Lewis Fic: Solace to the Soul
Pairing: James Hathaway/Robbie Lewis
Rating: Teen
Wordcount:11,151
Summary:
"The last thing he can remember of James is a Sir, a very insistent, rather panicked Sir, as the world went dark and then even a Robbie. And things must’ve been bad if James had finally resorted to his name."
Starts very early in canon and progresses through the years.
Notes: Written as a giftfic for wendymr. With many thanks to lindenharp for beta'ing and for all her help and advice.
Solace to the Soul.
Chapter I - Hands:
After a couple of years in a more forgiving climate, Robbie had forgotten how the English cold gets into every part of you. Until he finds himself crouched down beside Hathaway, this new lad who’s somewhat inexplicably attached himself to Robbie as his sergeant, in damply freezing pre-dawn greyness. Watching Laura Hobson, in a mercifully dry ditch below, do her work with the body of some poor sod.
Hathaway’s attention is not focused on the body.
Robbie turns his own head to query the angle of his gaze. “Your hands, sir.” And he becomes aware that in addition to the frigid air stiffening his fingers, his hands have taken on a rather reddish, mottled appearance. The harsh glare of the lights rigged up around the scene must make them look worse. He starts flexing his fingers to rid himself of the annoying distraction. There’s a job to do here. And Hathaway’s distracted Laura now too. She’s paused in her work to cast a glance up at them. Robbie sends a complicit, rather exasperated quirk of his eyebrows back at her. But she’s not looking at him. She’s gazing at Hathaway almost as if she’s properly considering him for the first time. And-“You should be wearing gloves,” comes Hathaway’s voice again.
He’s left them back in the car. He explains this, shortly, to Hathaway in his and-there’s-an-end-to-it-now-sergeant tone that doesn’t seem to really register with Hathaway sometimes-or else he chooses not to take it on board whenever it suits his purposes, Robbie’s not quite sure yet.
This appears to be one of those times, judging by the displeased set of Hathaway’s mouth. “No-one could possibly spend any length of time working outdoors on a night like this without wearing gloves-”
“Laura isn’t,” Robbie points out. A feeble argument, admittedly. “Well, not unless you’re counting those-”
“Laura can’t,” Laura says acerbically. “As you’re bloody well aware. Laura, however, is not of the school of martyrdom that requires other people to suffer alongside her.” She seems to have decided to take Hathaway’s side, oddly.
“I’m fine-”
“Here. While I get yours.” And Hathaway’s pulled his own leather gloves off and is holding them, still open, in front of Robbie. Robbie stares at him, taken aback. Hathaway looks back at him, quite open. It seems hard to muster an objection that can outweigh the expectancy of that gaze. Robbie finds himself sliding one hand into one of them and then the other. They’re long-fingered. It makes him think inconsequentially that Hathaway had said he plays guitar.
Through the patchy numbness that had set in he can feel the wool lining of the gloves, still warm from Hathaway’s hands. It’s unexpectedly intimate. Hathaway, satisfied, rises from his crouched position, turns on his heels above Robbie and retreats.
Laura looks up at Robbie again. She purses her lips slightly and then draws her eyebrows down and just sends him a look. There’s a lilt of delight in her expression.
“Stop that,” he tells her, distracted. He’s looking after Hathaway, who's striding back down the path towards the car, hands shoved down into the pockets of his long coat.
“And how’s your new sergeant working out?” Laura enquires gravely.
Chapter II - Walking Wounded.
Robbie’s not particularly sure how some of these rounds of polite wrangling even get started. Well-polite on Hathaway’s part. Technically. But it’s not like Robbie hasn’t started to work out how to interpret the array of looks that tend to accompany Hathaway’s deceptively mild words.
Working with Hathaway-it’s undeniably interesting. He keeps taking you by surprise, the odd mixture that he is. He sort of livens you up and brings an unexpected touch of humour to your days at the most unexpected moments. Keeps you on your toes. But this particular dispute is one that Robbie needs to win. Even if his current position-sitting in his own armchair, one foot elevated on a stack of cushions carefully arranged on the ottoman-is rather undermining his stance. Hathaway, after briefly providing a strong arm to assist Robbie into his flat, has patently failed to leave and dropped down on Robbie’s couch. The sheer undeniable fact of that injured ankle lying there between them seems to have triggered something in him, emboldening him.
“It’s a sprain, sergeant. Confirmed now. That’s all it is. I’m sure I can hobble around and cook me own dinner.”
