A Copper's Instinct: Chapter 7
Title: A Copper's Instinct
Fandom: Hot Fuzz
Characters/Pairings: Nicholas/Danny, Nicholas/OC, Doris, Bob, Andes, Saxon, Turners, OC
Rating: PG-15
Chapter 6
"Typical he en't here," said Wainwright to his pint, and very definitely not to his subordinate.
Two stools away, Cartwright fiddled with the beermats, stacking them slightly offkilter so as to create a piece of modern art that when you looked carefully at it, spiralled subtly upwards. "Franny said 'e just left."
"Oh, cram a highlighter up your arse," snarled Andy W, whipping round. "Who said I were talkin' t' you?"
Far from the beginnings of an inter-officer fistfight, in one of the corner booths, Doris was desperately trying to talk to her former best friend in hushed tones.
"Danny, 'm sorry, I jus'-"
“It's not your fault,” said Danny. He still seemed to be more or less on automatic pilot. The part of Danny Butterman which had the ability to respond in a human, emotion-invested way to what was being said to it was probably still back at the station, trying to pick itself up out of the many very small pieces it had fallen into when Nicholas had looked at him like that.
“I already said. It's not your fault. I never should've told you.”
Doris tried to touch his shoulder. "'Ey, if you never told me, he'd be in London right now, remember?"
Danny looked blankly at her.
It was true. It was very true. Nicholas had stayed in Sandford because of him. He'd stayed with Danny all through the first insensible-painful days in hospital and the long, boring weeks of recuperation at home. He'd given up his high-risk, high-stress, high-excitement London beat to stay with Danny in his sleepy, tiny, often frankly bizarre nowheresville. Later, when he'd set his mind on leaving, Danny, emboldened by advice dispensed by one Doris Thatcher, had once again managed to talk him out of it. If Danny had never told Doris about his feelings re: Nicholas Angel, Nicholas would, indeed, be in London right now.
“Yeah.”
"And he's the one havin' it off with Mr. New Guy, en't he? Danny, you oughter be the one angry at him."
Danny thought that he probably was. But Kinnell was clever and quick on the uptake and fast, in every sense of the word, and he was the exact opposite of simple, slow, small-minded Sandford. Danny had seen Nicholas looking at Kinnell as if he was remembering with pleased, slightly bewildered surprise that there was a bigger, brighter, shinier world out there. Like someone waking up from a dazed sleep.
“D'you... d'you think he is?”
"If you're even thinkin' it, Danny, there's gotta be sommat fishy. What do we even know about him, anyway? He's quiet and he laughs but there's something not quite right about 'im. He's too.. perfect. Angel's got a thing for perfect." Doris flailed a hand while chewing her lower lip, trying to grasp the concept. "I know I got no proof."
“It's not fair t' blame him, either. He just got here,” said Danny, automatically.
Somewhere, though, somewhere in the back of his unhappy, still-half-dazed mind, he had already started thinking. Kinnell. He was so... reasonable, so non-antagonistic. So much so that any sort of 'get-away-from-my-bloke' attitude would, far from being heroic, just make Danny look like cross between a tremendous twat and Lena Hyena. Without even seeming to try, he had him fenced into a corner. Without even seeming to try...
"I mean," said Doris, wringing her hand like she was trying to remember a word. "It can't be something half as big as what was going on with your da. Can't be secret organizations all over again. S'like lightning. Can't hit the same place twice. That'd be just ridiculous."
*
“C'mon Nick,” murmured Kinnell, into the back of the top shelf of Nicholas's wardrobe. A hand was clamped against the ceiling to keep his balance, and the rest of him was submerged head-to-shoulders in the wardrobe, pawing amongst folded sheets, papers, boxes. “Don't hold out on me, now.”
*
“Bit of a small secret organisation, innee?” said Danny. There was a little more life in his voice this time. Inside, he was still thinking away...
Only just got here. Week or so. What's happened in the last week or so, Danny?
What hasn't?
Doris shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe it's like the series with Nigel Havers an' Warren Clarke, remember that 'un? We used to watch it on your dad's telly."
