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Who is this? and what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they cross'd themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott."
Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott
*
"Why don't you?" Lewis asks.
They're eating sandwiches on a bench outside the Ashmolean. The sky is a clear, cold blue. Lewis's question appears to have emerged directly from it and dropped into James' lap without a parachute.
"I considered it, sir, but once you turn down MI-5, I don't think they're too keen on you changing your mind."
Lewis knocks his shoulder into James' in reprimand. "Go into academia, I mean. Teach or something."
James looks down at his ham sandwich and back up at Lewis. "And leave all this?"
Lewis makes his heaven-help-me face. "All right, if you don't want to talk about it."
James bites a rough edge of his thumbnail and then his sandwich. "Did you never wonder what to do with your life?" he asks.
"Easier to decide when you've not got so many options. No money for university even if I could find one that would take me. No A levels, anyway. Being a copper seemed like a pretty solid career, benefits and retirement and all that. And I always was a nosy bastard."
"And now you get paid for it."
"It's worked out well, for the most part."
"I heard you worked Vice in Newcastle."
"Who told you that?"
"I cannot reveal my sources. Bit of a change, coming here."
Lewis snorts. "You could say. Oxford was more of a shock than the worst Newcastle could offer. Not sure I could leave it now though."
"The bells," James says, almost under his breath.
Lewis nods. "Every day, steady as anything."
*
They get a call out that night. The deceased is a young woman. She is wearing a white robe, and her feet are bare. She was found drifting in a punt on the Isis. There are yellow leaves scattered on her dress. It's January. All the trees along the river are long since laid bare.
Lewis takes one look at her and heaves a sigh. "This is going to be a bugger and no mistake," he says.
"The Lady of Shalott," James says.
"Eh?"
"Lying robed in snowy white that loosely flew to left and right, the leaves upon her falling light though the noises of the night, did she float to Camelot."
Lewis pinches the bridge of his nose. "Yellow leaves, were they?"
"In the stormy east wind straining, the pale yellow woods were waning."
"Perfect. Laura?"
She glares at them both and shifts from foot to foot in the mud. "I assume you mean, how are you, Laura, on this excitingly frigid pre-dawn corpse-viewing excursion?"
Hathaway shrugs out of his coat and offers it to her.
"I don't know if you're being gallant or taking the piss," she says, and holds up her gloved hands. Either she doesn't want to contaminate his coat with her corpse, or her corpse with his coat. He knows which he'd bet on.
He drapes it around her shoulders. Her expression is still fierce, but she doesn't shake it off into the mud. James stuffs his hands into his pockets and tries to pretend his gallantry is keeping him warm.
"Time of death...I'd guess around the closing of the day?"
"She loosed the chain and down she lay," James agrees.
Dr Hobson nods. "It'd fit. Between eight and twelve hours. Sunset's around half four, and it's threeish now." She shrugs, careful not to dislodge James' coat.
"Cause of death, when you're done with the literary analysis?" Lewis asks.
"You'll have to wait for the tox screen. Nothing obvious, sorry. Not asphyxiated, no head wounds, no defensive wounds. I can tell you she either left her shoes behind when she cast off, or she was carried to the boat. Clean feet. Clean hands. Very carefully staged by someone, but it could've as easily been her as a killer."
"She's wearing a ring," Lewis says.
"Engagement ring."
"It's old though. Dirty. Looks like it's been in a drawer for forty years."
Dr Hobson is waving SOCO over. She is clearly not interested in engagement rings. "Eight sharp," she says. "I'll give you what I can. Right now I see nothing to suggest it wasn't an overly elaborate suicide."
She strides off, and James looks sadly after his coat.
"That's where gallantry gets you," Lewis says. He takes off his scarf to wrap it around James' neck. He looks down at the dead girl. "Christ, she's young. They get younger all the time."
"Yes, sir," James agrees gravely.
"Oh, stuff it. Come on, let's get you back in the car before someone mistakes you for an oversized ice lolly."
*
James retrieves his coat at eight. The smell of the mortuary will linger on it all day, but Dr Hobson thanks him and removes one glove to pat his cheek, and he feels amply rewarded. Gallantry, he mouths to Lewis, who rolls his eyes.
"Eggs and toast for lunch, followed by a ketamine overdose for dinner," Dr Hobson says. She shows them the injection site in the crook of the girl's arm. "It's clean. She didn't struggle."
"On the right side. Was she left handed?" James asks.
"Very likely." Dr Hobson displays the index finger of the girl's right hand. "Needle pricks. The sewing sort, not the injecting sort. You don't prick the fingers that are holding the needle."
"Can we have the ring?" Lewis aks.
Dr Hobson hands it over in a plastic bag. Their eyes meet and hold for a moment. There's tension between them this morning, but James can't work out what sort.
"Great. Thanks," Lewis says. He turns and walks out. James follows. It's what he does.
The ring has an inscription, which should make things easier, but a morning of ringing round every pawn shop in Oxford produces nothing.
"They'd clean it up anyway, wouldn't they?" James asks. " At least a bit. It wouldn't sell all dirty like that. Or if they didn't, who'd buy an old engagement ring and then not shine it up before they proposed?"
"Inherited then, you reckon?"
The phone rings before James can answer. Lewis picks it up and sits up straighter as he listens. "Yeah," he says. "That sounds like us. Be with you shortly." He hangs up. "Shoes, watch, earrings, and wallet found down by the river. ID says Melissa Solomon, picture shows a blonde girl, 19 years old."
They head out to the car. Lewis still hasn't reclaimed his scarf, so James wraps it around his neck.
"You think it's suicide, don't you?" Lewis asks on the drive over.
"You don't?"
Lewis is silent for a minute or so. Cold rain hits the windscreen with a hard, final sound.
"It's damned peculiar, all that staging," Lewis says. "What's the point of that? She's just as dead this way as jumping off a building or stepping in front of a lorry."
