Work Text:
‘This is for the arm,’ says Tavish, dropping a pile of bandages on his desk. He also holds out a tumbler of clear liquid. ‘And this is for the pain.’
Vodka? Kim blinks. It seems rude to refuse.
‘Thank you,’ he says, taking the glass in his good hand. Cold to the touch; he wonders where the vodka came from. A secret fridge? Then he shakes his head. He doesn’t really care about that, he’s just tired and spun out.
It’s late, and dark outside, and the 57th is empty and silent except for the sound of Matterforth typing in the next room. Even after less than a month, it’s a sound that’s already familiar; Matterforth always stays late. Kim likes that. But he likes almost everything about working here: the strong coffee that heats and reheats in the corner-kitchen all day long, the stupid sweepstakes his fellow detectives run on every little thing, and the complete absence of teenagers.
Tavish sits down on the other side of his desk and says, ‘Come on then.’
Kim, doing as he’s told, holds out his damaged arm. An hour or so earlier, a homicide suspect called Macaulay had stamped on it, hard, forcing Kim to drop the gun he was holding. In the grapple, he’d heard the click of Macaulay’s weapon, hammer pulled back ready to fire, and felt a moment of spectacular hopelessness, glimpsing the newspaper headlines in his mind’s eye, Juvie Cop Out Of His League Bites Dust On First Case. And then Tavish had been there, just when Kim needed him, his partner of three and a half weeks.
Macaulay’s downstairs in a holding cell right now, and he did that. Kim. He helped do that. Or rather, they did it together.
‘Anything go crack?’ asks Tavish, a miserable question, but in his soft, Ubi Sunt? accent it sounds faintly lyrical.
‘No,’ Kim says slowly. ‘I don’t think so.’
He considers it. Possibly something, one of the smaller bones in his wrist, had indeed gone crack - but it hurts, he’s tired, as soon as Tavish sorts him out he can go home to sleep. He doesn’t care to consider it more deeply than that. There’s no way he’s waiting around to see the Lazareth.
‘Hmm,’ says Tavish. He’s looking at Kim, considering. Kim feels a low hum of something like embarrassment. Then Tavish says, ’All right.’ He pulls a length of bandage from the pile, straightening and rewinding it until, satisfied, he puts it aside and takes Kim’s forearm in both hands, one at the elbow, one at the wrist. Slowly, he runs fingertips along first the ulna bone and then the radius, watching Kim’s face.
It hurts. Kim drinks the vodka. It burns all the way down.
‘I think you have a fracture,’ Tavish says at length. He gets a look on his face when he’s thinking that is already becoming deeply familiar.
‘Okay.’
‘But I don’t think it’s too bad. So I’m just going to strap you up. Is that all right?’
Kim nods. ‘Fine.’
Tavish nods back, and bends to his work. In the low light, hair falling into his face, he looks younger than he is, which, Kim thinks, is a few years older than himself. Early forties? He could probably ask, but he’s not sure how.
There’s a reticence in Tavish that matches his own - Tavish doesn’t push on things or ask personal questions, doesn’t like flashy police-work - and maybe that means there’s something he’s holding back on, but it had been easy enough, from the first, to fall into step with him. Kim’s been with the RCM long enough to have met the dregs of other homicide detectives, half-people, scraping themselves into their uniforms at the start of each day with enough narcotics to fell a horse; he’s known, these last weeks, how lucky he got with Tavish. But tonight’s the first time he’s really felt it, how fully he trusts this person; known that when he needs him, Tavish will be there.
‘All right. Can you bend everything?’
Kim takes his arm away, flexes his fingers. In the half-light, he feels Tavish’s eyes on him, watching him do it. The typing in the next room sounds strangely far away.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’
+
The nickname arrives soon after: Janken coins it about a month into their partnership, a blowhard who likes the sound of his own voice. It’s late afternoon and he’s sitting around while they work, the two of them at Kim’s desk, peeling through a folder of handwritten material from a crime scene. It’s taking hours to go through it all, flicking between their notes and the diaries, cross-referencing names and dates, with Kim sometimes saying, ‘This part? And what about this?’, asking Tavish to read the smallest and most illegible sections out loud.
