Chapter Text
It didn't require a detective to know that skulking in the shadows of your boss's secret poetry reading wasn't exactly on.
Kate hadn't meant to overhear the conversation that led to her standing hidden into the back of a darkened art gallery, listening to DCI Adam Dalgliesh read excerpts from his latest book of poetry. But it had been late when the phone call came in, so late that it was just the two of them left in the office.
The call had come through to her desk, partially because the young constable at the switchboard knew she was still around, and also because the young constable at the switchboard was, apparently, afraid of Dalgliesh. Miskin had managed to refrain from sighing heavily when Tommy had decided to take her into his confidence, though she didn't bother doing the same as she picked up her telephone, clocking that it was well past 8 o'clock. "Miskin. This had better be important, Tommy."
Dalgliesh, who had abandoned his upstairs office some time ago but had chosen to sit at the empty desk across from hers instead of going home, looked up from the file he'd been idly flipping through. It was one of the files she'd taken out of Archives for study, familiarizing herself with different procedures and processes. He'd started going down there with her on occasion, helping her pick out cases of interest. While she appreciated his expertise, it didn't do anything for her growing fascination (don't think about it) with him, huddled together in the cramped, cluttered fire hazard that was Archives.
"I've got a call for the chief inspector," Tommy said, his voice tinny and hard to hear despite his only being down the hall. "Some woman? Says it's a personal matter. Is.. is he still in?"
"Oh," Kate said, returning Dalgliesh's stare. He tilted his head at her very slightly. "Yes, he's here. One moment, I'll hand you over." She pulled the phone from her ear and extended it to him, leaning forward across her desk.
He regarded her for a moment before reaching out long fingers to take the receiver. He didn't immediately put it to his ear, though, just kept his eyes on her. "Who is it?"
Kate shrugged a shoulder. "It seems 'some woman' is on the line for you," she whispered, not wanting Tom to overhear her unflattering reuse of his words. "Apparently it's a personal matter."
Dalgliesh actually looked at the phone in his hand before carefully bringing it to his ear. "Yes? Dalgliesh." He listened for a moment. "What was the name? Oh." He closed his eyes and his shoulders tensed in a way that made Kate hadn't ever seen before on him. She'd certainly seen him tense, had seen him angry, had seen him with a hole in his shoulder (don't think about it), but this movement looked...self-protective. Kate felt her own shoulder twinge in sympathy. "Yes. Alright. Put her through to my office. I'll be there momentarily."
He returned the phone to Kate and pushed his chair back, rolling his sleeves down over his forearms again (don't think about it) as he stood. "I'll just be a moment," Dalgliesh told her.
"Is everything all right?" Kate asked, trying not to sound desperately nosy. The call had come through on her line, after all.
"Define 'all right,'" Dalgliesh muttered, almost to himself, then blinked. "No, it's fine. Just a...personal aggravation. It'll only take a moment." He glanced at his watch, eyebrows going up. "Though on second thought, why don't we call it a night? I hadn't realized it had gotten so late. You should have said."
Kate had frowned briefly at the accusation, then belatedly caught the set of his chin; he was teasing her. This was a new development, something that had only begun within the past few weeks. She ruthlessly swallowed down the tiny fizzles of pleasure that had begun to play at the base of her throat, praying her cheeks hadn't begun to pink. "Sorry, Sir. Won't happen again," she said, allowing herself to smile. Kate hated her smile. She always felt it made her look incredibly young, something she didn't want him to think too.
Dalgliesh actually smiled back. "Well," he replied as he slowly re-cuffed his sleeve, clearly delaying his return to his office. Kate's curiosity was spiking. "Perhaps we'll need to take turns clock watching in future. We can't both become sleepless devotees of our work."
He abruptly stopped smiling, and Kate looked at him curiously. Had he not meant to say that? Was this a critique of her sleep habits, or his own? When he still didn't immediately leave, despite both of them hearing the buzz echo out of his office to indicate there was a call waiting, Kate cleared her throat. "We can get an alarm clock, Sir," she said, deciding to try once again for humor. "One of those new ones with the awful buzzer that sounds like someone's robbed a bank vault." And then, because she was an absolute idiot, Kate imitated the sound (albeit much quieter and only once).
Before she could get up and walk straight into traffic, Dalgliesh actually chuckled. "Don't you dare," he said, stepping away from the desk finally to head to his office. His shoulders looked a little more relaxed, though, and Kate counted it as a win.
She decided to take a risk. "When's your birthday again, Sir?" she called after him. "Just out of curiosity?"
He turned toward the stairs, glaring at her over the side as he climbed to the second floor. "Go home, Miskin. That's an order."
