Chapter 74: A Slippery Path
Friday dawned clear and bright for Barnaby, a morning with no early phone calls and no cases or evidence percolating through his mind: nothing to distract him from a rare slow and nearly lazy breakfast with his wife across from him at the kitchen table. Some days, he thought those distractions for the better, something to hold his attention as Joyce served them both singed toast, blackened eggs, and limp bacon. But even with a better meal to start the day beckoning from CID's canteen, it was a joy to sit down with his wife for such a simple pleasure. Apart from Sundays, he'd rarely found the time these last few months between Midsomer's fresh clutch of murders and chasing a young man from one village to another.
"I suppose you and Gavin won't know what to do with yourselves," Joyce said quietly, leafing through the morning paper, "if you're not drowning in burglary reports."
Barnaby nodded as he swallowed a mouthful of orange juice; his own quick perusal of the Echo had left him with a small bit of peace for the coming day. "That might be true. He was quite right when he pointed out the man burgled his way through every village in the county."
His wife peered up at him over the edge of the daily rag. "Surely not every one."
"Near enough to."
"Then maybe he's earned his freedom for the effort."
He nearly laughed. "I wouldn't tell him that, Joyce."
"Perhaps not. I doubt Gavin would appreciate that after his tumble down that hill." Joyce's eyes narrowed, like she was thinking, and for a moment she turned her face over her shoulder toward the front room. "I didn't hear Cully come in last night. Did you?"
He shrugged. "Can't say I did, but she's been quiet this past week—whenever she's about, at least." Apart from Wednesday—when Barnaby had Troy captive at the office, going over and finalizing the paperwork that had come to nothing—his daughter was gone this week, vanished into another world he couldn't quite comprehend, couldn't quite fully see. Well, he understood what lay before his eyes, but...no, it couldn't be.
"Oh, Tom. I'm sure everything is fine—so you needn't say anything, remember."
"I very much do—and I don't always need to be reminded."
The conversation veered away from their daughter and the young man who occupied more and more of her life and mind—perhaps more—finally landing on the future: contemplating what to do and where to go for just long enough to clear Midsomer from their heads, at last remaining as undecided as last Sunday until the breakfast dishes were clear and the last of the tea had gone cool and a touch greasy on top as the milk threatened to separate. "I'll see you tonight, love," Barnaby finally said, gathering his suit coat from the back of his chair.
"Don't be too late."
"I never try to be—but sometimes, the office has other plans for me."
After kissing his wife goodbye and wishing her a pleasant day, he grabbed his autumn jacket, still uncertain whether the day would turn chilly like yesterday or cling to the Indian summer still dawdling over the county. But the air was balmy rather than chilly as he expected, stepping into the late October morning. Nearly at the driver's door of his car, keys in his hand, he just heard the churning of bicycle wheels approaching closer and closer, drawing his gaze up...
His daughter, just a few more feet to cycle to the head of the drive, still wearing the same old jumper he remembered when she left the house the night before. Only it was now wrinkled and rumpled, as though it had been slept in like a child's Christmas jumper after the excitement of the day. "Cully," he called loudly.
Her head jerked up, until now trained down on the pavement to keep watch for any branches or pebbles that might derail a tire and the brakes screeched. One of her feet found the ground to balance her bicycle as she looked back. "Dad!"
"Early time to be out for a bike ride, isn't it?"
"Not really," she said, swinging her leg over the frame.
"It's not even gone nine—and you need to be at the library shortly, don't you?"
"I know."
He wouldn't have any answers from his daughter, Barnaby already understood that. But he still asked: "And how was Troy, last night?"
"Irritated, with everything that happened yesterday," she said sharply, reaching into the basket lashed to the handlebars, "and a little irritating, if I'm honest, at least for a while."
"Was he?"
Her keys and mobile clasped in one hand, she leaned her bicycle against the side of the garage, no doubt planning to tuck it away in its alcove once he was gone. She'd hardly taken it out through this last long spell at home. Her late nights at the theater had always seen her find her way home...differently. Or perhaps not at all. "Yes, what of it?" she asked, peering at the time on the front screen of her mobile.
"And this morning?" he added quietly. His daughter's eyes narrowed—and Barnaby knew he was right, no question left in his mind as a key cut into his palm.
"Fine, Dad. We were talking—" He heard her sigh, almost shiver. "Just talking and lost track of the time. I didn't feel like cycling back in the dark, that's all."
"Why do I feel there's something you're not telling me?" Barnaby asked, though it wasn't really a question. After the last few days, he knew what swirled beneath the surface.
"I think that's between me and Gavin."
"Cully—"
"Do I have to, after everything?"
"I don't know what you—"
"No, Dad, you don't want to know."