Danny did remember. William Chubb out of The Bill trying to handle a sweet little Mini Metro like a Subaru. The two secret agent plonkers you really hoped were going to be alright. And a cuddly monkey.
He screwed up his nose, doubtfully.
“You're sayin' maybe Nicholas is ex-KGB?”
I dunno. Maybe." Doris was, in some ways, immune to the word 'far-fetched'. "He shot a crackhead in SO-whatever. In't that got sommat to do with spooks?"
“Fuck's sake. SO-19 is for when you need cops with guns, Doris,” said Danny, sounding a little bit like Nicholas himself for a moment. “Thassall. It's got nothin' to do with MI5.”
"Well, where'd he get so good at guns and secrets, then?"
“They teach you 'bout guns in SO-19. Not gonna just sign you up an' go, here's your G36, try an' point the right end at people, are they? You got to train f'r ages first. An' secrets- he- he just uses his head, thassall. There's always somethin' going on, as long as y'know that it doesn't take long to notice things you're not s'posed to.”
Danny could almost see Nicholas- the Nicholas who still wanted to know him, as opposed to the way the real one had been acting this last week- nodding approvingly as he stumbled on. “Always somethin'- fuck. Doris. Listen. What made you pissed off at Tony, the other day?”
"Well, I-" Doris looked down. "I dunno. I was annoyed that he were touching my stuff, an' then I got right ticked off at havin' to look after a man like he's a six-year-old, and.."
“Yeh, yeahyeah, I know, but all that happens every day of the week, right? Everyone knows Tony's like Typhoid Mary with computers. What made you get so hacked off about it this time that you nearly took 'is nuts off?"
Doris blinked. "Well, I... It's just that... Y'know, I don't proper remember. It's like when you get too angry an' worked up over sommat, and then you come back an' you got no idea why you feel like the bloody painters and decoraters are in, except you're still pissed."
“You said... you said...” Danny squinted, then half-turned round, searching for the table they'd sat at the other day, when Doris had turned up for lunch still blistering mad from what had happened in the locker room. Yes, there it was, and a couple of girls from the hairdresser's were sitting at it now, chatting, but it still helped him to picture the whole thing.
“You said you'd been talkin' to the other Andy.”
Doris's eyes widened. With eyes like hers, you sometimes wondered (especially when you were wondering with a brain like Danny's) if they were actually going to plook out. In the wake of Danny's admissions about whether or not his bloke was actually cheating on him, she'd forgotten.
"Ey. You think he's ex-KGB?"
Danny gripped the edge of the table. “Andes en't talkin'. You're not speakin' t'Tony. Turners're communicating through fuckin' Post-its, for fucks sake. Evan's th'only one Owen can get along with! Even Bob an'-” Danny caught himself, stammering. “An', an' all over this last week. An' Nicholas... Doris, the only person nobody's mad at is that- is him!”
"So... he's got a, er, magic de-angrifying field?"
Danny looked right through her. “No. Maybe. I dunno. I got to think about this. Frannie,” he added, hastily, as Frannie paused en route to the bar to take his juice glass and Doris's empty, “when Nick was here b'fore, did he have anyone with him?”
Frannie smiled, nervously, eyeing the Andes out of the corner of her eye, each daring the other to take it outside and do something. "Well, he were getting a bit legless, so that nice young man walked him home. Good lord but that Mr. Angel was in a foul mood. That new bloke is a saint."
“Yeh,” mumbled Danny, to Doris, as Frannie moved on. “Second comin' of fuckin' Christ, that one.”
The chewing creature of guilt and worry in the pit of his stomach grew some extra teeth. Nicholas must have been really fucking upset to overcome his ingrained prejudice against drinking on duty. And he must have been even worse to drink so much that he was 'a bit legless,' and 'a bit legless' coming from a barmaid, at that. Danny had almost never managed to get Nicholas drunk enough to really feel the benefit, partly because Nicholas still didn't believe that there was that much of a benefit, Danny guessed, but probably mostly because it was dangerous for someone who was always one moment of conscious effort away from four paws and a tail to relinquish that much control.
