Chapter Text
Oxford—Present
“New look for you since you’ve been back. Dark suit and tie. Bit dour.”
Hathaway stood at his desk, searching for a file. “Didn’t want to outshine your choice of neckwear. Has Laura been selecting your ties?”
“Something wrong with them?”
“Didn’t know she fancied purples.” Pauses. “I used to have a pink tie.”
“Used to have? What happened?”
“Seemed—frivolous.”
“James. What happened on your Spanish not-a-pilgrimage?”
A furrow deepens between Hathaway’s eyes as he considers the question. His jaw works, his lips press firmly together.
“Nothing I care to talk about yet.” He touches Robbie’s shoulder. “We can sort it over a pint on Friday, yeah?”
James's black coat swirls like a cassock as he leaves the office they now share.
Lizzie glances up from a stack of case files. “Can’t see him in a pink tie.”
“Pink tie, yellow shirt, pale grey suit.” Robbie smiles fondly. “Lavender socks.”
Her eyes widen.
“Oh, yeah,” Robbie muses, watching Hathaway leave the main office. “Something happened on the way to Santiago.”
Oxford—Past—A Few Weeks After Walking the Camino
Fallopia japonica, Japanese knotweed, is classified as an invasive species. Its deep root system can lift boulders, can cripple roads. It completely crowds out all other species. It takes root in poor soil that has lain fallow for years. Once it has taken root, it can be impossible to eradicate. And when cut back—with slow, deliberate care and careful disposal of shoots and leaves—it remains. The plant may not appear to flower and grow though it remains buried in the earth.
Many a gardener has shed a tear trying to cut back Japanese knotweed. The stalks, when cut, are razor sharp.
James thinks of Robbie when he thinks of Japanese knotweed. It’s not just the hours he’s spent helping on the allotment.
It’s much more than that.
His feelings for the man are no longer on the surface—they have been cut back in another attempt to keep them from flourishing. But the roots run deep.
He took a long walk to forget. And yet the roots remain.
It’s not bindweed. It’s Japanese knotweed.
He doesn’t know useful information, he tells Phillippa Garwood, as she hacks away in her garden, trying to distract herself from her husband’s murder.
But he knows Japanese knotweed.
It will not die easily.
It has heart-shaped leaves.
France—Camino Frances—St. Jean—Past
In France, he prepares to walk. He’s been on the Way of St. James before as a religious pilgrim, during the year of the Jubilee, the summer before he entered the seminary. Thirteen years ago. His credencial was stamped all along the Jacobean way; his compostela is rolled in a tube in the back of a file box in his flat with other memorabilia of those years.
This time, he does not wear the shell insignia of a pilgrim. He does not travel with postulants. He does not carry a marked staff or a gourd or even a bible. He decides to walk for personal reasons, filling in the paperwork to do so.
When he walked the Camino the last time, he was surrounded by others who thought the same way he did. He walked in joy, suffused with light.
Every night for the last two weeks, sitting in the darkness or in the dim light of a hostel, he misses his guitar, stashed safe inside Robbie’s flat.
He tests out a new solar charger for his mobile, ringing Robbie before he leaves from St. Jean, ostensibly to ask him about the allotment.
Knotweed has a lovely tiny white flower, James tells him. It seems to be everywhere, James tells him. I miss my guitar, James tells him.
He is dismayed to learn that Robbie will have to move his instrument from its safe spot against the wall in the guest room. Robbie is moving.
Robbie and Laura are moving in together. No great surprise there. Expected it, really. Still.
It’s an older place, Robbie says. I’ll put your baby in the back seat of me car, Robbie says. It will be fine, Robbie says.
There is something magical and otherworldly about the cadence of the conversation, James realizes. The sequence of threes. Sitting outside a café smoking a cigarette, about to embark on what should be a holy quest, he is betrayed three times by promises of fealty.
It’s not the first time he has compared himself to Christ. Probably won’t be the last.