After watching them for a while, both of them quietly trying to ignore his attention, Janken kicks Kim’s desk with the flat of his foot, a loud thud. ‘You absolute mega-bino,’ he says, laughing. ‘Can you seriously not see that shit when it’s right in front of your face?’
The thin certainty of Kim’s dislike for Janken has been settling inside him ever since he transferred here, heavy and inevitable and tiresome, because it never pays to let a colleague irritate you. But Jansen is irritating. It’s not Kim’s fault. A man can only put up with so much.
‘Nothing of your own to get on with?’ says Tavish.
Janken laughs his annoying laugh, hurr-hurr, says he’s busy waiting for the phone to ring. ‘You know what, Tavish? I think it’s sweet. You used to be a killer, now look at you - so domesticated. Kimball’s little pet. His eyes. Sweet.’
Kim sighs. ‘You’re remarkably observant, Janken,’ he says softly. ‘And original. I’m sure that’s why you made it to detective. Whatever people say about your father’s standing in the Moralintern, displays like that really prove you’re here on merit.’
Tavish ducks his head to laugh, and Janken stands up, looking pissed off. He’s sensitive about that sort of thing, right to be, of course. Everyone knows.
‘All right f*****s, no need to get uptight,’ he mutters. ‘I was only making conversation.’
‘Of course,’ Kim says pleasantly. Not a muscle in his face moves, not even at that word. Janken’s hitting out blindly, spoiled child, doesn’t know a thing of course. Kim’s safe, still.
Janken looks at them for a moment, something posh and uneven about his face, eyes too close together. Then he cracks into a grin. ‘Hey Matterforth,’ he calls, moving away. ‘I’ve got a good one for Tavish. Nickname. Listen to this.’
Somehow, after that, it catches on: Eyes. Kim isn’t sure why. It’s stupid, but it sticks.
+
What they have is a murder with no body. The cubic quantity of blood found at the scene says there’s no way Marika Quinn walked out of her kitchen without somebody carrying her, or bits of her, but there’s no sign anywhere in the city.
A high-ranking official’s (younger) wife, there’s been a stir about her disappearance, the RCM monitoring waterways, harbours, the aerodrome at Lausanne Central and all major freight routes out of Jamrock. A team of volunteers - mainly students at Quinn’s former girls’ school - are out even now, pulling sticks through the long grasses of empty rec grounds and abandoned building sites, from when money for renewal was abundant, before it ran out all over again halfway through. This side of Revachol West, it’s all half-finished building projects, somebody’s scam, somebody’s dream, somebody else’s grave marker. But none of them seem to be hers.
‘We’re missing something,’ Kim says tiredly. First officers at the scene, he and Tavish have been awake and working something close to twenty-nine hours. They’re sat in the front of Tavish’s old Kineema 40, tossing the case back and forth between them, getting nowhere. When the conversation dies away, they sit in silence, listening to the carriages on the motorway overhead.
Kim looks at Tavish. He’s thick-set, with dirty-blonde hair, late morning light in the freckles on his forearms. Brick shithouse, but gentle. And observant. He’s always quiet and always watching. Inevitably, he looks back.
‘Okay,’ he says after a moment, and starts the engine.
He doesn’t explain and Kim doesn’t ask. He just drives, neither of them talking, Kim stupefied by tiredness, lost in the view from his window. He loves being in Tavish’s Kineema. He’d always wanted to ride in one. Juvie cops go by bike.
The take the motorway to the other side of Fauborg, fifteen minutes’ drive or thereabouts, then Tavish parks up as abruptly as he started and says, ‘Come on then.’
Kim follows in silence. Tavish leads them into a block that looks half-derelict from the outside - high ceilings, from the grand old days - and up two flights of stairs. Inside, it’s clear the building is very much occupied, the smell of fried onions drifting out from behind one of the doors and from another, the sound of a radio.
