Work Text:
"And they're absolutely sure?"
"That's what they said."
Chandler pressed his hands deeper into his pockets. "But how can the DNA evidence be inconclusive?" It was more of a mutter to himself than an actual comment, but Miles picked it up anyway, shrugging.
"Suppose they fouled the sample. Look, it's not like there's not plenty of it, they can run the test again."
"And by the time they run the test, he'll have fled somewhere else. This time somewhere without an extradition treaty." He wanted to pull his hands out of his pockets and fidget with something, like the others did. He wanted to tear his hair out or hit something in frustration. The best he could manage was turning around in circles and straightening his cuffs, which did not, to him, convey the severity of his frustration. At last he turned back to the whiteboard, which yielded nothing new. "This is lunacy. Everybody knows he did it, his neighbors, her friends, everyone. How can he get away with this?"
The rest of his men looked up at him without even managing a full-on united front of disbelief, as they usually did. More like resignation. From Miles particularly, the tired expression that suggested, it's all right, Chandler, we all go through that stage at some point. Kent spoke up first. "It's all hearsay. We don't have any actual evidence, just rumors."
A chorus of voices reminded him how everyone knew that and he wasn't helping; Kent ducked his head again and wheeled around in his chair, turning back to the witness statements.
"What about the timeline?" Chandler dragged his hands palm down from his hairline to his chin, closing his eyes and making himself stand normally for a full twenty seconds before the comb came out and he had to straighten his hair again.
Miles scanned down the paper and shook his head, dashing what little hope Chandler had managed to scrape together in two minutes. "There's nothing here. There's nothing definitive, the time of death could have been anytime that night, he was in and out all evening. Assuming you can believe his mistress, which is hard to do. To my way of thinking, anyway."
Hard to argue with that. "She'd say he was with her in the south of France if he asked her to. All right, what about manner of death? The drugs used..."
"He's got legal access to scopolamine through the hospital, it's used in several medical treatments..." Kent shook his head, looking up from his papers. "Her friend at the club said she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it could be perfectly legitimate."
"Could be she OD'd," Miles offered.
Chandler wasn't accepting that. "But we don't know that for sure. And even if she did, it could be suicide, it could be accident, we don't know that he administered the dosage because we can't tell when or how it was given." They were going to have to give up for lack of leads. This case was going to go cold, and a murderer was going to go free. Not that he had a perfect record, but it grated on him that everybody knew what had happened and nobody could prove a thing.
"Look," Miles came up behind him, low-voiced so the others wouldn't hear. "Maybe we don't have anything. Maybe we're not looking at it right, who knows. But at least let's go over it again, one more time, check everything. We're not going around in circles for nothing, you know."
"We've got nothing. That's what we've got. No conclusive evidence..."
"You keep saying that, they'll hear you and take it to heart," Miles retorted. "You look at Kent, he takes his lessons from you, now. And if you give up, so do they. Might be we don't get any new evidence on this. Might be we don't get anything to pin him on, but we owe it to ourselves, to that poor dead woman, and to each other to keep trying." He gave that a bit to sink in.
Chandler looked around the room. Saw Kent looking at him when he thought no one was watching, saw Mansell looking over at him between scans of the coroner's report. Even Miles, who was watching him with the patience of a parent waiting for a child to comprehend a difficult lesson. It wasn't that he didn't understand what Miles was saying, but he didn't see how what he was saying made much of a difference. To Mansell, at least. Maybe to Miles. To anyone on the team. They ignored him half the time, went their own way, or argued with him. And he encouraged that because it promoted better thinking and more ideas, more avenues to follow down.
Like this one, he thought, finally catching up to Miles. Even if they went around it all again they might, if they all put their minds to it, come up with something even a little bit new. And it was worth a shot. "All right." He threw up his hands, turned back to the whiteboard as though he'd been thinking or arguing with Miles about some point of the case rather than trying to give up on it. "All right, you win. We'll do it your way."
"Course we will," Miles patted him on the shoulder so hard he coughed. "Knew you'd see sense."
Chandler scrubbed a hand over his face again, lighter and quicker. "Kent, where are you with those witness statements. Give them to me again, from closest to most distant..."
Going around it again turned up nothing big that they'd missed, but at least there were a few leads he had Miles and Kent going down. Chandler didn't think much about their chances, but he told it all to Buchan later while they were at the pub celebrating the publication of Buchan's next book. For a lark, as much as he ever did anything for a lark, or for a new idea or for some desperate hope of inspiration. Buchan had already done more than his fair share of police work, and Chandler had spent all day with the boys bouncing ideas from mind to mind like children with a ball at a schoolyard. He didn't know if it'd worked. He didn't know if this would work. He expected a fresh look at things but what he got, of course, was a lecture.
"You know what this reminds me of..."
His fork clattered to the plate, making him jump a little. "Don't. Say it."
"I wasn't! Well, not much." Chandler kept his mouth shut, waiting for Buchan to continue. As he did a moment later when he realized he wasn't about to have his nose snapped off. "There was a man, a doctor, like your suspect, in the early half of the last century. And he had a wife, and a mistress too. But he fled to Canada, which put him out of the reach of the police back then, there was no telephoning someone up in Halifax and asking them to detain him on landing. Or so he thought."
And there it was, the dramatic pause so that Chandler would feed his ego a bit by begging to know what happened next. More impatient because of the murder case, he obliged. "And then...?"
"Well, you see, the telegraph had just recently been invented. The captain of the boat on which our historical suspect was sailing to make his great escape, he recognized the man, as the murder case had been put about in the papers, along with photographs of all parties involved. The ship's captain recognized him because he traveled first class, and telegraphed the authorities to let them know that the suspect was on board. They arrested him on the voyage itself. The inspector had boarded one of the White Star Line's fastest ships."
"White Star Line, isn't that the one with the iceberg?" Just to needle Buchan, though, who sat back and gave him a sigh of rebuke. "All right, all right. So how does this help me now?"
"Well, back then, all the inspector had to do was to show up and tell the doctor that the game was up, and he was taking him back to London to be hanged. The doctor confessed to everything."
Chandler started to protest that they had no evidence. They'd had the doctor and the mistress in both to be interviewed, and nothing came of it.
Buchan was still fired up on the subject. "In the interview room, sure, but when a man travels all the way across an ocean on a ship to arrest you, he's got more than just a few bits of testimony to pin you on."
All he could see from that plan was him and someone else walking up to the doctor and attempting to take him under arrest with a straight face, and failing. "It'll never work." Though he was starting to believe it was the only lead he'd get. "And even if it would, I could never get it past Anderson."
"Well, you don't have to," Buchan grinned. "That's the beauty of it. It doesn't require that the person who takes his confession be a police officer. It just needs to be convincing."
Chandler didn't know whether to hit him or hug him; fortunately the table between them prevented either. "I suppose you already have your ticket purchased."
"Ready and waiting, at your command."
The pause between Buchan's offer and Chandler's assent took long enough that it made the mousey historian twitch a little. Really, Chandler still didn't think it was a good idea. Buchan might get into some sort of trouble, there was no telling what would happen on the rest of the cruise. Or the extraction of a confession might not work. At worst, Buchan would get laughed at, and hide in his quarters for the remainder of the voyage. So perhaps there wasn't much to be lost from it either, even if he doubted whether there was anything to be gained.
He shook his head. "All right, then. I'll tell the others... don't go getting carried away, mind you," he added, as the other man bounded upright to go pack or something. "Just get his confession and come back. With it and him, for preference."
"I'll be the soul of discretion," Buchan promised.
Which left Chandler staring after him torn between amusement and dismay. "Why do I have trouble believing that?"