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“Sorry to bother you sir,” Kate says as soon as he picks up the phone because she had been fine hours earlier when the paramedic had said that she didn’t need to go to hospital if she didn’t have a headache and she could see fine, but in the time between an agonized double vision had crept up on her. And unfortunately she didn’t have anyone else to take her and she was not calling for an ambulance for a headache.
“Is there something wrong Miskin?”
“I need a ride to hospital.”
“I trust that this headache and double vision is a new development,” he said tightly after he had turned up at her flat and helped her into the car before locking her flat behind them both.
“It is,” she promised as he pulled away from the kerb.
“Good. I should hate to have to lay into both my DSes in one day.” Kate laughs, because even though she hasn’t known him long she knows that he jokes very rarely, before giving him a sideways look.
Or at least she gives the general blur of him a sideways look.
“Did you really?” Kate asks and then clarifies. “Lay into Masterson?”
“He could have got you killed Kate—Miskin.”
“It’s alright.” Dalgliesh’s blur moves in such a way that she knows he is looking at her. “You can call me Kate.”
“I suppose now that Masterson won’t be working with us I don’t have to worry about undermining you in his eyes.”
“Tell me you didn’t sack him.” Another sideways look at that. “I just mean that I don’t want there to be rumours that I got him sacked from the boys club he runs with.”
It comes out a little more bitterly than she intended, but it had been bad enough in that pub and to her surprise Dalgleish reaches over and rests his hand on top of hers as the car comes to a stop.
“I didn’t sack him. I reassigned him. And I know you can handle yourself but if any of his boys club says anything too untoward let me know so I can lay into them.”
“Thank you sir. And for the ride.” They’ve been stopped long enough that Kate has determined that they’ve parked and begins to fumble for the door handle.
Before she can manage to get the door open he’s around the car and opening it for her and simply leads her inside without a word. Kate decides that she isn’t going to question it, not until she has been shuffled into a quiet room with a bed to wait for a doctor and he simply settles into the chair nearby.
“You don’t have to stay sir,” she offers because surely he must have better things to do than sit in a hospital room with his brand new detective sergeant.
“Thank you Kate,” he says and there is some rustling and then his gentle voice fills the room as he reads from a collection of poetry.
Not his of course, he’d never be so conceited, but still soft, gentle prose about the beauties of nature that manages to distract Kate from the pain as she lays there with her eyes closed.
“Thank you sir,” she says quietly when he pauses for emphasis a few poems in, and she imagines that he is smiling that rare soft smile.
“You’re welcome.”
“Did you like poetry in school Kate?” He asks one day when they are driving up to Sheffield because ever since the hospital Kate has taken to stashing books of poetry in his glove box for occasions such as this or stakeouts.
“No I gained an appreciation later in life.” She gives him a slightly teasing look in advance of the bemused look he gives her at her idea of later in life before she falls serious. “After my Grandad died I just found this poem that was like reading everything I was feeling.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, but it was a long time ago.” She picks up her pencil and carefully underlines a few words. Dalgleish throws her another look which she ignores as it is a friendly non-verbal argument they have been having since Kate started leaving her books in his car. He falls firmly on the side of the argument that thinks writing in books is essentially a crime, she believes that it’s her bloody book, she can do what she likes with it, and she likes being able to make notes on her thoughts.
(Dalgleish will not admit to anyone, especially not Kate who will remain oblivious if he has anything to say about it, that he always finds time to read what she leaves behind in those books: which words she circled, which phrases she underlined, the notes about feelings and thoughts she scribbles in the margins, so similar and yet so different from the way she constructs her police notes.)
“I discovered poetry when I met my wife,” he admits and sees Kate’s pencil waver slightly before she continues on casually. His lip quirks up on the side of his face that she can’t see at her treating him so gently. “It was strangely comforting to know that there had been so many others who had felt what I was feeling, the nerves and sweaty palms of it all.”
“I can’t picture you nervous with sweaty palms sir,” Kate teases lightly. “Is that why you’ve stopped writing? Because you were writing for her?”
“What makes you think I’ve stopped writing?”
“Sometimes the way you look at your notebook, not your case notebook your other one, like you are just hoping it will fill up, like words will just appear on the page, it well-- makes me think you’ve stopped writing.”
“Brilliant observation Kate.” It’s true pride that filters into his words and she shrugs.
“I learned from the best sir,” she says and flashes him a smile. He holds in the urge to tell her that she shouldn’t let herself shadow her accomplishments in him, that she should take opportunities to set herself apart.
She brings dozens of authors into his car, classic ones they teach in school, modern ones they will teach one day and the very modern ones that they never will.