"I'd like to know you're going to be all right." Did she fancy she'd found someone— No, he couldn't even consider it. Impossible—unthinkable.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
His hand hit the top curve of the driver's door, keys clinking against the metal already warming in the morning sun. "What is going on, really?"
"What do you think?"
"Cully, I'm only worried over you—that's all."
"By deciding who I should see and where I should go?"
"No, but I want you to think about the future, for once!"
"Do you think I haven't?" she said, quieter as he fancied—but no, it couldn't be—a sudden flush warming her cheeks.
"I have had to wonder—often."
"Or do you think I don't know him better than you?"
"I still wonder—"
"I asked him, this weekend," his daughter said with a step away from the house toward him, "what you said to him."
"This weekend?"
"Yes! Why shouldn't I have done?"
"I thought it was just Sunday. Not the weekend." It might not be that much longer, Barnaby knew, but she had stumbled over her words like she had more than a few times in her youth. The web of broken and confused words still glistened brilliantly around his daughter and his sergeant, woven over not just the last months but the last years—ever since that fateful evening he entrusted the young man with the simplest of tasks he was suddenly unable to complete. It all had come to naught, after all—if he had only refused, said "No" again, stepped between them before everything changed...
"What do you mean?"
"I think that's for you to answer."
"Is that it?" She folded her arms over her chest, and Barnaby thought he saw her shiver in a sudden breeze wafting across the drive. "I have to get ready for the day." He didn't answer, instead wrenching the car's door open. Halfway to snapping it shut, he heard, "Dad?"
Looking back up, Cully was a few feet closer, near enough that he saw new lines etched across her face. Fresh and harsher memories? "What?"
"It is my life, and my choice—Gavin's, too."
"Cully—"
"You know it is."
"Cully!"
"We can talk tonight, if you'll listen. At least about what I think Gavin would want me to."
And then, she turned away from him. The daughter whose barbed soul had softened in the last years, who had learned to keep her secrets and silent confusion less and less bound to her chest...she didn't look back, almost running up the walk to the front door with its lock that would stick ever so slightly and the hinges that would squeak and announce someone to Joyce. Running away from him, toward what? To whom? At least the din of the car's engine as he finally shoved the key into the ignition and turned over the starter dulled his questions.
All through his drive to Causton CID—from the wide and gently bending roads of the city's outer suburban edges to the more cramped and twisting streets just a mile or so from city center—Barnaby turned the radio rather louder than he might normally. The latest news played and replayed, nothing important or grisly for once. But in the quiet between the news desk's sign off jingle and the start of the next cluster of adverts, he couldn't silence his daughter's words newly echoing in his memory. "It is my life, and my choice—Gavin's, too."
"I guess that's that," he murmured, slamming his foot harder on the brake pedal than usual, the change of the yellow light to red caught just in time. If Cully had made her decision—unwise as it might be, as her choices so often were—then there was nothing to be done about it. "Stubborn to a fault as always." Nothing had really changed over all these years, and perhaps it never would. Did she even have any regrets about older and newer mistakes, or did she simply cast them aside never to consider them again?
The red light vanished—the green lamp at the bottom of the trio now shining in the dim light of the late October morning—and Barnaby's foot found the accelerator, again harsher than a normal commute to the office. There was no changing her mind, no arguing with her when her mind was set on a path before her. Why even bother worrying over it? he still had to ask himself, the next turn toward the office calmer than those before. She's weathered her storms before.
But...his daughter wasn't what troubled him, or at least not nearly so much. "Troy..." There was too much he remembered, too many comments both loud and quiet, too much of everything. If Cully's last words to him before he finally reversed from the drive onto the listless street in front of the house were anything to consider...Well, it begged an answer from Troy. Not an explanation, not what was really going on (there was no mistaking that anymore), but what did he want?
Really, he was blind to have missed it. All those quiet looks shot between them in the back garden, the little words they thought he didn't hear in those few moments he saw them together...But was it surprising? Perhaps not. Right about when the world must have been changed—fairly turned upside down on its head—he'd hardly seen his daughter, apart from waving goodbye as she set out for the morning trek to the Playhouse and sometimes at the weekend. Not seeing her had transformed into the new normal. And scarcely after Pygmalion ended its run, the world shook again, anything he might have noticed between Cully and Troy banished from his mind in his own sudden grief. The cardinal sin for a police officer, that: he had been distracted, unable to see the locus of a new and visceral unexpected grief. Between that wrenching sadness and Troy's sudden embrace of responsibility, everything was new. He was sure Troy craved the life of an inspector, no one else to peer over his shoulder every second and remind him to keep his mind on the job at hand. And if his sergeant was buried in paperwork at the office and his daughter either at home or at the library, well, he could almost allow himself to forget that anything amiss between them had ever nagged at his mind.
