29 May 1959

It was a bad idea. Lucien knew it was a bad idea, in the same way that he knew pouring a fourth glass of whiskey would not do him any favors, in the same way he knew that if he smoked a cigarette in his parlor the smell would sink itself into the wallpaper in the most unpleasant way. He knew it was a bad idea, just as he had known that going to Ealing Estate on his own was a bad idea, just as Matthew Lawson had warned him that it was. But knowing that something was a bad idea had never been sufficient to stop Lucien from doing exactly as he pleased; life was too short to be concerned with consequences, he thought.

And so, on a cool Friday night in late autumn he parked his car in the lot behind a bakery that had closed for the evening, and walked along the pavement with his hat pulled down low over his eyes and his hands stuck in his coat pockets. It was a bad idea, he knew, to venture to this place on what must surely be their busiest night of the week, and to do so at this time of night was doubly foolish. He was risking his reputation, and both his general practice and his position as police surgeon. Yet those concerns did not stop him, did not even slow his steps, for when Lucien Blake wanted something he did not let anything stand in his way.

There was no CLOSED sign on the door, not now, and the tinkling sound of the bell that announced his arrival was welcoming indeed. When he entered Lucien had expected to find the pub packed with customers, had expected to be greeted by a tumult of noise, but to his surprise there were less than a dozen men gathered in the dining room, and only three girls that he could see. Each of those girls was currently engaged in conversation with a gentleman, leaning against the bar or the back of his chair, watching her quarry with wide, bright eyes, and Lucien did not need to hear what they were saying to know what those girls were about. There was a table in the far corner where two older gentlemen in fine black suits were in the midst of a heated conversation, their heads bowed low over their pint glasses, and the bar was lined with men sitting on those old wood stools and staunchly refusing to acknowledge one another's presence. It was not the girls who drew Lucien's attention, however, nor was it the men who had come to buy them; his gaze went at once to the booth in the far corner where, despite the muted light he could just make out the glint of a pair of knitting needles. Grinning, then, he swiped his hat from his head, and made his way over to that booth at once.

"Is this seat taken?" he asked her, gesturing towards the bench with his hat.

Mrs. Beazley did not look up from her knitting, but she smiled, just the same.

"Not at the moment, no," she told him. If she had been any other woman Lucien would have taken that as all the invitation he needed to sit down at once, but this was Jean, and Lucien had learned just how particular she was about the niceties.

"Would you mind if I joined you?"

She looked quite pretty tonight, he thought. Though her skirt was hidden from view beneath the table he could see that the soft blue blouse she wore fit her well. Her makeup was, as usual, flawless, but the modest blue shade she'd painted above her eyes not only matched her blouse beautifully, but served to draw out the color of those storm-tossed eyes, to leave him breathless and staring at their beauty as if only just seeing her for the first time. Unconcerned by his attention she carried on with her knitting; they'd met just under a fortnight before, and in that time she appeared to have made great strides with her little project, for Lucien could see now that she was knitting a soft white blanket. A present for Sarah's unborn baby, perhaps, he realized, and smiled at the thought.

"Not at all, Doctor Blake," she told him, and so with her permission Lucien settled himself on the bench beside her, careful to place his hat by his side, and not on the table. Though she had not charged him for their previous conversation Lucien decided it would be prudent not to push his luck any further, and so before he spoke a word he reached into his pocket and produced a single shilling, laying it flat on the table and sliding it towards Mrs. Beazley.

She looked up from her knitting, and her gaze fell at once on the coin. She looked at the shilling, and then she looked at Lucien, one eyebrow raised in an almost accusatory sort of way. Lucien frowned, scooped another shilling from his pocket and added it to the first. This seemed to satisfy her; Mrs. Beazley gathered up both coins and made them disappear beneath the table before returning to her knitting.

"Where are all the girls?" he asked her curiously, looking around him. "I'd thought you'd be doing fine trade this evening."

"We are," Jean told him primly. "You ought to know by now, Doctor, that most of our business takes place upstairs."

Lucien grinned; of course she was right. The rest of the girls must be upstairs already, he realized, already entertaining customers, already earning their night's wages.

"What brings you here this evening, Doctor?" she asked him.

Lucien crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the booth. What had brought him here? There were plenty of other places he could have gone; he could have been sitting having a pint with Matthew, instead of sitting in a brothel with no drink at all to occupy him. Mrs. Beazley had her cup of tea and her biscuit, and as his gaze settled there it occurred to Lucien that it was not whiskey he wanted, but some of her tea, in one of her china cups with the flower pattern painted on the side.