They stop by one of the flats. Kim watches Tavish take out a key, open the door, and gesture for him to go first.
It’s his apartment. Tavish’s. Kim hadn’t expected this, somehow. ‘What are we doing?’
Tavish blinks at him. ‘Eating,’ he says. Then he turns and calls, ‘Aenita?’
A woman’s voice comes back, ‘In here.’
Kim follows Tavish down a dim hallway and into a kitchen-cum-living space, clean but well-lived, a faint air of respectable disorder. A woman with dark hair piled on top of her head is stood at the stove, stirring a big pan of something that smells like bacon and potatoes and paprika. She turns, pushing her glasses up onto her head, clearly surprised to see Kim.
‘You’ve brought a friend,’ she says, not unkindly, and Kim notices her shift her shirt up in one smooth gesture, hiding the top of her bra. She looks like a woman who wasn’t expecting a guest. Kim wants to say, I can go, some apology already on the tip of his tongue.
But Tavish plants a kiss on her temple and says, ‘Aenita, this is Kim. Kim, Aenita. Can we feed him?’
Her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. ‘This is Kim?’ She looks delighted. ‘Of course. Sergeant Kitsuragi—’ She holds out a hand and Kim takes it; firm, warm grip.
‘It’s a pleasure,’ Kim says politely.
‘I’ve heard so much about you.’
Kim feels his ears redden. ‘I hope this isn’t an imposition. I wasn’t aware…’ his eyes flick to Tavish, but already Aenita is back at the stove.
‘You’re fine. I had a lot of siblings, I always over-cater.’ She looks at Tavish. 'I know it’s lunch, but I just opened a bottle of wine if you fancy.’ For Kim’s benefit, she adds, ‘It’s my day off.’
Aenita’s some kind of academic, Kim vaguely remembers, but works in a bar to make ends meet. Nobody in Revachol gets married anymore but he’s heard Tavish call her his wife, never known if it was true or only shorthand. Neither of them are wearing a ring.
Kim’s eyes flick around their kitchen, land on the table in the corner. It’s a mess of papers and receipts, scraps of fabric, strange and specific books. Tavish sweeps the paraphernalia into a loose pile with one arm, making enough space for the three of them, then gestures to Kim to sit down. He does, and a moment later, a cold glass of wine is pressed into his hand. ‘More late than early for us, really,’ Tavish tells Aenita absently.
Kim’s sips his drink, but he’s too tired, can feel it in his temples right away. He’ll get a headache if he’s not careful. He pushes the glass out of reach, watches liquid bead down the outside.
Tavish sits opposite. ‘You all right?’ he says. The way he watches, the noticing. Kim feels his temples throb. Too late, shouldn’t have had the wine. But it’s not that really, it’s - the intimacy of being in this kitchen - sweat-damp hair on the back of Aenita’s neck as she stands over the frying pan, the mess of Tavish’s life, it’s all - he’s too much like a real person, suddenly. It’s overwhelming.
‘Tired,’ Kim manages, removing his glasses and running a hand over his face. That’s all it is, really, tired and overwrought. How long has he been awake? Thirty hours?
He covers his face with his palms, thinking about the room he’s sitting in, sunlight bright at the windows, and his own kitchen at home, empty and quiet. It’s been a while since he came home to somebody else cooking. And then he thinks about Marika Quinn’s kitchen, huge and empty and soulless, with her blood on the floor, on the worktop, on the bookshelves by the doorway. The signs of struggle, the story they told. How eloquently they told it. Blood on her cookbooks, on her Dick Mullen novels. He grabs Tavish’s arm.
‘What?’
‘We have been,’ Kim says quietly, ‘so stupid. Really just - completely and utterly imbecilic.’
‘Kim—’
‘She’s faking her death. Marika. A bored, rich housewife, nothing to do but read pulp novels all day. Hating her life. Hating her situation. Waiting for the right moment. That crime scene was like something from—’
‘The blood. It’s hers.’