“I’m sure you can,” Hathaway agrees. “Hobble around, that is. Even though you have been told to rest it,” he mutters to himself. “Cooking dinner though,” he continues, eyeing Robbie with a look that tells Robbie that he’s been sitting on this one for a while. “Well, that’s another matter. Isn’t it, sir?”
“I meant I’d take something that Sainsbury’s so kindly prepared for me earlier from the freezer and stick it in me microwave.”
“I know you did,” says Hathaway, with a sigh. “That’s what I meant. Seriously, sir, how do you live off those travesties?”
“An’ here was me going to invite you to stay and we could’ve had matching meals for one each.”
There’s a momentary flash of unexpected pleasure in his sergeant’s eyes. One minute he’s insulting the food on offer and the next he’s looking like he’s taken that joke as seriously as a formal dinner invitation and he’d actually like to-
“I think we can do better than that,” he resolves. “I’ll cook.”
He’ll do what? Well-he knows his way around the place. From being here in the mornings if he arrives early and makes coffee or a bit of toast when he’s waiting for Robbie. Or from the evenings when he appears on some case-related matter or other, opening a beer and comfortably collapsing on that couch for a bit-but cook? That’d be a shock to Robbie’s kitchen.
“Nothing there to cook with, Hathaway. Unless you mean beans on toast.”
Hathaway regards him askance.
“Be off with you now. Go on. I won’t starve. Can always get a takeaway delivered. You’re dismissed, sergeant. See you in the morning-”
“I can nip out and get ingredients,” Hathaway decides, his face clearing as he chooses to ignore his governor’s instructions entirely. He’s like a lanky cheerful limpet when he gets like this-impervious to Robbie’s rebuttals and moods. Deliberately so, too, Robbie’s figured out by now. But maybe sharing that thought with him might just offend him enough to get him to leave of his own accord-
“You’re like some sort of lanky limpet, you are-”
“Generally when people use a shellfish metaphor to describe me they prefer to go with clam,” Hathaway says, interested. Well-Robbie’s not about to dispute that. “But you do like to take the road less travelled, don’t you, sir?”
Robbie does? You couldn’t get much more normal than Robbie.
“I’m pretty sure that’s how CS Innocent would put it anyway-well, if she was looking to reference Frost. At the moment, I’ve heard she goes with unorthodox. Sometimes upping it to positively renegade. But that’s just on a bad day, sir,” Hathaway finishes in confiding tones.
“I’m not sure she’d say I give her that many good days.”
“I think she’s getting to like you-despite herself. And she definitely likes it when you solve cases. She just wishes you’d do it in more usual fashion. Ruffle less feathers in the process. Not undermine what she feels is proper procedure-it’s frustrating for her, that’s what I think.” He’s settling himself there on the couch, as he warms to his topic, making himself more comfortable. And Robbie suddenly feels an odd lack, sitting here in this chair.
He’d normally drop down on his couch beside Hathaway. Who has this contradictory way of being so unforthcoming and guarding his privacy that fiercely about some things, talking away but never revealing too much about anything too personal somehow, unreachable almost-and yet you suddenly find that he’s sharing your space with you quite comfortably. Robbie doesn’t object. Well, be hard to, wouldn’t it now? He tends to not really process that they are comfortably sitting that close to each other. Again. Until he starts to feel slightly more cheerful and becomes aware of the sensation of that accommodating warmth right against him.
“It’s when you blithely ignore her processes and in doing so get there by intuition.” Hathaway is still educating him. In his theories on Innocent’s mysterious inner workings. “It’s the combination really-your success rate seems to go up at the times when you’ve managed to ignore precisely what she’s said about proper procedure. And that’s got to be frustrating when she’s an excellent detective herself and she feels that just following her procedures-”
“She’s creative in her bureaucracy, I’ll give her that.”
“That’s an oxymoron…”
“Takes one to know one, sergeant.”
This time he’s thoroughly, instantly indignant. “Are you calling me a-”
“No, I’m sayin’ you’re a bloody contradiction in terms yourself. Contrary sod that you are.” Strangely, that seems to pacify him. Apparently you can insult his personality as long as you don’t cast aspersions on his intelligence. Must not be the first time he’s been called contrary. Well, Christ-how could it be? Which gives Robbie another idea-
“You can stay here tonight, if you like, then,” he suggests. “The better to keep an eye on me.” Giving in easily. That’ll get Hathaway feeling he’s won this round. And get him worried that he’ll be stuck here, kipping on his boss’s couch. He’s too dignified and carefully put together to spend a night on someone’s couch, isn’t he? Robbie eyes him, enjoying the thought of watching him back his way out of this one.
