Bartholomew Henry Allen, Esquire, better known as Barry to his friends and family, was late.
This fact of circumstance was of no surprise to him, or Cisco, as he clambered into the ground floor window at the back of the house Caitlin used whenever she visited London. The window he had chosen led to the library, which had been converted into a study for Cisco's purposes so as to aid their investigations.
"There is a perfectly working front door in this house, you know," said the gunsmith, looking up from the desk he was seated at. He was surrounded by sheaves of papers, each sheet detailing a different design he was simultaneously working on, for his many commissions.
Barry rolled over to stare at the plastered ceiling, his chest heaving as he sought to catch his breath. "I…thought we agreed…it wasn't good for the ton to see us in public with Caitlin or calling upon her…"
"Well, yes, because it would be difficult to explain why an unmarried daughter of a gentleman was so well acquainted with a freshly graduated Cantabridgian and a gunsmith despite not having grown up with them. But this house is on the outskirts of the city. What took you so long? We expected you at noon."
"There was a dog fight on my way here," Barry said, in explanation for his tardiness.
"Ah. Is every individual, human or dog alike, happy now?"
"Not the humans who took bets on the outcome, but both dogs emerged unscathed after my intervention." Barry sat up. "Something smells."
"Something always smells. It's Caitlin we're talking about." Cisco put down his pencil and extended a hand to his friend. "How was the soirée yesterday?"
"It went well, as far as I could tell. Iris was pleased," said Barry, rising to his feet. He recalled the way his childhood companion had smiled towards the end of the event, not even minding when two of her guests decided to fling their drinks at each other because the fracas would cement her soirée in the minds of the entire ton as one that was truly not to be missed. "May I presume you've already obtained the bodies then?"
They were always procuring bodies, whether in the course of investigations or as part of Caitlin's own research, but there was no need to indicate that Barry referred specifically to those from the Hyde Park murders. Nine corpses had been left by an archer in Hyde Park on Saturday, May the Sixteenth, with no rhyme or reason other than three messages that had reportedly been left embedded in the corpses in a very grisly fashion.
Cisco put a finger to his lips. "In and out so fast that Bow Street's coroner didn't even notice. You owe us both one, Barry – we had to pay a little more for the extraction this time, and I don't think it was worth it."
"Why not? May I see them? I have some time this afternoon."
"It's the type of thing only a demented person would enjoy. Deliberate wounds everywhere, but as it turns out the cause of death is fairly simple, as is the murder weapon."
They had begun walking down the corridor towards the sound of excited female voices downstairs,
"What about the famous bladders?" Barry asked. It was said that some messages had been inserted into sheep bladders further sewn into the guts of the men, a grisly detail that he did not quite want to believe till he saw it with his own eyes. His own visit to the supposed crime scene on Monday afternoon had yielded little other than the observation that the bodies must have been left there after the actual killing, owing to the lack of signs indicating that a struggle had taken place. But such conjectures were specious without a preliminary examination of the bodies.
"Absolutely disgusting. You'll have to ask Caitlin – I'm no good with that sort of thing. Is that Felicity's voice I hear?" asked Cisco.
Felicity Smoak was the occasional fourth member of their little group, given that her specific skillset came into play in harder cases. Fluent in twelve languages, mathematics, history, art and whatever else was required for her talent in forgeries, her accomplishments complimented Caitlin's expertise in human physiology, Cisco's knowledge of weaponry and Barry's instinct for observation and deductions perfectly.
The buzz of her voice could indeed be heard from outside the drawing room, along with Caitlin's. A third, male voice joined their conversation, and Cisco and Barry exchanged looks of interest. It seemed that Felicity had brought a friend.
As they stepped into the drawing room, Barry recognised their male guest as the Duke of Starling, with whom he had spoken just the night before at the Wests', and someone he had never thought to see in respect of his unorthodox hobby of solving crimes.
"Your grace!" he exclaimed, and Caitlin and Cisco produced expressions of surprise.
Dressed simply in a dark blue coat and Hessians, the duke emanated authority and graciousness, as always, but his polite façade fell away into a more taciturn demeanour as he heard Barry's voice.
"It is very nice to see you again, Mr Allen," said the duke coolly. His gaze was leveled directly on Barry, and he knew that he too was taking the sum of him at that very moment.
