Title: Fidelio
Author: BooksVCigarettes
Pairing: Morse/OC
Disclaimer: I only own the original characters.
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'... to what extent psychology is already taking part in transforming our lives; almost unnoticed… there has taken place the beginnings of a revolution which may influence the pattern of our lives as much as, or even more than, the Industrial Revolution did in it's time.'
-H.J. Eysenck 'Uses and Abuses of Psychology' (1953)
'It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game.'
-The Hoover Report on Governmental Operations (1954)
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Chapter 1 – October, 1967
The house was on a sprawling and leafy street just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was well appointed - perfect for both of them to get to campus. Leo had bought it without telling her, claiming it to be a wedding present. They had moved in a rush at the start of the autumn semester the year before, quickly acquiring whatever furniture they didn't have (which for two people who had previously been housed in university digs, turned out to be all of it) before taking up their respective positions and forgetting all about their oblivious attempts at homemaking. Most of the things they had bought for the kitchen were still brand new and in boxes, existing purely to be quickly shoved into the pantry whenever they had guests and left to languish for a few weeks before being rediscovered and returned to the sideboard where they remained unused until the next time they had to be hastily hidden as people alighted on their stoop, blissfully ignorant of the lack of domesticity their hosts had been born with. There had been a lot of nights like that, in the beginning.
As houses go, she didn't hate it. It was a two storey ranch style house (whatever that meant), with a wraparound porch at the front that looked out onto the quiet suburban street. The other houses on the block were spaced out in a way that she considered to be almost audacious, but perhaps that was because she had grown up in a terraced house in Whitechapel where one could often hear the Russian neighbours having a whispered conversation if one stood too close to the adjoining walls.
The shutters were painted pistachio green, a choice of the previous owner's that she had wanted to remedy from the beginning. Pistachio always made her think of hospital corridors, intended to soothe the agitated, bring a spring-like sense of cleanliness to proceedings and clearly chosen by someone who had never spent any significant amount of time in such an establishment. To those more intimately familiar with them however, the sickly shade induced quite the opposite of serenity. Leo had said the shutters were fine as they were, but she had brooked no argument on the subject. The paint she had bought for the job was still in the basement somewhere. She had gotten it the weekend before she had gone to the meeting with Cairns. Before she had been introduced to Don. Before everything had gotten… out of hand.
Other than the shutters however, she could find little to complain about. The bedrooms were spacious and light, the bathroom recently remodelled. The backyard was full of interesting flora and fauna that the previous owner had lovingly cultivated over a number of years. It was a gardener's dream plot - south-facing and wholly un-overlooked by the curious eyes of neighbourhood gossips.
And, as luck would have it, large enough to bury a body in.
The rainwater dripped from the ends of her hair and ran in murky rivulets down her face, mingling with the mud and the tears of anguish that she had stopped wiping away at least an hour ago. She could taste soil and blood - hopefully her own, but then one could never be sure. It had been threatening to rain all day, all week even. It seemed apt that it should wait until it was necessary for her to drag the dead weight of a man twice her size out through the kitchen and down to the bottom of the yard where there was a large flower bed before sending down a torrential onslaught.
The hole, which was more of a trench really, was now up to her knee and the instinctive knowledge (because all knowledge regarding the disposal of a body is instinctive unless one is well practised at it, which she wasn't) that this wasn't deep enough threatened to unleash panic within her over the precious seconds that she had already used up digging. Her superego - the existence of which up until now she had flatly refused to believe in because Doctor Freud was a lunatic and a charlatan - was telling her to keep going, that there was no turning back now, while her adrenaline fuelled panic screamed at her to abandon ship, to find some other way. But what way? She knew very well that there was none. That this plan, flawed and laborious as it was, was her only hope.