"More peaceful this way. If you don't choke on your own vomit, ketamine's not a bad way to go, and if it hadn't been enough to kill her, the cold would've finished the job before she woke up."
"Maybe her murderer was just a considerate sort of person."
They stop long enough to examine the ID and all the rest of it, and then they're off to St Benet's Hall. There's no porter's lodge and apparently no reception desk that they can find, and they end up asking a passing student for directions to Melissa Solomon's room.
"Honey's on the top floor, next to the monk. Her door has a cross-stitch sampler of the first ten lines of the Iliad on it, you can't miss it."
"The monk?" James says, at the same time as Lewis says: "Honey?"
"Her name means honey bee. You know, in Greek?" The girl frowns minutely. "She's not in some kind of trouble, is she?"
Lewis breaks the news to her with gentle weariness. James finds himself, this time, almost disconnected from the girl's fresh grief as he watches the minute sag of Lewis's shoulders, the droop of his mouth, as if gravity has, for this moment, tightened its grip on him alone.
The girl, Sally, gives them the name and number of Melissa Solomon's not-really-boyfriend, Luke. He's also at St Benet's, and they try his room before Melissa's.
The walls of St Benet's are thin. As they walk up the hallway, they can hear the grunts and groans, squeaks and thuds, of two or more people having enthusiastic sex on a bed that is not up to the task. They stop outside Luke Daleforth's room, clearly the source of the noise.
"Sounds like a fight to me," Lewis says, slowly.
"Sir..."
"Her body's barely cold. Where does he get off?"
"On the other side of that door. Any second now, I should think."
"Police!" Lewis says. He bangs on the door once with his fist and then goes straight in.
James follows and tries not to look at the bed. It's hard to miss the entirely male tangle of limbs though, the contraction of back muscles, the sweat-damp hair, oil-slick black and iridescent in the sunlight.
"With you...in one moment..." Unbelievably, one or both of them finish, with accompanying groans of satisfaction.
"Luke Daleforth?" Lewis says, into the silence that follows.
The boy with the crow's wing hair holds up his hand. "We were really being that loud? Sorry. We'll go to Jack's next time."
"This isn't a noise complaint, lad. We're here to ask you some questions about Melissa Solomon. Your girlfriend?"
"She's not his fucking girlfriend!" the other boy, Jack, says. "They were together for about two minutes, and that was months ago."
James wonders if he's the only person in the room who would prefer not to have this conversation with two sets of buttocks on full display. It appears so.
"Her body was found just after two this morning," Lewis says.
The two boys twist round to face them at last. They shuffle up the bed to brace against the headboard and clutch at the covers.
"Oh my god," Luke says. "Oh my god. Honey."
"I was here with him all night," Jack says. He laces his fingers with Luke's. "All night. He had nothing to do with it."
"No one suggested it was murder," James says.
"You're here, aren't you?" Jack says.
Except for the nudity of half the participants, the interview is fairly normal. Luke and Melissa split up last month. Luke and Jack have been inseparable ever since. Melissa - or Honey, as James is starting to think of her - had not yet met anyone new. Honey, like Luke and Sally, was studying Classics. Jack is studying chemistry and has rooms at Christ Church.
"It was her grandmother's," Luke says, when they show him the ring. "She wore it on a chain around her neck."
"Neither of you heard or saw anything out of the ordinary last night?"
Luke laughs weakly. "Didn't hear much. You know. You should ask the monk, he's right next door to her, and these walls are like paper."
"Does the monk have a name?" James asks.
Luke shrugs. "Who knows. I think he took a vow of silence or something. Or a vow to be a massive arsehole when anyone tries to talk to him."
"Except Honey," Jack says. "They sort of bonded."
"Over what?"
"Who knows?" Luke says, and elbows Jack under the covers, subtly but not subtly enough.
The boys don't have much to tell them after that, and Lewis nods toward the door. Upstairs, they find Honey's room with the promised hanging of the first ten lines of the Iliad in ancient Greek, stitched onto cream linen. James can just about remember one word in three.
"Not her boyfriend, then," James says, as they pass the threshold.
"All right," Lewis says. "I wasn't to know, was I? Anyway, that Jack didn't seem too fond of her."
"He's been with Luke for a month. Why kill her now?"
Lewis opens a drawer and pokes through it. "Maybe Luke was getting bored. Thinking of going back to the fairer sex."
"He didn't sound bored." James can feel himself start to blush with the memory and turns away. Ridiculous. He looks under the bed. "Anyway, he's studying chemistry."
"Exactly. Ketamine."
"Ketamine, yes. Lady of Shalott, no."
"You don't know that," Lewis says, opening the closet.
James peers into the dim and dusty space between wooden floor and box-spring. There is something there, on the far side, up against the wall. He frowns and reaches out.
"I just don't think he's that romantic-- Holy Christ!" James tries to snatch his hand back, but he's grabbed and held firm. Nails dig into his wrist.
Lewis is there in a second. He upends the bed, frame and all, and drags the huddled shape out into the light. The man struggles, but James recovers himself and throws himself on top of him.
"Don't!" the man says, and all his limbs go loose at once. His voice is a croak. "I'm sorry. You frightened me. I was asleep."
James withdraws, cautiously, but there seems to be no more fight left in the man. His hair is long, and he wears a full beard, mainly grey with trace remnants of reddish-brown. His trousers are patched, going at the knees. A brown hoodie covers his thin frame from neck to thighs. His feet are bare, and his eyes are red.
The monk James mouths to Lewis, but the man catches it.
"Yes, they call me that," he says. "My name is not important."
"It's important to us," Lewis assures him, arms crossed over his chest.
The monk shakes his head. "I have given it up to the grace of God."
"Be that as it may, sir, we do need it. Let's go back to your room and see some ID."
"I have none."
It turns out he's telling the truth, at least as far as anyone at St Benet's knows. There are genuine monks at St Benet's, but the monk is not one of them.