The telephone conversation ends with Laura shouting for Robbie to help bring in the shopping. He’s cooking again, he explains. James hears her laughter as she shouts, "At least, that’s what he calls it. I call it 'burning.'" She laughs.
Robbie chuckles, ringing off without waiting for James to say "goodbye."
Oxford—Present
"Orange juice?"
"Seems if you’re going to tell me about your trip, the least I could do is listen with a clear head."
"A clearer head is the last thing I need." James takes a deep drink of beer, sets his glass deliberately on the table, and wonders where to begin. "Your neighbor walked the Camino?"
"Made it to the cathedral. Big tourist attraction, apparently."
James nods. "People journey with the end in mind. For me, it was the walk. I walked part of the Camino before I entered the seminary. One hundred kilometers. It was simple." His lips twist into an ironic smile. "The traditional length is 500 miles starting from St. Jean. I told you I needed a change. What I needed—" He pauses to make sure he is understood. "—was to be transformed."
"Neighbor said she was transformed into a walking advert for paracetamol."
James nods. "From St. Jean to Burgos, you learn that nothing can prepare you for the walk. I’m fit. My pack only weighed 38 pounds—but it chafed for the first three weeks. Good trail shoes gave me blisters."
"Sounds punishing."
James quirks an eyebrow thoughtfully, sips his beer. "It was appropriate."
France—Camino Frances—St. Jean-Pied-de-Port—Roncevalles—Past
Like other pilgrims, he gets his hair cut before he leaves St. Jean—the queue is long. From inside the shop he watches the barber pole spinning lazily outside a smudged window and listens to the buzz of a shaver.
All pilgrims get the same haircut, the barber tells him. The penitent man has his head shaved to rid himself of pride and arrogance, the barber tells him. It is an act of humility, a mannat, a promise to God, the barber tells him.
I'm getting it shaved so my hat will fit better, James tells him.
When the barber shows him his likeness in a mirror, he wonders what happened to that sweet-faced young man he once was. The man in the mirror looks hard, worn. Like someone awaiting a sentence. A criminal.
He feels it's oddly fitting.
He gets a late start out of St. Jean, confident that he will reach Roncesvalles before nightfall.
He does not.
The climb is steep as it crosses the Pyrenees through a leafy beech wood on a carpet of leaves.
Chasing after suspects through the streets of Oxford has not prepared him for tackling the hills. Years of smoking have taken their toll. He stops frequently to breathe, to cough.
The two weeks spent strolling through French vineyards sampling wines on his way to St. Jean was hardly sufficient physical preparation, he admits to himself. It probably wasn't wise to maintain heroic levels of inebriation to get himself through, but it was an emotional necessity.
Best way to avoid entanglements in Oxford was to leave suddenly.
He would have gone to Spain straightaway, but the bulls were running in Pamplona.
He's seen enough bloodshed. Given the choice between getting drunk and running with the bulls and simply getting drunk, he chose getting drunk.
He doesn't want to die, he tells himself. He's just not too keen on living right now.
Not after what he's done.
And failed to do.
The list of accounts are long on both sides of the ledger, and, on balance, it's a poor performance overall. He's not used to getting less than top marks. These internal negative accounts of his personal performance grate on him like a shovel hitting a rock.
On the emotional side, it doesn't start with what happened at the allotment, though he can't keep the analogies of earth, rock, plant, water and every bit of transcendentalist verse out of his brain. Bloody hell, I've become a garden manual. But it doesn't start then.
Though it probably started with flowers. Orchids. Carried home from the Virgin Islands and laid at a grave years before.
On the intellectual side, it didn't start with any of the deaths that he and Robbie have investigated, though it will certainly end with Adam Tibbitt's death.
Because he can't do this anymore, he tells Robbie. There are no analogies, no verse, nothing except the sum total of wretchedness to describe how he feels.
Over the years, when the work became too much, he and Robbie would sort it.
But there never seemed to be a way of sorting the tangle of feelings he had for Robbie and they've only grown worse since Robbie and Laura finally got together.