The Duke of Starling was a man that could be said to have led a charmed life. Born and raised in with the benefit of rank and riches, he was found to be debonair and dashing in all circles, much as he was an elusive figure in the lace and starch of respectable ton. The sole tragedy in his life was a carriage accident that had purportedly taken his father's life and part of his memory, much to the intrigue of the novel-reading public.
The man that stood before Barry now did not just exude the magnetic air of mystery that had captivated the imaginations of scandal sheet writer and debutante alike, but also a guarded cautiousness while he waited for Felicity to finish explaining how a viscount heavily involved with law enforcement had placed suspicion on the duke for the Hyde Park murders.
"Am I mistaken in thinking that your grace is the duke that returned from the dead?" asked Cisco at once, as blunt as he always was, causing Caitlin to widen her eyes in chagrin and Felicity to wince. The duke's brow furrowed, before he quirked up a brow with the onslaught of words that Cisco was bombarding him with. "The one who disappeared for five years and then came back to open a club with a person who goes by 'Arrow', and who now holds much of London in debt to your club…"
Ever the voice of sensibility, Caitlin saved the conversation from the farcical turn it was threatening to take. "That will be enough. Your grace, I trust Felicity and if she brought you here to consult my findings, then I shall do as she requests. Will your grace come down to my workshop with me?"
It was not enough for Barry. Despite the dance he had shared with the duke's sister the night before – a request made by Iris he had complied with - he had only met the duke twice before this: once at a dinner hosted by the Duchess of Starling and then once again at Iris's soirée. Both times their conversation had been brief, and Barry belatedly recalled the duke's expression of interest in the topic of translation during their first meeting now, a detail he had not given much thought to then.
He darted a glance at Felicity. It was likely that she had been the duke's goal all along.
Arrangements were made to allow the duke's bodyguard to join them, and Felicity finally noticed his subtle attempts to beckon to her, following Caitlin's rather obvious swatting of Cisco for his earlier words. As she came up to his side, he felt the horripilation of the hairs on the back of his neck from the duke's corresponding look of displeasure trained on him.
Christ. Why did she always have to pick such dangerous men to associate herself with?
"You disappeared," he said in a low voice, a stray thought about what it was that occasioned her to don an old pair of breeches with her ostensibly new riding boots on her call here appearing in his mind. He had allowed Felicity to use his house in London as a front for her translation assignments for sometime now, until she had gone missing for a month with no word, other than a note from her house in Ely that said she was well and just needed a break from the work. In hindsight perhaps he should not have taken the note at face value, except that he was accustomed to the erratic nature of her work.
"I'm sorry if I made you worry. Deathstroke had acquired my mother's betting slips to hold over my head, and I escaped only after his grace took her to the Canary's. In exchange for decryption services, which is why there's the secretary story circulating the ton."
It was nothing he had guessed when the news of her working for the duchy of Starling broke across London, but hearing her confirmation that the duke was not taking advantage of her, and that she had escaped Slade Wilson's clutches, gave him some sense of relief. Barry looked into Felicity's eyes with concern. "Are you happy? Are you sure?"
Are you sure about trusting him?
He had always asked her this question about each and every single one of her assignments, ever since she asked him to provide a cover for her just so she could take on translation exercises that were not strictly speaking, legal. A flash of hurt met her eyes as she recognised the exact phrasing of his questions from the time when a certain blackguard was still in her life – Barry had asked her the same of her association with Cooper Seldon then. Her blue eyes clouded for a moment, and then she met his gaze confidently, her earnestness and confidence unwavering.
"I can trust him."
The duke's bodyguard arrived, a hulking barge of a man, and Felicity made the introductions. Barry barely noticed what she was saying as he reconsidered the duke, noting the way she omitted his rank in her latest expression of trust.
What was it his mother had always said? Still waters run deep. There was significant part of the duke's story that he suspected Felicity was not privy to, which was essential to answering why a peer of the realm who was known for rakish exploits would require the intellect of the best cryptographer in England.
As they neared the end of Felicity's summary, the Duke of Starling contributed his end of the tale. There was a sense of finality to the duke's bearing, conveyed by the decisive way he said, "My father was murdered five years ago, and I returned as the Arrow to find his murderer. I suspect that the person who did so is trying to target me now, and the Hyde Park murders are a message he's trying to send to me."