The rain continued to fall, turning the bottom of the trench slick and treacherous underfoot. Twice, as she turned to heave a shovelful of earth out onto the grass she had lost her footing and fallen heavily, landing flat on her back in the hole, staring up at the night sky. You are lying in someone else's grave, she told herself over and over, the thought a persistent low battle drum thudding through her veins. You are lying in someone else's grave.
But then again, wasn't that how she had gotten into this mess in the first place?
Finally, when the hole came up to her waist and every gulp of freezing night air she took in tore her lungs to shreds, she turned to look at the corpse.
His shoes had come off as she had been dragging him across the grass and she realised that although they could not be more than a few yards from her, she could see nothing beyond the miserable smattering of light that the lone torch she had dug out of the basement was throwing out. As if on cue lightning shrieked jaggedly across the night sky, the illumination given lasting no more than a second. But it was enough to show her her work.
He was led on his back on the grass next to the hole. Up until now, she had been careful not to turn and look at him whilst digging lest she catch a glimpse of his now ruined face. Now, she found herself unable to tear her gaze away from the prone form before her. His remaining eye stared skywards, death already turning his glassy gaze to milk. His lips were open, allowing the rainwater to gather in the hollow cavern of his mouth. The rest of his face was a mess of crimson and ragged tissue. She was suddenly grateful for the downpour. At least it might wash away some of the blood that she felt sure was saturating the lawn beneath him.
He seemed to have gained fifty pounds in the time it had taken for her to dig the hole, the rainwater soaking his heavy coat and suit. She felt the skin on her palms splitting and protesting as she tried to roll him into the grave she'd made for him. Eventually, and without ceremony or grace, he toppled into the hole with a thud and she clambered shakily to her feet, staring in after him. Even though it was no more than a few feet deep, she couldn't see him lying at the bottom. Instead, he had been swallowed by the earth. Suddenly and without warning, she was gripped with the visceral fear that a bloodied hand would emerge from the inky blackness and make a grab for her. She picked up her shovel once more and began, almost panic-stricken, to heave the sodden earth back into the hole whilst the storm raged on around her.
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The smell of the blood currently drying on the walls and coagulating in a gelatinous pool on the hardwood floor hit her as soon as she stepped back inside the hallway. The coppery tang in the air was overwhelming and unmistakable. It made her suddenly and acutely aware of the layer of the same substance that had soaked through her blouse to her skin. The fact that it was now obscured by a thick coating of mud was inconsequential - she knew the blood was there, mingling with her perfume, the scent working in tandem with the slippery, viscous consistency to compete for total domination of her senses.
For some reason, she reached for the light switch and plunged herself into darkness as though not being able to see what she had done would help. Her eyes watered and before she could get a hold of herself, she could feel bile at the back of her throat. She sank to her knees in the dark and vomited. Having eaten little all day, she brought up only the bitter, acidic liquid. Her stomach was seemingly not aware of this however, and as she lay heaving violently on the cold hard floor for what felt like hours, she wondered if she would ever be able to eat again. Briefly, her hand strayed too far across the hardwood and her trembling fingers came into contact with something wet and cool which only encouraged a fresh slew of retching.
She was still crumpled on the floor in a broken heap when the Grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs chimed the half hour. The sound reverberated through the house, rattling around inside her empty body. She felt like a pea in a drum. The clock continued its assault on the silence. Doubtless whenever it chimed from now on, she would be reminded of the moment she had driven the nail file into Harding's eye. The memory of how easily it had penetrated the soft rubbery tissue, the accompanying crunch that told her his eyeball had popped, made her feel sick again and she clenched her jaw, willing the nausea away. The battle drum from earlier when she had been laying in the trench had changed its ominous tattoo to coincide with the chime of the clock - You have nothing left, you have nothing left, you have nothing left to bring up.
Chime, chime, chime. The noise was almost accusatory. Like Banquo's ghost, the clock knew, had witnessed her crime and would forever be there to remind her of it - the eternal, unspeaking spectre at the feast of her life. Such as it was, anyway. She squinted through the darkness to where the clock stood on the opposite side of the hallway. Even in the dim light, she could make out the ornate, rolling script engraved into the face - Tempus Fugit.