He has always imagined himself to be much like the knight of woeful countenance: able to love pure and chaste from afar. Because although he loved Robbie, he had never imagined making love to Robbie. Not once. He couldn't imagine making love to anyone, really, though he had, a few times, because he cared enough to want to please them.
Sex was an intellectual curiosity at best.
So it was heady, this brief, unfamiliar sensation of desire for Robbie all of a sudden. Passion. Or what he imagines as desire or passion. It seems small compared to the reams of poetry and literature devoted to it. Not a fire, not a flame. A spark? Perhaps. He doesn't have a personal comparison. It's different for each individual, he knows, but he can't bring himself to be grateful experiencing this sensation at this point in his life. It feels intrusive, wrong, and has a destructive potential that outweighs any benefit.
He looks up at the mountains he will cross over the next few days. He rubs his knees, feeling miserable about every single bloody fucking thing in his life at the moment.
The Stella Drew case shattered him into the pieces he is now trying to pull together.
He knows now his feelings for Lewis were affecting his judgment. Knows he was feeling bereft, angry, jealous. And hurt.
He had expected to feel a little hurt once Robbie and Laura got together. He loved the man, after all.
The disconnect between the expectation of pain and the maelstrom of real anguish was something else again. It was a point of pride for him: he believed—truly believed—that because he didn't feel physically attracted to Robbie, he wouldn't feel hurt.
Certainly his love for the man was great enough, deep enough, encompassing enough, pure enough: Robbie's happiness would be his happiness. It would be enough, James thought, just to work at his side and be with him every day. He wasn't seeking martyrdom in this, he simply thought he was being realistic.
He believes he should be able to love Robbie enough to see him happy with Laura. No reason not to.
When his normal resilience became brittle—as did his temper—he failed to bounce back. Unable to focus properly, unable to control his frustration, unable to contain himself. He knows this now.
From his vantage point just off the Camino, his gaze follows a peregrine falcon lazily spiraling down on air currents.
That's how I feel, he thinks. Going down.
And he can't tell Robbie that he feels partially responsible because he was distracted. He's not supposed to be distracted by anything. James holds himself to a higher standard. So is he tormented by this feeling of guilt over Adam's death because he actually feels responsible? Or is he tormenting himself with guilt over Adam's death because he feels guilty about something else?
There's no problem so awful, that you can't add some guilt and make it even worse.
He wonders if Adam Tibbitt would still be alive if he hadn't tried to make him understand his need for an alibi. If he hadn't pushed him into admitting that he spent the night crying in his girlfriend Rachel's arms. Hadn't shouted at a kid who had been pushed beyond his limits by family, college, and God knows what else.
He wonders. Again, it is that disconnect between reason and emotion. He could not have known. But he feels that he should have known.
Poor kid. His father shook my hand, and there's the man who should have known. The man who is truly to blame. The teachers, too—all of them from Stella Drew to her husband the tutor to the dean of the college himself—all were culpable in his eyes.
Homicide has a wide circle of collateral damage. There are too many victims for him to recall each one now, and this troubles him, too, his inability to remember these lost lives.
Collapse of compassion—his "churchy friends" talked of nothing else in Kosovo. How horrible it is to lose your capacity to care because you can't minister to all those who require assistance. How devastating it is to see whole families destroyed on a daily basis.
And none of this—not a single thing he did then or now or will ever do—can bring back Adam or Vicky or Briony or any of the kids he's seen in SOCO photos over the last eight years. Those photos should have been school portraits.
He had dropped to his knees in the church when the case closed. Had asked God for guidance. Had begged to be heard.
God isn't listening, James thinks.
And neither am I.
So here in the Pyrenees, he sits on a rock, listens to the wind in the trees, and the footsteps of other pilgrims as they pass his solitary post. He opens his pack, and pops a dry paracetamol, hoping the bitterness it will awaken him and lessen his hangover.
He won't be able to drink like he has been while crossing the plains of Castile.