Kent had gone in, sung happy birthday, picked at a ghoulishly sweet piece of cake and knocked back one too many vodka tonics.
He isn't drunkwhen he clambers into bed, per se, but it's enough to give him a throbbing headache when the shrieks of his phone drag him away from his already tenuous sleep. He gropes through the thin darkness, chasing the blue cast of light that pricks at his eyes. He's never got used to that; he had found it rather easy to get used to the yellow glow of the streetlamp outside his window that obliterates every variety of curtain, but electronic pallor?
His fingers know the way to answer a call, and he holds the phone loosely to his ear with eyes closed. 'Yup?'
He doesn't bother with niceties anymore. Doesn't need to, really, since at this time of night it would either be one of his flatmates ('Kent, I've just realised. We're out of milk. Where do you get milk at three in the morning?') or someone from the station ('Kent, there's a body.') It's slightly terrifying that he doesn't respond that differently to either of them: noncommittal grunts and two-word sentences followed by a healthy dose of cursing them all once he's ended the call. There's even more cursing if Fred or Oliver manage to pocket call him, which happens more often than it should. At least Sarala understands how to operate a phone properly.
'Alright, Kent?' It's Miles, sounding more tired than shattered. 'You up?'
'Just about.' He yawns around the words.
'Well, you'd better get up quickly, then. We've got a body in Vicky Park.'
Kent can't halt the heavy exhalation that escapes his lungs. 'Oh, brilliant.'
'Just get down 'ere. Uniform will meet you at Crown Gate,' Miles pauses as Kent makes a pillow-muffled sound even he can't identify. 'Buck up, kid.'
Kent's tempted to say, 'Fuck off, skip,' because that's the sort of mood he's in, but he doesn't. He ends the call and chucks the mobile over his shoulder instead, and can't even be bothered to be glad it lands on the duvet instead of the floor.
He's not going to think about it. He's not. He's really, really not.
Except he knows what Chandler tastes like, now, and he can't ignore that.
The memory comes back, dulled at the edges by distilled spirits and disbelief, and Kent shakes it off with the duvet. Why the fuck had he done it? He's really not going there, not when he has to get up and go out and stand over a corpse with the very same man he'd kissed eight hours before. Not when it didn't end particularly well. Not when they're both going to have to pretend it never happened.
Kent gulps down two Nurofen and savours the taste of the sickly coating on his tongue. There's a moment where he considers borrowing some of Oliver's so-called 'emergency get-together' gin and leaving a conciliatory fiver, but then he remembers that he's not Chandler. He can't swig down a couple of shots and work. He'd just get silly, and he's already been silly enough to last him at least six months. He's still not decided what he's going to do with himself by the time he's tiptoed around the bathroom, pulled on his last clean suit and polished off Sarala's last custard tart.
(She won't be happy about it, but Kent reckons that's the least of his problems.)
But even through the shortcrust pastry and the ibuprofen and whatever's left of last night's vodka, Kent thinks about it. He thinks about not thinking about it, then he ends up thinking about it because what else is he supposed to do? Chandler had kissed him. Chandler had kissed him. Chandler had kissed him. Chandler had kissed him. How the fuck had that happened? Why—well, it didn't matter, did it? It had all gone to shit in the end. Bloody typical, really, except the last time he'd buggered it up this badly was during the Bogeyman case.
They'd had that slinging match at the time, and Kent had taken the two weeks' leave he'd been owed. Skip had slapped him on the shoulder when he had finally come back, saying he'd better go and see the boss because, quote, 'his nibs never quite got used to the empty desk.' So he'd gone in and Chandler apologised and so did he and that was the end of what was probably the most awkward conversation in his life. It took another few weeks for them both to coax out smiles out of each other, but they'd managed. Miles and Riley might have done a little pushing, and Mansell may have taken the piss, but they aren't awkward anymore. Or, at least, they weren't. They might be, after what's happened.
Kent fancies a cigarette, but he's not fancied a cigarette since he was seventeen and stupid so he's not about to buy a pack now.
He still tries to avoid as many shops as possible on the way, though.
Just in case.
It looks like the cold is already penetrating through the folds of Riley's scarf when Kent arrives. She's stood adjusting the fabric around her chin as he comes to a stop at the curb, and curses into the wind as her hair whips into her eyes.
'It's always us, isn't it?' she says, sputtering around the blonde strands as she fights to reattach them to her bun. 'Everyone else seems to be able to wait until morning. We have to trudge through damp parks before dawn.'
Kent scoffs as he swings his leg over the moped to dismount. 'Murphy's law.'
'You're not kidding,' Riley says, unzipping her jacket pockets and shoving her hands inside. 'God, it probably would have been better if I'd just not gone to bed at all.'
Kent reckons it probably would have been better if he'd learnt to leave an unattended bottle of vodka alone, but he understands the sentiment.
'I'll let them know you've arrived, yeah?'
He nods as he balances his helmet on the seat, and by the time his keys are out of the machinery and in his hand she's in the distance, separated from the road by cast iron gates and uniforms strapping up the area with crime scene tape. Kent takes a deep breath as he weighs the sculpted metal in his closed fist; that's the first step over with, then. He's broken the situation's ice. He can still talk to Riley without giving the game away. What game, though? There's no game. He's not going to think about it.