"He came to us from a monastery in Texas, of all places," one of the brothers tells them. "He lived on the monastery grounds, but primarily in hermitage. He met with his abbot once a month to discuss his spiritual progress. I understand there was...an incident."
"What sort of incident?" James asks.
"I don't know. He was a scholar before he withdrew from secular life, and his abbot sent him here to continue the research he abandoned when he took his vows. His order has paid his way generously. In return, we have been asked to indulge his wishes in certain matters."
"Like not having a name?" Lewis bursts out. "That's--"
"Could we please have the name and telephone number of his abbot?" James says quickly. "Thank you, much appreciated."
*
Luke and Sally come to identify the body. Honey's closest relative, both geographically and by blood, is her father, currently skiing in Gstaad. James spoke to him briefly, and he agreed, with some reluctance, to return. Her mother is dead, and her father's cousin, who raised her, is at an ashram in Arizona that appears to have no phone service.
"Do you have to tell her?" Sally asks.
"You don't think she'd want to know?" Lewis counters.
"Yes, but. Honey said she went there to die. She has cancer. It's her brain and her spine now. She usually writes once a week, but Honey didn't get a letter last week, so maybe..."
James and Lewis glance at each other. Adopted mother dying in another country, father off skiing, recently dumped by her boyfriend for another man. People with far fewer reasons to kill themselves do it every day. James doesn't quite buy it though, and he can see that Lewis doesn't either.
"We have to try to contact her," Lewis says, gently. "I know it will be hard for her, but it's the right thing to do."
Sally nods. She looks down at the floor and then back up. "Do you know where I can get the bus? Luke left already and he was my ride."
"Sergeant Hathaway will run you home," Lewis says, with a clap on James' back that sends him an involuntary step forward.
"Yes, sir." James spares Lewis one grim glance to show what he thinks of this idea. Getting young women to confide in him has never been his forte.
In fact, most of the ride is spent in silence, James looking straight ahead, Sally looking down at her hands. As they near St Benet's, she starts to cry and apologise simultaneously. James pulls over and gives her his handkerchief. She blows her nose into it, loudly. He's got to start carrying tissues.
"I'm sorry," she says. "Will you just walk me up? I know it's stupid and you didn't even find her there, but I don't want to go back in by myself."
James agrees and lets her take his arm as they walk up to the door. This may have been a tactical error. She keeps hold of it, and he can either wrest it free or continue up to her room. He goes with her.
If he were Lewis, she would undoubtedly confide in him now and in doing so let drop some vital piece of information that they need to close the case. James knows that he will have no such luck. Part of it is Lewis's age and fatherly aspect, but he suspects also that it's because Lewis would genuinely want to hear about her life and her troubles, whereas James mainly wants to detach her slightly sweaty palm from his skin.
"Do you want something to drink?" she says, letting go at last. "I've got scotch. Have some with me, okay? Just one."
James nods. Her hands are shaking, and he finds he does care a bit about her troubles after all. He perches on the edge of her bed, the only clear surface in the room. She pulls a bottle from the top drawer of her dresser and excuses herself to wash out two glasses in the bathroom down the hall.
James shifts his weight on the bed. Something pokes at him. He has inadvertently sat down on her bra. It has a teddy bear on it. In his haste to clear a chair, he causes an explosion of notes written in ancient Greek, sketches of trees and clouds and an older man with glasses, two letters signed love, mum, and a torn off scrap of another letter that starts My darling Marie. Not written to Sally, then, nor by her, going on the handwriting, which is distinctly masculine. Odd.
Sally returns with clean glasses and pours them each a scotch. It's cheap stuff, but James has suffered much worse for this job. One of the sketches still lies on the floor, and he is obliged to explain the explosion. She tells him about the man with the glasses, who is one of her professors and also, she has learned recently, a friend of her grandmother.
"Quite a coincidence," he says.
She looks down at her drink. "Do you ever think there's no such thing as coincidence?" she says. "That everything happens for a reason?"
James thinks of how fundamentally different his life would now be if Innocent hadn't sent him to pick up a stranger from the airport. He remembers how Lewis looked in those first seconds, worn out by his grief and his return journey to the genesis of that grief, but still almost frighteningly present as he asked: Are you for me?
"I've had that thought, yes."
*
The next day, they bring the monk in for questioning. He is docile and forthcoming on every point except his own name. They have a call in to his abbot in Texas, but it has not yet been returned. James watches the monk pluck at his threadbare shirt cuffs and wonders if all monasteries have answerphones now.
Lewis comes to stand beside him in front of the one-way mirror. "No word from Immigration?" he says.
James shakes his head. "If we could give them an arrival date, they might manage it, but without a name or at least a birthday, they're just looking for a fifty-ish caucasian man in a haystack."
"I suppose we wait until the abbot gets off his holy arse and gives us a ring then. All right, I'm going in. He's stewed long enough."
He squeezes James' shoulder on his way past, high up. His thumb brushes the back of James' neck. It makes James drop his head and shove his hands into his pockets. He hears Lewis's heavy footsteps retreat and another, lighter step approach. Dr Hobson walks in just as Lewis enters the interview room on the other side of the one-way glass.
"You just missed him," James says.
"Caught him in the hall. He said to talk to you."
But they don't talk. They watch.
James watches, as always, with a peculiarly physical hunger. It twists his stomach and floods his mouth with saliva to watch Lewis do this. It's the only time Lewis is cruel, and when he wields the knife, he does it with surgical precision, to excise contagion rather than to wound afresh.
It never stops being fascinating. Lewis is relatively gentle now, looking for facts, for scar tissue, rather than plunging straight in for the heart. James wonders sometimes how it would feel to sit across that table and watch that stubby finger stab at the recorder and know what was coming next. Sometimes he dreams about it.
"We haven't spoken to your abbot yet," Lewis says. He's not looking at the monk, but at the end of his pen where it taps in light percussive rhythm against the dull and pitted tabletop. "One of the brothers at St Benet's spoke of an incident?"