Barry found himself nodding, the words slipping out of him as he committed his findings to the duke's quest. The duke had expressed his confidence in their trustworthiness in choosing to divulge as such, and moreover, Barry and his friends knew that he would do anything to give someone the closure they needed when a mysterious death needed to be explained.
That was what fate had denied him regarding his mother's death so many years ago; that was what he needed to be able to give to anyone who was hurting the same way he did whenever he came across a mystery.
With a click of the door leading to the basement, the company of six entered the place where Caitlin's surgery was located.
Split into three different rooms, the space had been designed specifically to minimise the foul vapours associated with her line of work, but the smell was inevitable when three-day-old corpses were involved, and in such a large quantity.
To his right, Cisco made a sound of disgust as they descended down the stairs, while the duke's bodyguard – Barry believed his name was John Diggle – handed Felicity a white handkerchief to hold to her nose.
"How do you ever stand the smell?" came Felicity's muffled voice from behind him.
Caitlin looked back with surprise from where she was standing at the head of the delegation. "What smell are you speaking of?"
"And this is why precisely you will only ever marry a surgeon. Or a physician. No one else wants to come home to eau de corpse," muttered Cisco under his breath. Caitlin heard him and briefly turned to glower at him.
From the corner of his eye, Barry noted that the duke and his man were taking the odour fairly well, though he fancied he saw Diggle's jaw harden and the man blinking as if to prevent tears from coming to his eyes. The Duke of Starling remained stoic; he was watching Felicity's descent, on occasion lifting a hand towards her person when it seemed she would stumble from the uneven way she was walking.
They reached the final step of that flight of stairs, and Barry offered Felicity a hand. Instantly he felt the weight of the duke's notice. This hostility could no longer be written off as a coincidence: objectively, he was a fairly competent detective and he was quite sure that the duke was incensed whenever he and Felicity went beyond two feet of each other.
Barry looked at Felicity's oblivious face, leaning closer to ask, "I'm sorry to ask this, but are you and the duke…involved?"
She looked shocked and horrified. "No! Absolutely not!"
That was definitely an overreaction, close to reaching the likes of deserving a 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much', which was interesting but not worth risking his neck for. As he pulled away he noticed that the duke's bodyguard was watching all of this with a wry quirk of his mouth, even though his massive arms were crossed over his broad chest.
"Barry just asked if I wanted to touch the bladders," Felicity informed the room, to explain her loud reaction. "I'm not touching it – such should be kept to yourself!"
Caitlin and Cisco looked exceedingly skeptical, but headed into the first room anyway, Caitlin explaining that all the bodies were marked identically and so she had only been conducting extensive investigations on one of them while the others were stored in the ice room at the back of her workshop.
Cisco's description when Barry had first arrived was right. Past the gore of multiple wounds and the contorted grimace of pain that the victim's death mask was, the body itself presented little intellectual challenge.
"The cause of death was a single arrow to the chest, following that, excessive loss of blood," said Caitlin, tapping the corpse's chest with impersonal precision. "Every other wound was inflicted close to the time of death, either before or after - I measured the depth of the injuries and the way the victim's muscles have tensed from the impact and they are all consistent with the murder weapon, as well as my findings."
Cisco raised a single arrow with a broad head. "One of these was found in every body. I'm not sure if any other arrows were used but I'm still in the midst of deducing the perpetrator's height from the angle and the strength used – I bought a hunk of meat for this but we don't have an archer at hand for me to make direct measurements."
"I can help with that," said the duke. "If you have a bow."
Where did she find him? mouthed Cisco to Barry, albeit not very discreetly, followed by a "Yes, I do" out loud. "Would your grace prefer to use a recurve or long bow?"
"You better take measure of both, Mr Ramon," he replied, unbuttoning his coat and waistcoat with a hand to reveal that his clothing was not padded in the slightest, and that his large frame was packed with muscle not commonly seen on an aristocrat. The duke handed his garments to his bodyguard, who dutifully folded them over his arm.
"In the meantime I'll show Mr Diggle and Felicity here the bladders," Caitlin said, to the duke and Cisco's retreating forms. They were headed for the second room, where Cisco typically conducted tests to deduce the murder weapon where one was not found with the bodies.