Kent's shadow lengthens as a familiar vehicle comes to a gentle stop behind him. He doesn't need to see it in its entirety to know it's Chandler's Range Rover; he'd kept his eyes peeled trying to avoid it on his own approach. He can't very well walk off now—at least, not at the breakneck speed his feet are telling him to break into—so he settles for hoping that for some unknown reason Chandler picked Miles up on the way.
(That would prevent any awkward situations, wouldn't it?)
There's no such luck, and as Chandler steps out the door Kent can't quite figure out how to make himself scarce. He's both well aware that he's just standing there, sliding his key ring from one finger to another, and entirely confounded about how they're supposed to handle this situation. Then again, Chandler's the boss, so he could always just transfer him and be done with it—
'Good morning, Kent.'
He sounds normal enough, so Kent goes with good old reliable cynicism.
'I'll believe that when I see it.'
Chandler gets an expression on his face then that looks as if he might have chuckled if they weren't standing outside a crime scene. 'It's not that early.'
'Speak for yourself, sir.' Kent curls a fist in his coat pocket; the warm metal bites into his palm. Distraction—that's what he needs, distraction. (A body would probably do the trick, actually.)
He's consciously making sure he doesn't squeak the words out, so for a moment he can't possibly think what's caught Chandler's attention over his shoulder.
'Do you—' Chandler begins, accompanied by atrophied thrust of the hand that is still clasped around his car keys. 'Do you want to leave your helmet in my car? Save you carrying it around.'
Kent's mouth may drop open just a little bit, but it's more out of confusion than anything else. Sarala teases him about the habit enough. In any case, he can see why Chandler's offering—and he can't. It's not necessary. He usually just leaves it with the bike at crime scenes—the place is crawling with police, after all—but it would save him from checking for spiders and bird shit afterwards. Which is a plus.
(The mere fact that Chandler offered at all intrigues him, too. But he's not supposed to be thinking about that, is he?)
He looks over his shoulder at the item in question for a moment, then reaches out and grasps it. 'Yeah, go on then.'
Chandler takes it from him and looks entirely out of his depth, like if he'd just been handed a ukulele. Still, he manages, holding it slightly away from himself as he opens the passenger door. Kent would call it endearing if they hadn't charged past that point less than eight hours ago.
'Right,' Chandler says as the door falls shut. 'Shall we get on?'
Kent doesn't answer, just steps out of the way instead and lets Chandler take the lead. That's what he's paid to do, after all. Shall we get on? It seems as if they will. Kent's not sure if he likes it, though, when they walk through the gates and duck under the bright tape. But what else does he want? Well, there's that, obviously but it won't happen. Can't happen. His luck's so consistently shit that he'd never really thought that it could, even when he'd made that gut decision to instigate.
(Fucking vodka.)
They're both adults. They can kiss and not talk about it. That's perfectly within their capabilities as full grown human beings. Hell, Kent can remember doing the same thing with one of Oliver's mates during his first year on the force. They've never said a word about it to each other, and they can still have a laugh. Ergo, Kent concludes, he and Chandler can do the same thing. Probably. Maybe. (Maybe not.)
Kent makes the mistake of yawning, loudly, as he falls into step behind Chandler. He may have even hiccuped halfway through, though that was probably just the shock of Chandler turning his head so quickly.
'Do you need anything? I could get you a coffee, some tea—'
(Is it really that bad? Kent had reckoned he looked a bit peaky in the mirror, though to be honest he'd just put that down to the shit lighting. Maybe he does look a bit of a mess. It wouldn't be the first time they've worked a crime scene a bit sozzled. It would be the first time Chandler has commented on his well-being after a run-in with a bottle of cheap vodka.)
'No, no—you're all right, sir,' Kent says, although the yawn that slips out doesn't support his assertions.
Chandler might just smile at him then, although in the murky London morning Kent can't really be sure. 'Are you telling me, or asking me?'
Kent wants to say Whatever you need me to be saying, but only a pinched smile comes out.
(He's really not going to go there.)
Miles is waiting for them near one of the pedestrian alcoves—old bits of London Bridge, Kent had taken a liking to them as soon as he arrived in the East End—and he shoves paper crime scene suits in their direction. He's already rustling around in his, and Kent could do without the smirk he gets when the wind whips up one of the arms and it ends up smacking him around the face.
Chandler, of course, manages without such ungracefulness. 'What have we got?'
Miles gestures to the makeshift tent peeking out from the other side of the stone alcove. 'Stabbing. Young girl.'
'Suspicious?'
'Aren't they all?' Miles asks with a degree of exasperation, though it dies away when Chandler shoots him a look. 'Well, she definitely didn't knife herself, sir.'
Chandler ducks his head in that way he does when he thinks Miles is being facetious (Kent's inclined to agree with him), and as he zips the top of the suit he turns to march into the cordoned-off area, pulling on a pair of latex gloves on the way. Miles and Kent follow, walking more in steps than in Chandler's stride, and the constable begins his inevitable fight with the paper shoe covers.
'Do they ever?' he asks in a murmur.
'Yeah, in baths.' Miles doesn't turn around to look at him until they reach the makeshift door. 'In you get.'
Kent never worked any of those suicides. Somehow the cases never made it to his team. He didn't know if that could be considered lucky or not. Even so, the image of porcelain stained red and pink bath water and razor blades jumps to his mind and he can't quite get it to go away quick enough. He might be a policeman but he doesn't like it; he doesn't like what he has to look at. And they're just getting closer to having to do it one more time, to poke around with someone's body to find out who put it there.
