Primeval Fic: In Name Only 1/9
Title: In Name Only
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own anything herein and no one's paying me to do it.
Rating: PG
Summary: Children change almost everything.
AN: Item the first. What I know about parenting and childcare can be written on a 3x5 index card. Any real parents reading this may well want me dead by the end of this for sheer optimism. Item the second. I haven't spent any time around under ten children since I was one. See the second sentence of item the first. Third, I am no psychological expert, so you may just have to go with it. Finally, if anyone recalls my very brief Harry Potter crossover, this started out life as that. Then I realised I really only wanted Harry for the parseltongue thing and it morphed into this after some fits and starts.
Well, said she, grimly, we shall see.
********************************
Jake grimaced as he stood outside the school. There it was, home of bullies, ignorant teachers and misery. That was what school was, be it nursery school, primary school, high school, it was just effing miserable. And here he was, about to walk in under his own power.
This was all Kieran's fault. If he'd stood sentry like he was supposed to while Jake made the last connections into the system so that he could get every undergraduate transcript to be printed on a Star Wars themed background for a 24 hour period, Jake wouldn't be here, he'd be back in his residence, cackling with glee. Instead Kieran had wandered off to try to ask Danielle out again, and Jake had been caught.
The dean had chosen a deliberately creative punishment, rather than some sort of normal university censure, not wanting to do anything that would reflect poorly on Jake's transcripts. That, of course, had more to do with some sort of private funding and donation initiative on the dean's part than anything else, but Jake had been grateful. At least, until he'd heard the actual punishment. Then he pleaded to have his grades docked, to get thrown out of the residence, anything but this.
His punishment was to spend the next several weeks being the guest lecturer, classroom by classroom, in a set of three schools out in the hinterlands, which serviced several hamlets (they were too small to rate the title of 'village'). One nursery school, one primary and one high school. He had to teach uninterested children and teenagers about paleontology until he'd done so in every bloody class.
It was enough to make a geek cry.
Taking a deep breath, he walked in and headed for the office that was the central authority for all three. Standing in front of the secretary's desk, he tried not to wince. She was a bored middle-aged woman, trying too hard to cling to her youth with heavy eyeshadow that went out with the 80s, a powder-green power suit with huge shoulder pads, and with an expression on her face that screamed of an older woman hoping to land herself a young stud. The way her eyes lit up made Jake very uncomfortable, and for the first time in his life, he was delighted to be called into a headmaster's office.
"Mr. Cosgrove?" asked the man behind the desk. He was a paunchy man in a buttoned shirt and deliberately silly tie that went completely at odds with his demeanour, which was sort of completely humourless. The tie choice looked a little like it might be an attempt to make himself more likeable.
"Yes, sir," Jake said, feeling rather like he ought to play extra contrite. Who knew what word might get back to the dean, and he really had no desire to get stuck with some worse punishment. Like teaching maths or computers. At least he liked dinosaurs.
"I am the headmaster of the primary section of our school, Dudley Bottomley," Jake barely kept a poker face at that, "And I believe you are being sent to the nursery school to begin with, and will work your way up through the years."
"I see," Jake said, noncomittally. He listened to some standard-sounding blather about the school's interest in excellence, and was led to the building set a bit further back from the road of the three and entered the halls lined with bright paint and paper decorations made by the children.
"I believe the first class here is Miss Landy's," Headmaster Bottomley told him, then knocked and walked in. "Hello, children," he said in a patently false genial tone. Most of the children watched with a sort of fascination at this invasion of their daily routine, but one little girl looked rather sceptical of the whole thing. "I have here a special visitor from the University of Sheffield, and he's here to talk to you all about dinosaurs. Isn't that exciting?" he asked, now quite fatuous, really.
Jake smiled weakly at the children. They stared back, rather reminding him of the so-called "compies" in Jurassic Park. Harmless until they spat poison in your eyes and ate you alive. While he was woolgathering on the prospect of this collection of small people suddenly leaping on him and tearing him to shreds (why were creepy children so much more creepy than anything else on television?), the headmaster finished his introduction and left.