"Yes, Sir," she said with a grin, not pretending she couldn't see the way his own smile was trying to break through the stern façade. "Right away, Sir."
He gave her one last look - she couldn't really parse it, but she thought it was still amused - before disappearing into his office. He didn't bother closing the door, though she'd expected him to, which ultimately meant it wasn't really her fault that she could hear his end of the conversation while she (very, very quietly) packed up her things to head home for the evening.
"Yes?" he'd said, and then, on a sigh, "Hello, Blanche."
Kate slowed down her movements further at the unusual and unfamiliar name, inching papers along her desktop to slide them soundlessly back into filing folders.
"I'm sorry, you what?" A pause. "I don't recall agreeing to a reading, Blanche. It's just not something -" Another pause, longer this time. "Yes, I do understand that public appearances are, to a degree, part of the...yes, I received the letter. I'm honored by the write-up, but -"
Kate, who normally prided herself on being fairly quick on the uptake, was disappointed that it had taken her this long to realize this phone call must have something to do with his poetry. It wasn't a subject that Dalgliesh had ever broached with her. He revealed things about himself with incredible rarity, something that, at first, Kate had been relieved by. Her previous inspector had been nonstop talk, almost entirely about himself. Occasionally he'd lob a question Kate's way, but it was always derisive, placing her at the mean end of a joke. Dalgliesh hardly ever asked her anything about herself, minus the necessities such as how she took her coffee or tea. Food preferences had come up on late nights, of course, but they didn't exactly socialize. He never went down to the pub (though neither did she - it was a good match), and while the question "did you have a good week-end" was asked as the standard Monday greeting, it was always answered with a nondescript variation of "yes, thank you Sir. And yourself?" and "Yes. Thank you, Sergeant."
Last Monday, though, had been a variation. He'd said his weekend was "passable." Kate had chewed over that one for awhile, and then kicked herself for it. She knew her fascination with Adam Dalgliesh was probably a little too intense, but she couldn't help it. There was something about him that was endlessly intriguing. He was elegant in a way she wasn't used to, so deliberate and methodical. When she spoke, he listened with an intensity she had never experienced. It was affirming, and encouraging, and she knew how lucky she was. She knew she should be very, very careful not to jeopardize her luck, to prove she was worthy of such faith.
And yet, sometimes, she could feel herself on the verge of blushing, or feel her heart start to pound even though he hadn't done anything except look at her. It was frustrating. She didn't want to have these feelings for her superior, especially not one as important as Dalgliesh. He'd taken a gigantic risk on her, had stood up for her when her previous boss had dismissed her, when her co-worker (gone some months now, thank God) had gotten her hurt. He'd driven her home from the hospital himself after she'd been cleared from her concussion. She hadn't invited him in (her place was tiny, the best she'd been able to find in London on short notice), but he'd still waited until the door was closed behind her before he'd driven away from the curb. Kate wasn't used to kindnesses like that, especially from a man who didn't act like he was doing anything out of the ordinary at all.
She was broken from her spiraling musings when Dalgliesh finally responded to whomever had been talking away on the other end of the line. "Alright," he said, sounding defeated. "Where is it?"
Kate froze. Was he going to make an appearance about his poetry? Would he do a reading? The idea seemed incongruous. True, she'd seen him address groups before, but always over policing and with his professional veneer impenetrably in place. Never for something personal like his poetry. Would he wear a suit? Or would he wear one of those sweaters he was wearing when she first met him? Christ, she sounded like an absolute lunatic.
"Charing Cross Arts? Is that on...right."
Kate quickly grabbed a pen off the nearest surface, writing the name on her hand. She heard him sigh again, clearly resigned to something he wanted no part in. "Alright. Friday at 8 o'clock. I'll be there."
She slid the last file into her bag and silently fled through the doors to the main hall, down the steps and, after waving at the hapless Tommy, out into the chilly evening. She knew she couldn't do anything with the information she'd just learned. She had to forget about it, to wash the name of the place off of her hand. There was no way - absolutely no way - that she could go to Adam Dalgliesh's poetry reading.
And, with that stern self-talking-to firmly in the books, Kate really couldn't explain how she found herself standing in the very back of the dimly lit performance space. Oh wait, yes she could - she was an idiot.
She'd purposefully come in late, loitering at a cafe across the street until exactly ten minutes past the start time. She wanted to make sure she'd be able to sneak in without his noticing. She couldn't imagine what his reaction would be if he caught her there.
