Chapter 58: Off Course
He wouldn't admit it to Barnaby's face, that much was sure. Between the weekend and awaiting the chief inspector's arrival, his fingers twitched, eagerly anticipating a break in the day despite the early hour. Well, he could hardly be blamed, after...He'd sucked down that entire pack of fags over the course of Saturday evening and the following day, just one after another, the warmth and acrid burn in his lungs both delightful and miserable until his throat was raw. Never thought after all those years ago...Troy didn't bother finishing his thought. He'd traipsed back to the corner shop last night, buying the fresh pack that currently huddled in his right trouser pocket, already missing two cigarettes: one late last night, the other early this morning. "Might just confirm it all for him," he muttered, leafing through his pile of train reservations again, the details that had grown murky over the weekend newly fresh. Troy saw the dislike in Barnaby's face often enough without another reason for the chief inspector to despise him for even setting eyes on Cully.
Half an hour ago, Troy had typed Huhes, Iain into the Midsomer Constabulary database, not certain what—if anything—to expect. Without an identifiable fingerprint, it was likely to be another dead end—but...not quite. A caution for public drunkenness two years ago, nothing more. He had added it to the bottom of his pile of reservation lists.
He was trying not to think about it, if he was in earnest, rolling his head to one side as his neck cracked from the time leaning forward over his notes and papers. Her anger had throbbed in his mind all day Sunday, not even quelled by a football match on the telly. (Again, if he was honest, it did push her words aside, at least during play. Some things were just powerful enough to cope with...well, he wasn't sure what to call it.)
A set of footsteps echoed down the bare hall, snapping against the floor, growing louder—louder—and Troy gripped his pen a little tighter. His fingernails lightened from rosy pink to nearly white—and then the paces faded. Just someone walking past, he thought, his hand loosening as he began to write again, adding a few more words after that last clump of ink. He didn't want to know what wrath he faced. Troy well remembered the dark looks and clipped words after his first argument with Barnaby long ago, though it wasn't as though they hadn't been shot his way across the empty air between their desks over the last few weeks.
Another round of steps—coming, then going. Another, then another, and with each Troy's chest tensed until they ebbed into silence. What are you, he asked himself with a scowl, a frightened boy in the schoolyard? Would you been worried about him forever, if something had come out of it...He didn't want to hear anymore, even in his head. What good was dreaming, if that was all it would ever be, some sort of fantasy?
The next set of footsteps tapping along the hallway increased in volume—but these did not fall away, louder still as the muffling of the squad room's walls vanished. "Good morning, Troy," Barnaby said, walking across their small office corner to his desk, bringing the scent of CID's scorched coffee with him.
"Morning, sir," Troy said quietly, that same vice clenching around his ribs. He kept scribbling in his notebook, though the words slowed as his hand grew heavier, almost ready to break through the page to the one beneath.
"Bit early, aren't you?"
Troy simply listened to his breath for a few moments, hoping and waiting for the tension in his chest to loosen. Satisfied it had begun to calm, he finally lifted his face. "I just had a few things I wanted a head start on, that's all," he said slowly.
"Oh?" As the chief inspector at last took a seat behind his desk, despite the lamp and stack of filing boxes that half hid him, Troy's neck prickled under the weight of his gaze. Year after year in the maelstrom of Midsomer's murders and crimes and unpleasantness, he had sat beside Barnaby in the interview room, watching it deployed against men and women with secrets of their own. Even in the dark corners that the room's harsh overhead lights refused to touch, the grey walls closing in with through the shadows, there was no escaping it. Troy had struggled beneath its weight before, but never so...resigned to that fate.
He flipped his small notebook closed. "Friday evening, before..." Troy swallowed the rest of the sentence down. Before that git wouldn't shut his gob and I fell for it. No telling Barnaby that. Standing, scraping the very bottom the chair's feet over the worn floor, he grabbed that notebook and the stack of papers he had spent the last few minutes reexamining. Might as well say something useful, he thought, stepping around his desk, approaching the chief inspector.
"Yes?" the older man asked, peering up with that same eye. Questioning, examining, searching for something.
Troy reached over Barnaby's lamp with his reservation lists and the printout from Midsomer's database earlier that morning. "I—"
"Watch that, Troy!" Barnaby said loudly, pulling back the cup of coffee Troy hadn't noticed, almost buried beneath the papers in his hand.
He drew a deep breath, his chest still tight, his collar and tie newly a vice around his throat. "Sorry, sir," Troy said quietly, at last setting them down on the wooden desktop, for a moment nearly crushing the pages between his fingers, working to steady his hand before Barnaby noticed it shake. "I found something interesting, sir." Just worry about DCI Barnaby, not her father—doesn't matter right now.
