How We Smashed Johari's Window (part seven) by halotolerant, Brown Cortina, Gene/Sam
Title: How We Smashed Johari's Window (part seven - chapter 12) Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six
Rating: Brown Cortina (overall)
Pairing: Gene/Sam
Words: ~2,000 (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): In which Gene reaches some conclusions
Chapter Twelve
Gene had never seen Sam be so violent.
“You don’t!” Sam was yelling, scrabbling with the CI5 men, still kicking out though weighed down and threatened with more than one revolver. “You don’t come in here, talking like that to him! He saved my fucking life, Bodie! He saved my fucking everything!”
With a shouted curse, Bodie fought his way on top of him and finally, assisted by his henchmen, pinned Sam down.
“That doesn’t endear him to me much, you sick bastard” Bodie hissed. “If he’d been less busy bloody ‘saving you’ maybe he’d have noticed the mess you dragged behind you, but oh no, he had important meetings with Jack Daniels.”
With a roar, Sam tried to struggle up again, and received a stomach punch so vicious that Gene found himself wincing in sympathy, and this startled him from his reverie.
Crashing the chair back, Gene stood up.
And, whatever Bodie might have said earlier about washed-up, ineffectual fools, Gene had enough sheer presence then and there that all the scrambling men on the other side of the room turned and looked at him, all silenced for him to speak.
“Wait” Gene said, putting into his voice every glimmer of authority that had ever blagged his way in life. “Wait. Sam, where did you say that Victor killed the women and the kid?”
“In the Morgans’ garden.” Sam panted. “Gene, what?”
“And you went inside, you met Morgan, you talked to him, you took notes and then you did something to them, right?”
“That’s it.” Sam replied, still confused, even as Bodie snorted “Yeah, right!”
Gene strode out of the room to the corridor. “Annie!” He bellowed. “Annie! Go to the Ladies and bring me the sodding Frank Hagwood files!”
“Tampax packet” he explained, shrugging as he turned back to the room. He looked at Bodie - “You say Frank Hagwood called you using the number on Sam’s CI5 ID badge?”
Bodie nodded, twisting Sam’s arm further up behind his back.
Within minutes, Annie had arrived, rather bent slim manila folder in hand.
Thanking her, Gene leafed through the pages, heart in his mouth. He’d better have remembered this right or he was going to look bloody stupid…
And worse than that, he’d be wrong. Everything would be wrong.
Wait - there it was!
“Listen” he said, running his finger along under the typed text as he read, “This is from the statement from the lead worker at the community project where Frank went. ‘At weekends, Frank liked to help move the art materials around. He had a little bicycle cart and he’d take the stuff to and fro. He went to the houses, even, they didn’t mind. I mean the houses of the other volunteers - Mrs Frampton, Mrs Morgan and Mrs George.’” Gene looked up triumphantly. “Sam, you’re confused, not everything’s joining up properly yet, or at least you can’t see all the links, but maybe you’re actually thinking more clearly than you know.”
And Gene reached into his pocket, to produce the small model cat they’d earlier retrieved from Sam’s coat.
“Really, Hunt,” Bodie sighed, “This is no time for jokes.”
Rolling his eyes, Gene moved to his other pocket, located a hip flask, brought it out and with an almighty crash brought it directly down onto the cat.
The clay split into a million pieces, revealing - falling from the hollow centre like a treat from a Kinder Surprise - a small black roll of microfilm.
“I’d be careful” Gene laughed joy sneaking in under nonchalance, “From what I understand there’s half the secrets of state in there.” And he raised his loyal flask to his lips with a sublime smile.
- - -
“I wrote it out there in the house” Sam was saying later, much later, “which Morgan thought was odd, and then I photographed it on my Minox - my subminature camera - which he thought was frankly bizarre, but I just told him to complain to the PM if he didn’t like it. I was going to post it to CI5 HQ via the usual channels, rolled up in an empty ball-point pen.”
As he spoke, a police secretary was scribbling shorthand, and an important man in London listened through a two-way radio. Sam was in fact entirely surrounded with a wall of attentive people, as he sat at Gene’s desk - like that painting of the last supper, Gene thought.
And before Sam Tyler departed from this station he spake unto us, revealing the truth, for he knew it was his time to leave…
Sod it, he was getting all nancily poetical - it had been far too long a day.
Sam took a deep breath, rearranging some paperclips on Gene’s desk as if to better order his thoughts, “I was just finishing up when I heard Victor coming, and I…panicked, I suppose. I tried to get through the house, got to the hallway and there were these trays of clay things, I barely looked at them, just shoved the film into the nearest one, the first that was the right size. There were all on these rectangles of cardboard with the name of the person who’d made them - that one said Frank Hagwood, I’m almost sure. I suppose Frank was also delivering them. I suppose he saw me, fighting Victor and got the wrong end of the stick…I must have dropped my ID badge…” His voice seemed to run out and his head slumped down. “And then they killed him, just for seeing that, for seeing me and remembering it. Him and Mrs Morgan and Bethany, poor Bethany…”
“The facts please, Agent Tyler” came the stern voice from the radio.