So Nicholas had been so upset that he'd come in here, got recklessly pissed, and gone home with Alex Kinnell. And it was Danny's fault, one way or another. It was his fault, like Nicholas staying in Sandford was his fault, like their relationship was his fault. Danny couldn't deny that Nicholas was perpetually worried about 'them,' ashamed of it, with all the subterfuge and stress it took to keep it 'secret.'
And yet... and yet-
“It's too... the only time Nicholas's ever gonna have been in here along gettin' properly bladdered, right, an' jus' like that, here's Mister-My-Shit-Don't-Stink like a jack-in-th'-box to take 'im home. It's too tidy, Doris.”
"Well," said Doris, folding her arms and leaning back against her side of the booth. She'd nearly succeeded in getting him out of a funk; since his mum's funeral, it was something she'd become uncommonly good at, and from what she could glean from Danny's mood right now, he'd only need one more push from miserable lethargy to unstoppable motivated bundle of Danny.
"What are you going to do about it?"
*
Alex Kinnell's room was on the second floor. Nicholas would probably have shinned up the drainpipe outside or ninja'd in off the roof or something, and jimmied the window open with nothing but a piece of paper and a drawing pin. Danny did not know how to ninja, but he did know Mary Dolby, the head of housekeeping (a slightly extraneous title for the most senior of the only three maids on staff).
And Mary Dolby was Rita Finster's sister, and a couple of years ago Rita and George Finster's youngest boy Davey, who went to Sandford Primary, had had a bit of a bullying problem with an older lad called Matthew Gardener, and George- whose younger brother Harvey had been in the same year as Danny at school- had asked Danny if he might have a word, and it really hadn't taken that much, as it turned out, to quietly take the matter in hand and convince young Gardener Jr. that bullying small, bespectacled kids called Davey was still a capital offence in Gloucestershire. And Davey was doing much better now, and to cut a long story short Mary was only too happy to let Danny in through the hotel's back entrance and give him the spare key to Alex Kinnell's room, on condition that he tried not to grind quite so much potting soil, glass and blood into the carpet this time around.
Kinnell's room was nicer than Nicholas's had been, though not much bigger. Danny entered cautiously and ducked into the bathroom, just to make sure that Kinnell was not actually lurking anywhere. Then he came back into the main room, and nearly put his eye out on a fucking great big pointy metal duck. This did not improve his temper.
He'd been angry before, but it had been a guilty, furtive sort of angry, unsure if what he was feeling was rational or just the product of dumb jealousy. Now, what with one thing or another (and Doris was quite a large thing, as was the fact that Kinnell wasn't here and was therefore still with Nicholas, at nearly ten at night) he was still angry, but now he was righteously angry. Once he'd decided it really was Nicholas he was fighting for, the rest of it could shove itself up its own arse for all he cared.
There was something up with Kinnell, and Danny wasn't going to stop until he'd worked out exactly what it was, and whether it could hurt Nicholas or not. The rest could be sorted out later.
He pulled the door shut and went straight for the dresser drawers, working through them quickly with a Serious Business frown crumpling his forehead, pulling each one out and pawing through it with an old pair of gloves he'd found at the back of the Astra's glovebox. Clothes. Socks, pants, vests, shorts. A weird chunky black thing that looked like a chessboard out of Star Wars. A whole bunch of takeaway and fast food menus from various places around town. Kinnell wasn't nearly as clinically neat as Nicholas, but the chessboard-of-the-future was as personal as it got. No photos, no press clippings, not even a sodding peace lily.
It occurred to Danny, as he put the HAL-9000-chessboard back in the drawer, that at least if nothing else came of this, he'd still have a great gift idea for Nicholas next Christmas. If they had a next Christmas.
A small, slim blue book shoved in the bedside drawer turned out to be a yearly diary. Danny flipped through it. It was almost completely empty, apart from a few Biro circles here and there, outlining dates. He flipped through again, checked the back and the frontispiece. No explanation given.
Danny sat down on the bed in Kinnell's friendly, stylish, slightly untidy, and totally soulless room, riffling slowly through the pages of the little blue book, stopping each time he hit a little circle, marking the places with his fingers. Counting.