‘Yes, of course it is.’ Kim strikes his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Her sister. Wasn’t she…’
‘A medical professional. With the means to—‘
‘She’s been storing it, saving it up, maybe for months and months.’
‘Kim,’ Tavish repeats, his voice harder. He stands, chair scraping on the tile floor, and for a moment they are still, mouths open, both of them stopped in their tracks by the passage of their own thoughts, the motion of them, in beautiful tandem.
From the stove, Aenita is watching. She coughs politely. ‘Sorry,’ she says, looking between them. ‘But do you still want me to fry you an egg?’
+
Late, so late it’s early on some endless stakeout, watching empty shipyard buildings from the front of Tavish’s Kineema. Talking about nothing. Plenty of nights look like this; the docks account for most of their territory, which in practical terms means a lot of functional, professional homicide cases, a lot of organised crime, a lot of fucking stakeouts. They don’t mind. Some of the detectives in their precincts have families but Aenita works nights and for the last couple of years, Kim’s lived alone; they’re happy to take these kinds of shifts and spare the others.
There’s no reason this dark middle of the night should be different from any other, but somehow tonight they move from the professional to the personal: the why did you join up conversation. It’s the kind of lazy, time-passing soul-bearing Kim’s spent years avoiding with colleagues. Once or twice in his twenties, he let it happen, but he’s been too old for a long time for all that, the confected bonding and the next-day queasiness of raking over everything you said.
But for whatever reason - maybe because, after almost a year of working together, this type of thing is out of character for them - it feels different with Tavish.
‘After I realised we no longer had an airforce,’ Kim says, shrugging. ‘It seemed - I don’t know.’
Tavish looks sidelong at him, at the jacket Kim’s recently acquired, and laughs. ‘No shit.’
Kim rolls his eyes.
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. I like this. It suits you.’ Tavish plucks at the collar, a swift, confident motion, soon over. Kim blinks. They don’t touch each other often. He’s not sure which of them that comes from.
‘What about you?’
Tavish sighs, lets his head fall back against the seat. Outside, the moon moves behind a cloud, the brickwork of the empty building falling into darkness. His voice is surprisingly rough when he says, ‘You’re a good man, Kim.’
‘So are you.’
‘Not really. Not like you. You’re good on instinct. For a long time, I had to work so hard.’
Kim nearly says, I don’t think it’s as simple as that, meaning: I don’t think I’m as simple as that. But he stops himself. He likes it, Tavish thinking of him that way. Why stop him? He sits back in his chair too, eyes front, the false privacy of the stakeout. Always facing the same way. It’s what makes this kind of relationship so rewarding, closeness with that thin seam of impersonality.
They’re both quiet, Kim letting Tavish think. After a while, he clears his throat. ‘This job,’ Tavish says. ‘When I started out… I don’t know. It wasn’t for the right reasons.’
Kim’s mouth is dry. ‘What were your wrong reasons?’
‘Power, I suppose. I felt powerless. My family were - we lost everything in the revolution. My brothers and I grew up like animals. A lot of hunger, lot of…’ he doesn’t say it, but Kim knows the word on the tip of his tongue is violence. Tavish has thick arms, big fists, something of a reputation at the 57th. What was it Janken called him? A killer. Kim knows, has probably always known, and been happy to take Tavish as he is, day by day. Everyone has a past. It’s our choices that matter.
‘Do you know what? I don’t want to tell you this,’ says Tavish suddenly. ‘I don’t want you to think of me that way.’
‘Then don’t.’ Kim, feeling eyes on him, looks round. Tavish’s pupils are huge and reflective in the dark, like something nocturnal. ‘I know what kind of man you are, detective,’ he says.
After a moment, Tavish nods. ‘People change, right?’
Kim nods back. ‘People can always change.’
+
They’ve been around the unit with their tape measures, and the fact is, there’s an extra compartment, and the other, secondary fact is that Kim’s fairly sure it’s only reachable by water. ‘It explains everything, detective. The suits we found - the wetsuits they buried with their weapons - the fact there are no other access points…’
‘Mmhmm,’ says Tavish. He rubs the back of his wrist across his forehead, looking from Kim to the black water.
