’s voice burnt brighter than Gene had ever heard from him. “So I was in Morgan’s office, frantic, throwing paper about and that’s when I had a piece of luck, if you can call it that.
“See, Morgan showed up. It seemed that Victor had contacted him, told him they were going to meet face-to-face officially for the first time. I reckon Vic probably meant to kill him, part of covering his tracks. Anyhow, this guy had barely ever met Vic, and there I was, and I managed to answer his questions and before I knew it he was telling me all this stuff, these details and secrets and alluding to half a hundred others. And I wrote it down, all this stuff, incriminating as hell.”
Gene straightened up, brightening, the inner policeman gratified. “So where is it then? Because if we find that they’ll see you’re innocent at once.”
“Unfortunately, that’s when it all gets a little…fuzzy.” He looked apologetically at Gene. “I only remembered all this a couple of hours ago you know, watching your TV, seeing her…” He shook, suddenly, as if feeling a chill.
“Yes, you mentioned” Gene felt a twinge of worry. He’d heard of people who came off drugs with weird memory problems, personality changes.
Known a few and all.
“You see” Sam continued, rubbing his arms, “It was just then, just after I’d written it down, that Victor found us. He tried to beat up Morgan, I tried to stop him and in the end Morgan got away and I didn’t.” He pushed himself forward off the shelving, then, and stood a moment with a hand in his hair before shrugging and pulling a chair from under the interview table. He sat down, then looked to Gene, who found himself moving to sit next to him, if only because to sit opposite would seem like an interrogation.
They didn’t look at each other, or at least, Gene imagined that Sam was avoiding looking at him as well. He stared at the wall in front of them, imagining.
“He tortured you.” Gene said, not as a question.
“Of course.”
“And you didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.”
“I don’t remember any of the details. Lights. Noises. The feeling of… I don’t remember anything pertinent.” Sam ran a hand over his face, “But I hardly imagine he set me up with all his ex-KGB interrogating techniques and the expense and trouble of a false identity for the sheer fun of watching me freak out at that fucking cheap television.”
Gene wanted to place an arm round him, which was unthinkable, and so he pressed still deeper instead. “And the undercover job? The plot to bring down A-Division?”
“I don’t know. That may exist in someone’s approved projects somewhere, or that may just have been part of the lies to me. I ask you Gene, you weren’t exactly going to ring up Scotland Yard and say ‘Sorry, but are you actually trying to get evidence of my incompetence or is that just some mind-game a sadist’s playing with my DI’s mind?’ were you?”
Gene leant back on his back chair legs in precisely the way his school teacher had always told him not to. “So, this whole year gone, you’ve been… They had receivers in your flat, they were, what? Waiting for you to tell the monsters in the walls all the information you’d heard?”
“You’ve no idea how effective I’m afraid it may have been.” Sam said quietly.
“So why the hell did they move you? If they were onto a good thing? If you were… happy?”
Were you happy?
“I was coming to be” Sam murmured as if he heard Gene’s thoughts, looking at the table. “And I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out the whole way here. Do you have the files on Frank Hagwood’s case anywhere? That might trigger something.”
The warmth that had been building in Gene’s chest was doused with the immediacy of iced water.
He let the chair legs slam back down.
“Sam” he said, and breathed. “Sam. I haven’t told you about Frank Hagwood’s files. I haven’t told you that’s he’s connected to this at all.”
“Sam” he said again. It hurt.
Sam was looking blankly at him, as if he didn’t even realise his fatal mistake.
The door of Lost and Found swung open. Bodie was standing there, men in tow.
Gene didn’t even flinch. He was staring at Sam, thinking, trying, hoping…
“I thought that plan would work” Bodie said, dryly. “Leave you alone, let you make a mess of it, let him risk getting what he needed from you. And here he is, Hunt, leading you up the garden path again. Bloody prolific story-teller, aren’t you Sammy? And you, Hunt, no fool like an old fool I suppose.”
And that was when Sam launched out and attacked him.