Hathaway’s face doesn’t move a muscle. You wouldn’t actually want to be trying to get information out of this one in an interrogation room. He’d make a bloody great spy.
“That’d be best, sir,” he agrees. “I can give you a hand in the morning with anything that needs to be done and then, if you’re still going in tomorrow, we can leave a bit early and stop off at mine for me to change. Shall I make tea?”
Make tea? Tea? That’s his response? Had he planned this all out already? It’s not actually the worst plan, technically but-did Robbie just walk into that one?
“Don’t you have better things to do with your time off?” Robbie tries, suddenly curious. “Places to go, people to see, medieval madrigals to-strum at?”
“Practice is tomorrow night,” James informs him.
What else does he do in his time off anyhow? Robbie tries to picture it. “Book to read?”
“Well-can’t actually get to sleep without reading, just a bit,” Hathaway confides. “But I’m sure you’ve something here that I’d find-” He stops. “Although-” And he runs to a halt again, casting a dubious look at Robbie’s shelves. His confidence, which Robbie rather suspects is more a cheerfully impervious front than anything else, seems to falter for the first time. It occurs to Robbie that he may really be doing this determinedly unruffled act since he doesn’t quite want to be sent away. The thought makes little sense but there it stays.
And, actually, there is reading material in the flat that’d run more to Hathaway’s taste. Books kept for reasons beyond their contents. Odd books and plays that Robbie had been handed unceremoniously by Morse, over the years, in an everyone-should-appreciate-these-Lewis sort of a way. Some of which quite took Robbie’s fancy and some of which were very-Morse. And then there are particular favourites of Val’s that, come to think of it, Hathaway would probably approve of. Then his sergeant’s face clears. “Ebook,” he says in relief. He means on his little device. “I don’t much like the idea of them but they’re great for emergencies.”
Only Hathaway would have an emergency book. Robbie’ll warrant that he doesn’t mean a manual for survival in the wilds either. It’s so entirely Hathaway that Robbie just gives up.
“Take my wallet.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.” And he’s up, shrugging back into his suit jacket and heading off. Robbie will have to make sure he pays him back later. Maybe in pints. But the door has barely closed behind his sergeant when his mobile starts up in his pocket and he shuffles awkwardly to get at it. Lyn had rung earlier when he was waiting at the clinic to be seen.
“Did they x-ray it, Dad?”
“Aye, pet, it’s just a bad sprain.”
“You’ll need to keep it elevated-”
“I am, stop fretting now. It’s fine. I won’t have to move.” I’ll barely be allowed to. “Me sergeant’s here. Well, he’s gone out to get something to cook with. He’s helping out-”
“He is?” And then Lyn is overcome with laughter.
“An’ what’s so funny?”
“Sorry, Dad. That’s great, honestly. It’s just suddenly hit me-it’s like you and Morse when he’d have you doing all sorts-” and she’s off again.
“I don’t have him doing all sorts,” Robbie says grudgingly, not exactly willing to admit to any parallels here yet.
“I must email Mark and tell him how you’ve got your very own sergeant-I should’ve guessed when the two of you were listening to music together-that’s just like you and Morse too, although you never had a choice in what music you got subjected to then, did you, Dad? He did get you into opera, eventually, I suppose. God, I don’t know whether it’s karma that you’ve earned your own sergeant or poetic justice-”
What is the lass on about? “Lyn, you know Hathaway’s been assigned to me for a while now. And you know full well I’ve had sergeants before him-”
“Not like this one. Not one who comes around and cooks. Mind you, that’s one thing you never did-you never cooked for Morse, did you? Well, not like you could cook for anyone, Dad. Does he cook, your sergeant?”
He wishes she’d stop saying your sergeant in that delighted tone of voice. Like Hathaway is some kind of fixture that’s slotting into Robbie’s life, filling different ill-defined roles like Robbie had maybe done a bit for Morse. Although for someone so reticent and not exactly social-and Robbie would have been surprised, really, if Hathaway had had some lively social event to attend tonight-well, he does seem to be quietly placing himself into Robbie’s life. He’s sort of just-there. When you turn around. Should be well annoying actually. Should be. It’s hard to make head or tail of in some ways-
“Remember how it used to drive Mum mad when Morse would have you called back in? Or he’d just call in the middle of things when you’d actually made it home at a decent hour, with some random-seeming thought or instruction? And she’d be gesturing madly at you that dinner was on the table…” Lyn’s voice trails off a bit. “She’d have hated to have you living off ready meals, wouldn’t she?” she starts again in a different tone. And then there’s a pause on the other end of the line now, far away in Manchester. “I’m glad you’ve got someone there, Dad. Glad you’ve got a sergeant.”