He was left facing the class, and wondered how Star Wars on a transcript could really warrant this sort of torture. "Erm . . . hi, nice to meet you all," he said.
"Hello Mr. Cosgrove," they sing-songed back.
Jake tried, really he did. He talked about t-rexes and triceratops, brachiosaurs and deinonychuses, hadrosaurs and pterasaurs and didn't go into lots of depth, talking about how big things were and how scary the teeth and claws were and was as dramatic as he could be. It was sort of sickening. Oh, he'd been just as fascinated at that age with something that big and that old and that scary, but the little buggers were absolutely jaded and eventually they just erupted into screaming fits and yelling "Raarrrr!" at each other as they all pretended they were t-rexes.
He had to stay there for the whole bloody afternoon.
Miss Landy shot him a sympathetic shrug, patting him on the shoulder as she coralled a three-foot-high diplodocus, trying to use a rucksack as a makeshift tail to bludgeon a fellow three foot tall dinosaur. Jake suspected the latter was a triceratops from the use of paintbrushes held to his forehead to viciously poke the attacking sauropod.
He was distracted from the fascinating floor show by a tugging on his t-shirt. He looked down to see the highly sceptical little girl he'd noted before. "Hello," he said, crouching to put himself a little closer to eye-to-eye. "Did you need something?"
"Why are the dinosaurs' names so funny?" she asked.
He frowned. "What do you mean, funny?"
"Well," she said, plopping down beside him with a plastic brachiosaur held close. "We've got foxes and rabbits and lions and tigers and elephants and cows and things. Why aren't dinosaurs' names like that? They're all really long and funny-sounding."
"Well," Jake echoed her, "Foxes and rabbits and such got names like that because people know them and sort of just called them things 'cause they had to call them something. But since dinosaurs got discovered separately, scientists got to name them. So, a lot of the time, they name them things that sort of describe them."
"How does tyrannosaurus rex describe a really big, scary, lizard with scary teeth and tiny arms?" she asked all scepticism again.
"There's this language, Latin," Jake explained. "You may have heard of it. Lots of scientists use Latin words and call dinosaurs things that way. So, tyrannosaurus rex, actually means tyrant lizard king."
"Oh," she said. "Do scientists have special names for normal animals?"
He nodded. "Yep," he popped the 'p', making her giggle. "So, the red foxes you might see around sometimes are known as vulpes vulpes, which is sort of silly, 'cause it just means fox fox, but there's others, like vulpes cana, which means silvery fox, but people call them Blanford's foxes."
"Why would they have two names like that?" she asked.
"Because there's lots of different kinds of foxes, but they're all still foxes," Jake explained. "So they're saying this is a fox, but it's a whatever sort of fox."
"So, they name the dinosaurs things that describe them?" she asked.
"Yeah," Jake said. "But sometimes," he admitted, "They'll make it all scientific, but they're just naming them after someone's kid or pet dog." He grinned. "What's your name?"
"Imogen," she said, making a face. "I don't like it much."
"I can imagine," Jake said. "Still, if you have a middle name, maybe you can ask your mum and dad to call you by that instead."
"I couldn't," she snapped back, hastily and with an odd look on her face. Like the idea frightened her somehow. "Anyhow, my mum died when I was born and my dad doesn't . . . I don't want to . . . he likes it," she finished.
She didn't seem to want to talk about it, so Jake let it go. "So, if someone were naming a dinosaur after you, let's say . . . hmm . . ."
"A hadrosaur?" she asked.
"Why a hadrosaur?" Jake wanted to know.
She smiled, looking a little sad. "They take care of their babies, right? That's what Jack Horner proved with the Maiosaur."
"You're a smart one," Jake told her. "When did you hear about that?"
Imogen seemed to glow at his praise. "There was a bit on the telly last week," she said. "There were reporters talking to him, and he was talking about it."
"So," Jake went on then, "Maybe a dinosaur would be named something like, bucina imogensis. Which would be sort of, Imogen's trumpet."