How had he completely missed all of it? Blind—completely blind—that was all it could be. But then again, his family's own small world had lurched, and he had been unprepared to change with it—in every way. Through the last harsh moments of the ache of loss, he hadn't been prepared to listen to what passed between them that morning in Midsomer Worthy: muffled words he only half heard as he struggled to pay attention to the former colleague at the other end of the line.
"...on Sunday, like you said you would?" "I didn't think you wanted me to." "Why wouldn't I?" "You sounded so angry, Saturday—" "I was. Sorry, I'm not sure there's too much to do about it now." He hadn't been able to stand anymore, trying to decide just what to say to break through the small world descending around them as everything else faded into the darkness. Now, Barnaby had to open the window, the noise of Causton's morning mess washing over him—sweeping all the bubbling anger away.
The remaining drive to CID was a blur: the last twisting roads, the bump beneath the car as he turned into the car park, the new silence as he wrenched the key in the ignition back and out. Without the growling engine and the revving of the cars around him, nothing remained to drown out the frustration rising again. Just barely through the door—punching the entry code into the keypad rather harsher than he usually did—Barnaby gulped down a deep breath. Work, he thought, not your daughter.
He darted around the uniformed and detective constables, heavy and certain steps taking him down the hall to the main squad room and the small corner he called his own. Every day this week had seen Troy at his desk ahead of Barnaby, but today...no one. After these last few months, the one moment he wanted to see him, the man was nowhere to be found.
"Sir?" It didn't matter now— "Sir?"
He waved Sergeant Brierley away, instead glancing about for the young man who insisted upon dating his daughter and not saying a word about it. "Is Troy in yet, Audrey?" he asked, tossing his keys onto the corner of his desk.
"I'm sorry?" she said quietly. She was still flipping through the reports in her hands, like she was trying to find one she needed right now.
"I need to talk to him about something, that's all."
"He was here, about fifteen minutes ago. And you'll want to know—"
"Where's he gone?"
"That's just it, sir, he's already out in Midsomer Worthy."
"Midsomer Worthy?"
"Yes, sir—"
"Why?"
"To start the investigation in Setwale Wood. Didn't you get the call?"
"No, I did not," Barnaby snapped, snatching his keys back from his desk, almost snagging the teeth on his trouser pockets. A call Troy had received but he had not: had it been made to Joyce after he left home or to his mobile while he turned the radio louder and louder as Causton passed by in a blur as he struggled not to think on…them. "But what of it?"
"One of the local kennel masters with the pack—his daughter, too, it sounds like—found a woman's body in Setwale Wood. Looks drowned in a shallow pond."
He hadn't even been able to throw his jacket over the back of his chair, take a moment to find his thoughts and center his mind as he struggled to decide...what? "Anything more?"
Audrey shook her head. "No, sir, that's all he reported in his phone call—and we haven't heard back from SOCO or Sergeant Troy—"
"What a surprise."
"I'm sorry?"
"Is everyone else already at the scene? Bullard?" he asked, searching his pockets for everything, not that he'd had the time to throw anything but his keys aside.
"Not quite," she said, still searching through her papers. Distracting herself? "I think there are a few more constables going round soon, following up from the coroner. It only just came in, really, less than an hour ago."
"Well, thank you, Audrey, I'll go about with them and catch up with Troy at the site."
"Is everything all right, sir?" she asked, finally handing over one of her pages she still clutched in her hands. His eyes flew over the scribbled words and the barest details of what lay waiting for him at the site. A name—subject to identification by her next of kin—a place, a time.
"Of course," he murmured, folding it in half, stuffing it into one of his jacket pockets. "Why wouldn't it be?"
"Just you're a little out of sorts this morning—"
"You've got your own cases to worry about. Don't worry over mine and—Troy's."
Barnaby knew he had to get the man out of his head as he wandered back into the hallway, ducking around the endless stream of constables and sergeants and inspectors into the lobby once more. There was a new and too well known misery awaiting him—them—out of Causton, where the world transformed into something wild and mad, and the gathering gloom threatened to swallow them whole.
He waved down one of the vans preparing for the drive to Midsomer Worthy, tucking himself into the front passenger seat and shunting one of the SOCO technicians as he awaited the new scent of death and misery preparing to permeate everything. You were wondering about chances, Troy, Barnaby thought, the police van already bouncing over the cobbled streets of old Causton, like his sergeant still remained in the driver's seat. Troy was the person he least wanted to remember right now. I'm not sure there are any more for you. At least from me.
But all he had to do was survive the day, forget this morning and the night before, still threatening to haunt him like a ghost knocking on the front door. Sergeant Troy and his own daughter would have to wait.