Slowly, the frown cleared. In its place, a stunned widening of the eyes, eyebrows lifting so far that they practically shouldered his hairline up out of the way, and a single indrawn breath.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
Chapter 8
Fandom: Hot Fuzz
Characters/Pairings: Nicholas/Danny, Nicholas/OC, Doris, Bob, Andes, Saxon, Turners, OC
Rating: PG-15
Chapter 6
"Typical he en't here," said Wainwright to his pint, and very definitely not to his subordinate.
Two stools away, Cartwright fiddled with the beermats, stacking them slightly offkilter so as to create a piece of modern art that when you looked carefully at it, spiralled subtly upwards. "Franny said 'e just left."
"Oh, cram a highlighter up your arse," snarled Andy W, whipping round. "Who said I were talkin' t' you?"
Far from the beginnings of an inter-officer fistfight, in one of the corner booths, Doris was desperately trying to talk to her former best friend in hushed tones.
"Danny, 'm sorry, I jus'-"
“It's not your fault,” said Danny. He still seemed to be more or less on automatic pilot. The part of Danny Butterman which had the ability to respond in a human, emotion-invested way to what was being said to it was probably still back at the station, trying to pick itself up out of the many very small pieces it had fallen into when Nicholas had looked at him like that.
“I already said. It's not your fault. I never should've told you.”
Doris tried to touch his shoulder. "'Ey, if you never told me, he'd be in London right now, remember?"
Danny looked blankly at her.
It was true. It was very true. Nicholas had stayed in Sandford because of him. He'd stayed with Danny all through the first insensible-painful days in hospital and the long, boring weeks of recuperation at home. He'd given up his high-risk, high-stress, high-excitement London beat to stay with Danny in his sleepy, tiny, often frankly bizarre nowheresville. Later, when he'd set his mind on leaving, Danny, emboldened by advice dispensed by one Doris Thatcher, had once again managed to talk him out of it. If Danny had never told Doris about his feelings re: Nicholas Angel, Nicholas would, indeed, be in London right now.
“Yeah.”
"And he's the one havin' it off with Mr. New Guy, en't he? Danny, you oughter be the one angry at him."
Danny thought that he probably was. But Kinnell was clever and quick on the uptake and fast, in every sense of the word, and he was the exact opposite of simple, slow, small-minded Sandford. Danny had seen Nicholas looking at Kinnell as if he was remembering with pleased, slightly bewildered surprise that there was a bigger, brighter, shinier world out there. Like someone waking up from a dazed sleep.
“D'you... d'you think he is?”
"If you're even thinkin' it, Danny, there's gotta be sommat fishy. What do we even know about him, anyway? He's quiet and he laughs but there's something not quite right about 'im. He's too.. perfect. Angel's got a thing for perfect." Doris flailed a hand while chewing her lower lip, trying to grasp the concept. "I know I got no proof."
“It's not fair t' blame him, either. He just got here,” said Danny, automatically.
Somewhere, though, somewhere in the back of his unhappy, still-half-dazed mind, he had already started thinking. Kinnell. He was so... reasonable, so non-antagonistic. So much so that any sort of 'get-away-from-my-bloke' attitude would, far from being heroic, just make Danny look like cross between a tremendous twat and Lena Hyena. Without even seeming to try, he had him fenced into a corner. Without even seeming to try...
"I mean," said Doris, wringing her hand like she was trying to remember a word. "It can't be something half as big as what was going on with your da. Can't be secret organizations all over again. S'like lightning. Can't hit the same place twice. That'd be just ridiculous."
*
“C'mon Nick,” murmured Kinnell, into the back of the top shelf of Nicholas's wardrobe. A hand was clamped against the ceiling to keep his balance, and the rest of him was submerged head-to-shoulders in the wardrobe, pawing amongst folded sheets, papers, boxes. “Don't hold out on me, now.”
*
“Bit of a small secret organisation, innee?” said Danny. There was a little more life in his voice this time. Inside, he was still thinking away...
Only just got here. Week or so. What's happened in the last week or so, Danny?
What hasn't?
Doris shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe it's like the series with Nigel Havers an' Warren Clarke, remember that 'un? We used to watch it on your dad's telly."
Danny did remember. William Chubb out of The Bill trying to handle a sweet little Mini Metro like a Subaru. The two secret agent plonkers you really hoped were going to be alright. And a cuddly monkey.