Dr Llywellyn heaves herself to her feet and pulls the mask away from her mouth as they file inside. Kent doesn't know if he's ever seen her greet them with anything other than a sad, remorseful smile.
'Morning.'
They echo the sentiment; there's no need to preface it with adjectives that don't quite fit. Just the idea of a new dawn feels wrong when there's a body at their feet, a person that will never see it and whose consciousness disappeared into the black of night. Kent should be desensitized by now, really, he knows, but then again Sarala should be as well and she's come home from the hospital in tears too many times to count. There's no escaping humanity.
He chances a sideways glance at Chandler, but he's just got on with it, peering at the form at their feet. She's not sprawled, not spread-eagled, not splayed. She's just crumpled, collapsed under her own weight, and the grey marl of her jumper is blackened with blood. Kent's stomach lurches, as it always does, when he meets her wide-open eyes and finds nothing there.
'You've got a young female—between twenty-five and thirty, around five foot six—with multiple stab wounds to the abdomen,' begins Llywellyn, her gloved hand hovering over the wound site. 'Three entrance wounds, but only two of them deep. The other's much shallower, almost superficial.'
'Cause of death?' Chandler asks, twisting his head to follow the movement of the pathologist's pointing finger.
'You'll have to wait until I've done a complete post-mortem to get an official answer, but the wounds are serious. Internal bleeding as a result of the trauma is probable. The aorta's been severed, and this entry wound here—' She points to a particularly dark patch of fabric on the victim's left side. '—is near enough to the spleen that it's likely the attacker caught the organ, especially since it looks like it's not a straight in-and-out strike.'
Chandler rustles beside Kent. 'There's no obvious weapon?'
Llywellyn shakes her head. 'Not on or near the victim, no. She would have bled out even more quickly because the weapon wasn't left in situ.'
'Any ideas about what we're looking for?' asks Miles.
'Something with a serrated edge.'
Miles looks up from where he's crouched, and raises an eyebrow. 'Well, that's more than we're used to getting from you, Caroline.'
She turns to fix him with the shadow of a stern look. 'There's some rather definitive tearing around the wound sites that suggest a serrated edge. Not an especially long one, though. I can't say for certain yet, but I don't think you're looking for anything like a bread knife. Or any kitchen knife, for that matter.'
He frowns. 'But definitely a knife?'
'You know I can't be definite at this stage. There's always the possibility of something more exotic than a bog-standard blade, but I can't say either way until I've been back to the lab. There's only so much I can do at a crime scene.'
'Right, then. What about who we're looking for?'
'I'm not a clairvoyant, Ray, even though it does sometimes seem that way.' Llywellyn says with a brief smile that momentarily lightens the mood. 'Though the wounds are quite… controlled? Her attacker wasn't frantic. But they didn't get it right the first time, either—and there is that shallow cut—so I wouldn't think he or she was a professional.'
'Prepared for the possibility, though?' Kent suggests. 'Not planning on it, but aware the situation might call for violence?'
She nods. 'I'd say that was a reasonable conclusion. If there was only one strike then it would have been extremely lucky for someone who didn't know exactly what they were doing to kill with a single hit. These injuries would suggest they had the general idea but no so-called training.'
Chandler clears his throat. 'How long has she been…' He trails off, even then.
Llywellyn motions to one of her own team and pulls off one latex glove. 'I'd put time of death anywhere between six and eight hours ago.'
'Between nine and eleven last night, then.' Kent surprises himself with the mental math, and scolds himself for the distracting mental pictures of what he and Chandler were doing at the time.
'Mmhm.' The pathologist turns away from the group of detectives to peer into the plastic bag she's been handed. She holds it out to Miles once she's identified the contents. 'Her personal effects. She had her phone and a bit of cash in a jeans pocket, and keys in a jacket pocket.'
Miles thumbs at the cash through the plastic, and turns to Chandler. 'Not a mugging, then?'
'It seems unlikely.'
The sergeant returns his attention to Llywellyn. 'No identification?'
She shakes her head. 'There's the phone, but…'
'It's not conclusive.'
'No.'
Miles holds the bag under the closest light source, stretching the clear material tight over the contents. 'Nothing else?'
'Nothing.'
'Right, then. Ta,' he says to Llywellyn, who smiles, before turning to Chandler. 'I'll just go and have a word with the bloke who found her.'
Chandler's mouth narrows as he hods, and he seems deep in thought as Miles marches away from them. Kent remains silent, and begins to feel the cold (even through the thick walls of the forensic tent); he places his hands in his coat for safekeeping.
Dr Llywellyn catches Chandler's eye. 'May I?'
'What?' Chandler's still standing there, controlling his breathing with a hand over his mouth. 'Oh. Yes, of course.'
And when SOCO swarms, with their body bags and preparations, he ducks out of the zipped flap door and becomes the static shadow of a man through fabric. Kent doesn't quite know what to do, and stands watching for what's probably too long until Llywellyn appears at his side. She inclines her head in Chandler's direction when Kent notices her proximity.
'He's a bit ansty,' she says, folding her arms across her chest.