Part Seven
Rating: Brown Cortina overall
Pairing: Gene/Sam
Words: ~4000 (this part)
Notes: Thank you to everyone who's been feeding back as this goes along, and those who've let me know they'll read when tis done - it all makes me happy! We're getting near the end at last, hope there hasn't been too much flist spammage, I've tried to post at the right kind of intervals...
A Johari window is a psychological tool that divides personality into: things we know and others know about us; things we know and others don't; things others know about us but we don't and; things we and others do not know about ourselves.
Summary (this part): Sam gives his version of events in Hyde, but can Gene really believe him?
In the end, and feeling every inch the bastard doing it, Gene had repeated to Annie everything that the agent had said.
He’d been unsure whether it was kinder to her to tell the truth or not to tell the truth, and been equally unsure whether being kind was something he could do or that she wanted.
In the end he’d been too tired to fabricate another layer of lies, and too sick of second-guessing his own tongue.
She was sitting, now, in Chris’ chair, staring at the floor ahead of her and swinging gently from side to side. Gene was back at her desk, smoking the last cigarette in his packet and making it last. He watched the white smoke ascend to the ceiling, thinking of his teacher quoting at her class:
‘Mankind is born to wickedness, as surely as smoke moves upwards’
Today, in all honesty, he wouldn’t now be surprised if the smoke had drifted away towards the floor. Nothing was certain any more.
Chris and Ray he’d sent with the CI5 men, mostly so that they wouldn’t have to hear the story from him, or more accurately so that he wouldn’t have to tell them. Everyone else had an unexpected afternoon off.
The fewer people knew about all this, the better.
The captain of a sinking ship still has to be a bloody captain.
“Would you like some tea, Sir?” Annie asked, half-heartedly.
“No, thank you Cartwright.” He took one last drag at the butt and pushed it into the edge of her metal inbox, then turned to look at her.
“You do know that this isn’t cut and dried?” he said, trying to read her expression. “I mean, those men in Sam’s flat - we don’t know who they were. I was so sure they were to do with this Bodie and his lot, but he’s assured me that’s not so. And Sam attacked them. Sam saved me, which there can’t possibly be any purpose to if he’s a cold blooded killer. And I swear, Annie, when I first went to Hyde he didn’t know who I was.”
She gazed at him for a moment, then sighed and rolled the chair across the floor to sweep the ash he’d left on her desk onto a piece of paper, pouring it subsequently into the waste bin.
“I think he was a lot of things” she said softly, “But he wasn’t a bad man. He thought he was, sometimes, but only because he tried to be everything to everyone, and he couldn’t. That’s no crime.”
With a harsh trill, the phone in Gene’s office rang. He sprinted to it, spoke briefly, and then walked far more slowly back to Annie’s side.
“Well, it’s not good.” He folded his arms. “Apparently those men yesterday did a thorough job. There’s not a trace of anything wrong in that flat - they say it still looks awful and as though it hasn’t see the business end of a broom in a while, but no holes, no graffiti, it’s all gone. And the neighbour has gone all ‘see no evil’ and won’t talk to them.” Sitting on the chair again, Gene ran a hand distractedly through his hair. “And that was the best chance we had of any kind of evidence that... that Sam at least wasn’t in control of himself.”
He would be, could be, objective. He could be a policeman. After everything he’d lost or altered to get here, he could bloody well do his bloody job.
Annie didn’t answer for a while, drumming her fingers on Chris’ desk.
“Sir” she said eventually, in a low voice, “We could always…that is, my mother has her Diphenhydramine. I could break some window glass.” She looked at him, wide eyed and still so innocent. “We could say we took it from the flat when we were there, for testing.”
Gene regarded her over steepled hands. “Do you trust him that much?”
“Yes. Yes I do. He’s saved my life, and yours, Sir.”
She held his gaze.
“What you want to say to me” Gene told her calmly, with something falling together in his brain even as he spoke, “is that I’ve planted evidence before now, haven’t I? You want to ask me, WDC, if I can’t decide guilt and innocence for myself one more time. You want to ask if I won’t do this one thing for Sam.”