‘I’ll go.’
He shakes his head. ‘Not alone.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘No, Lieutenant.’
(Kim’s only recently made the rank; he can still see a flush of pride whenever Tavish says the word.)
‘All right,’ Kim says, bending to unlace his boots. ‘Together, then. Do you want to radio in first?’
Tavish nods and heads to the Kineema. He stalks back a few minutes later, looking uncomfortable. ‘Listen,’ he says in a rush. ‘I’m a bad swimmer.’
Kim feels the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘All right.’
‘All right? I’m worried I might get us both drowned.’
‘Then I'll go alone.’
‘No,’ Tavish says again, his voice a high, irritated whine. It’s clear that he would prefer there to be some other solution and equally clear that there isn’t one. He removes his patrol jacket, unknots his tie. ‘I’m just - saying. Warning you. In case something goes wrong.’
‘Nothing will go wrong. The container is empty now, I’m sure. I’ll take the prybar. You can pass it down to me.’
The commune was always too compromised, too much under attack to have the time and resource to build their promised infrastructure; Revachol is rich in history, poor in public transport links, community spaces, swimming pools. But there’s one a few blocks from Kim’s flat, an old, high-ceilinged, turn-of-the-century place in the basement of a gym, a relic, rarely busy. He goes there sometimes to swim laps. He likes the quiet self-sufficiency of it, the feeling of being alone with his own rhythm, for the same reason he likes driving so much whenever Tavish lets him borrow the Kineema.
But this is no pool, of course; there is no ladder. Kim says, ‘Okay, detective?’ and when Tavish nods, he drops in, holding his nose. He’s never found it hard to float and bobs back up breathing deeply. It’s only autumn but already the sea is bitingly cold. But the problem with cold is the shock, right? Not the actual cold, not at this time of year, anyway - Kim’s pretty sure.
Treading water, he holds out a hand and Tavish passes the prybar down. Kim feels the weight of it, steady and sure in his hand. They’re lucky there’s not much of a current in this bay. ‘Ready?’
Tavish mutters, ’Fuck it,’ and drops in. He’s thicker set, bigger than Kim, a splash sends water flying. He comes up coughing with a face like thunder. ‘I hate this,’ he grits out, winded by the cold.
Kim ducks his head politely. ‘Come on,’ he says, keeping the smile out of his voice.
They head to the back of the container, Kim leading, Tavish doggy paddling behind. Sure enough, there’s a trapdoor just above the waterline, padlock rusted by the waves. Kim passes Tavish the prybar, helps him stay afloat while he eases the lock off, an arm looped beneath his shoulder. It doesn’t take long. Tavish’s skin is cold to the touch, strangely inhuman-feeling.
‘I’ll go first,’ says Kim.
‘Like fuck you will. I’m senior officer, I take the risks. Hold this.’
He hands the prybar back, then reaches up and heaves himself into the container. After a moment, his voice, a little shaken from the cold: ‘Safe.’
Kim reaches up, grips the edges of the trapdoor and pulls. It feels undignified, but the entrance is a little too far from sea-level to be anything but. On his hands and knees inside, wet clothes sticking to his skin, he resists the urge to shake himself like a dog, and stands, pulling the torch from his shirt pocket.
Tavish looks so wet and irritated that it’s all Kim can do not to laugh at him. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Kim protests.
‘You didn’t have to.’
They get on with their search, both knowing that the quicker they do it, the quicker they can get back and warm up. The cold didn’t seem so bad while Kim was in the water but after a few minutes, he can hear Tavish’s teeth chattering on the other side of the room, and his torchbeam begins to get unsteady; he’s shivering. He folds his arms across his chest and tries to hold the torch still.
‘Kim?’
Kim looks, just as Tavish loops an arm around his chest from the back, pulling him in. ‘You’re freezing,’ Tavish says roughly. ‘So bloody skinny,’ he adds, like a grandmother.