Chapter III - Impossibilities
They don’t get very far once they leave the courthouse and Simon Monkford behind. To the prospect of his incarceration. They get across the busy road all right. As Oxford, oblivious, goes on about its normal business. For a moment it seems that that’s what they can manage to do too, even in the face of this. That it’s done now, irrevocable, and he’s thanked Hathaway for coming with him and now they can just-But then Robbie hits a wall. He finds his steps slowing, his forward momentum fading, and he’s turning abruptly where there’s no turn to make, faced with a literal wall in the warm golden bricks of Oxford stone. He’s helpless to do anything that makes more sense, in the face of the reaction that’s risen up within him with breath-robbing suddenness.
There’s that hand on his arm again, closing on his elbow and not letting go this time. A different clasp than that brief reach at the top of the flight of stairs, a minute ago. Before they’d descended out into this overbright sunlight-“C’mon, sir. In here.”
When the world starts to assume solidity again, it’s dingy and shadowed. The windows in here are too low and not the cleanest and the wooden table is vaguely sticky under Robbie’s palm as he lowers himself into a chair. And maybe it’s the right sort of place to come to if you're going to seek alcohol at this hour when the pubs are barely open. Maybe it’s the right place to come to when you’ve just had the most forcible of reminders of how your comfortably pictured joint future had disappeared those years ago in one moment on Oxford Street. When one half of you was keeping the parts that made up all of everyday life going, in her own particular fashion, just shopping for Christmas, and the other half was working back here in Oxford on a case in St Matilda’s.
“If you want something harder, I’ll get it for you.” James, who must’ve left for a moment, is putting a pint glass down on the table. Unsure. It’s early enough that maybe he’s worried how much drinking it’ll lead to if he does hand Robbie something that’s more like what Robbie needs right now.
James has only got orange juice himself, incongruously bright in its glass in these surroundings, held in his hand as he hovers. Robbie’s own habitual drink as a sergeant. Back then. Before. Robbie should probably locate something to say about tonic water and spurious glamour. James in the Randolph just a short time ago. Make some joke about that.
James waits. “Do you want me to…”
Robbie angles his head at the seat opposite. It’s the only instruction he can come up with for now. It’s enough, though.
When you have a sergeant who can sense that there’s some need to put that much into following up on a petty conman, as you’ve now discovered that he did. Who knew somehow that he was close to something that they needed to find-and maybe that was just because he’d taken the sheer fact of your immoveable grief on board and never tries to shy away from it, never undermines it. When you have a sergeant who has internalised the injustice and the bloody wrongness of it all until he’d somehow found himself right in the place that Monkford’s sister had said the date when the world changed and James had just known, as instantly as Robbie would have himself. When you have a sergeant like that he’ll just sit when and where you need him to.
So you can just sit for a while yourself and not be required to take part in the fiction that the world outside is still turning unchangeably on its axis.
The traffic roars past, still jarringly loud through these inadequate windows. Passers-by continue to go about their business. This pub, which probably deserves to be deserted if the flatness of their beer is anything to go by, stays back apart from it all. He looks across at James, who had tried to get him to stop his desperate search at Oswald Cooper’s house with all those press clippings when there was no hope at all of finding this man. And who had then refused to leave him when Robbie couldn’t stop. And who’s now somehow found him anyway for Robbie.
There are certain undoubted truths that James, apparently devoting his full attention to watching the street, could offer here. Other folk will be offering them over the next while, after all. Sometimes it gets worse again before it gets better. It has to help in the long-term. At least they’ve got him now. All softly implying that Robbie can move on now. All undeniable. And wholly inadequate. All failing to do justice to the still-incredible fact of her death.
There had been a court reporter there today too. There’ll be another press cutting generated now. The neatly summarised facts of this. Or a more personal piece with a sympathetic tone. Tidying up the story of Robbie’s loss with this as its ending. More people with something to say about this. More people with their opinions.
James, gazing straight out the window, knows to say nothing at all.