Time Flies.
And how it had. She was dimly, peculiarly aware that Leo would be walking through the door in a few hours' time, completely unsuspecting of what had occurred within these four walls while he had been away.
What would she tell him? The truth, and put him in danger? Risk both their lives, both their reputations?
Or a lie that might draw too much attention?
If she told him that someone had broken in and attacked her before getting away injured, he would insist on calling the police. There would be a full-scale manhunt underway immediately, Leo would see to that. They may even bring sniffer dogs.
Dogs that would almost certainly head straight for the backyard and the freshly churned earth of the flowerbed.
No. That couldn't happen. Through the exhaustion and the fear, she felt a new resolve rise within her. Not defiance, not exactly, but an energy borne of the same fighting instinct she had almost forgotten that she had. That's what fear does to a person over a long period of time - makes them tired. Makes them forget the person that they used to be before they were afraid.
Before she was fully aware of making the decision to move, she had half shuffled, half crawled to the bottom of the staircase, all the while keeping the blackened pool of blood out of her eye line. She would deal with it. But not now. At the foot of the stairs, she paused. The Grandfather Clock loomed over her, silent now, patiently awaiting its next opportunity to betray her, to shout about what it had seen.
Slowly, and as though she had lost the use of her legs (and at this point she wasn't entirely certain that that wasn't the case), she reached up and curled one filthy hand around the bottom bannister. With a grunt of pain at the newly settling stiffness in her aching muscles and joints, she hauled herself up onto the bottom stair before beginning a clumsy ascent on her hands and knees, trying not to think about the trail of mud and blood that she was leaving in her wake. Her own personal Somme.
Reaching the upstairs landing, she felt the queer notion of being in a completely unfamiliar house, unrelated to her and completely separate from the carnage she had left on the ground floor. The air was unstirred by violence up here. It was like she had entered a different world. Bizarrely, she was reminded of her aunt and uncle's house back when she and Beatrice had first arrived in the States. They had been unable to sleep in their new surroundings, and the music and laughter from the party downstairs had drawn them from their beds to stand, barefoot and hand in hand on the silent landing. Life and conversation were mere feet away, but it felt as though she and her sister were stranded on another planet.
Slowly, she crept toward the bathroom as quietly as her injured body would allow so as not to disturb the eerie peace and gingerly shut the door behind her. There was nothing special about the bathroom in this house but in that moment, with it's pristine white tiles and blessedly lockable door, she breathed a small sigh of relief.
Staring at the reflection in the bathroom cabinet, she did not see herself staring back. But then, it had been so long since she had been able to look herself in the eye that perhaps she had stopped looking like herself a long time ago. The woman looking back at her tonight through the mud and the blood was a ghost, a shadow. Her hair hung in lank, wavy clumps, slick with rain and mud and God knew what else.
The last time she had really looked at herself she had been twenty-nine. Now she was a hundred years old.
Hands surprisingly steady (or perhaps just numb), she reached into the cabinet and delicately picked her way to the aspirin, careful not to get mud on any of Leo's fastidiously kept shaving kit. Something for the pain first. That was what she needed.
And then to work.
The jangling of her nerves had almost completely subsided by the time that Leo walked through the door out of the inky black night, shaking the raindrops from his umbrella and cursing the filthy weather. He gave her a vaguely questioning look as he walked into the kitchen to discover her sitting in the semi-dark with a cup of coffee, a cigarette smouldering between her fingers. It was unusual - she didn't normally wait up for him.
The letter was lying on the table in front of her. She had fished it from the corner where it had landed earlier during the argument, when she had ripped it from his hands and crumpling it up into a tiny, sad ball before casting it aside. Now though, she couldn't not touch it, couldn't stop herself from playing with it, fiddling with one dog-eared corner like some nervous tic.
"I've changed my mind." She said.