Barry waited for her to present the most intriguing part of the murders, to his mind. There was a squelching sound as Caitlin calmly pried open the jagged slash on the corpse's gut, pulling out a translucent pouch with a pair of calipers.
"I don't think I can have supper after this," Felicity remarked.
Caitlin chortled, retrieving three pieces of paper from within the sheep bladder. "You'll find that you get used to all of it after a while. I, for one, always need to have a cup of tea and biscuits after working." She laid the papers out on the table and the four of them crowded round them to inspect the writing.
There were three different messages, all subversions of biblical verses.
The first: Vengeance is mine; I will repay.
The second: The sins of the father will be visited upon the son.
And the last: I say not unto thee, until seven times: but, until seventy times seven.
"It's not someone I have worked with – I don't recognise the handwriting. And either the writer of these does not know how to read the bible in context, or he has a colossal ego and thinks himself equal to God," said Felicity.
"I'm inclined towards the latter myself," Barry concurred.
"I've heard the second before," Diggle said gruffly. "His grace was stabbed at the Theatre Royal a month ago, and he told me that the attempted murderer's last words to him were such."
Last words?
"The man is still alive, is he?" Barry asked tentatively.
Diggle's grim expression did not change. "Unfortunately, yes."
As the sound of arrows being fired in quick succession broke out from behind them, Barry looked back at the body, tilting his head to see better.
"Do you have the list of identities?" Caitlin was asking of him.
"Yes, I visited Bow Street this morning and you won't believe the amount of pie I had to ingest with Mr Winchester before he was amenable to talking," said Barry absently. The way the wounds were positioned…
"Anyone of note?"
"…Orion," he declared, his conjecture being corroborated by the evidence before him.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Everyone present needs to see this!" interrupted Cisco. He leant out of the doorway that separated the two rooms they were in, eyes shining with excitement. "I've never seen anyone shoot so fast before in my entire life…"
They all entered the weapons room, where the Duke of Starling aimed an arrow at the slab of meat hanging by a hook on the other end of the room. He released his hold on the taut string, and his arrow met its target with a decisive sound of impact.
"He's definitely a relation of Ronnie's," Barry heard Caitlin mutter, owing to the fact that the duke stood shirtless in the centre of the room, the powerful lines of his body were clear for all to see.
Barry did not know his Debrett's as well as he should, but he recalled Iris once mentioning that the Raymonds were related to the Queenes by a marriage a couple of generations back. There was indeed a resemblance to Dr Ronald Raymond, the young physician who was last to train with Caitlin's father in Lincolnshire, and who enjoyed swimming nude in a nearby lake, according to Caitlin.
The duke certainly had the same effect on women as Ronnie did, judging from the furious blush that struck Felicity's cheeks as she appeared to be wrestling with herself in an inner moral dilemma about whether to look directly at the duke or not.
"I have measurements!" cried Cisco triumphantly, waving the piece of paper on which he had presumably made notations while the duke fired. "Now we just need to see what corresponds to your findings, Caitlin."
The duke crossed over to where his discarded shirt had been laid out, next to the chest of drawers by which Barry stood. "You shoot faster when your arms are not constrained by fabric," he explained, pulling his shirt over his head.
Barry was just glad that Iris was not here to see this, not after she had gushed at length about how handsome the Duke of Starling was after her event last night.
"What were you saying earlier about 'Orion', Mr Allen?" asked the duke's bodyguard. Barry believed that Mr Diggle did not miss much in the quiet vigil he held over his surroundings, even though he said very little.
"The wounds correspond to the position of the stars in the constellation. And the records concerning the victims' identities, which I consulted this morning, point to a commonality between their occupations. They've all served as mercenaries at some point of their lives."
The duke met his eyes. "The hunter becomes the hunted."
Barry nodded. "It's a dare, your grace."
"A dare from the hunter…" mused Cisco, a faraway look in his eyes that his friends recognised as the beginning of the process where he would label the investigation with a fanciful name for their records. "We'll call this case 'The Orion Inquest'."
The rest of the afternoon frittered away quickly, but there was little new inroads made on the investigation, save for when Felicity exclaimed her recognition of one of the bodies – an Anthony Ivo who had apparently made a visit to Slade Wilson's infamous house party for a brief meeting a fortnight ago.
The duke did not take the news well, and he remained aloof while Caitlin offered tea and biscuits in her drawing room at the conclusion of their investigation.