She giggled again. As she moved, he spotted a bruise on her arm. It went all the way around. Not wanting to scare her, but suddenly unsettled, Jake deliberately grinned and kept talking. She was a bright little thing, actually interested in dinosaurs, not just in big stompy things, and Jake enjoyed his morning after all, because she was clever and fun and asked all sorts of interesting questions for a four-year old.
Imogen was picked up by a stern man, who half dragged her down the hall. As he watched her go, Miss Landy came up to him. "Don't think about it," she told him. "Geofferey Clarke's not one to be crossed."
But Jake couldn't stop thinking about it. He thought about it that afternoon at the next class of four-year-olds, none of whom had her spark. He couldn't stop that night, or the next day or the next. He had to tramp back to the school day after day, since his term at uni was over and he was stuck in that godforsaken hamlet until he was done. Every day he'd stop off to see Imogen Clarke, who'd smile and ask him more questions about dinosaurs.
The bruises were hidden, but not well, and they always peeked out from just under hems and sleeves and shirt necks. A week and he couldn't stand it, couldn't stand the small hints that were dropped and the way none of the teachers seemed to care to notice. So, he reported it to the police.
Two nights later, he was accosted on his way back to the room he was staying in at the dean's cousin's house. "You'll stay out of Clarke's way if you know what's good for you," he was told.
Miss Landy shook her head when he stopped by, "I told you," she said.
Imogen wasn't there that day.
She wasn't there for three days, and when she was back, she was pale and sad, and very angry when she saw him. "He said you told. You can't tell," she said. "He gets angry with me when people tell."
It seemed Clarke had the whole area in his pocket. Or scared. Or both. On a hunch, Jake hacked into the police files and found that his report had been shelved by an investigation he knew couldn't have happened, because nothing worked that fast. A little more hacking and Clarke's name began to show up as a man who made a lot of charitable donations and a man with connections to a raft of people with less-than-stellar reputations. And the idea that came to him was so mad, he dismissed it at once.
But as his bruises faded, he couldn't help but think of it again. There was no going to the authorities, what would he do? Tell them that the whole of the town and its police force were corrupt? That everyone was scared of this man, whatever his influence was? And if he took his temper at Jake out on Imogen, what would he do if Jake got an investigation happening? It was like some sort of third rate television melodrama.
He'd given his last horrible speech to dully uninterested teenagers, wondering if a bare five years before he'd been that horrible to his teachers and the like, when he passed Clarke, not quite dragging Imogen down the street. She was crying, but silent, and he couldn't stand it. It was completely mad what he was thinking, but somehow, he did it anyhow.
Gloves and the skills from three years doing a combined degree in electrical engineering and animal biology (more the engineering than the anatomy and behavioural study), got him into the Clarke home, more mansion than house, the alarm on the door disabled. It wasn't hard to find Imogen's room, or to break in past the locks on the bloody outside of her door, since he'd been breaking into places to set pranks for years.
"Imogen?" he whispered, hearing a muffled whimper and horrified to find that she'd not only been locked into the room, she'd been locked into her own wardrobe.
She stared, silent and shocked as he knelt and hastily collected a change of clothes for her, stuffing it into a rucksack. Finally she asked, "J - Jake?"
"Yeah," he whispered. "It's me. I'm taking you away, so you've got to be really quiet, okay?"
She nodded, and when he picked her up, she clung to him like a limpet. Jake hurried away, getting to the edge of town where he'd left the car he was 'borrowing' from the headmaster. Once they were on the road, he reviewed his plan. He knew how to do it all in theory, the only question was, would Imogen and Lettie and the universe cooperate? They drove until dawn, at which point he left the car in a small copse of trees out of sight of the road, then hastily put on a hat and purchased train tickets for them both, heading out to Lettie's home.
He knocked on the door when they got there, and she answered, took one look at him and Imogen and said, "So, you're clearly in more trouble than usual."
Imogen had fallen asleep, and Jake ignored Lettie for the moment, taking her up to the familiar room at the top of the stairs. Then he came downstairs and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. "Yeah, I'm in trouble." He sighed, ran a hand through his hair and said, "I kidnapped her."
Lettie was walking to the table with the tea and detoured to slap him on the back of the head. "Why did you do it and what help do you need from me?" she asked calmly.