Still she didn’t move, didn’t blink. Looked directly at him, not breathing even.
“But you see, Annie, Sam hated that. Our Sam. Whoever he… The man we knew. The only time he was ever proud of us, of our team, was when we did things right. And that wouldn’t be right.”
He could see tears forming in her eyes, but she didn’t make a sound.
“If we only have one part of Sam left” Gene continued, spelling it out for her because it felt important that she understood, that he turned her right now away from any example he’d given before, “If we only have one way to remember him, let it be that I did the right thing, just once.”
Something was twisting in his chest, scratching the back of his eyes, and telling him he hadn’t slept well, telling him hadn’t slept well in a month, telling him he wasn’t eating properly, telling him he was deficient, missing, lacking, mourning.
Annie opened her mouth to breathe. He saw her chest rise and fall heavily, and she bit the inside of her lip.
“Guv, look behind you.”
Jumping, Gene spun in his chair.
There was a dark shadow in the doorway, leaning against the wall.
Sam.
Sam, who stood up straight and coughed, then, and said “Annie…” with a low tender recognition. “Annie. How are you?”
She ran to him, because to her - Gene thought - that was that easy.
Sam looked over her shoulder even as he hugged her tightly. He looked over her shoulder with such an expression - haunted, hunted, horrified - and Gene felt something in his stomach like how it must feel to leap from an aeroplane, or maybe to be in a lift when the cable breaks.
“Sam…” somebody said.
There was no reply, Sam’s mouth was grimaced, almost like he was crying, but his eyes were dry and feverish with life and pain, and just…Sam.
It was Sam.
The real, fake, imaginary and proper man, in the flesh.
And you see people, sometimes, in an airport or a train station, who are just running at each other, just desperate to grab hold of someone and say ‘You’re back, you’re here, you’re real again’ with every sinew they have and every breath they draw in of that person’s scent, with every handful they can grasp and every piece of skin they can contact.
That’s a fucking dangerous feeling, Gene knew that well enough.
He sat back in his chair because if he was seated he couldn’t…
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms and just stared as Sam said “I’m so sorry, Gene” and moved Annie’s arms from round himself. “I’m so…Oh Gene.”
“What for, Sammy boy?” Gene replied, in a voice that aimed for light and sarcastic and fell short and broken well shy of that target.
“You don’t think I did it” Sam replied, wasting no time, some of the confidence, of the instinctual attitude that Gene had witnessed in the last few days creeping into his more familiar apologetic air. “If you thought I could do that, you’d be calling them right now; you’d be knocking me over. You wouldn’t…honour me.”
“Yes, well, you weren’t meant to hear that, were you?”
“I suppose not.” Sam looked round the mess of the floor. “They’re here then, I take it?”
“Round at yours, well, your old place, trying to rouse up evidence of what I was telling you about last night - the drugs and that. Bloody hell, Sam” he continued, taking a deep breath, “So you remember this now? And it’s you. I mean. It wasn’t you before.”
“It’s me” Sam confirmed, as if he actually had been able to understand what Gene had meant. His gaze flicked to Gene’s and then away again with a shiver Gene couldn’t comprehend.
Sam swallowed, throat moving, and then coughed. “If they’re not here” he said, purposefully, “Then I’ve got time to explain. I was afraid I wouldn’t.” Taking off his overcoat he threw it over the back of Ray’s chair, next to Gene’s. Then he looked at Gene again.
“Do you still trust me?” he asked.
Gene stood up abruptly, unsure what he meant to do.
“You said, remember?” Sam reiterated, with the kind of crazed assurance that was all too familiar in him. “When you were framed for murder? You said I had to trust you like you trusted me, and, well, do you still, Gene? I need to talk to you. We could use Lost and Found, like always, yes? Do you still trust me, Gene?”