Part Two (Chapters IV - VII)
Rating: Teen
Wordcount:11,151
Summary:
"The last thing he can remember of James is a Sir, a very insistent, rather panicked Sir, as the world went dark and then even a Robbie. And things must’ve been bad if James had finally resorted to his name."
Starts very early in canon and progresses through the years.
Notes: Written as a giftfic for wendymr. With many thanks to lindenharp for beta'ing and for all her help and advice.
Solace to the Soul.
Chapter I - Hands:
After a couple of years in a more forgiving climate, Robbie had forgotten how the English cold gets into every part of you. Until he finds himself crouched down beside Hathaway, this new lad who’s somewhat inexplicably attached himself to Robbie as his sergeant, in damply freezing pre-dawn greyness. Watching Laura Hobson, in a mercifully dry ditch below, do her work with the body of some poor sod.
Hathaway’s attention is not focused on the body.
Robbie turns his own head to query the angle of his gaze. “Your hands, sir.” And he becomes aware that in addition to the frigid air stiffening his fingers, his hands have taken on a rather reddish, mottled appearance. The harsh glare of the lights rigged up around the scene must make them look worse. He starts flexing his fingers to rid himself of the annoying distraction. There’s a job to do here. And Hathaway’s distracted Laura now too. She’s paused in her work to cast a glance up at them. Robbie sends a complicit, rather exasperated quirk of his eyebrows back at her. But she’s not looking at him. She’s gazing at Hathaway almost as if she’s properly considering him for the first time. And-“You should be wearing gloves,” comes Hathaway’s voice again.
He’s left them back in the car. He explains this, shortly, to Hathaway in his and-there’s-an-end-to-it-now-sergeant tone that doesn’t seem to really register with Hathaway sometimes-or else he chooses not to take it on board whenever it suits his purposes, Robbie’s not quite sure yet.
This appears to be one of those times, judging by the displeased set of Hathaway’s mouth. “No-one could possibly spend any length of time working outdoors on a night like this without wearing gloves-”
“Laura isn’t,” Robbie points out. A feeble argument, admittedly. “Well, not unless you’re counting those-”
“Laura can’t,” Laura says acerbically. “As you’re bloody well aware. Laura, however, is not of the school of martyrdom that requires other people to suffer alongside her.” She seems to have decided to take Hathaway’s side, oddly.
“I’m fine-”
“Here. While I get yours.” And Hathaway’s pulled his own leather gloves off and is holding them, still open, in front of Robbie. Robbie stares at him, taken aback. Hathaway looks back at him, quite open. It seems hard to muster an objection that can outweigh the expectancy of that gaze. Robbie finds himself sliding one hand into one of them and then the other. They’re long-fingered. It makes him think inconsequentially that Hathaway had said he plays guitar.
Through the patchy numbness that had set in he can feel the wool lining of the gloves, still warm from Hathaway’s hands. It’s unexpectedly intimate. Hathaway, satisfied, rises from his crouched position, turns on his heels above Robbie and retreats.
Laura looks up at Robbie again. She purses her lips slightly and then draws her eyebrows down and just sends him a look. There’s a lilt of delight in her expression.
“Stop that,” he tells her, distracted. He’s looking after Hathaway, who's striding back down the path towards the car, hands shoved down into the pockets of his long coat.
“And how’s your new sergeant working out?” Laura enquires gravely.
Chapter II - Walking Wounded.
Robbie’s not particularly sure how some of these rounds of polite wrangling even get started. Well-polite on Hathaway’s part. Technically. But it’s not like Robbie hasn’t started to work out how to interpret the array of looks that tend to accompany Hathaway’s deceptively mild words.
Working with Hathaway-it’s undeniably interesting. He keeps taking you by surprise, the odd mixture that he is. He sort of livens you up and brings an unexpected touch of humour to your days at the most unexpected moments. Keeps you on your toes. But this particular dispute is one that Robbie needs to win. Even if his current position-sitting in his own armchair, one foot elevated on a stack of cushions carefully arranged on the ottoman-is rather undermining his stance. Hathaway, after briefly providing a strong arm to assist Robbie into his flat, has patently failed to leave and dropped down on Robbie’s couch. The sheer undeniable fact of that injured ankle lying there between them seems to have triggered something in him, emboldening him.
“It’s a sprain, sergeant. Confirmed now. That’s all it is. I’m sure I can hobble around and cook me own dinner.”