"That's why I love you, Lettie," Jake said, rubbing the area he could have half sworn was coming out in a lump. "I can rely on you to help, and to beat me half to death."
"What do you expect?" she asked. "Jake, I love you as if you were my own son, but even Connor, God rest his soul, wouldn't have got away with starting out like that with me."
So he explained, and when he was done, Lettie looked at him thoughtfully. "It's just as well, I suppose, that I'd moved away before he died and so few people here are even aware of him." A moment more, and she said, "So, I assume you'll be saying that Margaret's her mum?"
"Margaret was Conn's girlfriend," Jake admitted. "It would make sense, and you know he would've taken in their daughter in a heartbeat."
"She would," Lettie said, nodding. "Alright, Jake. I'll do it. You just take the next couple days to do what you need to, and then . . . we'll go from there."
"Jake?" came a soft voice from the stairs. They both looked up. Imogen was standing there, looking lost and confused.
"Hey sweetheart," Jake said. She reached for him, and it was instinct to pick her up and feel her clinging on. "We were talking about a few things to do with you." He went back to his chair and turned Imogen to look at Lettie. "Imogen, I want you to meet Laetitia Temple, who's doing me a really big favour. Lettie, this is Imogen Clarke."
"Delighted to meet you," Lettie told her. "Call me Lettie, everyone does that I like."
Imogen giggled. "Delighted to meet you too," she said.
"Are you hungry?" Lettie asked, "It's a little late in the day, but since you've been sleeping, you'll probably want breakfast."
"Yes, please," said Imogen softly.
Jake sighed. "Sweetheart, we have to talk about some really important things," he said. "Like what we're going to do now that I've got you away from your dad."
"What are we going to do?" she asked, looking frightened. "My dad always finds out about everything. I shouldn't have gone with you, but you're nice and I just wanted to pretend that I had a real dad who wants me and-"
"Shh," Jake soothed. "He doesn't have to find out where you are, if you help me."
She sniffled, but perked up slowly. "How can I help?"
"Well, you see, we're going to hide, not by running away and staying in a cave somewhere where there's bats and rats and snakes and things," Jake explained, "We're going to pretend we're other people. So when someone goes looking to find Jake Cosgrove and Imogen Clarke, they won't find them." Lettie put the eggs, bacon and toast down and a glass of chocolate milk for Jake and Imogen each. While Imogen slowly ate her eggs, sopping up yolk with her toast, Jake went on. "Lettie's my best mate's mum. Only, see, my best mate died a while ago."
Imogen gasped. "That's sad," she said. "Do you miss him?"
"Very much," Lettie said, her dark eyes wet. "But Jake's been wonderful, always coming by to make sure I'm not by myself."
Jake smiled at her. "It's not like it's horrible to come here. You're practically as much my mum as my real mum is." He turned to Imogen. "You see, Conn and I, we looked a lot alike. If we dressed the same and did up our hair the same and made sure to wear a hat, people would sometimes mistake us for each other."
"You're going to pretend that you're your friend?" she asked.
He nodded. "And Lettie's going to help by letting people think she's my mum for real." He took a deep breath. "And we'll tell everyone that I'm your dad-"
He was cut off by the small form hurtling into his lap. "You mean it?" she asked.
"I mean it," he told her. "And so we'll pick out a new name for you. Like Gertrude," he teased, laughing as she made an 'ick' face.
"Don't be horrible," Lettie told him. She turned to Imogen. "I've got a baby names book, we can look through that and you can pick something. Keep in mind, it has to go with Temple for your last name."
"I can stop being Imogen for real?' she asked, happily. "Brilliant!"
"You're a bad influence," Lettie told Jake mildly. "You need to get started on that computer stuff of yours?"
Jake nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Can I leave you with Lettie a bit?" he asked Imogen. "Only, I've got some things to do, and she'll probably be better help picking out a good name for a girl than me."
She looked a little apprehensive, but agreed, and Jake headed upstairs to start covering up his tracks. In short order, he'd begun deleting himself from existence along with Imogen. Starting with hospital files and working gradually up to his university one. Once they didn't exist anymore on any computer he could access, then he'd have to start creating things from scratch, and that would require finding as many people as possible who had died to make up the paper trail.