“Facts!” Sam exclaimed, fiddling his fingers together and giving a short laugh. “I don’t have facts any more. Not many, any how.”
And he looked across the desk, directly at Gene.
Sitting in a chair, near the wall and out of the way, Gene bit his thumb and succeeded in not getting up and sweeping Sam away, in not trying to take him somewhere safe and quiet where it could be just the two of them.
People milled around the room, form after form came along, calls were made, watches put on airports and stations, officers sent to arrest Morgan in Bognor. News came in of arrests made in Hyde, of the discovery of the corrupt CI5 men Victor had used to raid Sam’s flat and the A-Division station. Later in the evening Sam’s so-called wife came on record confessing to her part in creating another false life for Sam after the tip-off that Frank Hagwood had contacted CI5 had made his current position too risky for his interrogators.
“Bitch” Bodie had murmured, putting down the phone. “You had a girlfriend like her once, called Sita, a coloured” he said to Sam, pointing at the identikit photo, “I have to say they did a bloody good job of convincing you, mate.”
“It didn’t feel right” Gene heard Sam reply. “But, I do remember Sita…god, I do remember her now.”
“She’d not be one to forget” Bodie concurred, with a leer. “When we’ve got you back south to civilisation, we should look her up.”
Gene got up and left his office. He didn’t have to listen to this.
- - -
It was one o’clock in the morning.
The station was littered with sandwich papers and dirty coffee cups, with finished cross-words, used up typewriter ribbon and a thousand cigarette butts.
Gene was sitting once more at one of his inferior’s desks, twisting a pencil idly in his fingers.
There was a chinking noise near his elbow. A cup of tea had appeared, and with it Annie, who looked almost as bad as he felt.
“Thought you could use some, Guv” she said, softly.
An amazing breadth and range of retorts ran through his mind, plays on what she’d said, comments on her use as a female officer and her tea-making skills.
“Thanks” he replied, taking a gulp. It was good, honest, canteen tea, tasting predominantly of brown and leaving a bitter coating in the mouth.
“Ahh, that does hit a certain spot.” He set the cup back on the saucer and pretending not to notice her picking up the brimming ashtray and moving it away.
“You’re not going home yet?” he asked, by way of conversation, “Won’t your Mam be worried?”
“I phoned her” Annie looked tired, pulling her cardigan around herself protectively, and Gene began to recall that she’d been facing this mess in the office rather longer than he had. “And you haven’t gone home either, sir.”
Gene looked rather hard at the tea.
“I don’t recall ever telling you to be nice to me” he said, rather flatly.
“Maybe that’s why I am.” She pulled up the nearest chair from the general mess, leaning back in it and toying with the woollen cardigan’s belt.
“I feel like he should be out here, you know Sir? Here with us.”
Gene followed her gaze through the office windows to where Sam stood, leaning with Bodie over some papers his associates had lain out on Gene’s desk, pointing and scribbling notes on them with a pencil. He looked efficient, they all did. Well-oiled, team-like, presentable.
“Keep your girly thoughts to yourself, Cartwright.” Gene retorted smartly. “Can’t you see that that’s what he’s been pining for this whole bloody time?”
“Sir, if what you say’s true, then I know he wasn’t himself when he was with us. I always knew that he was confused, that sometimes he didn’t know what was going on. But he wanted to be with us, at the end. He was happy, Sir. I said it to you a month ago and I’ll say it again now, he wouldn’t have wanted to leave.”
“Maybe not a month ago” Gene concurred, “But I can guarantee you that his life has got a lot more complicated since then.” Memories sparked and spangled in his mind and he gave himself a shake. “And he doesn’t belong here. He never bloody did. He wasn’t himself, not then, not since I found him in Hyde. And he may not want the same things. In fact....”
Suddenly the foolishness of it all struck him - him sitting out here like some bleeding Romeo waiting patiently under a balcony. He stood up.
“I am going home” he said, trying to sound casual, “I need some decent sleep. And a drink. And you should go home too.”
“What about Sam sir?”
“Whether we stay or not, Sam won’t.” Gene shrugged on his coat like armour. “We set out to find Sam” he said slowly, “And we can’t. That Sam just isn’t a real person. And him,” he gestured at the figure in the office, “He’s like Sam, but with a key difference - he doesn’t belong here. He has a whole life somewhere to sort out and get back into. This wasn’t our story, our mystery, just…someone else’s game we wandered into.”
Ignoring her look of surprise at the length of his outburst, Gene pushed violently through the swing doors.
‘No fool like an old fool’, indeed, he thought. Sam had taken what was available to him and Gene had maybe been the best on offer in his previous circumstances. But now, with his dynamic job back and his young, dashing co-workers, well…
Well, put it this way: Sam had lived contentedly enough before now in that fucking creepy flat because it was all he had. Didn’t mean he’d ever go back there.
Turning up his collar, Gene strode off towards his empty house, which he already knew was going to smell like chip-lard and vinegar for the rest of his life.
Part Eight