“I’m sure you can,” Hathaway agrees. “Hobble around, that is. Even though you have been told to rest it,” he mutters to himself. “Cooking dinner though,” he continues, eyeing Robbie with a look that tells Robbie that he’s been sitting on this one for a while. “Well, that’s another matter. Isn’t it, sir?”
“I meant I’d take something that Sainsbury’s so kindly prepared for me earlier from the freezer and stick it in me microwave.”
“I know you did,” says Hathaway, with a sigh. “That’s what I meant. Seriously, sir, how do you live off those travesties?”
“An’ here was me going to invite you to stay and we could’ve had matching meals for one each.”
There’s a momentary flash of unexpected pleasure in his sergeant’s eyes. One minute he’s insulting the food on offer and the next he’s looking like he’s taken that joke as seriously as a formal dinner invitation and he’d actually like to-
“I think we can do better than that,” he resolves. “I’ll cook.”
He’ll do what? Well-he knows his way around the place. From being here in the mornings if he arrives early and makes coffee or a bit of toast when he’s waiting for Robbie. Or from the evenings when he appears on some case-related matter or other, opening a beer and comfortably collapsing on that couch for a bit-but cook? That’d be a shock to Robbie’s kitchen.
“Nothing there to cook with, Hathaway. Unless you mean beans on toast.”
Hathaway regards him askance.
“Be off with you now. Go on. I won’t starve. Can always get a takeaway delivered. You’re dismissed, sergeant. See you in the morning-”
“I can nip out and get ingredients,” Hathaway decides, his face clearing as he chooses to ignore his governor’s instructions entirely. He’s like a lanky cheerful limpet when he gets like this-impervious to Robbie’s rebuttals and moods. Deliberately so, too, Robbie’s figured out by now. But maybe sharing that thought with him might just offend him enough to get him to leave of his own accord-
“You’re like some sort of lanky limpet, you are-”
“Generally when people use a shellfish metaphor to describe me they prefer to go with clam,” Hathaway says, interested. Well-Robbie’s not about to dispute that. “But you do like to take the road less travelled, don’t you, sir?”
Robbie does? You couldn’t get much more normal than Robbie.
“I’m pretty sure that’s how CS Innocent would put it anyway-well, if she was looking to reference Frost. At the moment, I’ve heard she goes with unorthodox. Sometimes upping it to positively renegade. But that’s just on a bad day, sir,” Hathaway finishes in confiding tones.
“I’m not sure she’d say I give her that many good days.”
“I think she’s getting to like you-despite herself. And she definitely likes it when you solve cases. She just wishes you’d do it in more usual fashion. Ruffle less feathers in the process. Not undermine what she feels is proper procedure-it’s frustrating for her, that’s what I think.” He’s settling himself there on the couch, as he warms to his topic, making himself more comfortable. And Robbie suddenly feels an odd lack, sitting here in this chair.
He’d normally drop down on his couch beside Hathaway. Who has this contradictory way of being so unforthcoming and guarding his privacy that fiercely about some things, talking away but never revealing too much about anything too personal somehow, unreachable almost-and yet you suddenly find that he’s sharing your space with you quite comfortably. Robbie doesn’t object. Well, be hard to, wouldn’t it now? He tends to not really process that they are comfortably sitting that close to each other. Again. Until he starts to feel slightly more cheerful and becomes aware of the sensation of that accommodating warmth right against him.
“It’s when you blithely ignore her processes and in doing so get there by intuition.” Hathaway is still educating him. In his theories on Innocent’s mysterious inner workings. “It’s the combination really-your success rate seems to go up at the times when you’ve managed to ignore precisely what she’s said about proper procedure. And that’s got to be frustrating when she’s an excellent detective herself and she feels that just following her procedures-”
“She’s creative in her bureaucracy, I’ll give her that.”
“That’s an oxymoron…”
“Takes one to know one, sergeant.”
This time he’s thoroughly, instantly indignant. “Are you calling me a-”
“No, I’m sayin’ you’re a bloody contradiction in terms yourself. Contrary sod that you are.” Strangely, that seems to pacify him. Apparently you can insult his personality as long as you don’t cast aspersions on his intelligence. Must not be the first time he’s been called contrary. Well, Christ-how could it be? Which gives Robbie another idea-
“You can stay here tonight, if you like, then,” he suggests. “The better to keep an eye on me.” Giving in easily. That’ll get Hathaway feeling he’s won this round. And get him worried that he’ll be stuck here, kipping on his boss’s couch. He’s too dignified and carefully put together to spend a night on someone’s couch, isn’t he? Robbie eyes him, enjoying the thought of watching him back his way out of this one.