They talk about each and every one of them, especially the classic ones. Kate teases him, in a gentle merciless fashion, about his patriotism regard the fact that his favourite authors are always English, he always volleys retorts regarding her penchant for overdramatic Americans.
“Did you ever think about going to school for literature?” He asks one day. He almost doesn’t recognize himself sometimes in these moments in the car, when he prods her for information to fill the silences, to start conversation. But she always obliges him so he can’t stop the urge whenever it arises.
“No. I didn’t like literature until after my university years. I was going to go to university for chemistry, and then work in a lab developing new drugs.” She reaches out to the dash idly and runs her finger along the line between the dash and the glove box, like she is tracing the path her life was supposed to take. “But my older brother went to Uni for chemistry first and was properly brilliant at it and I didn’t want to feel like I had to compete with that on top of everything else.” Her finger shifts as if hitting a bump in the road and then continued on just parallel to before. “So I went in for Biology.”
“Biology?”
“Still science,” she said with a smile.
“Why the police then?”
“Human anatomy class. We were doing it in combination with a class of medical students, so we had a cadaver, and no one knew who he was. Not us, not the professors, no one. And the injustice didn’t sit right with me.” His lip quirks up at that. “So I traced it all out. He’d been a war veteran who was homeless, but he did have a daughter down in Wessex who was happy to know what had happened rather than keep on living not knowing.”
“That was good of you,” he says, and she smiles with a shrug as her finger changes to run perpendicular to the lines she had been tracing before.
“Then I got the taste for it. You know the rest.” Her hand drops away. “What about you sir? How did the son of a minister wind up Detective Chief Inspector?”
“I’m afraid that despite my father’s best efforts my faith in the Lord was never quite unshakeable, which is rather important for a minister.” Kate laughs at that. “I had always enjoyed puzzles, was always clever and thought it would be a good place for me. Nothing quite so profound as yourself.”
“Well you were right. Sound instincts even then.” A pause and then. “Was it your wife who convinced you to publish?”
“It was. She was a journalist and she thought that it was nearly a crime that I wasn’t even trying to let the world see the depths of my soul.” Kate can tell that’s a quote just from the way he says it and thinks that his wife must have been a little bit silly, which must have been so good for the stoic man she worked with. “So I tried, and she was unbearably smug about the whole thing when I was published.”
“What was her name?” She could have looked into his file and found out probably, but she felt that it was both cheating and an invasion of his privacy to go about it that way.
“Maria,” he says quietly and doesn’t think of the poems he’s scrawled in his notebook, the ones he hadn’t wanted to write about his grief for her, about battling through a world without her, about trying to find a point in it all when every moment ached so poignantly.
“What kind of a journalist?”
“Investigative. She was quite fond of rooting out corruption.”
“Good for her,” Kate muses and then flashes him a smile as thanks for telling her before letting silence fall over the car.
And that is the moment that he realizes that he is standing on the edge of a cliff, metaphorically looking over the edge. Not a cliff with a long drop into an abyss carved of his sadness and grief, but a fall of a completely different kind.
She thinks of making his newest collection her latest book that she shoves into his glove box, if only to see the baleful look he’ll throw her direction when she digs it out, but then she reads it and she can’t.
She can’t because it’s too close to her, too real, to see the sad man she had first met back in Weymouth reaching through the time to stare at her from the pages of the first half of the book. She can’t sit in the car with him and tease him about word choice and sentence structure and debate whether the metaphor was too heavy handed.
Then there’s the second half of the book, which makes her feel like she’ll never be happy again the first time she reads it.
The second time she reads it is after the shooting and it feels like an apology. An apology for the fact that neither of them could save the other from all the emotions that have arisen up between them and gotten so irrevocably tangled.
She wishes there were poetry for this and wishes that they could find it together.
It is after the way he held her hand and looked up at her so beseechingly, it is after the promotion, it is mid way into his five week tour of America that Kate admits to herself that she cannot do this.
“You’ve seemed a little glum ever since Dalgliesh went to America,” Tarrant says casually one day and seemingly ignores the look she throws him as he nudges the office door shut behind him. “I know I didn’t work with the two of you together very long, but I thought you might need someone to talk to.”
“What could I have to talk about concerning Dalgliesh?”
“Again I wasn’t with you two very long but were you?” He makes a gesture to indicate togetherness.
"No," she says. "Did it seem that way?"
"Not usually, but sometimes the two of you reminded me of my Mum and Dad.” She throws him another look at that. “Not age wise, but you were just so aware of each other.”
“Well it wasn’t like that.”
“Did you want it to be?”