Kent's heart lodges itself in his throat; at least, he hopes that's what it is, because otherwise he's just developed some rather serious breathing difficulties. He doesn't want to think that he might know why the boss would be antsy. He could just put it down to the blood. The messiness of it all. The crime scenes, how grubby they make Chandler feel.
'Yeah,' he says, pursing his lips as he follows her line of sight.
They stand there, side by side, for a moment before Llywellyn turns back to their victim and Kent reckons he can't just hang around all day. He follows his boss's footsteps, and as he manages to extricate himself from the tent he notices that Chandler's still there. Just standing—possibly thinking, probably thinking—as he folds the line of the crime scene suit as neatly as he can without a decent flat surface at his disposal. Another glance around and Kent can see Riley and Skip with a distressed-looking man, and Mansell speaking to one or two of the uniformed officers not with their department.
There probably won't be any harm in hanging about a bit. Kent might not be thinking about what happened, but he still means what he said. I wonder, sir. He wonders even when he's not supposed to. He wonders because he's not supposed to, because who is? Miles, Kent supposes, but he's got his own family to worry about. Plus, Kent suspects that Skip doesn't have quite the same sort of investment he has. It's hard to imagine that he would. Then again it's hard to imagine a successful relationship between a constable and his inspector, too, so that's not saying much.
In any case, Kent decides not to do the thing that any self-respecting detective constable would do and take initiative in favour of sidling up to Chandler and standing just near enough to elicit conversation—if there's any there to elicit at all.
(Kent's never quite sure about that with the boss. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't.)
The lamp Chandler's standing next to casts a yellow light onto his already yellowing bruises, and Kent chastises himself for still wanting to reach out and touch them against the pads of his fingers. As if that would help.
'Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur.'
To Kent, it sounds like Chandler's just spitting out assorted consonants into the night. But he's the only one there to hear them, so they must be for him.
'Excuse me, sir?'
'Those whom the gods love die young.'
'Course?' Kent ventures, although he's rather sure that the police don't offer courses in conversational Latin.
'No, just something I was interested in.'
'Like Keats?'
Kent doesn't really understand why he brings it up; he doesn't have to, and it would probably have been better if he hadn't. They're standing in the middle of a crime scene, and they're trying to talk about poetry. Except it's what Miles had done for him when he'd first joined the team, and it'd helped to talk about something other than the zipping of the body bag and the clicking of forensic cameras. Chandler wasn't new blood and neither was he but they all still did it. Murder doesn't change, so why should they? It's never easy, to stand over someone's corpse.
'You recognised that?'
'I'm carting around an English A-level, sir,' he says, allowing a small smile to slip through to his mouth.
'Really?'
Chandler seems honestly interested. It's disconcerting, the openness of his face.
Kent turns away and faces the cracks of the pavement. 'Yeah. Literature, politics, biology. Then straight into the force.'
'Biology was a bit out of place, wasn't it?'
A shrug accompanies Kent's reply. 'Probably why I ended up with a D in that one.'
Ironic, really. He couldn't have remembered the names of all the bones in the hand for the life of him at eighteen, and a year later he'd seen all of them broken. He knows more about the abdominal cavity and its contents from disembowelments than diagrams. He knows about poisonings, about stabbings, about strangulations, about throttlings, about shootings, about overdoses, and yet he never quite got to grips with light-independent reactions.
Chandler nudges the small gravel of the footpath with the sole of his shoe as they stand in silence, and Kent speaks before his mind can tell him it'd be best not to.
'They dipp'd their swords in the water, and did tease their horses homeward, with convulsed spur, each richer by his being a murderer.'
Chandler looks at him and smiles slowly in a manner that doesn't feel inappropriate for a crime scene. It's a skill he doesn't know he has.
'Don't try and get anything else out of me, sir. That's the one thing I remember,' Kent warns, though he looks away when Chandler holds his gaze. One shoulder jumps to his ear in the afterthought of a shrug. 'Seemed apt, at the time.'
Except that's a bit of a fib, really, because there's always that bit at the end of Jane Eyre that gives Kent reason to pause. Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to trangress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? It had struck a chord with him then, in that overwarm classroom, and he'd hoped it'd struck a chord with the boy sat two desks to his right. (It hadn't.) And now, when it pops back into his head again and he's stood near enough to Chandler to kid himself that he can feel his body heat through the morning chill, the words begin to wrap themselves around workspace relationship policies instead of the general idea of his sexuality. Except he's already buggered that up, hasn't he? He'd almost forgotten, faced with that smile.
'Wait a minute—' Chandler says, half under his breath and half exclaimed, as he turns away from Kent in favour of staring at the cold, dark water of the fishing pond in the distance. He turns back to Kent and then away again in what must have been less than a second, because Kent can hardly do more than narrow his eyes that little bit more before Chandler's motioning to a passing uniform. 'Matthews! Contact someone at the station, we need to have this lake searched.'
The officer nods before hurrying towards the street, and as Chandler shoves the neatly folded square onto the nearby bench Riley strides up to them with both Mansell and Miles in tow.
'Boss?'
'Yes?'
'The jogger—Jamie Poole—the one who found the body. He reckons he might know who she is.'
'Really?'
She sighs heavily into the lightening air. 'No, not really, but it's all we can go on at the moment.'
'Go on, then.' Chandler says as he rubs a hand over his eyes.