"Edward Tyneman almost certainly killed Lucille," he told her.

It wasn't what he meant to say, but the words came spilling out of him just the same. Jean sucked in a sharp breath, and then laid her knitting to the side. She raised one hand, and caught the eye of the girl who was pulling pints behind the bar, and then she gestured to her tea cup. The girl seemed to understand what she meant, and rushed away, and then Jean turned her full attention to Lucien.

"Are you certain?" she asked him urgently. "I haven't heard anything-"

"And you won't. We can't prove it. We know that she was with him. We know that he has been coercing girls to - I'm terribly sorry to be so blunt, Mrs. Beazley, but he has been forcing these girls to perform indecent acts while he films it. We found a bit of badly damaged film that seems to show Lucille with Edward, but we can't definitively prove it's her. He's being charged with the production and distribution of pornography, but we won't be able to charge him with murder."

Even Jean's frown was lovely, soft and sad. She listened to him intently as he spoke, and when he finished she folded her hands together in her lap, and looked down at her teacup for a long moment.

"Will he go to prison, do you think?" she asked him softly.

"Yes, he-"

"Excuse me." It was the girl Jean had called out from behind the bar; she carried a tray on which there lay a full tea service, a steaming pot and small bowl of sugar and a cup for Lucien and a full plate of biscuits.

"Thank you, Lorraine," Jean said, offering her a warm, genuine sort of smile.

"Yes, thank you very much," Lucien echoed. The girl - Lorraine - blushed prettily, and then danced away from them, back to the bar and her waiting customers. Jean's soft hands with their red-painted fingernails reached for the teapot, and Lucien watched in silence as she poured a cup for him, handing it over to him when she was finished.

"Sugar?"

"A bit, thank you," he answered. There was a small set of silver tongs lying next to the sugar bowl, and Jean carefully lifted out a single cube for him, dropping it into his cup and then offering him a small silver spoon with which to stir it.

"Thank you," he murmured again, softer this time, and then he began to stir his tea, watching it swirl around the cup in a contemplative sort of silence.

"It isn't exactly justice," Jean said, picking up her own tea cup and settling back against the booth. "If he killed Lucille, he should answer for her murder. But you've done your best, Doctor Blake. What he did to those girls, the ones in the films, that's a crime, too. And he'll go to prison. Not for life, not for as long as he would have if he'd been charged with murder, but he will go, and he will pay for some of his crimes."

"Is that enough?" Lucien asked, still staring morosely at his tea. He honestly didn't know.

"It has to be," Jean told him gently.

Lucien did not know how many of the girls who appeared in the films they'd discovered at Ealing Estate had been unwilling participants; some of them might have agreed to it quite happily. Some of them, like the girls in Jean's pub, might have been willing to do just about anything, for the right price. And technically, the business Jean ran here was a crime, too. Technically, she should be in prison for operating a brothel, profiting off of the work those girls did. But what was legal was not always right, and some actions that counted as crimes were not always wrong; the world was painted in shades of grey, and Lucien was still learning to distinguish one from the other. There was no doubt in his mind that Edward Tyneman was wrong, and cruel, and deserving of punishment. As for Jean, well…

"Thank you, Doctor," she said to him softly.

"For what?" As far as Lucien could see he'd done absolutely nothing to merit praise of any sort.

"For caring about what happened to Lucille. For trying to find justice for her. Most people wouldn't care about a girl like that."

Jean was watching him thoughtfully over the rim of her teacup, those grey-blue eyes haunting and focused completely on him. What a beauty she was; the wrong side of forty, perhaps, too old to still be in this business, the soft skin at her eyes and lips wrinkled with the passage of time, but she was slender, and graceful, and the high, sharp rise of her cheeks, the pink fullness of her lips, the sharp brilliance of her grey eyes, everything about her combined into quite the loveliest picture, and Lucien was all but spellbound just looking at her. She fascinated him, as no other woman had done for quite some time, and he was powerless to resist her.

"Someone has to stand up for girls like that," he told her gently. "And I think you know that better than most, Mrs. Beazley. You do it every day."

She had been a girl like that once herself, and now she gave those girls a home, and three hot meals a day, gave them friendship and support, gave them safety, gave them her love. She knew their names, and treated them kindly, and opened her doors to them, gave them a place in a world that had turned its back on them. It was Mrs. Beazley, he thought, who deserved thanks.