“No.” And the worst part is that it’s not a lie. “He was the boss.”
“Was,” Tarrant points out and she holds in the frown she wants to make. “Did you ever think about the possibility?”
“I think that—”
“This conversation is inappropriate and unprofessional, but the office door is closed and we’re friends right now,” Tarrant says with a simple hand wave. “Because respectfully Kate I could see the way the two of you looked at each other when neither of you were looking.”
“You’re annoying,” she says, but can’t say he’s wrong because she had just been sitting here thinking about how having his presence had been enough, and how not having him at all was slowly driving her mad, and how there were so many questions dangling up in the air, but for the first time none of them felt like swords.
Tarrant, the bastard, gives her a smile before exiting her office and she reaches down to dig out the book of poetry from the bottom drawer of her desk and starts formulating her strategy.
Three weeks later she knocks confidently on his door, and he doesn’t look confused at the sight of her even though she hadn’t told him that she was coming.
“Hello Kate.”
“Hello, could I come in?” He steps aside to let her in and closes the door behind her gently.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m here to talk to you about your book,” she says and that is enough to make him stop dead in his tracks and peer at her in confusion. “About something that I think the two of us need to clear the air about.”
“And what might that be?”
“The second half of the book,” she says and brandishes her copy at him. He nods in that way he has where he seems pained. “Everyone thinks it’s about you trying to decide if the love was worth the pain. But it’s not.”
“Isn’t it?” He sounds almost desperate but Kate plunges forward anyway because she is going to be brave.
“No. It’s about being afraid to fall in love with someone you shouldn’t.” Her voice briefly stutters from nerves before she rallies and draws herself fully upright to look at him. “The first half of the book is about Maria; the second half is about me.”
“Kate,” he says weakly but not protesting when she opens the book and for the first time reads him his own work.
“’Framed in sunlight, bathed in distant open spray/fearful eyes pressing down upon me, and I feel the fear of wanting to live’. That’s us on the cliff.” It’s not a question but he nods. “’Quiet moments full of potential that I worry over/so many unwitting steps into a direction I fear to tread/led along the way by words of others.’ That’s the car, reading poetry.” Another nod. “Then why didn’t you say?”
“I told you that I would give you any opportunity,” he says as his eyes open again, and she remembers that conversation vividly, remembers the way that he had looked at her sideways across the car, so different and yet so similar from all the other times before. “That means not standing in your way.”
Kate waits because she can tell he’s not done, but she knows that he needs to put his thoughts in order.
“I have had the genuine pleasure of watching you spread your wings, I have never nor will ever regret asking you to come work for Met Major. But there were enough rumours when you first joined.” Kate nodded tersely because she remembered the whispers about him hiring a pretty, young woman from the middle of nowhere after he’d been off on holiday. “I couldn’t countenance the idea that I would do any further damage to your career. You would have been brilliant without me, and I refuse, categorically refuse, to raise the possibility that any of that brilliance was awarded from me.”
“After the shooting.” Here he stutters to a brief stop, waiting to see if the wedge they both drove between each other after was going to wedge its way into this conversation, but Kate’s face stays mercifully open, so he carries on and does not remember how much will it had taken to not press a comforting kiss into the top of her head when he had her in his arms. “I knew that I was walking a line that could irrevocably damage everything I had sworn I would not.”
“So you took a promotion and told me that I should be happy,” Kate says and gets a firm nod in response. She takes a step forward and wraps her hand around his fingers, in the same way he had done that day on the bench before she looks up at him. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that you could make me happy.”
“Kate,” he says, sounding almost afraid but all the words about how he is too old, too stoic die on his tongue as she looks up at him.
“I never read love poems,” she says. “I couldn’t read words that made me think of you when I was stuck in closed quarters with an invisible, uncrossable line drawn between me and you. I told my mother stories of you, and she held my hand and couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to transfer somewhere else, that I would have rather continued as we were than break my own heart.”
“Kate,” he says, sounding desperately wrecked. She tightens her hold on his fingers.
“You should be happy Adam Dalgliesh. We should both be happy, and I think we were doing that together.”
“Kate,” he breathes her name this time, with a hint of wonder and that is all the warning she gets before he steps in closer to her and reverently, ever so reverently, lifts her hand to brush his lips across her fingers where they are still holding his. “Kate Miskin are you certain?”
“There is poetry in you and I/Though neither of us say it,” she says and then swoops in to press her lips to his because he has moved as forward in this situation as he could ever dare.
One day he will write a poem about this, their first kiss with fingers intwined and other hands curving around cheeks, but for now he simply lets himself live the poetry.