When he finally took a break, he came downstairs to be greeted by a smiling Lettie in the living room. She pointed towards the little girl Jake suddenly realised he'd taken full responsibility for, and said, "It's a girl," she told him brightly. "Let me introduce Caitlyn Rose Temple."
Her previously waist-length brown hair had been trimmed much shorter and was in adorable pigtails, the prissy dress she'd been wearing had been replaced somehow with a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a jumble of dinosaurs on it and her normally glum little face sparkled with excitement. She looked like a completely different person, and for the first time, Jake felt really sure they'd pull it all off.
*****************************
Once Jake, (Connor, he had to keep reminding himself), had finished erasing himself from the files of the world, he had to effectively build up and merge his life with Connor's. It involved a few things, not least of which was finding dead doctors to do checkups and dead schoolteachers to give him better grades and reports, dead testing authorities to give him graded GCSEs and just generally making sure that there was almost no one on the paper trail who was accessible to question about the validity of the various statements, including the death certificate he had to get revoked.
Caitlyn (nee Imogen) was another one who had to have a life carefully aligned. He had to create a false history of pregnancy for Connor's girlfriend who'd died in the same car accident as he did, find closed hospital wards and dead doctors to fill in all of Caitlyn's history. Luckily she was only four, so there was no need to fake much in the way of school records and the like.
Through all this, Jake -- Connor, damnit, had a crash course in parenting.
At first it was easy. Caitlyn, still nervous about how she'd be punished if she misbehaved, happy to be safe and cared for properly, didn't act out at all. It was a relief, of course. Connor had seen those other children at the nursery school and primary, thought he knew just how bad it could get and figured he'd lucked out with the best behaved child in the history of the world.
When he said this, Lettie laughed, and said, "Just don't hesitate to call me. Unless it's after midnight." Then she walked away cackling, and a sense of foreboding fell over him.
It started slowly. Instead of one story at bedtime, she wanted two, and Connor was happy to oblige her that. When she asked for dessert after dinner one night, Connor was happy to produce some chocolate biscuits. When she had a bad dream, he let her climb into bed with him and curl up with her new dad so she'd feel safe.
That last one seemed to twig something for her, and Caitlyn started getting pushy. When she didn't get dessert every night, the complaints began, the whining.
"But Dad," she whinged, "I hate courgettes. I don't want them. I won't eat them."
"They're good for you," said Connor, who also hated courgettes, but ate them at Lettie's because she was like a second mother to him and she could ravage anyone verbally with the best of them.
"I don't care," she said obstinately.
Not wanting to argue, Connor leant over and whispered in her ear, "I hate them too, so we won't have them at home. But do what Lettie . . . your grandmum says, because she's a scary lady when she's upset. Ow." The sharp rap on the back of his head made him quiet and silenced Caitlyn as a consequence.
Then the tantrums started. Connor tried ignoring them, tried naughty step tactics, tried reasoning with her and pleading. Nothing worked, and Lettie, who'd been more one for a sharp rap to the head or a spanking, admitted she was worried about using that on a girl who'd already been abused, because it might just set everything back. They witheld desserts and suffered through more fits and demands until Connor snapped.
He was in the midst of setting up a very delicate piece of identity work, something that needed monitoring of the firewall, juggling bits and pieces of code and could get him in a lot of trouble, because these were census files and such, and with the need for confidentiality were far more secure than most things.
Caitlyn was at the office door, screaming the house down because he was ignoring her, and Lettie had gone out shopping, so there was no one to pull her away. He finished up to the sound of her furious shrieks, then whipped around, furious. "Stop that right now!" he snapped.
"You're not listening-"
"Do you want to go back to Clarke's?" he demanded. "Because if you do, keep it up."
The threat shocked her into silence. "You said you wouldn't take me back," she finally ventured.
"I won't have to, if you keep interrupting me when I'm working on this," Connor said grimly. "What I'm doing is hard, and complicated and if I get caught at it, they'll take you away back to him, and I'll be sent to prison."