Silence from the monk.
"Must've been difficult, being on your own like that the whole time," Lewis suggests.
Silence.
"Too much thinking'll get a man in trouble every time."
Has James imagined the sideways cut of Lewis's eyes toward the mirror? It was so quick.
"Still, you had your abbot to talk things over with, that's something. Good man, is he?"
"The best," the monk says.
"S'pose he knew what he was doing then, sending you away?"
The monk's prominent Adam's apple undulates as he swallows. One hand rubs at the back of the other. His stick fingers widen to burls at the knuckles.
"He said I should complete my studies," the monk says slowly. "He said not everyone was meant for a life of devotion."
"But you think you are?"
"I don't know anymore." The monk's fingers twist together. His face is drawn and pale. "I don't know."
James' hands are clenched to fists in his pockets. He cannot uncurl them. He cannot look away.
"Would you like to tell us why you were asleep under Honey's bed?" Lewis asks. He has looked up from his pen and watches the monk with gentle, inviting eyes.
"I have n-nightmares," the monk stutters. "So does, did she. We talk, but she wasn't there last night."
"You knocked on the door," Lewis prompts.
"No answer, but lights, light under the door, it reflects in the wood. I went in. All warm. Messy. No one. But--the feel of recent occupation."
"You expected her back?"
A jerky nod. "Rude, to lie on the bed. Clothes on the chair. Delicate things. The floor, but too bright. So, just--" He slides one of his hands under the other. "Safe against the wall, dark. Sleep. Then your young man."
Dr Hobson releases a genteel snort. "Is that you?" she asks.
"Do you know anyone else who might conceivably fit that description?"
"Did you hit him?"
James shakes his head. "Just a bit of mutual, surprised flailing."
"Did you know Lewis did some undercover work in Newcastle?"
"Oh?"
"Bare-knuckle boxing. Actually in the ring for a round or two. I think I would've liked to have seen that."
"I...am finding it difficult to imagine." He frowns, trying, but the image won't come into focus. The oldest pictures he's seen of Lewis are the ones of him and Valerie at his house, already into his sedate and cheerful thirties, already carrying the spare pound or two of flesh that his frame demands.
He casts back to the bare-knuckle boxing fight they broke in upon a few months ago and tries to picture Lewis like those boys, lean and hard, all his sharp edges showing. He can't do it.
"I'm not," Dr Hobson mutters, and then clears her throat. "Anyhow, I came to tell you that the angle of insertion for the needle is consistent with her self-administering the ketamine."
"Are you ruling suicide then?"
"No." Her mouth tightens briefly in irritation at a world where possession of all the pieces does not always allow one to assemble the puzzle. "Undetermined. The amount she took is more consistent with an accidental overdose than suicide, but when you combine that with the other factors...well, I get undetermined, and you two get to work it out. Best of luck."
She makes a hand-washing gesture and departs. Her flats tap with an oddly hollow sound on the floor, like a percussive beat drummed on the body of a guitar.
James returns his attention to Lewis and the monk. The monk now has a tissue threaded between his knotty fingers and is telling Lewis reluctantly that he is missing some personal effects.
"Research papers?" Lewis asks, clearly wondering what sort of personal effects the man could have, given the Spartan quality of his room.
"No. The abbot sent a box of my things. It's been in storage since I took my vows. A few odds and ends from there. I can't think who would want them."
"No monetary value?"
"None. A tin box, an old yo-yo, an ivory comb."
"No idea why they might've been taken?"
"They were at the top of the box. Perhaps the thief merely took what was first to hand."
This is so obviously a lie that Lewis visibly restrains himself from rolling his eyes. James, safe behind the glass, does not bother. What was in the tin box, he mouths, uselessly. Lewis does not ask and instead takes his leave.
He rejoins James, and they watch the monk, shoulders touching. "What did Laura want?" he asks.
"To wash her hands before the multitude."
"If she's Pilate, does that make us Herod?"
"Have you read the Bible, sir, or merely watched Jesus Christ: Superstar one too many times?"
"Can't say I've experienced either one all the way through. Undetermined, is it?"
"Undetermined."
"Do you think he did it?" Lewis nods to the monk.
"I don't care for his explanation of how he came to be under her bed," James hedges. In truth, he doesn't want to think the monk did it, and Lewis has no patience for that sort of thing.
Lewis rubs at his mouth. "That's the one bit I did believe," he says. "Come on, let's get some lunch."
They go to the pub, acquire pints and sandwiches, and stare past each other into the murk of the recent past. James replays his conversation with Sally. He expects Lewis is turning over the monk for some new angle.
Two bites into his sandwich, Lewis snaps his fingers for a pen, which James provides. Lewis starts writing a timeline on a scrap of paper. It traces Honey's movements throughout the day of her death, and there is a conspicuous empty space between three in the afternoon and the discovery of her body at just after two in the morning.
"Nearly twelve hours," James says.
Lewis taps the time of death, which he has written as At the closing of the day, hemmed in by unnecessarily large quotation marks. "Half four to just past two, she's drifting down the river in a boat, dressed in white. For nearly ten hours. And no one saw her?"
James sits up straighter. "How far would she have gone along the river if she were drifting the whole time?"
"She might've got snagged on something. Still. That's just over a mile in ten hours."
"Someone set her adrift after she was dead."
"Well after," Lewis says. "So much for undetermined."
It's a long way from conclusive, and they both know it, but they exchange satisfied looks anyway. It's something to tell Innocent when she inevitably wonders why they're wasting police resources on this.
*
After lunch, the monk's abbot calls. Lewis answers and then asks the abbot to hold and gestures for James to get on the phone and perform his duty as translator and ambassador to the foreign and often hostile realm of organised religion. James doesn't mind. Lewis performs the same duties for him in regard to the rest of the world so often that this reciprocation seems the least he can do.
The monk's name is Richard Abernathy, which strikes James as decidedly anticlimactic. When they get on to the subject of his 'incident', things become more interesting.