Unfortunately, she hadn't done her homework - she should have investigated the place before taking such a bold step. Charing Cross Arts was essentially a small box of a building, and it was only a hanging velvet curtain that separated the entrance from where a collection of chairs had been assembled for the reading. At first, Kate had thought there was absolutely no way he wouldn't catch her immediately, but she knew the two people at the table just inside the door were watching her. She couldn't turn tail and run, so Kate had squared her shoulders, taken a deep breath, and slipped around the curtain.
Fortunately, Dalgliesh seemed absolutely discomfited where he sat, bright lights pointing directly at his face. He was squinting a little, and the house lights were already turned down in preparation for the reading. There was no way he'd see her, and Kate meant to take advantage of every secret moment. While he did not look easy up at the front, a little bit too hunched in on himself (which was a shame, as he was wearing a very nice - if a bit poetically predictable - black turtleneck she'd never seen before), he had a guileless, self deprecating charm that surfaced when directly addressed by the moderator. Kate hadn't realized he'd even had a new book out, and wondered when he'd had the time to write it. Masterson, back when he'd been on their team (and before he'd set up Kate to get her skull cracked) was the one who had clued her in to Dalgliesh's literary achievements. He'd been mocking about it, though, a sure sign - in Kate's opinion - that he shouldn't be anywhere near a job with the police. Apparently, he'd overheard a young suspect-turned-murder victim asking their boss about his poetry and, according to the Malevolent Masterson, Dalgliesh had told the girl he hadn't written anything new for some time. Clearly, something had changed.
It was interesting to think that maybe this is what Dalgliesh spent doing on his weekends. For someone like Kate, who had no affinity for writing or for the arts, it all felt so far away. What was such a life like? His poems, at least the ones he was reading, were unbelievably sad, something even she could work out. Something that made her wonder. For someone so well respected, he seemed to have few friends on the force. At least, there were none he would spend time chatting with at the front desk, or in the hall, or anywhere else that Kate had ever seen him go. He never, ever left the office before she did, often retreating to his own office once she'd left instead of simply walking out with her. She wasn't exactly sure what he went home to. She'd heard those stories from Masterson, too. She'd heard about his wife and his child, having apparently been unconscious when he'd talked about it at length with Dominic Swayne after the man had hit her in the head. It worried her, how alone he seemed to be, and while their exchange over Kate's negligence of the time had been light-hearted, it wasn't exactly unfounded. Sometimes, Kate didn't really want to go home either, especially if she knew he was still hovering around the office. She'd never been one for maintaining much of an active social life anyway, so it wasn't some big hardship for her to spend a little more time at work brushing up on old cases or building on new areas of training. She'd recently begun the preliminaries for firearm training, encouraged by the nightmare that liked to visit her on particularly lonely nights where, instead of reaching Dalgliesh in time, she instead found him bled out on the cliff outside the Black Tower.
In retrospect, she and Dalgliesh spent a significant amount of their time together. She wished she could talk to him about his poetry. About what it meant. Was he really okay?
...was she?
When the house lights came up, Kate shook herself and slipped back out the door, glancing back once to see Dalgliesh looking down at his own hands, not out at the audience. Good - that meant she'd gotten away with it. She wished she'd had time to stop and pick up one of his books on her way out, but she hadn't wanted to pause. She knew if he looked up even for a second, being the single standing person would draw more than enough attention.
The problem was, his reading was on a Friday. That meant Kate had the whole weekend to mull over what she'd learned, over what she'd heard. She couldn't stop thinking about his words, about him, about...well. And ultimately, early on Monday morning, she found herself poking her head into a surprisingly open Charing Cross Arts.
"Oh yes!" the lovely young woman at the front desk said. "We have a few left of Mr. Dalgliesh's book. Too bad you weren't able to be here Friday for the reading - he did a signing and all! He was really lovely."
Well, that was a new thought that would linger in Kate's private moments. Her, taking Dalgliesh's book up to him to be signed. She could only imagine his face. No, scratch that - it was far more likely he wouldn't react at all. Not until she got to work the next day and discovered he'd sacked her for insubordination and prying into a superior's personal life. Or something. She didn't know if there was anything officially in the code of conduct about not stalking your boss to his public event outside of work, but she still knew she was pushing far past a boundary. He'd done so much for her. What right did she have to intrude on him further?
"He's doing another one next month, you know," the girl said as she handed over Kate's change.
Kate blinked. "What, here?"
The girl shook her head. "No, a bookstore over on Hansbury street. But if you want your book signed, I'm sure you'll be able to do it there! Here -" she reached out and grabbed a bookmark. It contained the name of another bookstore along with a date. "Take one just in case."
Kate thanked her, knowing that she wouldn't be queuing up anytime soon. But when she got home, she found herself penciling in the date on her calendar.
Just in case.