Chapter Text
They forced him out of the station in cuffs, because it was the only way he would go. Everyone watched him leave and no one said anything. There was just dead silence, even from Akram, who was standing by the water cooler with a tiny paper cup, looking as politely confused as ever.
They wouldn’t even let him take his own car, he was led, like a fucking dickhead, to one of the pool cars to be taken home and Moira told the confused constable driving him not to let him out of the cuffs until they were home.
Because short of arresting him or locking him in the basement, there was fuck all she could do for him. He knew it. She knew it. This wasn’t like Leith Park. He was just a fucking parent now. If there was any investigation in their building, he would be kept far fucking from it. He wouldn’t know the detectives or see the crime scene photos, or be told anything until a fucking cabal of interdepartmental lawyers and H-fucking-R cleared it.
And by then it would be a fucking game of telephone. Useless.
Rachel wanted to come with him.
He said some things that made her rethink that. Some horrible things he knew would land. It was largely a blur, but the word cow came out particularly viciously.
The house was dark, and Martin wasn’t home, and that could only mean that Martin knew. Because Martin was always home.
Well fuck him too.
Carl called Vic again. He didn’t know how many times he had dialed her now. It would just ring once and went to fucking voicemail. It was just so fucking typical of her, to punish him like this. Punish him for--
There was a noise in his head and he couldn’t think around it. It was high pitched and dizzying. Fuck. Fuck. There was an aluminum baseball bat in the umbrella stand and he broke all the cabinets in the kitchen before the impact caught up in his hands and he could no longer hold the fucking thing.
And then he called Rose.
She picked up on the third ring and immediately started talking. “What’s going on Carl? No one’s saying anything, but Moira looks bloody-- ”
“Jasper left Edinburgh four days ago,” he said. “With a bunch of school mates. I want names and numbers. Them, their parents, their fucking-- their fucking pictures, Rose.”
She was quiet for a minute. “This is about Jasper?”
“Can you do it?”
“Wait, what’s going on with Jasper?”
“Do it or don’t Rose, I don’t give a shit. Start on social media. I’m blocked on all of Jasper’s accounts.”
And then he hung up before she could start talking again, and called Hardy, who picked up on the first ring. “Carl? What the fuck did you do, mate?”
And because it was Hardy, because it was Hardy, and Hardy knew Jasper and Hardy had two boys, and Hardy was his best-fucking-friend, and Hardy’s spine had slowed the bullet that should have killed him, the words were finally there. They finally made sense.
“Jasper’s dead.”
The line crackled, the faint sounds of the station pushing through the phone to the beat of Hardy’s breathing. “What?”
There were splinters all over the kitchen. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, pressing a hand to his forehead. It was bloody. He had split the skin between his fingers, chopping at the fucking cabinets. “What do people do? I don’t—”
His knees were weak again and he stumbled to the floor, hanging on the edge of the counter top, twisting until his back was to a wall.
“I’m coming. Where are you?”
“I don’t know.” It was true. This wasn’t his place, it was Vic’s place first. But she wasn’t here and he was because they hadn’t wanted to move Jasper, because Martin was a good stopgap for all the kinds of trouble an intelligent, healthy, angry kid like Jasper could get into.
This wasn’t his home. It was Jasper’s home, and now--
“I mean-- I’m... The house,” he said finally. “I’m-- I’m at the house.”
“Okay mate, alright. Stay on the line, yeah? Tell me what happened.”
Carl scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know. They said—” What did they say? “He was pissed. They said he was pissed, and he drowned. I don’t know anything else.”
And there was nothing else to say. He wasn’t even sure he wanted Hardy to come here.
“I don’t even know where he is. He was in Glasgow three days ago. He could be in Inverness by now. Or Aberdeen. He sent me a link to his itinerary but it was a fucking spreadsheet, I don’t know what the fuck any of it meant, I didn’t think it would be—”
He stopped. There was a tennis ball under the table. He could see it, but there wasn’t a single shred of him that wanted to reach for it. To feel any of this less.
“I have to go. I have to keep trying Vic,” he whispered.
He hung up before his friend could protest.
He called Victoria again.
It rang once, and then beeped into her inbox.
She could still be on a plane.
She could have turned it off.
He didn’t know how long he stayed there on the floor, alternating between calling Vic and Jasper when there was a knock on the door, but it was sooner than he had expected. He forced himself to his feet, staggering to the entrance hall on locked-up knees and numb feet.
But when he opened the door, it wasn’t to find Hardy standing on his doorstep.
It was Akram.
And it had started to rain, bucketing down over the umbrella the quiet, deadly man was holding just over his head. Carl stared at him, and he stared back. “What?” he snapped.
“May I come in?”
Carl considered him for a moment. He could guess Akram was there to find out why Carl had been led in cuffs to the car. Probably to find out if he still had a job. “No,” he said at last. The last thing he needed right now was the weight of Akram’s bloody doe-eyes, looking at him like a kicked-fucking puppy.
Akram’s eyebrows raised, but he made no move to back away from the front door. “I think you should let me in.”
Carl’s finger tensed on the doorknob. “And I think you should—”
It was one thing to know Akram went around knocking the wind out of people, and quite another to be on the receiving end. The blow came out of nowhere, the umbrella twisting closed in an instant and then shoved, hard, into his sternum with enough force to make him think, for an instant, that it had punctured his fucking chest cavity.
He fell back, dry heaving against the wall, retching through the suddenly unbearable pain of breathing.
Akram stepped neatly through the doorway. “Thank you,” he said, closing his umbrella and tucking it into the holder by the front door.
He looked around, and Carl realized he had probably never seen the house before.
He had the same look everyone did though, surprise at the calm, neat décor, and then it was gone, replaced by the gentle, concerned look as he helped Carl straighten up.
“Before I come to work for you—” he said.
“Yes… yes,” Carl said, waving an impatient hand, still coughing oxygen back into his lungs. “This mysterious… job for the Syrian…. police.”
“No,” Akram said firmly.
Carl looked up with a frown.
“I worked in IT,” Akram said. “And I helped many people, many police officers, recover their passwords. To emails, and servers, all over the country.”
He fixed his collar. “Please do not misunderstand, I would not have abused this trust placed with me, but I was… concerned, with how you left. And so I looked at the emails, and I understand now.”
Carl leaned back, rubbing the stubborn ache from his chest. The pain was good. It had grounded him, pushed the rage right back where it should be, where it was useful.
So Akram had hacked the fucking police, endangering not just his job and residential status, but his fucking freedom.
“so what do you fucking understand, Akram?” he asked shoving past him, back to the kitchen.
“I understand what you will likely want to do now,” Akram said, following him, and barely hesitating over the scene of destructive chaos Carl had left there. “And because after you have seen what I have seen, I think you will think as well, that there is something not right with this report.”
Carl paused. He looked back. “What report?”
And Akram untucked a sheaf of white copy paper from his jacket. “The report of your son’s death,” he said. “It is all… very obviously wrong.”