"He was-- Is this really necessary?" the abbot asks.
"This is a murder inquiry, sir," James says. It's the most useful phrase he's learned since he joined the police.
The abbot sighs and then coughs and then sighs again. "He was eating his Bible."
James stares at the opposite wall. "Can you elucidate, sir?"
"Ripping out pages, putting them in his mouth, chewing until they were reduced to pulp, and swallowing them down. Two or more a day, I reckon."
"Did he say why, sir?" James thinks he sounds admirably calm, but something in his voice has alerted Lewis, who is now watching him with a finely honed attention.
"He said he wanted the word of God to be part of his flesh. I said I thought he should take a little vacation."
James pauses for longer than he should. There is something deeply disquieting about Abernathy's literal consumption of the word of God, a cannibalism of ideas that makes James squirm.
"You still there, boy?" the abbot asks.
James reassembles his professional self. "Yes, sir. He told us you sent a box of his personal possessions. Can you tell us what was in it? Some items appear to be missing."
"Gimme an address and I'll email you a list."
Five minutes after James hangs up, they have a list. Most of it is books, but there are a few items of note: the yo-yo and ivory comb, a Longhorns baseball cap, a tin box containing letters from his now-deceased wife, a digital watch circa 1982, and a t-shirt from a Tesla concert.
James is moved to ask Lewis a foolish question: "What would you keep, sir?"
"If I were...dedicating my life to God," he says, as if the words taste bad. "I don't suppose I'd keep anything. Bit of a cheat, that. Like saying your vows with your fingers crossed behind your back."
"I thought about becoming a monk."
"You did not," Lewis says, without looking up from the list.
"No," James admits. "The humility issue would've been problematic."
"What would you have kept, then?"
"My guitar. Except I would've had to give it up. Vanity, pride, et cetera."
Lewis slants him a look over the top of the computer monitor. "Nothing else?"
"I had very few things that were important to me."
"And now?" Lewis asks, attention now fully transferred from the list to James.
James can't hold his gaze. He looks at the floor where it's been polished to a high gloss by the repeated opening and closing of the door. He tries to think of the things he couldn't abandon, but, guitar aside, all his things have become people. He's sure that's Lewis's fault. You can't take people with you.
"I wouldn't go now," he says, and it's too harsh, too sudden in the silence. "I couldn't."
Lewis drops his eyes to the list, and he frowns. "How do you make this thing print again?"
He knows how to make it print. James shows him anyway. Out in the hall, waiting for the printout to emerge, he has a thought. He carries it back in along with the sheet of paper and presents both to Lewis.
"What happened to the chain?" he says.
"The chain she wore her grandmother's ring on," Lewis says, slowly. "They didn't find it in her room."
*
Lewis starts the process of acquiring a search warrant. James is dispatched to get a fuller description of the chain from Honey's friends. He finds Luke sitting on the grass outside St Benet's. A copy of The Bacchae lies open beside him. James' paltry remaining Greek does not allow him to translate any of it, but he can still pick out the names.
He sits down next to Luke and offers him a cigarette. Luke accepts. They smoke in silence for a moment.
"Pentheus deserved what he got, don't you think?" James says.
"No," Luke replies instantly. "Dionysus tricked him. He wanted to avoid bloodshed, and he got ripped apart for it."
"Or he wanted to see a lot of naked women dancing about, and then go after them with his army."
Luke glances at him. "I know who you are. My sister went to Cambridge. I saw you row once."
"Did we win?"
"No. Oxford did."
"Pity." He blows a smoke ring skyward. It's lopsided and collapses quickly. Needs practice. "You said Honey wore her grandmother's ring on a chain. What did it look like?"
"Gold, I think. With some little black beads on it?"
"How are you and Jack getting on?"
Luke picks up his book and flips through the pages. "We broke up," he says, at last.
James remains silent. He leans back on one hand and tips his face toward the weak winter sun. The ground is cold and faintly damp, but he has a feeling this will be worth the dry-cleaning bill.
"He wasn't with me that night like he said he was," Luke says, all in a rush. "He only showed up at half eleven. And he said he said it so you wouldn't suspect me but there's not any reason to suspect me, and--"
"And he's been working at a veterinary clinic where they stock ketamine," James finishes. Luke stares at him. "We do check these things," James says, mildly.
"But he wouldn't--" Luke looks as if he might be ill. "There wasn't any reason-- He wouldn't--"
"He is not currently under suspicion of murder," James says. It's the best he can do. The odds are quite good that Jack supplied the ketamine, but he was working at the clinic until after six, so he's probably off the hook for the actual murder.
Luke draws up his knees and wraps his arms around them. "What about the monk?" he asks.
"What about him?"
"I don't want to think it was him just because he's weird, but..."
"What did he say to you? You said he was rude."
"Not to me. He was awful to Sally though. She said she only asked him the time, and he went off on her, said she was damned to hell or something and crows would eat her eyeballs."
James frowns. That does not sound like the man Lewis interviewed. But maybe it does sound like a man who would devour the gospel, one page at a time. James wonders, once again, why on Earth the abbot thought Oxford would be conducive to a revival of the man's mental health.
"Do you know what he's studying?" James asks.
Luke shifts on the grass and presses the heel of his hand briefly to his forehead. "Thomas Malory. Honey was really into that Arthurian stuff. They used to talk about it."
James remembers the elbow Luke gave Jack when he was about to suggest what the monk and Honey might have bonded over. Malory's Morte d'Arthur contained, among other things, the story of Elaine of Astolat, on which The Lady of Shalott was based.
"You were protecting him," James says. "Why?"
"Because-- Just because he's weird and no one likes him doesn't mean he killed her."
Having spent much of his life as that weird boy no one liked, James finds himself unexpectedly touched by this. Nevertheless: "It doesn't mean he didn't, either. Sometimes-- Most of the time, the obvious suspect is the correct one."