Gene took Sam in, in that moment. From wind-blown hair to the shirt that only hours ago Gene had peeled off him, in the dark and hidden tangle of each other. The bare neck, glistening with the sweat of his run to the station and bereft of the St Christopher that Gene had managed to go a full year and resist asking about. The eyes, darting about, always seeming to see something he couldn’t.
Gene didn’t know why he felt Sam deserved the truth - maybe as payment for being all those things - but in any case Gene gave it:
“No. I don’t. I don’t trust you.”
Letting go of Sam’s hand, he got up by himself. “I don’t trust you any more, Sam. I don’t know you.” He spoke not loudly, but clear, staring Sam straight in the eye and watching the effect of his words. “I suppose never did.”
And then, because he was a self-confessed fool, he told the whole truth: “But I want to trust you. And I will.”
He looked away before he finished speaking, not wanting to know how Sam took it, not hearing if Sam said anything or if Annie called out after them as they strode from the room, because all could hear was the echo of himself a month and life ago, tempting fate.
(“Like you could hurt me.”)
- - -
Lost and Found was a misleading title. Things that resided there were never found, merely moved from place to place in their lost state. And so the room looked much as it always had, and that familiarity when everything else was in uproar grated enough to make Gene realise that no day in his life had ever been so tumultuous.
He got another packet of fags from his pocket and fumbled for a lighter.
Sam was standing amongst the lost things, the umbrellas, wallets, handbags, unpublished novels and false teeth, the unwanted, unused and unclaimed.
He could be dangerous, said Gene’s voice of reason. You have every reason to think he could kill you.
You don’t know anything about him. Other than what he did, what he was. Your gut instinct.
Your feelings.
Folding his arms across himself, Gene leant back on the shelves behind him. Lit the cigarette and waited.
“We could sit down.” Sam said, at length. He also seemed to feel the constraint of the room, the place of interrogation, where once boundaries between them and us, copper and not-copper, had been so fiercely delineated.
Gene didn’t move, only looked at him through narrowed eyes, and tapped off the end of his ash. “Just tell me, Sam. No bullshit.”
There was a rag-doll on the shelf by Sam’s head, and Sam reached it down before he spoke, seemingly to have something to twist about in his hands.
“’S’funny. After all this, I don’t know how to begin.”
The cigarette trembled so hard the ash spilt off, and Gene took a long angry drag at it before snapping out:
“Well, genius, what do you think is the most important?”
Sam looked at him then; a flash of pure, familiar, Sam, eyes raking at him like he wanted to see each thought in his mind. But his answer came quickly.
“I didn’t mean to leave you, after…in September. I just went out to buy us some breakfast. I meant it to be the best morning you’d ever had.”
In the silence that followed, Gene realised that he had started gripping the shelf behind, and so hard that it was hurting him, the sharp edge cutting into his fingers. He let go, taking great care over keeping his breathing steady.
He seemed to have dropped his cigarette, but he stamped on it, the slap of his sole on the floor echoing eerily, and brought out another, cupping his hand around it and over his eyes as he lit it, a moment of privacy before he could speak again.
His voice was almost toneless as he pushed on: “You still haven’t told me what happened.”
Sam’s mouth gaped at that, his fingers digging into the soft body of the doll, but when Gene raised his eyebrows in unspoken challenge, Sam only resumed speaking, staying over on the other side of the room.
“I wasn’t lying to you that day at the train shoot-out when I said I didn’t know why I came here. I didn’t have a clue. All I knew, from the moment I had that car crash and walked in the doors of this place, was what I found here.” Sam pointed at the ground in emphasis, his words clipped and precise in their sincerity. “I thought I knew who I was, but…what I thought, Oh god, Gene, what I thought…. Well, let’s just say it didn’t make any sense, so then I thought I was mad, and then Morgan - Victor, really, but I thought he was Morgan - convinced me I had amnesia. But, as you know, it wasn’t me at all, making me how I was.”
The doll was shaking in Sam’s hands, right to the ends of its trembling strands of hair.
Gene nodded, “You were being drugged.”
“More than drugged. Interrogated. Not by anyone I could see, but by my own mind, my own attempts to figure out what in the hell was going on.”