Kim tries to laugh, but he feels sort of stuck, panicked, and pulls away - even though, despite them having got out of the same cold sea, Tavish is comparatively warm, and his heatseeking animal brain wants to stay put. Two impulses working against each other. ‘I’m fine,’ he mutters.
They look at each other for a moment. Then Tavish rolls his eyes. ‘Aye, right, suit yourself,’ he says, not unkindly. ‘Found anything useful yet?’
+
They play games sometimes, the three of them, late nights at Tavish and Aenita’s kitchen table; Ombre, Karnoffel, Suzerainty. She mixes strong drinks and sometimes one or the other of them cooks, but more often than not they all just snack until nobody has an appetite, and Kim goes home light-headed and vague. Aenita likes him, lends him books, one time a pop-history about the Golden Age of Revachol: ’Therese lent it to me,’ she says, ‘but I liked it so much I had to get my own copy. Maybe you’ll find the same.’
The name starts popping up here and there - Therese plays Wirral with a group that meets every fortnight, what do you think? - something Kim notices only vaguely, until one Saturday night he turns up and there she is.
‘Kim, I’d like you to meet Therese.’
She’s stood beside Aenita at the stovetop, fair-haired, bright lipstick, sensible shoes. She shakes Kim’s hand.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he says.
‘You too.’
‘Therese was passing and I said she should join us,’ Aenita explains, and then, quietly contradictory, adds, ’She brought her copy of Envegure. Have you played it?’
Kim smiles, shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’
Tavish makes a huge omelette for everyone and they sit around the kitchen table, the bright Envegure cards spread out between them, pictures of birds from every Isola, and a little bowl of egg tokens in the centre. Therese is careful and knowledgeable and looks at Kim shyly but regularly enough that by the end of the evening he feels obscurely guilty, though he knows it’s not his fault. He’s been falsely advertised. Well, he never asked to be set up with anyone.
The combination of guilt, embarrassment and frustration makes him distracted. He plays badly, loses worst of everyone (he usually at least beats Tavish) and makes his excuses around half ten, during a flurry of activity, while Aenita’s mixing drinks. ‘Actually, don’t make one for me,’ he says, apologising, claiming to be tired, which is sort of true. He shakes Therese’s hand, kisses Aenita’s cheek, waves to Tavish, is out the door before anyone can really protest.
On the stairs down to the front door he exhales, relieved. Then a moment later he hears footsteps behind him.
Oh god, he thinks, not wanting that conversation, not tonight. But it’s Tavish.
‘Kim, it’s late,’ he calls. ‘Let me run you home.’
‘You don’t need to do that.’
Tavish shrugs. ‘I’d like to. They’re old friends anyway, they don’t want me around.’
On the drive, the two of them talk about Envegure, it’s engine-building systems, why Kim lost so badly, the mistakes he made - from an academic point of view. Kim’s feeling calmer, has nearly forgotten his discomfort, when Tavish says, idling at traffic, ‘Look, man, I’m sorry about Aenita. She shouldn’t have done that.’
Kim blinks. Tavish, for once, isn’t looking at him, eyes fixed on the road. He wonders whether to play dumb - but what would be the point?
‘Springing Therese on you like that, it wasn’t fair on either of you. I’d have stopped her if she’d told me what she was up to.’ He pauses for a second, and Kim realises for the first time that Tavish is a little nervous. ‘I’m not wrong, am I? About you?’
Shame is a vice Kim gave up in his twenties, along with so many other vices. He doesn’t go around shouting about his private life at work, but he’s not ashamed Tavish knows he’s homo-sexual. Just surprised. Of the two of them, he would have assumed Aenita— Well, apparently not.
‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘You’re not wrong.’
They look at each other. Kim feels the tips of his ears warm, a rush of embarrassment that’s only really about privacy, how hard it is to relinquish. As so often when he feels out of control, he’s dimly aware of himself growing formal. He adds, vaguely, ‘Lieutenant, I’m—’ and that makes Tavish laugh.
‘Don’t lieutenant me.’
