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“Kate. You should be happy.”
Dalgliesh says that with the kind of emotional gravity Kate has come to associate with him, all sincerity and depth, and understanding.
And Kate just wants to scream.
She wants to burst out of her skin, she wants to tell him she won't go, she doesn't want to go, wants to say that he has no right to push her away, has no right to hold her hand, no right to look so intently into her eyes and ask her, no, tell her to be happy.
He has no right to do that. She gives him no right to do that.
She wants to say he could make her happy. She wants him to say that.
But he won't.
So she swallows down the sob that is somewhere between her heart and stomach, releases just a small hiccup and pretends to smile.
“I will be.”
She has to be.
The promotion, though promised, does not come through immediately.
However, Dalgliesh leaves almost immediately; Kate has to wonder if they are so afraid he might instead leave the force after all that they stitch the new epaulettes on his shoulders before he's had a good night's sleep.
In true style, he does not want to fuss about the leaving ceremony, so there is a brief speech – for a poet, he seems often at loss for words in times of great emotion, Kate thinks – and everyone stands around, claps and cheers. There is a whiskey passed around and she partakes, the bitterness of the drink dulling the bitterness inside her.
She doesn't avoid him, at least not on purpose but there always seems to be someone else hovering around him and while she has learned to take up space for herself, sometimes she still wants to stay on the outskirts of it all, and can hide there.
She feels him looking in her direction a couple of times, and she knows she should meet his gaze and not make it weird but her world is out of focus, and she finds it hard to settle.
“Kate.”
He sneaks up on her so quietly that she almost startles; in her quest to avoid him in the room, she had attracted his attention instead.
Her eyes flit quickly to the side – him, there, always with that patient expression, her world shifting into focus for a moment – and she nods.
“Sir.”
There's silence but Kate does not want to look again, does not dare to see those eyes that she should not be thinking about. His proximity, though, and possibly the whiskey, embolden her to break it.
“Will you miss us?”
It's an impertinent thought that has made its way into an impertinent question and she resists the urge to clamp her hand over her mouth, like a child.
But Dalgliesh just breathes softly. “It will be a change. I assume I might miss the investigating. Even though I probably have seen more death than one should. Might be a good change.”
She remembers what he said of dark emotions when he made mention of his promotion and wonders if perhaps the death he sees daily is exactly the thing that keeps him going, and if then, being a commander, would not take him to those depths after all.
But that thought she keeps in her head as most improper.
“It will be a new responsibility, sir. You will be doing a lot for the proper functioning of the Met. And that is valuable, for the future.”
“I have seen the future, Kate. And I've made sure she is recognised too.”
Now she does look at him because the implication is made explicit. He meets her eyes with a warm gaze that she will misinterpret at her peril but cannot look away either.
“You are an excellent police officer, Kate. Don't ever let anyone convince you otherwise. You lack nothing in comparison to all the men that dominate these hallways.”
He has not often been so clear about what he thinks of her womanhood, or her skin colour, her otherness. Truth be told, she has thought he somehow disregarded those parts of her, forgot that she was a woman of colour in this world that has been made for men like him. Maybe that is why she has excelled; because he has not asked that she prove her worth despite these attributes many would consider and will continue to consider faults.
“I'm sorry your transfer has not gone through yet. They have assured me it should be a week or two more, at most. And if they do not, I wish you would tell me.”
Kate nods; she has not intention to bother him, of course, but there is honour in his promise.
“Thank you, sir.”
He opens his mouth and almost stutters, uncharacteristically, before he lets the response escape. “Good luck, DCI Miskin.”
He's gone the next moment and she follows his retreating form for a beat, trying to remember the way he walks, the way he speaks, before she locks it all away.
His promise does come through in a week's time and two weeks after, she is the senior investigating officer, though they make her stick with DS Tarrant.
He is not the worst that she has seen, as she fleetingly remembers DS Masterson, and their work alongside Dalgliesh has at least made him amenable to willing to accept her command.
On the whole, that is probably why they made her stick with him.
Their first case is not too intriguing nor complex – a domestic, husband beating his wife to death, not too uncommon, unfortunately – but when they solve it, she feels a sense of real accomplishment for having done it without anyone's supervision.
Briefly, she considers ringing Dalgliesh and letting him know. But what is there for him to know? That she did her job?
The pervasive thoughts about him, since him, continue swirling in her head.
She groans, perhaps unwittingly loudly, and Tarrant perks up.
“Fancy a pint?”
Her instinct is to say no; before, it was the joke of the station to ask her and Dalgliesh never did take to the drinking custom.