Hathaway’s face doesn’t move a muscle. You wouldn’t actually want to be trying to get information out of this one in an interrogation room. He’d make a bloody great spy.
“That’d be best, sir,” he agrees. “I can give you a hand in the morning with anything that needs to be done and then, if you’re still going in tomorrow, we can leave a bit early and stop off at mine for me to change. Shall I make tea?”
Make tea? Tea? That’s his response? Had he planned this all out already? It’s not actually the worst plan, technically but-did Robbie just walk into that one?
“Don’t you have better things to do with your time off?” Robbie tries, suddenly curious. “Places to go, people to see, medieval madrigals to-strum at?”
“Practice is tomorrow night,” James informs him.
What else does he do in his time off anyhow? Robbie tries to picture it. “Book to read?”
“Well-can’t actually get to sleep without reading, just a bit,” Hathaway confides. “But I’m sure you’ve something here that I’d find-” He stops. “Although-” And he runs to a halt again, casting a dubious look at Robbie’s shelves. His confidence, which Robbie rather suspects is more a cheerfully impervious front than anything else, seems to falter for the first time. It occurs to Robbie that he may really be doing this determinedly unruffled act since he doesn’t quite want to be sent away. The thought makes little sense but there it stays.
And, actually, there is reading material in the flat that’d run more to Hathaway’s taste. Books kept for reasons beyond their contents. Odd books and plays that Robbie had been handed unceremoniously by Morse, over the years, in an everyone-should-appreciate-these-Lewis sort of a way. Some of which quite took Robbie’s fancy and some of which were very-Morse. And then there are particular favourites of Val’s that, come to think of it, Hathaway would probably approve of. Then his sergeant’s face clears. “Ebook,” he says in relief. He means on his little device. “I don’t much like the idea of them but they’re great for emergencies.”
Only Hathaway would have an emergency book. Robbie’ll warrant that he doesn’t mean a manual for survival in the wilds either. It’s so entirely Hathaway that Robbie just gives up.
“Take my wallet.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.” And he’s up, shrugging back into his suit jacket and heading off. Robbie will have to make sure he pays him back later. Maybe in pints. But the door has barely closed behind his sergeant when his mobile starts up in his pocket and he shuffles awkwardly to get at it. Lyn had rung earlier when he was waiting at the clinic to be seen.
“Did they x-ray it, Dad?”
“Aye, pet, it’s just a bad sprain.”
“You’ll need to keep it elevated-”
“I am, stop fretting now. It’s fine. I won’t have to move.” I’ll barely be allowed to. “Me sergeant’s here. Well, he’s gone out to get something to cook with. He’s helping out-”
“He is?” And then Lyn is overcome with laughter.
“An’ what’s so funny?”
“Sorry, Dad. That’s great, honestly. It’s just suddenly hit me-it’s like you and Morse when he’d have you doing all sorts-” and she’s off again.
“I don’t have him doing all sorts,” Robbie says grudgingly, not exactly willing to admit to any parallels here yet.
“I must email Mark and tell him how you’ve got your very own sergeant-I should’ve guessed when the two of you were listening to music together-that’s just like you and Morse too, although you never had a choice in what music you got subjected to then, did you, Dad? He did get you into opera, eventually, I suppose. God, I don’t know whether it’s karma that you’ve earned your own sergeant or poetic justice-”
What is the lass on about? “Lyn, you know Hathaway’s been assigned to me for a while now. And you know full well I’ve had sergeants before him-”
“Not like this one. Not one who comes around and cooks. Mind you, that’s one thing you never did-you never cooked for Morse, did you? Well, not like you could cook for anyone, Dad. Does he cook, your sergeant?”
He wishes she’d stop saying your sergeant in that delighted tone of voice. Like Hathaway is some kind of fixture that’s slotting into Robbie’s life, filling different ill-defined roles like Robbie had maybe done a bit for Morse. Although for someone so reticent and not exactly social-and Robbie would have been surprised, really, if Hathaway had had some lively social event to attend tonight-well, he does seem to be quietly placing himself into Robbie’s life. He’s sort of just-there. When you turn around. Should be well annoying actually. Should be. It’s hard to make head or tail of in some ways-
“Remember how it used to drive Mum mad when Morse would have you called back in? Or he’d just call in the middle of things when you’d actually made it home at a decent hour, with some random-seeming thought or instruction? And she’d be gesturing madly at you that dinner was on the table…” Lyn’s voice trails off a bit. “She’d have hated to have you living off ready meals, wouldn’t she?” she starts again in a different tone. And then there’s a pause on the other end of the line now, far away in Manchester. “I’m glad you’ve got someone there, Dad. Glad you’ve got a sergeant.”
