Chapter Text
Morse should have known that the day was not going to go well. His morning had slipped away from him, like so many others, and he had ended up leaving without so much as a cup of tea, let alone breakfast. Not that he often had breakfast. Most mornings he was either too tired, or too restless, to contemplate such an effort. But he did normally manage tea at least. Today, however, there had been no milk. Living alone meant he had no one to blame for that but himself, and he was growing tired of blaming himself for his perpetually miserable state of existence. A psychologist would no doubt have a lot to say about how readily he blamed himself for the most trivial, and critical, of things.
He shunned psychology as a general rule. His feelings on that matter were well known. What was less well known was that his issue lay more with psychologists than psychology itself. Mason Gull had not definitely not helped with those feelings. He could not deny though that much of his studies of ciphers, classics, and police work had left him in no doubt that people could be programmed in much the same way as a machine. Input violent childhood, output violent adult etc.
His own childhood, and consequently his adult life, was much harder to qualify. His mother had loved him certainly, but she had been so distant. Always having to work after his parents had divorced. Her time at home spent doing the never ending list of chores, and her Sundays devoted to quiet worship. He had snatched at whatever time he could get with her, even going to services despite his lack of faith. Then she had slipped away from him as the illness had eaten her from the inside out. As he had cared for her during her last days he had thought to finally get closer, but in the end there had always been that issue hanging, unspoken, between them.
Then there was his father, who had never lifted a hand to him, in anger or in love. He had received everything necessary from them both but there had always been something lacking. His father had never truly seemed to love him. Some days he would have been hard pressed to say if he even cared about him. Disappointment was the solitary emotion he felt sure he could attribute to how his father felt about him. The rest remained a mystery. He wondered sometimes if there was not some underlying guilt that had made him the way he was, but if that was the case he never showed any sign of it.
Then there was Gwen of course… She had hated him, certainly, but he was never sure why. His sudden presence in her household had not been wanted, but she would have struggled to claim he had disrupted anything very much. His father had spared him very little time, he looked after himself, and most of the time he was away at school on his scholarship. Sometimes he wondered if she knew, but that would have meant his father admitting what had been done, and he found that very hard to believe.
He wasn’t supposed to know about it. It had been an accident one day when he was around 6 years old. He had been looking for a form about a trip that the school had sent for his mother to sign. That morning, before she left for work, he had asked her about it and she had said she had misplaced it. After she was gone and he had finished his toast he had decided to look through the drawer he often saw her store forms in. It hadn’t even occurred to him that there was anything in there that he shouldn’t see. But then he had seen it – that photograph – and his world had changed forever.
Morse shrugged off his contemplation with a shudder. Dwelling on the past would do him no good and he was already late to pick up Thursday. He grabbed the car keys, made his way hastily through the station, and out into the dim, sleet filled, morning. Gathering his coat tightly around his frame as he dashed across the yard to the car, he reflected that some would take this as a sign that things could only get better. His own fatalistic beliefs noted the thicker clouds on the horizon and the hurried way in which the duty sergeant had headed towards CID after he had hung up the phone.
No...
No good could come of today he decided. One way or another he was destined for a storm.