But Tarrant is young and inexperienced – 6 months out of graduation, she thinks with only slight bitterness – and she is now his commanding officer, which comes with its own duty.
“Okay.”
The pub around the corner is frequented by other police officers and Kate usually avoids it for the rowdiness and edge she feels as they look at her, not belonging.
Tarrant pays it no mind; he moves with ease, grabs the pints and sits them down at a table with a bit of distance from the other officers.
“Though it'd be a bit more relaxing.”
He smiles pleasantly and she is struck by his thoughtfulness but also annoyed by him trying to coddle her like she was too delicate to handle whatever kind of nonsense the others would spew.
“I can handle it.”
There may be too sharp an edge to her words as Tarrant looks down into his pint and nods. “No, yeah. Of course.”
So they drink in silence but she feels the remorse of being harsh to him; that's not what Dalgliesh would have done, even to someone who annoyed him. One must stay above of that sort of emotional outbursts, after all.
And Kate wants to be better.
“So, vice. How was that?”
He blinks up at her in surprise but seems to understand the opening with ease. “It was...interesting. Never knew there was so much prostitution happening in the suburbs.”
A month goes by that she tries not to think of Dalgliesh, not wilfully, not on purpose.
One day she catches the newspaper.
Met Commander wins poetry prize.
There's a whole section about him, about Last Sighting and its haunted poetry, its depths of pain and longing. Of course, it comes with a few sentences of his tragic past and how that must be what's poured into the pages.
She knows all of it; she has read it, felt it, memorised it. Sometimes she felt like she was doing something wrong by reading his poetry but never telling him; it was as if his soul was on the paper and she was overstepping the boundaries between them by having access to it.
But then again, she also suspects the truth is something more. That he is there, on the pages of his poetry, in the words that speak of immeasurable pain, but that a part is still hidden, still locked away inside of him, never to be shown to the world.
The blurb ends with one sentence that almost makes her drop the tea she is having with the morning paper.
“At the end of this month, Dalgliesh will be taking a leave of absence, to embark on his first tour of the United States, expected to last five weeks. He will be giving his final reading of Last Sighting next Wednesday, at Charing Cross Arts.”
It might have also been a part of the deal he struck; otherwise Kate finds it inconceivable that he would've just gone.
He is leaving the country; why didn't he tell her; why would he have told her? Even though they have not spoken, even though she does not expect to get into contact with him, tries her best to avoid him, she feels like something is being ripped apart by this notice.
She goes to the reading.
It's madness, she knows. If she hasn't let him know she has read his poetry, it would be insanity to show up at the one place where he would know without any doubt that she has.
The one and only time she did was probably the moment that she opened herself up to the insanity of whatever feelings are insane of her, so to go again is a mistake.
Yet, she goes.
The presenter is more effusive than last time, and there are more people, not just sitting but also standing, so she can hide in the shadows with ease.
He looks much like he always did, dressed down like an ordinary man, an ordinary poet, and he reads the poems from the book in that voice she could never forget.
She barely listens to the words but she knows the poems by now so well that they are also seared into her soul, so she can really only focus on the cadence of his voice.
The hour passes quickly, as the presenter chats with Dalgliesh in turn with the poems but nothing is revealed, other than what the prize means – It's good recognition, though there are others who deserved it too – or what he expects from America – Hopefully other poets.
Until the very end, when he asks, “Is there anything new you are working on, if you don't mind me asking? Perhaps a sneak peek for your British audience before American?”
She sees him hesitate for a moment but then he nods. “Very well. This one I do not expect to be published, an experiment of sorts.”
The room quiets in rapt attention, and Kate along with them, as he begins.
Before others I say you are not my beloved
and deep inside I know what a liar I am
I claim that there is nothing between us
just to keep trouble from us
And sweet as they are, I deny the rumours of love
and make ruins out of my beautiful history.
So I said nothing to the woman I loved
but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase
and fled from all languages.
As the final line echoes, she forgets to watch the room, forgets to notice his movements, so taken by the words he speaks, so that without her having planned so, their eyes meet.
She can tell he sees her because there's something akin to fear in his eyes but she doesn't stay and wonder; she flees.
She runs through the streets, trembling, as if she was being followed – even if he wanted to, he could not have just stormed out of his own reading – and just in case, she does not go home.
She ducks into a pub, orders a pint and stares into it for the next hour.
If someone were to ask what she was running from, she couldn't say.
She would pretend to not know that it was those words that threw her for a loop because for all that Kate does not take notion that Dalgliesh sees her as more than DCI Miskin, a part of her hopes.