"But-"
"But nothing," Connor told her. "And just for the fact that I may not have got this right because you were screaming in my ear, you're not just getting no dessert tonight, you're getting no stories at all before bedtime, and since you're so determined to be in here with me, you get to sit, quietly, right here, watching me until I'm done. No books, no toys, no nothing."
She was very quiet that evening and even went to bed without a fuss. "What happened?" Lettie finally asked.
Connor rubbed his forehead. "I may have sort of threatened her with going back to her father's."
"Ja -- Connor," Lettie may have been the one to suggest they all start using the false names all the time at once, but she had a lifetime of calling him Jake, and he wasn't Connor, never would be. "You said you weren't going to, and you were right not to."
"I know," he said, sighing. "But I was hacking the census figures, taking her out of them and shifting her over to Connor . . . my . . . household when she started pitching a fit. I'm not sure I didn't leave some big markers behind that I was in the system and I just blew up. Warned her that if could be her fault if we got caught by the police and all -"
"And that she'd be taken back if you were caught," Lettie caught on. "I think that may have been a good idea, actually."
He frowned at her, confused. "How come?"
"Because she's still a young child, and I don't know if she really understands how important it all is," Lettie explained. "Right now, I expect she's pushing partly to see whether we'll crack and act like her father did, but it's also because she doesn't know how to judge what's important and what isn't, what you interrupt an adult for or don't." She slumped down. "Still, I'm getting too old for this. I should be playing at spoiling my grandkids, not being her mum."
"I'm sorry," he told her, contrite. "I just threw this all in your lap, didn't I?" he asked.
"Jake," she said, "You're just as important to me as Conn was, and I'd help you with anything as important as this. And a lot that's less important."
"Still," he said with a sigh, "We'll be getting out of your hair soon enough. I've finished up everything, and all that's left is transferring 'Connor' from Sheffield out to Met Central University for the last year in undergraduate studies."
"London?" she said, surprised. "You're going that far? I thought maybe Leeds or . . . somewhere a bit closer."
He shook his head. "I've got to get far away, and I know that Connor would have gone for his PhD in something to do with paleontology in the end. He was always more gutsy than me, doing the engineering second honours focus just for the safe fallback."
"He was," she chuckled. "So, you'll be taking his risk for him?"
A sad smile crossed his face. "I should make sure our database is good for something, yeah?"
***********
So, a few weeks later it was all done. The 'replacement' identifications, birth certificates, driver's license and what-all had arrived in the mail, Jake no longer sporting his clothing, but Connor's that Lettie hadn't the heart to be rid of, and Caitlyn, now sporting the nickname Lynn and dressed like Connor in miniature were on their way to a new life in London.
Connor had had to add a few extra layers of hiding after Clarke had showed up, accusing Jake of kidnapping Imogen. With all his concern, he decided to compartmentalise Lynn and his academic life as much as possible, since the academic community could be very small at times and he didn't want any rumours leaking back to his old stomping grounds. So, now he was stuck in the sort of council flat that gave government housing a bad name, on a student budget, and no way to claim assistance from much of anyone besides Lettie.
He struck gold in the nice lady down the hall, who was happy to babysit for him when Lynn wasn't in nursery school and Connor had to be in classes, exams or working part time to fill in the gaps.
They'd got settled in, with a few tantrums and tempers from Lynn, who wasn't at all used to such squalid surroundings, and was cynical enough at the age of five (her birthday had passed over the summer), to give him the evil eye when he suggested something as stupid as pretending it was an adventure.
Admitting shamefacedly to her teachers that he'd been a stupid teenager, who'd done a few stupid things, and that was why he had a five-year-old daughter while he was still twenty-three, Connor was meticulous about being an attentive parent and being seen to do all the right things. The last thing he wanted was to have anyone think to call child services down on him to investigate. Consequently, he had a nasty shock when a redheaded man in jeans plopped down next to him on a bench at the park while he was watching Lynn on the swings and doing his readings for his next class.
"Afternoon Mr. Cosgrove," he said.