*
The search warrant comes through. They find Honey's rose-gold chain at the back of the monk's desk drawer. He can't explain its presence. Innocent wants an arrest, but Lewis frowns and rubs at his neck and frowns some more.
"Something isn't right?" James hazards.
"Funny," Lewis says, absently. "You can feel it too. Can't you?"
James doesn't know what he feels. He doesn't want the monk to be the killer, and, paradoxically, it's blinding him to whatever thread Lewis has latched onto that suggests he actually isn't.
"We've got the chain," James says. "He's obsessed with Arthuriana, certainly is familiar with Tennyson's poem. He knew her well enough to know she was left handed. We found him under her bed after the murder. What else do you want?"
"Motive would be nice."
"He was eating the Bible. Do you think he needs one?"
Lewis frowns again. "Solitude does strange things to people. He wasn't eating Tennyson, or...that other bloke. Seems sane enough now." He turns abruptly. "Come on. Let's have a chat with Jack."
They find Jack at the veterinary clinic. He bolts at the sight of them. James leaps the counter and follows him out the back, over a fence and into someone's ornamental fountain, where Jack takes a spouting cupid to the goin. James has no problems with him after that, apart from his unwillingness to uncurl from the foetal position.
James drags him back to the clinic's car park, where Lewis is waiting.
"I could get used to this," Lewis says. "Ten years ago, that'd be me soaked to the skin with a scraped up knee."
James glances down and represses an oath. There is a red stain spreading across the knee of his trousers. It looks as if they might be torn as well, and they won't be cheap to replace. He gives Jack a shake in retaliation.
"I don't think my sergeant's too pleased with you," Lewis says. "Have you got something to tell us?"
Jack looks at James' face and tries to edge closer to Lewis. James takes a firmer hold of his collar.
"You know why we're here," James says.
"Don't," Jack says, sulkily.
"Do, or you wouldn't have run."
"Sally said you were arresting that monk guy. She said he had the chain in his desk drawer. What are you bothering me for?"
"He's no longer on our suspect list," James lies. "You, on the other hand, have easy access to ketamine and quite a plausible motive. People do the most horrible things for love. And now he's dumped you anyway. Shall we check with your boss, see if anything's gone missing?"
Jack pales. "It wasn't me! I-- I sold her the K a few times, all right? But that's all. She was fine last time I saw her."
"Which was?"
Jack looks down at the ground. "That day. I gave her the stuff. I wasn't going to do it anymore, but you know her aunt, her cousin really, but Honey called her Aunt Daisy, she's dying, and Honey wanted to forget about it, and the new shipment had just come in, and..."
James and Lewis share a glance. "She was a regular user?" Lewis asks. "You didn't feel the need to mention this before?"
"She wouldn't have overdosed! She knew what she was doing. It was that fucking monk, it had to be."
"It never occurred to you that it might be suicide?" James says.
"She didn't want to die," Jack insists. He's shivering now in the chilled air, wet clothes sticking to his body. "She just wanted a break. Everybody needs a break sometimes."
Lewis sighs. "Get in the car, both of you," he says. "You're turning blue."
They drop Jack at the station to be processed, and Lewis drives James home to change. James leaves him in the sitting room, touching the spines of James' books, picking up his chess pieces and putting them back down, poking through his kitchen cupboards.
It makes James smile, and he takes his time changing. He puts the bloodied knee of his trousers to soak, but there is also a small rip. They are most likely doomed. He stands naked in front of the bathroom sink and looks at his pale, elongated frame in the mirror. His body has always seemed alien to him, but it has become less so in this job that uses all of him, muscle, bone, and mind. Even, on rare occasions, his somewhat tarnished soul.
There is a thud from the sitting room, just on the other side of the wall, and a curse from Lewis. Likely he's walked into one of the many stacks of books. It strikes James that he is standing here naked with Lewis not ten feet away. He retreats to the bedroom rather quickly and searches for clean socks and underwear.
When he emerges, still cold but dry, Lewis presses a mug of tea into his hand. "Milk, no sugar," Lewis says.
"Thank you, sir."
They sit shoulder to shoulder on James' sofa, steam warming their faces.
"It's damned fishy," Lewis says, at least.
"A trenchant observation, sir."
Lewis ignores him. "Maybe it was suicide."
"But the chain? The ten hours drifting invisibly on the currents of the Isis?"
"Sally," Lewis says, slowly. "Jack said Sally told him we found the chain in the monk's desk drawer. Did we tell anyone that?"
"No. No, we didn't." James sits up straighter, ready to go again, but Lewis puts a hand on his knee.
"Slow, now," Lewis says. "In the morning.
"But--"
"In the morning. Early. You get some rest."
He's looking into the distance, well past the bookshelves on the far wall. His hand still rests on James' knee. It's warm and covers an unaccountably large expanse of trouser. His thumb moves restlessly against the side of the kneecap. James calms under the touch and subsides against the sofa cushions.
Lewis remains focused on the world beyond James' bookshelves. James watches Lewis's hand on his knee and thinks, for the first time in months, of the day Lewis kissed him.
Eventually, James stirs himself and makes dinner, a Moroccan tagine of chicken, carrots, and green beans, with coconut rice. Lewis seems surprised when he's called to the table, but he eats with every sign of appreciation.
They talk about food, and Lyn's pregnancy, and about the persistent leak in Lewis's ceiling and the poor drains.
"Think I'll move when the lease is up," Lewis concludes. "Buggered if I know where though."
"There's a building down the road that's being renovated. I think it'll be quite nice when it's done." James makes the offer without thinking how it might sound, and his grip on his fork tightens.
It's all right, though, isn't it? It's not as if he suggested Lewis move into his building. They'd hardly see each other more if Lewis lived down the road from him. James doesn't know how they could see each other more without actually sharing a flat.
Lewis takes the offer in stride and with no suggestion that he finds it odd. He says he'll look into it. He sounds as if he means it.