Kim blinks. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, no.’ Tavish turns back to the road, ghost of a smile. ‘I’m the one who’s sorry. I wouldn’t have said anything, but it felt rude to just… Look, anyway, there we are.’
Kim thinks about asking how long he’s known, how he found out, who else knows. It can’t be on the RCM rumour mill or he’d have had shit about it from Janken, so Tavish must have just - put the pieces together. Detected. Not that Kim makes a point of hiding these things. Still, it makes him feel prickly and exposed, the strange discomfort of being reminded that people you see and think about are seeing and thinking about you too. And there’s something of the RCM’s old-fashioned machismo about Tavish, so it’s a surprise to realise that, after everything, he just… knew. Has presumably known for some time. That he’s being so careful about something Kim had, if he’s honest with himself, hoped would simply never come up.
He realises they’ve been driving in silence for a while. His mind’s whirring, knuckles white on the dashboard. He takes them away, flexes his hand, clears his throat. Instead of anything more revealing, he asks simply, ‘Will Aenita mind?’
Tavish shakes his head. ‘No, no. She’ll be embarrassed, but. No more than she should be. Do you mind if I tell her?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a compliment really. Therese is her best mate. She must really like you.’
+
Tavish is an okay driver, but he treats his motorcar more roughly than Kim would, in his place. The morning they get a flat tyre, they’re between the harbour and the precinct; they need to get off the motorway, find somewhere quiet to fix it properly, so Tavish takes a turning up towards the coast.
They radio in to let the captain know they’ll be late. Alice is a consummate professional (‘That’s a 10-4 on the motorcar repairs, Lieutenant,’) but Kim hears somebody laughing in the background, ‘Eyes sure about doing it himself? He doesn’t want to get a professional in?’ Tavish hears too, pulls a face.
They park up outside a Frittte, a huge set of harbour gates behind them, Wild Pines logos on the cranes. Kim’s been going over his notes in the passenger seat instead of paying attention. ‘Where are we?’ he asks, climbing out.
Tavish nudges the dead tyre with his foot. ‘Martinaise,’ he says. ‘You been up this way before?’
Kim looks about them. Pockmarked streets, walls riddled with bullet holes. Yes, he’s been here, but he doesn’t know this part of the coast well. ‘Not recently.’
‘It’s sort of ours. I worked a case here once. Tough place.’
Some kids are watching them from a metal staircase by the harbour gate. Kim looks at them, then back at the Kineema. ‘I can imagine.’
He walks round the other side to take a look at the tyre himself. Tavish’s brow is furrowed in thought.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Can you give me a hand with this?’
Kim smiles. ‘Of course.’
In just over a year, Kim will be back here, this coastline, these ruins, this light. A different person and exactly the same. Coming back, he will not particularly remember this day, the twenty minutes he spent changing a tyre with his partner. Why should he? It’s just a day, like any other; it feels like there are hundreds, thousands more like it, waiting for them.
Kim doesn’t know that, three months from now, there will be a bullet. That when Kim reaches him, Tavish’s eyes will already be distant, half-clouded over. Blood on his lips, in his mouth. That Kim will say, ‘I’m here,’ hands pushing down on Tavish’s chest, pressure on the wound, just like he was taught. He will know that Tavish’s life depends both on him reaching the radio, and staying put, pressing down.
But not today. Today, they are in Martinaise, in the sunlight, changing a tyre.
+
‘I need to get help, all right? I need to get to the radio in the car. So you - you—’
‘Kim.’
‘No, don’t look like that. It’s me you should be frightened of. I already said I’m angry with you.’
Kim’s head is pounding. He hit it when he fell. When Tavish pushed him out of the way. When he saved Kim’s life. Tavish’s laugh is a dry rasp when he says, ‘Never.’
‘Don’t talk, you don’t need to talk.’
‘You don’t scare me, Kim. You—‘
‘No, listen—‘
‘Hey. Hey. It’s okay. Tell her I’m sorry, will you? She’ll understand.’
