There was nothing wrong with modern policing. He'd certainly never complain about the advances in evidence gathering or analysis, but he saw some of the younger coppers relying on it a bit too much. Seemed like they weren't taught to think like he had been. Seemed like they weren't trained to consider how things might be connected in ways that weren't obvious by looking at a piece of paper or a photo or a CCTV camera.
Take this case. An body had been found on a lawn at one of the colleges, a body that had been posed very carefully. There were no visible marks, but it had been arranged so the face was away from the lawn and the body appeared to be kneeling to pray flat against the bench. It was obviously a message of some sorts, but it could have been in Russian for all Robbie was able to decipher it. Hathaway was away on some two-week training course somewhere warmer than Oxford in January, the lucky sod, so he'd been given a different DS, one who clearly wasn't used to hunches. Robbie tried to draw him out, to get him to suggest something, but it didn't work. In the end, he assigned the Sergeant to looking at the CCTV and investigating the life of the victim while he tried to make the hunches himself.
He wasn't as good at it without Hathaway. He came up with a few things, obvious things, and eventually found a few suspects, some of which he even interviewed. Finally, though, he admitted temporary defeat. Sharing hunches with Hathaway had become an integral part of his process as a copper. He managed to take a photo of a photo of the crime scene and send it to Hathaway's phone with a short message.
does this remind you of anything
He wasn't sure where the punctuation or capitalization was, but Hathaway would understand without it. He went back to working on the victim's unremarkable if poorly organized financial records and waited for his bagman to reply.
Any connection to William Blake in the case?
That wasn't actually an answer, but then again it was, and Robbie smiled. Something in the photo had reminded Hathaway of William Blake. That was the kind of hunch he trusted James to come up with, the kind of thing he trusted him to help Robbie find.
"DS Ramsey," he called, and his substitute sergeant appeared in the doorway with an entirely correct and somehow slightly annoying "Sir."
"I want you to look into any connection between Mr. Bell and William Blake."
"The … poet, sir?" Ramsey said, clearly concerned that his temporary DI had gone spare, since there was no apparent reason for the request.
"Yes, the poet," Robbie confirmed, although until that confirmation he hadn't actually been sure who William Blake was.
"Yes, sir," Ramsey said, clearly still mystified, and disappeared. Robbie picked up his phone again.
Looking into it now Enjoying the training
A few moments later, his phone beeped. Hathaway must be on a break between sessions. Either that or he was texting in a session, and Robbie preferred not to think about that.
Entirely.
He could hear the sarcasm in the one word reply and he smiled before putting the phone down and getting on with looking into the life of Mr. Bell again.
About an hour later, DS Ramsey came in again, looking at Robbie like he'd won the pools.
"You've got something," Robbie said immediately, and it wasn't a question. The way DS Ramsey was looking, it had to be something good.
"Sir, do you remember interviewing a man named Porter?"
After a moment, Robbie nodded. The man was a lecturer with a strikingly Northern accent. Most lecturers sounded posh, but this one could have been off the last train from Yorkshire. It stuck in the mind.
"Mr. Bell and Porter were second cousins twice removed through an illegitimate relationship. As it turns out, their common ancestor left a sketch of William Blake's Urizen to his last descendant to make something worthy of being called a creator. Porter and Bell are the last descendants. They've been fighting over which one of them is worthy," Ramsey said, and showed Robbie a stack of letters written back and forth between the two men.
"And how much is this sketch worth, Sergeant?" he asked, flipping through the letters. The letters were increasingly angry and demanding on both sides.
"In 2006, another Blake sketch went for nearly £500,000," Ramsey said, and Robbie's eyebrows went up.
"That'd be a good motive."
After that, it was just a matter of getting the evidence and arresting Porter, although of course that wasn't as easy as it sounded. Never was. Just as they were booking him in, though, Hathaway arrived back from his training course.
"Ah, Sergeant. Feeling more trained?" Robbie asked, but Hathaway merely gave him a speaking glance as they watched the Custody Sergeant go through the formalities with Porter.
"Is that your Blake case?" Hathaway asked.
"Aye, it is," Robbie said. "Thanks for the help. Ramsey's a good sergeant, but he doesn't believe in hunches. Lucky for me, you do. Wouldn't have got him without your epiphany, unorthodox as it was."
Laura had got a Word of the Day calendar for Christmas and was determined to expand everyone's vocabulary.
"Well, it is the right time of year for that," Hathaway said dryly.
Robbie frowned. He certainly wasn't an expert on religious holidays, but he thought that one had passed.
"Hang on, wasn't that a couple of weeks ago?"
Hathaway smiled slightly in the way that meant he was about to say something clever.
"Not if you're Orthodox."