"They're my family, Doctor," she answered simply. "And family means we take care of each other."

"What about your sons?"

It was a bad idea, he knew, to ask such a question. The conversation had been rolling smoothly along between them, but he had already discovered that it was wise to steer away from personal questions, lest Mrs. Beazley grow cross with him. She guarded her privacy fiercely, and he could hardly fault her for that, but there was still so very much he wanted to know about her. For a moment she watched him warily, and then she held out her hand to him, palm up, and he grinned, rushing to obey her silent demand. He dug another shilling from his pocket and placed it in the center of her hand, his fingertips brushing against soft warm skin for a fraction of a second before she took that shilling, too, and made it disappear beneath the table.

"I love my boys," she told him, and then she took a sip of tea, seeming to gather her thoughts. "But they don't need me so much, anymore. Young Christopher is a soldier. He has a wife and a house of his own, and he's built a good life for himself. And Jack...well. Jack still needs me, but he won't let me help, and there's nothing I can do about that. He's a man, now, and he has to make his own choices, whether I like it or not."

Jean had told him once how old the boys were, and he recalled that now because her Christopher, at twenty-three years old, was the same as Lucien's Li. Or the same age she would be, if she was still living. Though they had been separated by an ocean, though neither of them was aware the other even existed, though Jean looked to be several years younger than Lucien himself, their children had been born around the same time. There had been a day, once, when they had both been holding their babies in their arms, dreaming of their futures, united in that love of their children. Had Jean known, then, what that future would hold in store for her? Was she already working in the trade, or had she not yet realized the course her life would take? Lucien had not known, when Li was born, the fear, the horror, the violence, that pain that waited for him. If he had known….well. What he might have done, if he'd only been given the gift of foresight, didn't matter so much now, he supposed. The past was the past, and there was nothing he could do to change it now.

He did not know, now, where his Li was. There was a private investigator in Hong Kong, still dutifully searching for Li and for her mother, but it had been nearly two decades without word. At least Jean seemed to know where her own sons were, but there was such sorrow in her when she spoke of them, disappointment and regret, and Lucien, wanted so very badly, to spill out his own story in the hopes that it might encourage her to do the same, that they might share the grief and the joy of their own experiences of parenthood, and become better friends for it.

"I think my father felt much the same way about me," Lucien told her carefully, keeping his thoughts about Li to himself for the moment, and focusing instead on what Jean had told him about her boys. "I'm afraid I caused him no end of grief."

"But he still loved you, Doctor Blake," she answered, smiling that sad, beautiful smile of hers. "You were his son. And no matter how much trouble you caused -" Lucien laughed - "he never stopped loving you. And I love my boys, even when they do things I'd rather they didn't."

"I think Patrick Tyneman loves Edward, in his own way," Lucien mused, his thoughts running away with him. "Even now, after everything, I think he can't help but look at Edward, and see the little boy he used to be, and he loves him."

"They'll always be our children," she said softly. "What's your son's name?"

It was a clever question, asked quickly, smoothly, deftly, intended no doubt to throw him off his guard and garner an immediate, truthful response. Lucien had not told Jean that he was a father himself, but she had heard his words, his quiet musing, and drawn her own conclusions. She had, very neatly, seen straight through the heart of him. For a moment Lucien considered asking for his shilling back as payment for an answer to her question, but he found he wanted to talk about Li more than he wanted to tease Jean.

"My daughter's name is Li," he told her.

The corner of Jean's mouth quirked up into a smile, as she realized that she had been - mostly - correct in assuming that Lucien was a father.

"Where is she now, your Li?" Jean was watching him curiously, her delicate hands still wrapped around her teacup.

"I don't know," Lucien confessed. "But I've never stopped looking for her, and I never will."

Jean watched him for a moment, and then she set her teacup down, and reached out to place a gentle hand on his forearm.

"I'm so sorry, Lucien," she told him earnestly.

There was so much more Lucien wanted to say. He wanted to tell Jean about his wife, about his daughter, about the Japanese invasion, about the stink and the squalor of the camp, about the years he'd spent spying for his country, about the ocean's worth of whiskey he'd drunk trying to quiet the ghosts that haunted his conscience. He wanted to tell her that she was beautiful, that he missed his daughter with everything he had, that he could not help but wonder if their children would get along, should they ever meet. There were so many things he wanted to tell her, but the words would not come. He simply covered her hand with his own where it rested against his arm, and smiled at her sadly.

"I'm sorry, too," he said.