"These are so good…" mumbled Cisco, stealing biscuits off Caitlin's plate once he finished the ones on his own. "Reward for deducing that the measurements are consistent with an archer of average height, slightly shorter than his grace here, though just as skilled… Barry and I will have to look into the provenance of the murder weapon, of course."
Felicity asked a question about the process by which that investigation would take, followed by Diggle's offer to ask his own contacts about arrow production, and Barry took the chance to approach the Duke of Starling.
"I've a feeling that your grace will ask us to relinquish the investigation at this point," he said softly, standing next to the other man.
"I'm considering it. The perpetrator is dangerous and highly skilled, and the fewer individuals vulnerable to his attacks involved, the better. My partners can fight and defend themselves."
Barry chafed a little at the description, but he acknowledged that what skill he had at boxing and fencing could not match the duke's obvious athleticism. After all, Barry had always relied on the speed of his wits, not his reflexes, in the course of his hobby.
"What about Felicity?"
The duke did not hesitate for a moment to give his reply. "I'll protect her."
Barry opened his mouth slightly, deliberating whether he would be exceeding the bounds of what was proper by articulating his thoughts. He decided to speak. "As her friend, I'm not too concerned with the danger the other archer poses, your grace. If I may speak frankly, her real vulnerability lies in problems which her considerable intellect cannot solve. I don't know how much of her past you know, but Felicity's heart is at once her greatest strength and her weakness. Once she declares her allegiance, she will never waver, but those who have her regard must all the more be careful with her."
It was precisely this quality that Barry had once been attracted to, before he acknowledged that his heart ultimately lay elsewhere.
The duke's face softened at the description. "I know."
That did not address Barry's interest about the extent of his knowledge about Felicity's background, but he felt more reassured about his old friend suddenly working for this dangerous man, who clearly had the ability to kill and a reputation for being careless about women.
He could tell that Felicity Smoak was valued by the Duke of Starling, and so Barry did not mind too much when, at the close of their impromptu afternoon tea, the duke announced, "My mission must be a closely guarded secret known only to a few, and if it were to get out, it'll endanger my family, my friends, and it will embolden my enemies to retaliate at me through them."
He even allowed himself a chuckle of amusement when Felicity followed that speech with a translation that the duke, in fact, enjoyed their collaboration that afternoon and could not wait to repeat the experience, to Cisco's unconvinced, "You know, it didn't sound like what his grace was saying…"
It was only as they stood in the entrance hall and watched the three of them ride away, that Barry remembered that his afternoon was not as free of appointments as he had believed.
"What time is it?" he asked, patting at his fob for his missing watch, instead of answering Cisco's, "Well, now that his grace has taken the case off our hands, I guess it's back to waiting for something interesting to happen."
"Quarter past six," replied Caitlin, indicating the clock down the hallway.
"Damn," said Barry, looking around for his hat immediately.
"Barry!" chided Caitlin for his language, while Cisco asked him what he had forgotten this time.
Iris had expected Barry back home for a promenade down Rotten Row a good half hour ago. He spied his hat on the sideboard where he left it before he entered the drawing room when he had first arrived, and snatched it to his person hastily.
"I'll be back tomorrow – Iris needs me," he cried, dashing off in the direction of where he had left his horse.
Cisco called out something after him, but he did not hear it, too busy was he tearing down the dusty road at top speed in direction of Mayfair.
After all, it was the only thing to do: Barry Allen was late.
I hope you liked it and understood what was going on! I wanted anyone to be able to read this without all the background of 20+ chapters from The Dark Prodigal but looking through it again I don't think that's possible at all. As usual I couldn't resist making inside jokes about the characters and I even referenced a previous chapter of TDP where Diggle's sense of smell is horrified at what goes on around him. Sorry.
This was written in response to all the comments and reviews that wanted to see the Flarrow scenes I cut out of Chapter 25. I don't think it's as cute as you probably imagined it to be with regard to Jealous!Oliver and I actually was in the midst of writing Chapter 26's Olicity scene when I got the reviews and Barry's voice popped into my head and then I had to take a break to write this, but here it is. I kept this as ship-free as possible beyond Olicity but I suppose I don't do subtly very well when it comes to shipping. I hope you enjoyed it all the same :)