'He jogs the same path through the park most weekday mornings, sometimes Saturdays if he's missed a day. You know what it's like, you start seeing familiar faces and you might chat sometimes—sort of like the school run, really. Anyway, he says they've spoken a couple of times. Not really proper conversations, good mornings and how are yous and that sort of thing so he doesn't know a thing about her. But he did hear one of her friends call her Lou once.'
Miles huffs and shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. 'That could just be a nickname. What if her name's Lucy? Or Louise? Louisa? Louella? It could just be Lou…'
They all look at him as if he's just sprouted a second head.
'What? We've still got enough baby name books in the house to have a bloody bonfire.'
Mansell snorts from behind his paper cup of coffee. 'Haven't you discovered the internet yet?'
'Judy's old-fashioned.'
'Right then,' Chandler says, interrupting the diversion with a slightly louder tone. 'We've got a bit of a name—'
Mansell finishes the thought for him. '—And that's about it.'
'Right.' Chandler looks to the ground at his feet, a small furrow appearing between his brows as he taps a rhythm onto the side of his leg. Kent finds it difficult to ignore the fact he knows what that would feel like against his skin until Chandler's light eyes fix on him. 'Kent, go back to the station and try to formally identify the victim. Start with the phone and missing persons.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Mansell, you and Riley oversee the search of the fishing pond. It's one of the more likely places to dump the murder weapon, but there's no current so we shouldn't be in too much trouble as far as movement goes. The longer its in there the worse it is for forensics, though, so if it's there to be found let's find it quickly. They like to keep us waiting even with perfectly preserved evidence.'
Kent's already stepped away from the rest of them as the two other constables nod to climb out of what was left of his crime scene suit. He's faced with only the bloody infuriating shoe covers when he realises that he needs his helmet. Which is in Chandler's car. Chandler's locked car. Chandler's locked car that he left parked on the other side of the park. Shit.
He takes a deep breath and a step towards where Chandler's already speaking quietly to Miles. 'Sir?'
The blond man looks up. 'Yes?'
'Helmet.' Kent motions towards his head.
Chandler looks at him blankly for a moment before realisation appears in his eyes. 'Oh! Yes, of course. Miles, I'll just—'
Miles shoos him away with a dismissive wave, and Chandler looks between them with wide eyes before swooping away down the path, leaving Kent jogging to catch up. He never really does manage to bring himself level with Chandler, though, and they only exchange words when they reach the Range Rover and the inspector fishes his keys out of an inside coat pocket. He opens and closes the passenger door in one fluid motion.
'There you go,' he says, holding the headgear in front of himself with a slightly awkward grip.
Kent takes it from him with both hands, palms laid flat against the plastic shell. 'Thanks.'
The taller man gives him a short smile, which Kent doesn't get a chance to return. Chandler turns on his heel, and with the flick of his wrist the Ranger Rover beeps shut. Kent watches him go as the flash of the headlights dies away, and he reckons that was the only time Chandler could have brought it up. The only time he could have said anything, when they were away from the rest of the team and a quick comment would have been carried away by the traffic. Not mentioning it is almost an order to ignore it—so ignore it he will.
He's not disappointed. No. No, definitely not.
Except he desperately is.
It's light by the time Kent settles into his chair in the incident room, and it's much more comfortable to stare into the beige of his tea than it is to do anything else. He'd much rather have coffee at this ungodly hour of the morning, but he's familiar enough with the morning after routine to know that it'd just make the slight pounding in his head worse. That plus a morning of clicking through the computer's missing persons database would just be a recipe for eyestrain-related disaster, and he's had quite enough disasters for one day already, thank you very much.
Other officers, both uniform and plain-clothes, file in as Kent decides by what criteria he's going to use. None of it's really specific enough to be useful; there's still considerably more than a handful of matches. More like a boatload, in fact. He indulges in a sigh that uses all the air in his lungs as he narrows down the findings to reports from the Greater London area. He has to start somewhere, after all.
Riley arrives when he's approximately an eighth of the way through and running low on tea. Kent turns to offer her a brief nod of greeting—anything else will pull him out of whatever efficient trance he's been lulled into, and popular science says it'll take him seven minutes to get it back and he doesn't have seven bloody minutes—but she's brandishing an evidence bag. At least that could be a bit interesting. And the phone should give them a name, at least, with a bit of tinkering. Which forensics would probably insist on doing themselves. Shit.
'Here you go,' she says, dropping the bag on top of his filing as she pulls off her coat.
Kent puts down his mug. 'Is this it?'
'Yes. Dr Llywellyn's cleared it for us for a while, but it'll need to go to the tech boys before long.'
'Ah, bureaucracy,' Kent mutters as he peers at the phone's screen through the plastic. The screen comes alive once he presses a button; thankfully there's a decent amount of battery left.
'It's for the best,' Riley says, though she's smiling as she unwinds her scarf and sits at her desk. 'Still a bloody pain in the arse, though.'
He grins in agreement, then turns back to the computer screen. If he can get through checking half of the London ones, he'll take a break to examine the phone. At least then he can say he made a concerted effort to identify the victim using means other than handling potentially essential evidence. Satisfied with his plan, and the fact that his head isn't feeling quite as vice-like anymore, Kent attempts to drain the last of his tea only to find it's gone cold. He grimaces against the clammy liquid and shoves the ceramic across the surface of his desk.