They have a beer after dinner, and Lewis departs. James plays the guitar in shorts and an old t-shirt. He goes to bed just before midnight. At four, he wakes up already reaching for the phone, but he stops himself before he dials Lewis's number.
Slow, Lewis said, and James can see why. He can sense everything drawing together. Now is not the time to move too quickly and knock it apart. He showers, dresses, makes himself eggs, and drives to the station.
James checks his memory against the abbot's emailed list of Abernathy's belongings. Included is a set of old letters from his ex-wife, Marie. In his mind, he can still see the masculine, slanted handwriting of the fragment of paper among Sally's notes: My darling Marie.
A little more checking shows that Sally's mother's name was Marie North. Her father's name is Richard Abernathy.
The computer screen is so bright in the dim room that the text imprints itself on his eyes. He can see the names even as he stands and walks down the hall to make coffee. A quiet feeling of triumph is expanding in his chest, but he can't let it take over. He knows, or thinks he knows, what happened, but he needs to work out why, and how.
Ideally he'd like to do it before Lewis gets in.
*
"James."
The world is inexplicably hard and coffee-scented. His cheek and ear are resting precariously on the rim of his coffee mug. Lewis is knocking on his forehead as if on a door, though gently. James squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them as far as they'll go.
"Abernathy is Sally North's father," James says.
Lewis smiles and nods to the computer screen. "I saw. Good work."
James tells him about the fragment of the letter in Sally's room, but after that he has to stop. Despite the paper in front of him, covered with notes and wild theories and possible interconnections, he still doesn't understand precisely what has happened between these people.
"Unless Sally murdered her friend solely to frame her father for it," he says, and stops. He shrugs, helplessly. "I don't understand."
Lewis picks up James' mug, sniffs it, and takes a gulp. James stares at his lips on the rim, distracted. He's never had a friendship progress to the beverage sharing phase before. Maybe it was the kissing that did it.
Lewis makes a disgusted noise and puts the mug back down. "It's cold. When did you make this? Never mind. What if she was already dead?"
"You mean Sally found her like that, overdosed?"
"We'll go and ask her," Lewis says.
When they stop outside St Benet's, there is frost on the grass. The rising sun gilds it in pale orange and sugar-coats its tips with pink. Hathaway walks close to the edge of the path so that he can step off it here and there and feel the frost crunch under his feet. Lewis catches him at it and smiles.
They stop outside Sally's door. James knocks. They wait. He repeats the knock, more loudly. Someone from across the hall tells them to get stuffed. Eventually, the door creaks open, and Sally blinks at them, young, soft-eyed, in a band t-shirt and blue striped shorts.
"What? What is it?" she says. She tries to finger-comb her hair into order, but there are too many knots. She ends up holding onto a hank of hair as if to a life rope. She stares at them.
"I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to come with us," Lewis says gently. "There are some more questions we need to ask you."
Lewis leads her down to the car while James dons latex gloves and transfers the letter fragment from her wall into an evidence bag. The ride back to the station is quiet. Around them, Oxford is waking up.
Somewhere, not close by, but near enough, there are bells. They start with a clashing off note and come together gradually into a round of grandsire triples. He's thought of putting in to practise with a method ringing band, but he barely has time for the band he's already in. Lewis is tapping out the tenor bell's line with his thumb on the steering wheel.
They let her sit in the interview room with a cup of coffee and watch her through the glass. Her head is bowed. She's pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands.
"You do it," Lewis says.
James looks at him and has neither time nor resources to hide his surprise. It's never him, at the last. It's always Lewis.
Lewis looks back at him, unreadable and impassive. James sets his coffee down and goes out into the hall. He opens the door, sits across from Sally, and folds his hands on the table. Confession should lead to consolation, should lead to contrition and absolution. Here, there is no absolution, often no contrition, and he can offer nothing but penance paid to an uncaring state.
Sometimes James wishes he had retained the morally absolute view of the world that he held at fourteen. It would make his job easier.
He says her name to get her attention. She looks up at him through her hair.
"What happened after your father left your family?" he asks.
"Mum got sick," Sally says, quietly. "I mean, not, like, ill. But sick in her head, so she thought there was something wrong with her, that it was her fault he left and she wasn't good enough. Wasn't good enough for anything. Some days she wasn't good enough for brushing her teeth or getting out of bed."
"That must've been hard for you."
"I got past it. Mum never did. And then she got the big C. Renal cell carcinoma, kidney cancer. She died two years ago. End of."
"Until you came to Oxford," James prompts. "Until you came to St Benet's."
"Honey was my first friend here. She was such a good person, you know? She tried so hard. But she reminded me of Mum. Every little thing hurt her so much."
"We know she was getting the ketamine from Jack."
"Yeah, but she wasn't-- She wasn't an addict. It wasn't like that. Things were just hard for her, like she didn't have any skin. Raw. And she-- You know what K-hole is?"
"A state of disassociation from the body, sometimes accompanied by euphoria, hallucinations, and occasional memory loss."
She smiles a little. "Did you look that up on Wikipedia?"
"Yes. Is that what she wanted when she took the ketamine?"
"Yeah. She said it was the only time she could relax."
James lets the silence between them rest for a few seconds. It's oddly comfortable. He can see the right things to say as clearly as if they're both following a script.
"She took it that night," he says, at last.
"I was supposed to meet her down by the river." Sally twists her fingers together just the way her father does. "I was late. She'd already dosed. She was cold. I touched her face, and she was cold."
"The boats were nearby," James says, before Honey's death can lock them both behind its walls.
"I thought she should have something nice." Sally's voice is flat, but her eyes are shining. "She loved that stupid poem. I had to listen to her read it about a million times when she was trying to memorise it. She was already wearing white."
"God in His mercy lend her grace," James murmurs, and Sally's tears spill onto her cheeks. He hands her a tissue and waits.