He screwed up his nose, doubtfully.
“You're sayin' maybe Nicholas is ex-KGB?”
I dunno. Maybe." Doris was, in some ways, immune to the word 'far-fetched'. "He shot a crackhead in SO-whatever. In't that got sommat to do with spooks?"
“Fuck's sake. SO-19 is for when you need cops with guns, Doris,” said Danny, sounding a little bit like Nicholas himself for a moment. “Thassall. It's got nothin' to do with MI5.”
"Well, where'd he get so good at guns and secrets, then?"
“They teach you 'bout guns in SO-19. Not gonna just sign you up an' go, here's your G36, try an' point the right end at people, are they? You got to train f'r ages first. An' secrets- he- he just uses his head, thassall. There's always somethin' going on, as long as y'know that it doesn't take long to notice things you're not s'posed to.”
Danny could almost see Nicholas- the Nicholas who still wanted to know him, as opposed to the way the real one had been acting this last week- nodding approvingly as he stumbled on. “Always somethin'- fuck. Doris. Listen. What made you pissed off at Tony, the other day?”
"Well, I-" Doris looked down. "I dunno. I was annoyed that he were touching my stuff, an' then I got right ticked off at havin' to look after a man like he's a six-year-old, and.."
“Yeh, yeahyeah, I know, but all that happens every day of the week, right? Everyone knows Tony's like Typhoid Mary with computers. What made you get so hacked off about it this time that you nearly took 'is nuts off?"
Doris blinked. "Well, I... It's just that... Y'know, I don't proper remember. It's like when you get too angry an' worked up over sommat, and then you come back an' you got no idea why you feel like the bloody painters and decoraters are in, except you're still pissed."
“You said... you said...” Danny squinted, then half-turned round, searching for the table they'd sat at the other day, when Doris had turned up for lunch still blistering mad from what had happened in the locker room. Yes, there it was, and a couple of girls from the hairdresser's were sitting at it now, chatting, but it still helped him to picture the whole thing.
“You said you'd been talkin' to the other Andy.”
Doris's eyes widened. With eyes like hers, you sometimes wondered (especially when you were wondering with a brain like Danny's) if they were actually going to plook out. In the wake of Danny's admissions about whether or not his bloke was actually cheating on him, she'd forgotten.
"Ey. You think he's ex-KGB?"
Danny gripped the edge of the table. “Andes en't talkin'. You're not speakin' t'Tony. Turners're communicating through fuckin' Post-its, for fucks sake. Evan's th'only one Owen can get along with! Even Bob an'-” Danny caught himself, stammering. “An', an' all over this last week. An' Nicholas... Doris, the only person nobody's mad at is that- is him!”
"So... he's got a, er, magic de-angrifying field?"
Danny looked right through her. “No. Maybe. I dunno. I got to think about this. Frannie,” he added, hastily, as Frannie paused en route to the bar to take his juice glass and Doris's empty, “when Nick was here b'fore, did he have anyone with him?”
Frannie smiled, nervously, eyeing the Andes out of the corner of her eye, each daring the other to take it outside and do something. "Well, he were getting a bit legless, so that nice young man walked him home. Good lord but that Mr. Angel was in a foul mood. That new bloke is a saint."
“Yeh,” mumbled Danny, to Doris, as Frannie moved on. “Second comin' of fuckin' Christ, that one.”
The chewing creature of guilt and worry in the pit of his stomach grew some extra teeth. Nicholas must have been really fucking upset to overcome his ingrained prejudice against drinking on duty. And he must have been even worse to drink so much that he was 'a bit legless,' and 'a bit legless' coming from a barmaid, at that. Danny had almost never managed to get Nicholas drunk enough to really feel the benefit, partly because Nicholas still didn't believe that there was that much of a benefit, Danny guessed, but probably mostly because it was dangerous for someone who was always one moment of conscious effort away from four paws and a tail to relinquish that much control.
So Nicholas had been so upset that he'd come in here, got recklessly pissed, and gone home with Alex Kinnell. And it was Danny's fault, one way or another. It was his fault, like Nicholas staying in Sandford was his fault, like their relationship was his fault. Danny couldn't deny that Nicholas was perpetually worried about 'them,' ashamed of it, with all the subterfuge and stress it took to keep it 'secret.'