Whether it's the scraping sound that makes everyone in the immediate area freeze or the ringtone, Kent can't tell. He's still recoiling from the taste in his mouth when he realises a phone's going at all, and an embarrassingly long moment stretches between that realisation and the one that tells him that it's her phone. He wastes no time after that as he jumps to his feet and pulls a pair of gloves out of a drawer. His fingers fumble a bit as he fiddles with the closure of the bag, but the mobile's still ringing when he brandishes it in front of him, presses the answer call button, and sets it to speakerphone.
Kent meets Riley's expectant gaze as he speaks. 'Hello?'
'Oh, sorry—' It's a female voice. 'Sorry, but, um, is Lou there?'
His heart sinks as he recognizes her surprise. 'I'm afraid, miss, that this is DC Kent with Whitechapel police.'
There's a sudden intake of breath, and the words come out on exhale. 'Oh, my God. Is she—?'
'I'm sorry, but I have to ask for your full name, miss?'
'Um… uh, Roselyn. Roselyn Lyons.'
Kent grabs blindly with his free hand for the pen that he knows is on his desk, and pulls the cap off with his teeth. He scribbles down the name as best he can without holding the paper still.
'And your relation to Lou…?' He lets the question trail off; they're getting too close to the terrible explanation for comfort.
'I'm her flatmate,' Roselyn replies, her words hovering at the very edge of controlled. 'Oh, God, what's happened?'
'We…' Kent tries to find the right words. '…believe that your flatmate was found in Victoria Park earlier this morning.'
'And she's—?'
Kent swallows heavily. 'It would be a great help to our investigation if you could come down to Whitechapel police station as soon as possible.'
'Investigation? Just—please, just tell me.'
He doesn't want to say it over the phone, but: 'We are managing the situation as an unexplained death, Ms Lyons.'
The only way Kent can describe the sound she makes is as a whimper.
'If you could just come to the station and ask for a DI Chandler—'
'Yes, of—of course. I'm on my way, but—oh, God—someone's got to tell Jonathan.'
'Jonathan?' Kent frowns, and picks up the pen again.
'Lou's boyfriend.'
'I'm sorry, miss, but if you could just give us his full name—'
Roselyn sniffles around the syllables. 'Jonathan Torbett. I've got his number around here somewhere…'
'That's fine, Ms Lyons, we can contact him ourselves.' Even as he says it, Riley's taken the paper from his outstretched hand and is already balancing the handset of the office phone in her palm. 'If you could just give me one or two pieces of information before you go—'
The shuffling through papers on the other end of the line stops, and Roselyn takes a deep breath that doesn't quite calm her. 'Yes. Yes, of course.'
Kent resolves not to draw this out for much longer; this time he's ready with both his pen and his questions. 'What's Lou's full name?'
'Louisa Fox.'
He writes and speaks at once. 'And are there any identifying features that we should know about?'
'Um—' She swallows, takes two gulping breaths. 'Well, she's got a tiny tattoo of a star on her wrist.'
'Right.'
'Oh, but it might be covered. She has to cover it up for work; she used to use some heavy-duty concealer—
'Which wrist would that be?'
'Um. Oh, God, I don't know,' she says, her voice closer and closer to tears. 'I don't know.'
'It's fine, don't worry.' Kent leaves the pen uncapped on his desk and clasps the paper instead. 'Ms Lyons, is anyone there with you?'
There's a static on the end of the line that sounds like someone shaking their head. 'No. God, I dreaded something like this. She's always back before morning, or rings if she's going to stay out all night. When she didn't—' She breaks off into a truncated sob.
'I'm sorry, but I have to ask.' (And he really, really is sorry. He always is.) 'Would you feel able to formally identify Lou's body?'
'I—I don't know. Oh, Jonathan—'
'We're contacting him now, Ms Lyons. Are you still able to come in?'
She takes a shuddering breath. 'Yes, I think so. '
Kent's not sure but takes her at her word. She'd know, after all. 'Ask for either a DI Chandler or a DC Kent at the front desk. One of us will be down to speak to you when you arrive.'
The words are half-sighed into the silence Kent leaves for them. 'All right.'
'Take care, Ms Lyons,' he says in return.
'Thank you.'
She doesn't say goodbye, and Kent is left at the end of the line as he rereads his handwriting. He's careful to end the call and reseal the phone back into its evidence bag, peeling the gloves off inside out once he's finished. The slight powder residue on his skin sticks against paper, and he hates it, but he's got a job to do. More so now.
His colleagues had returned to their appointed duties long before the end of the conversation. Judging by Riley's face, she's got one of the more difficult attendants on the phone and would undoubtably have to endure a little wrangling to get this Jonathan Torbett's contact details. As much as Kent wishes there's another option, he would just have to relay the information to the boss himself, wherever he was. Ironic, really—he'd spent three years thinking up tenuous reasons to go to Chandler and as soon as he doesn't want it the fates hand him one. Just his sodding luck.
Mansell comes in with a glowering expression only a coffeepot could cure.
'Where's the boss?' Kent asks.
'No idea.' Mansell's tone is a degree worse than his face. He tilts the acrylic pot in Kent's direction. 'Coffee?'
'Nah, I've had a cup of tea already.'
'Suit yourself,' Mansell grumbles, shrugging as he pours a mug for himself.
Kent glances over his shoulder. The incident room's almost full now, each desk occupied and properly utilised, but there's no sign of either member of the upper chain of command. 'Have you seen Skip, then?'