+
Kim breaks the news himself. The awful thing is how pleased Aenita looks to see him, before she realises. She doesn’t understand, obviously. Neither of them do. Death is absurd, the absence of narrative, of resolution. But while Tavish’s blood was between his fingers, Kim had said only, ‘Yes. Yes. Of course.’
+
And then for a while it is: cigarette, blackout, alarm clock, start over. Days all melding into one, the infinite present tense of what Kim will later recognise as grief, as loneliness. But at the time, he simply goes on, one task after another, sleeping, waking up, grey light on the ceiling above his bed.
There’s a lethal force investigation, of course, but things being what they are - no partner to testify - it goes through with very little ceremony. And then it’s over. He’s cleared. At his Captain’s insistence, he takes a few days of compassionate leave, which, for no obvious reason, he spends painting his bathroom a slightly lighter shade of blue.
They go for walks sometimes, him and Aenita. Kim waits for the day to come when she will stop calling. He knows what she must see when she looks at him: the guilt written all over his face at still being here, when Tavish is not.
Kim’s life has not been easy, or straightforward, but this is the first time he has ever had a feeling of incompleteness. Of not being enough, by himself; being a half of something. He wishes he’d learned to enjoy that more when Tavish was alive.
+
‘Matterforth’s old.’
‘Sir?’
‘He’s retiring soon. Did you know that?’
‘No, sir.’
Captain Lozére leans back, steeples his fingers, looks at Kim over the tops of them. ‘So that’ll leave Janken with nobody to work with.’
Kim feels a slow kind of shaking begin in the tips of his fingers, his hands. Anger. He'd usually work to push this sort of thing down, stay professional, but already it’s beyond him, in his body, a life of its own. ‘Sir, I - can’t. I’m sorry. But I refuse. A man like that—’
‘Lieutenant.’
‘A man like that. Sir.’
They talk for a long time. Lozére listens. Eventually, he lets the matter drop quietly, and no more is said about Kim working with Janken. In defiance of décomptage, of logic, he is left alone, unpartnered, for nearly a year.
He doesn’t know, of course, that next spring, he will be back in Martinaise witnessing a miracle. That he will have it again, that feeling: thinking in step with another person, minds moving in tandem, apart and together. Today, it doesn’t even feel like that is possible. Nevertheless. He goes on.
+
One moment, Kim has Macaulay cornered, half-dressed in the alley behind his apartment. He ran when they knocked the door.
‘Don’t move, RCM,’ he says, heart beating so hard he thinks it’s going to come right out of his mouth.
Macaulay is gigantic, has a foot at least on Kim, but his hands are in the air, ‘All right, copper, all right,’ until - they aren’t. Until somehow, from nowhere, there’s an elbow in Kim’s gut, blow to the back of the head, he’s on the ground, and then something in his wrist goes crack under Macaulay’s boot. Kim drops his gun. He pushes forward through the pain, making himself reach for his weapon, but Macaulay moves fast for a man his size, and now he is armed and Kim decidedly is not.
Kim’s always been calm under pressure, but today, for whatever reason, his brain is an alarm system in an empty building, distantly repeating the same few useless words: oh god, stupid, stupid. His first ever homicide case and he’s going to die on the job.
Macaulay doesn’t even make some cheerful wisecrack, like in the movies. Say your prayers. He just levels the gun between Kim’s eyes and draws the hammer back with a click. Oh god. Stupid. So stupid.
And then behind him, cold as ice, a voice: ’All right, sunshine, don’t you move a fucking muscle.’ It’s Tavish, of course. They split up when Macaulay ran, and now he’s here, he's found them. The smile that spreads across Macaulay’s face is slow and full of bitter fury, but he’s a pro. He knows when he’s beaten.
‘Right,’ he says.
‘Drop the gun.’ Macaulay does. ‘Now face the wall. Yes, there. Hands on your head. Keep them where I can see them.’
And then there is a firm grip on Kim’s arm, and he is on his feet, pain in his wrist, in his side, glorious, and Tavish saying, smiling, ‘Okay?’ And he is alive.