And yet... and yet-
“It's too... the only time Nicholas's ever gonna have been in here along gettin' properly bladdered, right, an' jus' like that, here's Mister-My-Shit-Don't-Stink like a jack-in-th'-box to take 'im home. It's too tidy, Doris.”
"Well," said Doris, folding her arms and leaning back against her side of the booth. She'd nearly succeeded in getting him out of a funk; since his mum's funeral, it was something she'd become uncommonly good at, and from what she could glean from Danny's mood right now, he'd only need one more push from miserable lethargy to unstoppable motivated bundle of Danny.
"What are you going to do about it?"
*
Alex Kinnell's room was on the second floor. Nicholas would probably have shinned up the drainpipe outside or ninja'd in off the roof or something, and jimmied the window open with nothing but a piece of paper and a drawing pin. Danny did not know how to ninja, but he did know Mary Dolby, the head of housekeeping (a slightly extraneous title for the most senior of the only three maids on staff).
And Mary Dolby was Rita Finster's sister, and a couple of years ago Rita and George Finster's youngest boy Davey, who went to Sandford Primary, had had a bit of a bullying problem with an older lad called Matthew Gardener, and George- whose younger brother Harvey had been in the same year as Danny at school- had asked Danny if he might have a word, and it really hadn't taken that much, as it turned out, to quietly take the matter in hand and convince young Gardener Jr. that bullying small, bespectacled kids called Davey was still a capital offence in Gloucestershire. And Davey was doing much better now, and to cut a long story short Mary was only too happy to let Danny in through the hotel's back entrance and give him the spare key to Alex Kinnell's room, on condition that he tried not to grind quite so much potting soil, glass and blood into the carpet this time around.
Kinnell's room was nicer than Nicholas's had been, though not much bigger. Danny entered cautiously and ducked into the bathroom, just to make sure that Kinnell was not actually lurking anywhere. Then he came back into the main room, and nearly put his eye out on a fucking great big pointy metal duck. This did not improve his temper.
He'd been angry before, but it had been a guilty, furtive sort of angry, unsure if what he was feeling was rational or just the product of dumb jealousy. Now, what with one thing or another (and Doris was quite a large thing, as was the fact that Kinnell wasn't here and was therefore still with Nicholas, at nearly ten at night) he was still angry, but now he was righteously angry. Once he'd decided it really was Nicholas he was fighting for, the rest of it could shove itself up its own arse for all he cared.
There was something up with Kinnell, and Danny wasn't going to stop until he'd worked out exactly what it was, and whether it could hurt Nicholas or not. The rest could be sorted out later.
He pulled the door shut and went straight for the dresser drawers, working through them quickly with a Serious Business frown crumpling his forehead, pulling each one out and pawing through it with an old pair of gloves he'd found at the back of the Astra's glovebox. Clothes. Socks, pants, vests, shorts. A weird chunky black thing that looked like a chessboard out of Star Wars. A whole bunch of takeaway and fast food menus from various places around town. Kinnell wasn't nearly as clinically neat as Nicholas, but the chessboard-of-the-future was as personal as it got. No photos, no press clippings, not even a sodding peace lily.
It occurred to Danny, as he put the HAL-9000-chessboard back in the drawer, that at least if nothing else came of this, he'd still have a great gift idea for Nicholas next Christmas. If they had a next Christmas.
A small, slim blue book shoved in the bedside drawer turned out to be a yearly diary. Danny flipped through it. It was almost completely empty, apart from a few Biro circles here and there, outlining dates. He flipped through again, checked the back and the frontispiece. No explanation given.
Danny sat down on the bed in Kinnell's friendly, stylish, slightly untidy, and totally soulless room, riffling slowly through the pages of the little blue book, stopping each time he hit a little circle, marking the places with his fingers. Counting.
Slowly, the frown cleared. In its place, a stunned widening of the eyes, eyebrows lifting so far that they practically shouldered his hairline up out of the way, and a single indrawn breath.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
Chapter 8