The hair was coming off the doll, as he fiddled with it. Ripping off and falling to the floor.
“The hilarious thing” Sam continued, a chuckle dry as dust under his voice, “Is that as it turns out, I did actually come from Hyde. Not originally - I’m from Bradford, actually, originally. But that’s not the point.” He sighed. “Point is, from December of 1972 I lived in Hyde. I had a job there.”
“So your friend tells me.”
Another strand of yarn hair fell, and Sam’s fingers moved, tugging at the doll’s unevenly stitched dress and button-eyed smile. “So you know I was spying on someone? DCI Morgan, in fact, the real one.” Sighing, Sam folded his arms around himself, the doll still clutched in one hand as if unnoticed as he continued.
“This man was - is - a traitor. He was selling police arms through a third party to terrorist groups, and creaming a good salary off the top. Of course, no one was questioning him because he was good old copper, an old boy, just like Harry Woolf.”
There - that smug rightness - that was Sam. “Leave Woolf out of this” Gene muttered, with quiet steel.
“Well, anyway by February we were really getting somewhere with the investigation. That was the problem.”
Gene cocked his head to one side as Sam looked up and continued.
“It turned out, you see, that this man wasn’t the only rotten apple in the barrel. Victor - my partner, for that job anyhow - he was actually Morgan’s handler. He’d been planning to fix the whole thing to get them both away scot-free, but when I showed up, it buggered the whole scheme. All the same, there was no evidence on Victor himself, he could have been fine and…and she could still be alive today.”
He paused, then spoke softly: “But she - Morgan’s daughter, this is, called Bethany - she went to say hello to Victor, recognised him from some cocktail party her parents had let her stay up for, years before, something she shouldn’t even have remembered.”
The doll was twisting over and over in his hand once more.
“I didn’t take in the significance. Not until we’d parted and he’d walked off in the same direction as her, and I’d sat in the surveillance booth a while with nothing but my thoughts and the bloody TV for company. And I reckon by the time I’d thought of it, even if I’d been able to bloody teleport like on Star Trek, even then it would’ve been too late. For her and for her mother.”
He was staring at a fixed point, just in front of his feet, seeing, as ever, something Gene could not.
“I arrived just as Victor was…finishing. Bethany had this long, long blond hair and they’d wear red, her and her Mum, and her Mum would dye her hair to match, and we thought it was so ridiculous, me and Vic, we’d sit taking those bloody surveillance photos and laugh about it. And there he was, my mate, and he’d…The things he’d… I gave her this nickname when we were doing the surveillance and we called her ‘Test Card Girl’ - you know? That kid on the BBC card? And there was Victor, standing over her, and he’s saying ‘where’s your fucking clown then?’”
The doll fell, limp, to the ground. “Every day, almost, I’ve seen her” Sam said softly and inexplicably. “I think she saved me. I know I had chemicals coming at me and all your bloody whiskey chasers on top of them, but I think when I saw her it was more than that, or I’d like to believe, or…” He raised a hand sharply to his eyes, “I’m sorry, I…this all came back to me so recently, with your TV, you know? And it’s hard to…”
Biting his lip, stiff with embarrassment, Gene waited for the next words.
Sam swallowed, gritted his teeth. “Victor had taken my gun to do it with. He’d said he’d clean it for me. It was my gun. And so I had nothing, I couldn’t do anything. Not that anything would have helped them then.”
That’s the second time you’ve said that, Gene thought - So you don’t believe it, or don’t want to.
He wanted to reach out. To say or do something not to comfort but to interrupt him and staunch the flow of recollection. Cease the intimacy of the moment before it became overwhelming. But he made himself grip the shelves again, made himself listen as Sam let it out.
“Victor didn’t see me. He’d taken them out of the back of Morgan’s house, you see, into this wilderness behind the gardens, and I was able to hide in the trees, out of sight. As soon as I was able to move, I ran back into the house. I was determined I’d find some evidence of what he’d been doing, something concrete that could make him rot in a cell until he died.” The vitriol in Sam’s voice burnt brighter than Gene had ever heard from him. “So I was in Morgan’s office, frantic, throwing paper about and that’s when I had a piece of luck, if you can call it that.