Troy talked the chief inspector through the information he had uncovered late Friday evening and early this morning, bristling at the quick dismissal of his solidifying theory and the thought of him arriving a bit early to have a head start on the day. Like you haven't had me out all night on a wild goose chase more than once—sir. There hadn't been a point in lingering around his flat; he hadn't slept well the past two days, awakening several times through the night, troubled and struggling to understand what had just transpired. Another half hour at home would have found him savoring the burn of three or four fags this morning rather than just one.
While he reviewed the spare details of Huhes' past he had at the moment—fielding the questions he anticipated even if he still had no answers, listening to Barnaby's opinions with a small swell of satisfaction as their thoughts followed the same path—Troy's mind still drifted, the chief inspector's cluttered desk of files and coffee softening even as the words still droned in his ears. What was she doing now, and yesterday?
"I'd get on it, if I were you," Barnaby said, pulling his mind back from Cully. "That might take Edwards off our back, at least for a day or two."
"Right," he muttered, starting to turn back to his own half of their small corner of the squad room. At least that got Barnaby off his back for the next little while.
"And Troy?"
He glanced back, uncertain what to expect as the chief inspector looked up from the lists he had scoured Friday evening. "Yes, sir?"
"Good work."
Troy bit his lip against a grin before he took his seat again. The chief inspector's compliments were rare, but sincere whenever they were offered. More often, he received a reprimand for leaping to any sort of solution. Maybe this will make a change, he thought, pulling his chair closer to the edge of his desk, shaking his head. That'll be the day.
Over the next hours, Troy passed the morning with a couple of phone calls. The first he placed to Causton Comprehensive, searching for any information on Huhes, hoping to transform him from a name into something more than a shadow of a man. Shunted from one office to another ("Can you hold, please?"), he finally landed with the school counselor, who had at least a few memories. ("Left in 2001, there's not much more I can tell you, at least right now." "Do you know what he planned to do after leaving school?" "Not really. University, somewhere in London, I think." "Do you remember what course? Or anything from when he was there?" "I'm sorry, can't say that I do.") "Useless as always," Troy muttered, dropping the handset back onto the phone's switch with a clatter.
After consolidating his notes on half of a fresh sheet of paper, he rang the DVLA, tossed around from one receptionist to another ("One moment, sergeant.") until he landed in records, offering his name and rank in exchange for any registrations. ("Yes, sergeant, we do have something registered to him.") He jotted the registration number and vehicle details under the man's school information, along with the address of record. "Well, that's something to start going on."
Although he had spent most of the previous week examining the whole collection of files, he still wanted to look over the first few cases once more. ("Can I borrow the first two files, sir?") Troy could nearly recite the reports from memory: the dates, the locations, the entry points, the scratches on wood, the missing property. Nothing new there. He shifted his attention to SOCO's photographs, slipping the reports beneath the glossy pictures.
I don't know what I'm wanting to find, he thought, flipping through the photographs in quick succession. Looked at them all last week. But—there had to be something, anything. How many times had he walked through a crime scene in the immediate aftermath or peered at a photograph days later and seen nothing, only for Barnaby—often in just a few minutes!—to spot something that suddenly became obvious. When he has done, we knew something, at least. We don't know anything, now.
"It didn't add up." Barnaby said that time and time again, when what had become so apparent to the chief inspector remained invisible to him. So, what was off in these photos, what didn't add up?* If Barnaby invariably found something, then it must be there. Returning to the first photograph, Troy clenched his eyes for a few seconds, opening them with a deep breath. Fresh eyes, he told himself, crossing his arms as his elbows rested on the very edge of his desk. At least for something.
His eyes scanned over the broadest photograph of the first known crime scene, trying to forget everything he had seen and known before. Crushed grass leading to smeared footprints in mud just under the windowsill—and no mud on the pristine white paint. A tall man—or woman? he wondered, shuffling back to the detailed reports for some measurement about how far that sill sat above the ground. Almost four feet and neither mud no footprints. Tall? Troy added it to the opposite side of his notes, to all the possibilities. They'd talked through that before, but he jotted it down dutifully.
Training his gaze on the next photograph—centered on the first broken window of the burglary spree—Troy still fought to forget his assumptions. SOCO's bright lights had driven away the worst of the shadows the house's eaves and the surrounding trees cast, leaving the brick a brilliant terracotta and the frame around the glass gleaming in the flash. The next was surely another photograph inside the sitting room, documenting the spray of glass from the bottom left pane—
"Left?" he whispered, drawing the photograph closer to his face. Why not the right? That would be more normal. Shoving aside the images of the first case, Troy found the same picture in the collection from the second. Another clean sill, not so high this time, and another four pane window with the bottom left pane shattered. "Odd." In preparation for snaking an arm through the razor sharp edges to undo the latch inside, why the left side of the window, unless…As he stood, Troy said, "Sir, could I see the next few files?"