'I passed him on my way in.' Mansell ducks to fish the milk out of the fridge, and huffs out half a bad-tempered laugh. 'He should be just about at the foot of the stairs by now.'
Kent's tempted to roll his eyes, but he's a professional. 'Right.'
'Why?' Mansell asks just before he swallows his first gulp.
'Louisa Fox.'
'Ah.' His face gets marginally lighter, but Kent doesn't know if that was the coffee or the information. 'Shall I write that down?'
'It would probably be for the best if you did,' Kent says, twisting the paper between his fingers. He glances towards the doors before adding, 'And her flatmate and her boyfriend are on their way in for informal interviews.'
Mansell opens the closest drawer and lazily goes in search of an appropriate felt-tip pen. 'I'll keep my jam-packed schedule free.'
'What about the pond?'
'Later this morning. Half a body washed up in Chiswick last night. We're low priority.'
Kent speaks on the exhale of a resigned sigh. 'Bloody brilliant.'
'You can say that again.' Mansell lets out a derisive snort as he makes his way towards the whiteboards.
Kent's half tempted to take him up on his offer, because it's turning out to be one of those sorts of days, but he keeps his mouth shut. It wouldn't be the first time it had run away with him. The paper in his hand feels heavier and heavier in the moments he stands next to Mansell's desk, but by the time he forces his feet to carry him to the stop of the stairs, he still can't quite tell if it's relief or disappointment that settles in his stomach when he spots Miles.
Ed knocks on the office door before Chandler's managed to get the pot of Tiger Balm to sit right. He knows better than to be annoyed, but it happens anyway.
The archivist pokes his head around the door before his body. 'Do you have a moment?'
'Of course,' Chandler says, and he manages to place a smile on his face that doesn't give Ed any ideas. 'What have you got for me?'
He links his hands behind his back as he walks further into the room. 'Not much, I'm afraid. Stabbings are ten a penny in the archive.'
'I expected as much,' Chandler all but exhales, scrubbing a hand over his jaw.
'Stabbings of young women—' Ed spreads his hands in front of him as he takes a seat and pauses for effect. '—are still strikingly common. For all sorts of reasons, too. A large amount of the cases I've been looking at are, in fact, torso wounds, but I suppose that's the easiest bit to hit…'
Chandler cringes and straightens the file that Ed's stray hand bumped. The stapler gets a bit of a nudge, too, before he thinks better of it.
'But, if you want to hear about deaths in Victoria Park…'
The detective inspector looks up as Ed trails off. 'Go on.'
'There have been several. Not recently. Victoria Park, or the People's Park as it is sometimes known, effectively became an anti-aircraft site during the Second World War. There is evidence—some suggestion, in fact—that the park had something to do with the Bethnal Green Tube disaster. A noise or an explosion, something of that sort, was heard from the direction of the park just before the run on the shelter. Possibly a new anti-aircraft rockets. The Ministry of Defence denies this, of course, but then again they always do—'
'Ed, get to the point.'
Chandler interrupts for the sake of brevity. He definitely doesn't do it because the longer Ed goes on about conspiracy theories regarding the role of a public green space in the largest single loss of civilian life in World War II, the more likely Chandler's eyes are to try and follow Kent's movements around the room on the other side of the windowed walls. That can't be intruding on his mind now.
'Right,' Ed says, voice clipped around the edges. 'Yes, quite right. Where was I? 1943?'
'Somewhere around there.'
(Chandler can't quite understand why once you start watching someone it's so hard to stop completely.)
'Okay, well. The park has been a bit of an icon for political rallies, for open air speeches, that sort of thing. There are records for injuries and scuffles, a few deaths deemed accidental and a few deemed purposeful dating from the nineteenth century to today. I've looked into those, and very few are stabbings. Not like—' Ed stops himself, finger pressed to his own lips, before he glances back at the whiteboard already littered with notes and photos and the shadow of someone else's blood on their consciences. 'Not like hers, anyway.'
'So there's nothing?'
'Oh, I don't know about that, Joe. There might not be a direct precedent, but as far as I can tell I've brought you information that might lead to one or two avenues of inquiry. They might not be very long avenues, but they're options if you want them.'
Chandler nods his assent, but manages to seek out Kent's face again in the split second pause. Except this time he finds his eyes and can't hold them; Kent turns away almost before Chandler realises they're looking at each other, and fiddles with something in a drawer. Ed doesn't notice as Chandler lowers his gaze to the wood of his desk and frowns.
'For one, the history of the area as a people's park. The area was a hotbed of activity for socialist agitation, for nonconformism, for reformism. Any group could pop someone up on the soapbox and watch them go. Now, I doubt any organization or school of thought that used the park in the twentieth century could be responsible for Ms Fox's death, but what if there was a new vein of thought? One that used the park as a meeting place, perhaps? A nod to the past?'
Sometimes, Ed does come up with some interesting ideas. Chandler wouldn't have expected it when he'd brought him on, but it happens. This time Chandler stops considering whether or not to have a proper, full-on cleanup of his office to consider how far they could go on an already stretched police budget.
He settles for, 'It's not impossible.'
'Trust me, Joe,' Ed says, leaning an elbow on the desk. His watch is five minutes off. 'If anything in my archive's to go by, nothing's impossible.'