Jake felt the blood drain out of his face. "You one of Geoffery Clarke's people?" he asked. It didn't even occur to him to try bluffing until after it was too late.
The man shook his head. "DC Daniel Quinn," he said.
"That's almost worse," Jake said with a sigh. "You come to take me in, then?"
"Personally," Detective Quinn said, "I'm more interested right now in the real story."
"The . . . real story?" Jake asked, hesitantly. "Meaning?"
"Meaning," Detective Quinn told him, "That I found it interesting that the little girl's room back home hadn't been slept in or lived in at all, looked pretty much for show to me, but her wardrobe, that looked plenty lived in. More like something had been trying to get out of it. Then when I caught up to you," he turned and flashed Jake a companionable look, "Nice job on hiding by the way, I'm not sure any of our witness protection people could have done much better."
"Er . . . thanks?"
"Anyhow," the man continued, "I found her, and she seems pretty keen on you. Likes you a lot, never seems to act like she's afraid of you or anything. Calls you 'dad' without a single thought about it. So, why is that? If she's been taken from a loving home and all, why's she so happy here?"
"He was abusing her," Jake said, and the whole story spilled out. Between one moment and the next, everything, the police corruption, the way no one did anything, Clarke's apparent power in the area, Jake's fears that if he'd gone to the police it would get swept under the rug and both he and Imogen would suffer for it, it all came out. Detective Quinn listened, getting steadily more focussed and more angry.
"Right," he said. "I'm going to look into this, and you'll stay in London and keep on as you have. You run, I'll run you to ground. That clear?"
"Just so's I'm clear," Jake replied, "You're not arresting me? You're not taking her back?"
"No." That much was definite. "I'm checking out your story, then I'll report them to internal investigations if I can, and then we'll see." He looked Jake in the eye. "What I do know, is that right now I do believe you were rescuing her and that you didn't see any other options." He stood, grinning in a friendly way again, and said cheerfully, "I'll see you around, Temple."
He sagged down on the bench in relief. This being in hiding was extremely stressful.
A week later, a knock at the door interrupted Lynn's declarations that, "I hate you! You don't let me do anything! I just want to go to Jackie's for a sleepover!" (on a school night no less, and neither girl had her parents' permission when they made their plans).
Lynn was throwing toys at the door to her bedroom when Connor let the detective into his flat. "Trouble in paradise?" Quinn asked with a tired-looking smirk.
"She thinks I ought to let her stay overnight at a friend's on a Wednesday evening when she's got school the next day," Connor said with a shrug. "Let -- Mum thinks that, now that she's allowed friends and to visit them, she's testing her boundaries all over again, since Clarke never let her have any friends at all."
"You'll have to watch those slip-ups," Quinn said, suddenly dropping to Connor's couch. "I got nowhere. That man's got all the regional authorities in his pocket, not just the police. Worse," he said heavily, "I can't figure out what he's doing out there that needs it. But who has that kind of pull already set up if they don't need it?"
"No smoke without fire?" Connor asked.
Quinn nodded. "Seems like. I tried to report things, and it just got cancelled by a councillor on behalf of a few groups."
"Hell," Connor said, joining him on the couch. It was the only place to sit besides the chairs at the table he and Lynn ate at.
"So, I snarled up the paperwork and investigations looking for you instead," Quinn added.
His heart skipped a beat as he breathed, "Thank you."
Quinn looked around the cracked walls, stained ceiling, windows with gaffer tape to seal the cracks at the frames where the wind would come through and freeze them both come winter, and said, "As much as looking into that berk even more makes me sure she's better off here, I wish I could do more for you."
Connor smiled. "Knowing that no one's coming for us at the moment's good enough. But," he added, joking, "It'd be nice to have a back-up babysitter. I can't trust Miss Kirkpatrick down the hall to always be available when I need her, and since she's gone most of next week, I'm going to have to pay someone to pick Lynn up from school at three on Tuesday, and stay with her on Wednesday and Thursday evenings while I've got classes."
Friday morning of the week after, Lynn declared that Danny was the coolest babysitter ever, and could he keep looking after her instead of Miss Kirkpatrick?
On to Part 2
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