Barnaby handed him the next three folders without looking up and, back at his desk, Troy swiftly pulled out the photographs of each mangled window. The next two windows were large, single panes broken in the middle, but the final...Six small panes, again broken at the bottom left. Coincidence?
"Ah, Troy..."
Barnaby's words sounded a quiet echo as he added Left-handed? to his second list. "Yes, sir?" he muttered, returning to the other two photographs. In both, the break in the glass was still slightly to the left.
"Did you talk with Cully this weekend?"
Troy drew a deep breath, just hearing her name aloud. "Yes, sir, what of it?" he asked, tightening the grip on his pen again as he finally looked up. One of his feet began tapping as he curled his left hand, his fingers ready to twitch anew, eager to reach for his lighter and a cigarette.
"Nothing much." Barnaby shook his head, still partially hidden behind his desk lamp. "Just wondering."
"Why, sir?" Troy already regretted asking. The questions Barnaby lobbed were all the ones he was eager to avoid: had Cully said something about Cambridge (Of course.) and what did he think (A lot more than you want to know, sir.). What was he supposed to say to that sort of interrogation, really say? More than five years working beside Barnaby had taught him how even a few quiet and simple inquiries were still meant to dig—to uncover the truth rather than break the silence and fill the air with meaningless words. Was he supposed to tell the chief inspector that if she vanished again, if her voice and smile and laugh and touch scattered like sand in a seaside breeze, then her absence would turn to a throbbing ache he still didn't understand? Don't think about it, he chided himself, returning to the photographs. If he didn't remember it—their last conversation—then he could ignore the regret.
He'd hardly had a chance to return to the files and his notes when the chief inspector's voice cut through him again. "Troy."
He stifled a groan, the tip of his pen nearly cutting through paper again. "Yes, sir?"
"Could you do me a favor?"
"What is it?" he asked, his eyes rising.
"Could you get me another cup of coffee, black—"
"No sugar," Troy said loudly, tossing his pen down, "I do remember—sir."
I'm not an errand boy, he thought, snatching his jacket from the back of his chair as he scraped it along the floor once more, throwing it around his shoulders. Even as he walked over to Barnaby—his mug held high in the air—Troy already had his right hand shoved into his pocket, his fingers running over the flimsy cardboard edges of the cigarette pack and the cold rounded plastic of the lighter. Snatching it from his boss, he didn't wait to hear some muttered thanks before he swiftly strode out of the squad room.
The corridor from reception now buzzed with officers and technicians to weave between, a stark difference from when he arrived earlier this morning. Then, only a handful of men and women had already arrived for their workday, mixing with the exhausted officers escaping from the overnight shift right of passage into the real world. Troy glanced at his watch, just visible beneath the hem of his coat's sleeve: about half twelve. How many hours had it been since he sat at the tiny kitchen table in his flat, his head dropped back against the top of the chair's frame as his eyes watered with the sting of the warm haze swirling in a cloud above his head? If his fingers had been jittery as he sat across from the chief inspector, now they were shaking.
Still holding Barnaby's mug, Troy ducked through the side door just ahead of the exit to reception, into the small courtyard surrounded by the wings of CID, joining three constables in uniform as well as a female officer in plain clothes: all of them with a cigarette clutched between their fingers. None of their faces were familiar, not that it was of any concern to him. Taking another few steps away from the door and them, he crouched down, dropping the mug onto the cobbled dusty ground. Barnaby can wait.
Troy tugged the pack from his trouser pocket, digging a fag out by the filter with his twitching fingers, now exchanging the cardboard package for his lighter as he bit the orange end between his lips. And as the grooved wheel spun against the flint, throwing off a spray of sparks against his left palm while the new flame danced up, the first gulp drowned his shaking like it had yesterday.
As Sunday afternoon wound on after both sides cleared the football pitch, the distraction of sport vanishing, he couldn't help falling back into the memories, hardly a week and a half ago. Hidden from the deluge beneath the eaves of one of Causton's creaky old buildings, as soaked to the bone as she was, her hair plastered to her forehead and blouse and cardigan clinging to her shoulders and curves as the sudden rivulets rushed past in the street...Even as he saw her shiver in the sudden downpour, Troy couldn't help his laughter. In the misery and gloom and damp of the night, he wouldn't want to be standing with anyone else, not caring about the clamminess of her skin against his, near in the dark, finally wondering if he could finally allow himself to hope and ask for anything more.
He wanted to give her a ring more than anything right now, to hear her voice and stumble over his words anew in some garbled apology—not that he was the only one— Troy pressed his forehead into his palms, sliding forward on the settee, ignoring the sting as he now crushed his hands against his eyes. All he had to do was reach into his back pocket and pull out his mobile, scroll to her number, at last find those words now that their anger—or at least his own—had abated, like he said he would...