“See, Morgan showed up. It seemed that Victor had contacted him, told him they were going to meet face-to-face officially for the first time. I reckon Vic probably meant to kill him, part of covering his tracks. Anyhow, this guy had barely ever met Vic, and there I was, and I managed to answer his questions and before I knew it he was telling me all this stuff, these details and secrets and alluding to half a hundred others. And I wrote it down, all this stuff, incriminating as hell.”
Gene straightened up, brightening, the inner policeman gratified. “So where is it then? Because if we find that they’ll see you’re innocent at once.”
“Unfortunately, that’s when it all gets a little…fuzzy.” He looked apologetically at Gene. “I only remembered all this a couple of hours ago you know, watching your TV, seeing her…” He shook, suddenly, as if feeling a chill.
“Yes, you mentioned” Gene felt a twinge of worry. He’d heard of people who came off drugs with weird memory problems, personality changes.
Known a few and all.
“You see” Sam continued, rubbing his arms, “It was just then, just after I’d written it down, that Victor found us. He tried to beat up Morgan, I tried to stop him and in the end Morgan got away and I didn’t.” He pushed himself forward off the shelving, then, and stood a moment with a hand in his hair before shrugging and pulling a chair from under the interview table. He sat down, then looked to Gene, who found himself moving to sit next to him, if only because to sit opposite would seem like an interrogation.
They didn’t look at each other, or at least, Gene imagined that Sam was avoiding looking at him as well. He stared at the wall in front of them, imagining.
“He tortured you.” Gene said, not as a question.
“Of course.”
“And you didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.”
“I don’t remember any of the details. Lights. Noises. The feeling of… I don’t remember anything pertinent.” Sam ran a hand over his face, “But I hardly imagine he set me up with all his ex-KGB interrogating techniques and the expense and trouble of a false identity for the sheer fun of watching me freak out at that fucking cheap television.”
Gene wanted to place an arm round him, which was unthinkable, and so he pressed still deeper instead. “And the undercover job? The plot to bring down A-Division?”
“I don’t know. That may exist in someone’s approved projects somewhere, or that may just have been part of the lies to me. I ask you Gene, you weren’t exactly going to ring up Scotland Yard and say ‘Sorry, but are you actually trying to get evidence of my incompetence or is that just some mind-game a sadist’s playing with my DI’s mind?’ were you?”
Gene leant back on his back chair legs in precisely the way his school teacher had always told him not to. “So, this whole year gone, you’ve been… They had receivers in your flat, they were, what? Waiting for you to tell the monsters in the walls all the information you’d heard?”
“You’ve no idea how effective I’m afraid it may have been.” Sam said quietly.
“So why the hell did they move you? If they were onto a good thing? If you were… happy?”
Were you happy?
“I was coming to be” Sam murmured as if he heard Gene’s thoughts, looking at the table. “And I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out the whole way here. Do you have the files on Frank Hagwood’s case anywhere? That might trigger something.”
The warmth that had been building in Gene’s chest was doused with the immediacy of iced water.
He let the chair legs slam back down.
“Sam” he said, and breathed. “Sam. I haven’t told you about Frank Hagwood’s files. I haven’t told you that’s he’s connected to this at all.”
“Sam” he said again. It hurt.
Sam was looking blankly at him, as if he didn’t even realise his fatal mistake.
The door of Lost and Found swung open. Bodie was standing there, men in tow.
Gene didn’t even flinch. He was staring at Sam, thinking, trying, hoping…
“I thought that plan would work” Bodie said, dryly. “Leave you alone, let you make a mess of it, let him risk getting what he needed from you. And here he is, Hunt, leading you up the garden path again. Bloody prolific story-teller, aren’t you Sammy? And you, Hunt, no fool like an old fool I suppose.”
And that was when Sam launched out and attacked him.
Part Seven