Chandler sighs, and tried to reign himself in. 'We'll look into it. Anything else?'
'That's as far as I've got this morning.'
'Right. Keep going, then. Come up for lunch, too, and we'll get you up to date with what we've got then.'
Chandler catches sight of Kent past Ed's shoulder and funnily enough, it's his fingers he remembers, the curl of skin and bone around the crook of his elbow. He can still feel it now. If his body feels like betraying him as much as it usually does, he'll be flushed in no time, and he's got a murder investigation to run. He'll need another shirt. His fingers are already twisting the cufflinks; as soon as he realises, Chandler lies his hands flat on the desk in front of him and takes a deep breath.
'And don't forget about meals, Ed. We need everyone on the team in working condition. I'll send someone down to drag you up, even if you've managed to get yourself stuck in a filing cabinet.'
'Of course,' Ed replies, returning Chandler's forced smile with an honest one that makes the inspector feel much more like a liar.
Chandler tries to shoot the constable another look, but apparently his aim's off. That, or Kent is ignoring him. Chandler realizes that, unfortunately, the latter is more likely. That was why he'd spent the first quarter of an hour at the station loitering around downstairs with a cup of tea, waiting for Ed to arrive so he could do the brief himself instead of manning the boards in the incident room with Kent's eyes searing into the back of his head. That's why he's sat in his walled office, transparent but hidden, there but separate. That's why he's straightening that pile of files again, even though Ed's watching him do it with a quizzical look in his eye.
He's just about to reach for the Tiger Balm again when Riley almost careens straight into Ed as he widens the open door.
'We've found some more information about the victim's family, boss,' she announces, brandishing a torn piece of paper in one hand. Chandler could make out the lettering on the other side; he doesn't know why he's disappointed when it's not Kent's handwriting.
Chandler gets up anyway, because it's what he should do and he's not been doing nearly enough of that in the past twenty-four hours. 'Yes?'
'She's got a brother. The last the flatmate heard he was somewhere in the Wirral, but the boyfriend says he heard he was in Leicestershire. She didn't talk about him that much. Lyons assumed they just weren't that close but Torbett thought there might have been some animosity in the family.'
'Of what sort?' Chandler asks, interest piqued, as he walks out from behind his desk.
Riley shrugs. 'Doesn't know. As I said, she didn't talk about it. They had the impression that she didn't have much to do with her family anymore. Torbett's met her parents once or twice—Christmas, someone's wedding, that sort of thing—but never the brother. He says he can't remember anyone even mentioning a brother at a ll.'
'Not unusual, these days,' Ed says with a resigned sigh, propping his reading glasses on his nose before leaning to read the note.
'No, not really.' Riley tips the paper so Ed can see without craning his neck. 'Anyway, neither of them knew the bloke's name, so Kent's looking.'
She meets Chandler's eye and he nods, hoping that she can't read his mind. (She's got children; she might be able to. She might even have eyes in the back of her head.)
'What about the parents?' Ed asks as he removes his glasses and uses them to gesture between the detectives. 'Surely they know their own son's name.'
'Their contact numbers are out of date. Apparently they're in the middle of relocating to Stavanger, of all places. The boyfriend says they've got the numbers written down somewhere, just not put them in their phones yet. Mansell and I were going to look at her flat; he's checking his.'
'Right. Give him the chance to do that, but if anything else comes up on him, we'd better check his flat as well.'
As each word rolls out of his mouth, Chandler feels calmer, more in control. He knows what to do with information. He can even work with speculation, at a stretch. It's the guesswork that makes him nervous. The confusion.
'Yes, sir.' Riley folds the paper unevenly and shoves it in her back pocket on her way out. She pauses with one hand on the door. 'Kent will bring anything straight to you.'
'Good,' Chandler says as he ignores the uncomfortable, guilty lurching of his stomach. 'We'll find him.'
They all nod at each other, the sort of policeman's code for mutual dismissal when there's little left to be said. Chandler just wants them gone. There's too much that could be said accidentally for him to relax as Riley takes her leave, and he doesn't trust himself not to just blurt it out. He's lost control before. He'd have liked to write it all out, to get the thoughts out of his head and to somewhere where he could rearrange them in peace.
Ed pauses, and they watch her smack the side Mansell's head on her way to get their coats. Once they've both gone, the archivist turns slowly and raises an extended finger. 'I'll see what I've got on siblings, shall I?'
He doesn't wait for an answer; Chandler doesn't try to offer one. He saw the gleam in the other man's eye. They could probably light the basement with that level of enthusiasm for leafing through files. Perhaps they should bring him in for the audit—
The thought drops clean away from his mind when he realises what he's looking at. He hadn't really been paying attention before, with the comfortable, clean silence of his now-empty office and the itch for his hands to leave his pockets and do something, anything. Chandler makes a mental note to never not pay attention at the office because there's Kent again, on the phone, balancing the handset against his shoulder.
A shiver works its way down Chandler's spine as he remembers how easily his hand fit in the same place.
Shit.
Chandler knocks his mobile and keyboard out of place in his haste, and he's barely sunk into his chair before he's reaching for the familiar pot and twisting the cap between his thumb and forefinger.
A/N: Next chapter on Monday, 9 December 2013.
The lines that Kent references are from John Keats' poem 'Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.'
Thanks so much for the lovely comments and feedback on the first chapter! It means a lot to me. :)