He couldn't. Releasing a breath, his hands fell to his sides, his unshaven jaw dropping almost to his chest. "You got what you wanted, Cully," he whispered, grinding his palm against a crick at the base of his neck. "Sorry I won't be around to regret giving into it. I don't know what you think I'm supposed to do."
For the first time in years—sometimes, it felt like forever—something bright and wonderful had loomed in the future. Still shapeless, yet warm—delightful and beautiful, but...what? The gentle breeze whistling around the yard threatened the glowing ash at the tip of his fag, and Troy gulped another breath through the filter to bring it back to life. Propping the sole of one shoe against the brick wall—careful not to scrape his jacket against the rough surface—he released the breath and smoke and burn through his nose. God, he wanted to loathe the man sometimes, for all the cutting words and glares: the ceaseless, hidden reminders to enjoy any time with Cully, but always keep her at a bit of a distance, to always remain wary. Do you think I didn't realize that, sir? he thought, his foot falling back to the rough stones. For the last three months, he'd guarded everything around Barnaby, always vigilant, whether of his words or his deeds—and struggled to release control and lose himself in her and those fleeting moments of peace that washed over him so often when she was near. If he closed his eyes, set himself adrift from the early afternoon, he could almost touch the light and the memory, inhale it and taste it.
Pinching the cigarette between his fingers, Troy let out a sigh as it burned farther down, his skin growing warm. Without even looking at his watch again, he flicked the half spent end away, the orange glow fading to greyish white after a few seconds; he'd wasted enough time lost in his own mind. With a deep cough against the rush of nicotine and tar, he scooped up Barnaby's coffee mug, not bothering to see if the faint gusts circling the walls had tossed in a flurry of dust or ash. He'd wash it out if he had to, but couldn't stay his hand from wiping the bottom of any traces of dirt.
The detour to the staff room was a mercifully quiet one, most of his fellow officers either out pursuing their investigations or tucking into lunch in the canteen; what coffee that remained smelled more burnt than usual. A quick glance spotted nothing in Barnaby's mug beyond coffee dregs, so he quickly topped it up before pouring one for himself, stirring in plenty of milk and sugar. Have to make it drinkable somehow.**
Troy's hands were steadier as he traveled the aft half of the corridor again, his footsteps probably ringing in the squad room as Barnaby's had all those hours before while he fought to forget the weekend—the shift in the world—and remember what he had been studying instead. Taking the final turn through the doorway, he still took a cautious breath. Barnaby remained seated at his desk, holding up a photograph, probably just a few inches from his nose. Hoping not to disturb the man—for his own sake—Troy lightened his steps, sliding the mug of oily coffee into the corner of the desk he remembered Barnaby preferred. "Took you long enough," the chief inspector set quietly, dropping the photograph back into its folder
"Sorry, sir," Troy muttered around a sip from his own mug before returning to his own desk; at least the milk and sugar cut through the burn. "Didn't mean to."
"Oh, I'm sure."
Settling into his stiff chair, not worrying to shrug his coat from his shoulders this time, Troy scanned his new lists of notes again, the heat of the coffee bleeding into his fingers. Where had he been before Barnaby dispatched him like a member of the waiting staff, before he asked about her? "Left", that was the last thing he had scribbled on the once fresh paper. Yes: flipping through all the point of entry photographs, deciphering a pattern he had missed all last week—
"Do you smell that, Troy?"
His thoughts interrupted again, he drank another mouthful of milky coffee, quelling the first growlings of his stomach ready for lunch. "Hmm?"
"Smells like a bonfire."
Though he shook his head, Troy resisted shrugging his shoulders. "No, can't say I do, sir." You wouldn't want to know, sir. Not that it mattered anymore; whatever brightness he had previously imagined—no, desired!—was rent and perhaps irreparable. Why should Barnaby care at all?
With the new quiet, Troy shifted his attention to SOCO's photographs from the interior of the crime scenes. No, he thought, shuffling them into their proper folders. Where were those handful of fingerprint reports? Perhaps...
Barnaby coughed, and Troy heard the grinding of the wooden chair's feet against the floor. "All right, Troy, what do you have? Anything new to go on?"
Even though the reports still eluded him, Troy nodded, crinkling a top of corner of his notes between his fingers. "I think so, sir."
* It's a new acronym! WWBD: What Would Barnaby Do?
** He's very wrong; coffee should be black, strong, and deliciously bitter. JK JK, if you like a lil' milk and sugar, more power to you. But coffee and coffee flavored milkshakes will always be different things.
A/N: I've doing a little ret-conning of Chapter 57 to bring a few details in line with this one. It won't affect the plot, just FYI.