Chapter III - Impossibilities
They don’t get very far once they leave the courthouse and Simon Monkford behind. To the prospect of his incarceration. They get across the busy road all right. As Oxford, oblivious, goes on about its normal business. For a moment it seems that that’s what they can manage to do too, even in the face of this. That it’s done now, irrevocable, and he’s thanked Hathaway for coming with him and now they can just-But then Robbie hits a wall. He finds his steps slowing, his forward momentum fading, and he’s turning abruptly where there’s no turn to make, faced with a literal wall in the warm golden bricks of Oxford stone. He’s helpless to do anything that makes more sense, in the face of the reaction that’s risen up within him with breath-robbing suddenness.
There’s that hand on his arm again, closing on his elbow and not letting go this time. A different clasp than that brief reach at the top of the flight of stairs, a minute ago. Before they’d descended out into this overbright sunlight-“C’mon, sir. In here.”
When the world starts to assume solidity again, it’s dingy and shadowed. The windows in here are too low and not the cleanest and the wooden table is vaguely sticky under Robbie’s palm as he lowers himself into a chair. And maybe it’s the right sort of place to come to if you're going to seek alcohol at this hour when the pubs are barely open. Maybe it’s the right place to come to when you’ve just had the most forcible of reminders of how your comfortably pictured joint future had disappeared those years ago in one moment on Oxford Street. When one half of you was keeping the parts that made up all of everyday life going, in her own particular fashion, just shopping for Christmas, and the other half was working back here in Oxford on a case in St Matilda’s.
“If you want something harder, I’ll get it for you.” James, who must’ve left for a moment, is putting a pint glass down on the table. Unsure. It’s early enough that maybe he’s worried how much drinking it’ll lead to if he does hand Robbie something that’s more like what Robbie needs right now.
James has only got orange juice himself, incongruously bright in its glass in these surroundings, held in his hand as he hovers. Robbie’s own habitual drink as a sergeant. Back then. Before. Robbie should probably locate something to say about tonic water and spurious glamour. James in the Randolph just a short time ago. Make some joke about that.
James waits. “Do you want me to…”
Robbie angles his head at the seat opposite. It’s the only instruction he can come up with for now. It’s enough, though.
When you have a sergeant who can sense that there’s some need to put that much into following up on a petty conman, as you’ve now discovered that he did. Who knew somehow that he was close to something that they needed to find-and maybe that was just because he’d taken the sheer fact of your immoveable grief on board and never tries to shy away from it, never undermines it. When you have a sergeant who has internalised the injustice and the bloody wrongness of it all until he’d somehow found himself right in the place that Monkford’s sister had said the date when the world changed and James had just known, as instantly as Robbie would have himself. When you have a sergeant like that he’ll just sit when and where you need him to.
So you can just sit for a while yourself and not be required to take part in the fiction that the world outside is still turning unchangeably on its axis.
The traffic roars past, still jarringly loud through these inadequate windows. Passers-by continue to go about their business. This pub, which probably deserves to be deserted if the flatness of their beer is anything to go by, stays back apart from it all. He looks across at James, who had tried to get him to stop his desperate search at Oswald Cooper’s house with all those press clippings when there was no hope at all of finding this man. And who had then refused to leave him when Robbie couldn’t stop. And who’s now somehow found him anyway for Robbie.
There are certain undoubted truths that James, apparently devoting his full attention to watching the street, could offer here. Other folk will be offering them over the next while, after all. Sometimes it gets worse again before it gets better. It has to help in the long-term. At least they’ve got him now. All softly implying that Robbie can move on now. All undeniable. And wholly inadequate. All failing to do justice to the still-incredible fact of her death.
There had been a court reporter there today too. There’ll be another press cutting generated now. The neatly summarised facts of this. Or a more personal piece with a sympathetic tone. Tidying up the story of Robbie’s loss with this as its ending. More people with something to say about this. More people with their opinions.
James, gazing straight out the window, knows to say nothing at all.
Part Two (Chapters IV - VII)