Hardy pulled into the underground garage in his apartment building, carefully backed into his assigned spot, and killed the ignition. As he stood in the elevator on the way up to his flat, he felt the familiar discomfort of trying to avoid looking at himself in the mirrored walls. He had always felt awkward about the elevators in this building, as though they had been designed to trick passengers into picking their teeth or trying out their winningest smiles, only to be walked in on abruptly by another tenant.
Stepping into his flat, he dropped his briefcase on the couch and loosened his tie as he walked into the kitchen to grab a seltzer water, as usual. Every day, he pushed through files and answered questions at work, and every night he came home to this dark, empty flat, reheated some food, watched a bit of telly, and went to bed. With no real involvement in any active cases as work, and no social contacts outside of work, he had fallen into a monotonous routine which, while not overtly depressing, was also in no way inspiring. Daisy had suggested that he get a pet cat, both to keep him company and to give his flat less of a sterile feeling, but he doubted that he would. He thought that there was something especially peculiar about a single, middle-aged man living alone in a flat with only a pet cat – somehow more disturbing than the same man living in the same flat on his own. He supposed that this characterization may be unfair to cat owners, but he could nonetheless not shake his impression.
It had been three weeks since the HCMD had been thanked for their service and invited to move on from the serial hate crimes case. For three weeks, Hardy had been in withdrawal from active police work – he was surprised by the difficulty of the transition, given how short and relatively uneventful his stay in Derby had been. For three weeks, he had been following his monotonous routine, disrupted only by the occasional gleam of hope that he would be invited into the field for a case, and then the disappointment when this hope was inevitably shattered.
He had met with Ramsay a few days after he had come back, telling her that he was desperate to get back out into the field. He told her that his talents and experience were being wasted on a desk job; that he was perfectly well enough for field work; and that being shut alone in an office all day was making his teeth itch.
She had listened patiently and seemingly attentively to his impassioned declamation, and then suggested that he get a plant for his office, a cat for his home, or better yet, both.
"Hardy, you've dedicated your life to law enforcement; trust me, your dues are paid in full. You're in your forties now – why not take the chance to relax a little bit, work regular hours, help train the next generation of new detectives? Spend some time with your daughter. The fact is that you've been known to push yourself too far on cases in the past. I know about you being rushed to hospital from a scene, and being placed on medical leave. I'm certainly not going to be the DCS who killed Alec Hardy."
"With all due respect, I can mind my health. I had ill health for a while, but I'm fine now. Just give me a case."
"In your present position, you get to see lots of cases. Why, just the other—"
"I get to consult on lots of cases. They ask me how long they should wait for the attorney to arrive, and whether it's appropriate for them to witness documents. I haven't even led an interrogation in months."
"Let me think about it. I'm sure we can reach some sort of compromise." Ramsay had stood and held the door open to invite Hardy to leave her office. That had been more than two weeks ago, and the matter had not been revisited.
In an effort to break up the monotony of his lifestyle, he had taken to periodically browsing the files that he had brought back with him from Derby. On this evening in particular, he sat on the sofa with a mug of tea and a bowl of noodles and tried to get a handle on the geographic trend of the crimes. Bo's instinct that something stuck out about the clusters felt right to him – each grouping of crimes tended to be clumped together in loose geographic areas. He frowned, remembering what Murray had told him; they were probably dealing with a network of thirty or more individuals across the country. Could it be that they were loosely organized into local chapters? It would make it easier for them to share resources for their crimes, as with the lacquer thinner in the mosque fires; however, it would also increase the likelihood that local constabularies would pick up on the trend when they became aware of one another's cases. The vandalism and cabdriver robberies hadn't emerged as a pattern at the time because they flew below the radar as relatively unremarkable crimes. The mosque fires, of course, opened up a wider inquiry that took them to their present position in the investigation.
Had that been the intent all along? Were the first two clusters lower-risk practice runs before the escalation to more violent crime? There had been no casualties in the mosque fires, but there could easily have been. Even more concerning was the shrapnel in the car bombs – it was a targeted, intentional means by which to cause bodily harm. Hardy cringed to think of what might be next.
For what felt like the thousandth time in the past three weeks, he reached for his mobile and began to type a message: "Don't know about you, but I haven't stopped working the case."
He frowned at the screen. Was that too familiar? He deleted the draft and instead typed, "I'm still working on the case, of course."
He wondered if he should insert a question, so as to elicit a response. "Pulled out the case file on a lark. Have you heard anything about it?"
He deleted the draft and put his mobile back down. He wasn't sure why he felt nervous thinking about sending Bo a text message about the case, and he preferred not to think about it too much. He chose to focus on the fact that he was bored and unstimulated in his day job, and so picked this case up periodically as a mental exercise out of interest. He pointedly did not think about Bo's good-natured laughter or her warm, nearly flirtatious smile when she had leaned toward him and told him that their next dinner would be on her. He made a conscious point of not sending her a text message taking her up on her offer. Instead, he focused on the facts of the case, and tried to commit to reaching out to Bo only when he had something concrete to offer. He directed his mind to believe that the case was the only reason he was thinking of Bo at all.
Amongst his files from the case was the dossier that Bo had given him about the HCMD. He traced the logo on the front with his fingers, and opened it under the pretense of organizing the documents therein. He paused when he reached Bo's CV, remembering the article that he had read about her stabbing in Birmingham years ago. She had said that it was a blessing in disguise for how it had ultimately brought her to sobriety and the HCMD. Hardy found it difficult to imagine Bo as a drunk; over the years, of course, he had met plenty of officers who were alcoholics – recovering or otherwise – and Bo seemed to stand in stark contrast to them. He had come to associate alcoholism with pervasive self-doubt, traumatic stress from the ghosts of cases past, and an inability to relate socially to others. It was perhaps unfair to think that all alcoholics should exhibit such characteristics; but still, Bo presented as confident, self-assured, outgoing and friendly, with leadership skills and natural social grace. It was only one of the many things about her that he found intriguing.
Hardy realized that he had drifted unwittingly into thinking about Bo outside of the context of the case, and stopped himself. He shut the dossier abruptly, packed up the files, and stood up from the sofa to go wash up. He was struck by a moment of sudden light-headedness, and he had to brace himself on the arm of the sofa to prevent himself from stumbling, but it passed after a minute or two. He traced his fingers over the protrusion under his collarbone where his pacemaker had been implanted. Other than these periodic dizzy spells – which, if he were being honest, were occasionally accompanied by moments of confusion and shortness of breath – he felt as though he was in better health than he had been in years. Ramsay was surely daft not to put him in the field.
Later that night, as he drifted into sleep, Hardy made a point not to wonder if the stabbing had left Bo with a scar – for wondering that would require that he imagine what she looked like under those loose Oxford shirts, and he was sure that he had no interest in imagining such a thing.