And that hope has been set alight now.
There is no one waiting for her when she gets home, and she does not let herself feel disappointed.
Five weeks pass by quickly and in the slowest agony of Kate's life. She does not keep track of the passage of time, yet it reminds her at any chance it gets – in newspapers, in cases, through the mundane everyday happenings of her life.
Five weeks and seven days after Dalgliesh left for the tour in America, five weeks and seven days of not thinking about the poem – she is still not counting – there is a package for her at the office, in her name, transcribed in handwriting she knows and dreads.
For the whole day, Kate does not look at the package, does not think about the package, pretends it does not exist. And then she goes home, she puts it on her dinner table and she stares at it as if she could see through it if she just tried hard enough.
She already knows it's a book; she is a detective who can detect, after all.
Finally, she unwraps it, puts aside the paper with her name on it and looks at it.
It's a notebook, really. Plain black, no writing on it, nothing to tell her who's it from or why. But she knows.
It smells fresh but as she opens the first page, she can see it is not untouched.
To Kate.
And on the next page, the poem she has already heard once before. She traces the words with her fingers but she still doesn't understand.
For a moment, she considers not wanting to understand. It would be easier.
But then she remembers that look in his eyes, that edge of something Kate hadn't found before, and she remembers that she is not meek and quiet, that he had made sure she knew that.
She picks up the phone.
“Commander Dalgliesh please.”
He was, of course, not at the office but his receptionist almost immediately gave out his address; Kate did not even need to push.
She definitely has to make him tell his staff not to give out his home address, even if another officer asks for it. However, in the moment, she is glad that she can stand in front of his door, though with trepidation building, and she knocks.
There's a moment of silence, which stretches for aeons, while Kate realises that it is actually late, and perhaps not a very respectable hour to be knocking on the door of a Met Commander, and the foolishness is trying to creep into her soul and just as she considers turning around and going, the door opens.
“Kate.”
His voice is as warm as ever but she can now truly look into his eyes, look at him, emboldened by some unknown force, so she sees so much more than ever before.
“Sir.”
He then notices the book in her other hand and a mixture of emotions flies over his face, too quick to capture but enough to make her hope, again.
He steps aside and she walks in, noticing the unassuming but tidy flat, the teapot on the table, the soft glow of the lamp over a notebook in the middle of it.
“Would you like some tea?”
Ordinarily, she would say yes, and they would drink, and it would be pleasant. But it wouldn't be enough and Kate thinks it has to be more, or it has to be nothing.
“You sent me this. Why?”
He stops his movement towards the table and looks at her. Finally, he nods. “I saw you at the reading. And I thought you should have that one. I will never publish it.”
“Why not?”
“You liked it?”
“Yes, but...”
She doesn't know how to say everything she thinks of that poem, everything she's felt about the poem. His presence makes her world go off-kilter, like it has for some time.
“So you gave it to me because I liked it?”
He sighs and looks up to the ceiling as if awaiting some sort of sign, or perhaps divine intervention but that mercy does not come.
“I...want you to be happy, Kate.”
She flinches as that word comes out of his mouth again, and she remembers that conversation so long ago, that tear in her soul it had left.
This time, she doesn't want to lie.
“To Kate. And this poem. It is not like you to dance around things, sir. Say what you want to say or just...leave me to be happy. But do not make such promises then.”
His expression is almost pained and she would, under ordinary circumstances leave it be, would not push but she is tired of pretending like it's nothing.
When he speaks, it is quiet but with such conviction that she is mesmerised by it.
“I thought it was all over. It was all gone, you must understand. There was only the darkness, the ending of it all, the unfathomable abyss of being. That is what Last Sighting is about.”
He takes a step closer to her, carefully but with intention and his gaze is now intent, alive with something bright.
“I thought it easier to stay in that abyss but – there was a moment. Actually, more than one. I wrote that the day after the shooting, and I didn't yet realise but it had all changed already. I do want you to be happy, Kate. I just didn't know how to say, how to offer that. So, that poem is for you. If you want it.”
“If I want the poem?”
There's a risk he won't say more than he has but she has to know, she has to be sure.
“Yes. It could only be for you.”
He takes her hand, again, and for the first time with clear intention, and wraps his fingers around hers with purpose, not with hesitation.
“Will you write more like that?”
“I do hope so. As long as you stop calling me sir.”
His eyes are crystal clear and full of warmth she has not really seen before, and his hand is warm and reassuring.
“I do want to be happy. Adam.”
He breathes a kiss onto her mouth, and she smiles into it.
The kaleidoscope clicks into place and her focus is sharp.