"They used to talk. He talked to her and sat with her late at night and had lunch with her and-- She said to me once that it was like having a dad, properly, even though she had one and she saw him at Christmas and he even came to visit for her birthday--" She takes a deep breath and smooths her hands over the scarred table.
"You felt she'd taken something of yours," James says.
Sally is silent. She looks at her hands for a few long seconds and then wipes away the last of her tears. When she speaks again, her voice is steady. "She was already gone when I found her. I tried to send her off in a way she would have liked. I know I should've called the police. I'm sorry." She pauses, and the words come more slowly now, as if she is working out whether they'll hold water. "I put the necklace in his room because I thought he'd like to have something of hers. They were very fond of each other."
She might get away with it. He can see he won't get any more out of her. She's locked down now. James knows the look, most familiar on his own face. If he looked at the one way mirror, he'd see it now. He believes her about Honey's overdose in any case. It makes more sense than murder.
He stands and rejoins Lewis in the other room. "Sorry," he says. "I didn't get it."
"Close enough. Abernathy won't go to prison for it. Anything else, she'll have to live with. Might be better for her if she weren't clever enough to get away with it, but she is." Lewis looks at her, and his expression is heavy.
*
At the end of all things, there is paperwork. The case is over, but he and Lewis are still working when Innocent comes to chase them out at five. James protests that he'd rather finish and not have it waiting for him tomorrow, but she'll have none of it.
"It will always be waiting for you tomorrow," she says. "That is the nature of work. If it were something you could finish, we'd all be unemployed. Now get out, go on, have a life." She points at Lewis. "That goes for you too."
"What about you, ma'am?" James asks.
"The higher ranks are taking life cuts as well as pay cuts, didn't you hear?" She sighs and almost smiles. "I'll be another hour at most. But you two are leaving now."
They leave as instructed. On the way to the car park, Lewis asks, "Did you really look up ketamine on Wikipedia?"
"Of course." James pauses just long enough for Lewis's eyebrows to begin to rise. "I thought I'd better refresh my memory."
"Your memories of ketamine. Fond ones, were they?"
"You know how it is, sir. All night raves, glow in the dark body paint. One does things one might not in other circumstances."
"You..." Lewis shakes his head. "Come on, I owe you dinner."
James follows, and they leave in Lewis's car. It will strand James at Lewis's flat, in all likelihood, between the beer they'll consume and the way his eyes are already threatening to close. They both know it. Neither of them mentions it.
"Are we stopping for something?" James asks.
"Thought I might make eggs and bacon. Yeah?"
"Yes." Perhaps there will be no beer, then. No night folded onto Lewis's sofa. Perhaps it's for the best.
Dr Hobson hails them as they reach the car, literally. "Hail, fellows," she says. "Leaving work and it's not dark yet? What's this?"
"We've been sent home," James tells her.
Dr Hobson glances at them, and then at James' car, across the car park.
"He's making me eggs," James says.
"He can do that?"
"I've seen him. 'Tis a wondrous sight to behold."
"Oi, you," Lewis says. "In the car, now."
James bows very slightly to him and gets in the car. For a moment, he thinks the silence is due to the insulating effects of glass and metal, but no: Lewis and Dr Hobson are merely standing in the chilly night in silence.
Dr Hobson's lips are barely parted, and she wears a small frown, as if trying to work something out. Why the man she's been trying to date is making eggs for his sergeant instead of for her, perhaps.
"Good night," Lewis says, at last, and it sounds oddly final.
"Good night, Robbie." Dr Hobson squeezes his arm and gives him a little smile. She turns and walks back toward the building.
Lewis watches her go, watches until she's inside and the door has closed behind her. He gets in and starts the car. James searches for something to say, something that will be at once light and serious, encouraging and absurd. Lewis should go after her. He knows that. Dr Hobson knows that. The only person who appears not to know that is Lewis.
James glances at him. His face is calm. The lines in it are relaxed, cheeks loose, mouth soft. His eyes search the road as he pulls out of the car park and turns toward his house. He looks altogether sure of himself. James has never known anyone more settled in his skin than Lewis is, more certain of what the world asks of him and of what he can give it.
In the end, James keeps his mouth shut, and they drive in silence.
"Plumbing still bad?" James asks, as Lewis is unlocking his front door.
"Worse. Drippy tap in the loo too now. I ought to just fix it myself, it'd be faster."
"You can do that?" James asks, affecting surprise.
Lewis propels James ahead into the dark room and catches his elbow when he knocks up against a misplaced chair. "Yes, smart boy, I can do that."
"Oh, good. You can do mine as well."
Lewis laughs, flipping on lights as he progresses to the kitchen. "You know why I can do that?"
"I assumed it had something to do with being too proud to ring a plumber."
"It was Morse. He had me round to fix his tap before I'd known him a month. Just assumed I'd know all about it."
So he'd learned all about it rather than disappoint Morse, or at least Morse's assumptions regarding his working class background. "Did you look it up on the internet?" James asks. "Oh, sorry. They didn't have that back then, did they?"
Lewis gives him a two-fingered salute, other hand extracting eggs from the fridge. "Val showed me how. It's not hard. Get the bread. That cupboard." He points.
James retrieves the bread. Lewis doesn't talk about Val, doesn't talk about Morse. And now both of them in one night, almost in one breath. James looks down at the yellow printing on the bread wrapper and searches his mind for suitable recompense.
He doesn't find it. He's not a generous person when it comes to his past, even when he wants to be. All this gives him is more questions.
He watches Lewis fry bread and make poached eggs and doesn't ask: What was it like for you when they died? How did you go on? Will you ever be happy again? If I say the right thing, will it help? Can anything help? Is there hope for either of us?
Lewis sets two plates on the table. "I rang that building you were talking about," he says. "The one by you. They said the renovations are almost done. Should be ready to let in a month or two. I'll go by and take a look, but it's all new everything, not like this place. These taps might be as old as me."
"Surely not, sir," James says, but his heart has set a foolish pace in his chest, and he bends to his meal with a good appetite.