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He met her just after his return from Borneo. To Whitstable, who had been missing from the village for years, it seemed that she simply appeared from nowhere. It was as though the years he had been gone had been nothing more considerable than the flash of a coin in the air before it came to land in an open palm. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, there she was.
Agatha, and her two sons. There was never any father, never even the rumour of one. Any other unwed mother would've been subject to stares and murmurs. But not Agatha. There was something…impenetrable about her. Something sharp and cold, like a deep breath in January. Bracing and strange and furious.
The boys are not doing well. Oh, Flynn does his job, and does it well. But in quieter moments, Whitstable catches him inspecting his own hands as if he can't understand them anymore.
"It was awful," he confided to Whitstable once, when the latter was walking him home from the pub. Flynn was halfway sozzed, and Whitstable knows that it might not be the usual arrangement for an Inspector to be so personally invested in the well-being of a Junior Detective, but, well—The boy died. It's rather difficult not to feel some measure of concern and care for him after that ordeal.
"It was like—" Flynn gestured, seemingly indicating the whole world. "Like I was dreaming about everything that had ever happened, and some things that hadn't. but I was also back in my own body—" He stopped, and Whitstable had to pull him along quickly to avoid being crushed by a passing cart. "Have you ever felt like that, Inspector?"
Whitstable swallowed, his mouth dry. He forced himself to smile, though he suspected it looked forced. "There's nothing to be done about it now, son," he said firmly, and he guided Flynn down the street.
The little one's not doing so well either, though at least his ailments are a little less…supernatural. It's not an easy thing to shoot one's own mother—Whitstable knows this from years of Inspector work. James is staying with her servants, Brian and Kevin, though Whitstable is hardly certain he can trust them, either. After all, were they not with her for years? How many? There's no way to know.
Still, it seems best not to disturb the child more than he's already been disturbed. The poor lad's been having nightmares, tantrums, crying spells—All awful, but, as Whitstable unfortunately knows, exactly what he ought to expect. Brian and Kevin do what they can to calm the boy. No one ever speaks of what he's done, not directly to him, at least. Whitstable cannot find it in him to summon hope for James, only dry pity, the same pity he (only on occasion) feels for himself. It's the knowledge that what's been done can never be undone.
If there is one bright side to the whole affair, it's that the curse is lifted. Not only the one that trapped the lads' souls in that accursèd book, but also the curse that formerly affected his leg. Now the strange, magic tingle that used to trigger his hand to twitch for the cane is gone, replaced by solid, earnest pain. Not the pain of a curse, but the pain of years of battle, hard conditions, and misuse. Whitstable grits his teeth against it and is grateful that it is his own pain now.
When he came back from Borneo, it seemed that the Knick-Knack Keeper was the only one who understood him. Whitstable was angry in those days—Not angry at anyone or for any particular reason, but plagued instead with a buzzing fury under his skin—and his leg hurt terribly. To be back in the same village where he'd grown up, surrounded by people who purported to know him yet could never imagine the things he'd seen, was nearly more than he could stand.
The only things that helped were his work, the Knick-Knack Keeper, and Agatha. These were the only ones that didn't make him feel like a stranger, because they were just as strange as he. In that tiny English village, where the majority was so unremarkable as to effectively disappear, Whitstable felt like a sore thumb, a black sheep, a cat among pigeons, an ugly stepsister.
And right beside him were the Knick-Knack Keeper and Agatha. His partners in dissonance and isolation.
The Knick-Knack Keeper knew Agatha back in East Germany; they had been in school together. "She was very talented with the knicks," he told Whitstable when he asked. "And the knacks."
He and Whitstable always speak shallowly, regardless of the topic. Neither of their souls are touched directly. Call him a coward, but Whitstable is glad of it. The Knick-Knack Keeper is a man of many secrets, and Whitstable fears what the revelations might bring to light. And for his own part, it's just as well. Whitstable knows his soul to be a bleeding, mangled thing.
But no matter how passingly they spoke of her, Agatha was a knife's edge. There was always an undertow when the Knick-Knack Keeper spoke of her, threatening to pull them all out to sea.
Whitstable didn't mind the feeling.
Her other son isn't adjusting well. He sits for long hours in the garden, drinking milk. His eyes, unseeing, trace the horizon. Sometimes, he holds a book, but Whitstable doubts he ever reads. Sometimes, he goes on long walks. Whitstable doesn't know when he manages to sleep.
Whitstable stops by when he can. He feels a certain tug of duty, though he feels foolish for feeling it at all. After all, what duty does he have to one of his bodies, even if that body is alive again? None, save to solve his murder. And the murders here have been solved already.
One of the murders was an accident, a bit of careless reading on Flynn's part, but the other murder wasn't a murder at all unless the roles of victim and perpetrator can be assayed by the same man, and Whitstable doesn't really perscribe to that kind of view. Perhaps it's because of this (because of T. X.'s cloudy eyes; because of his own foggy brain and the pain in his leg) that he feels he has a duty. It's not the dull duty of his work. No, it's a cleaner, sharper feeling. A sense of duty to a breath of January air.
So he sits with T. X. and drinks milk on occasion, even though it upsets his stomach. He listens when T. X. tells stories of dark magic seen and done in the east. He offers comfort when he can, silence when he cannot. Occasionally, he works on his notes for the weekly Whoopsie: How They Died. It seems right to write in her garden.
Of course, he can't know how much of it was sincere. Agatha was a woman shrouded in mystery, draped in a life more mystical than he can imagine. Then again…
A few years ago, during the time when T. X. was still abroad, Whitstable left the pub with the intention of going home. He saw the light of her cigarette first, and then, slowly, the whole figure of Agatha sitting on a bench came into focus.
He nodded to her. "Madam." He could have left then, but he didn't. Something about the night, the slight chill in the air, made him bold. He sat beside her.
"Inspector," she said. After a moment: "I quite enjoyed your latest column."
He nodded in thanks. "How are your children?"
She answered him, and they spoke for perhaps ten minutes of inconsequential things—of the weather, of town matters, of crops and sons and writing. They spoke, in short, of nothing.
It was pointless, practically play-acting, to pretend that neither of them knew anything about dark magic, or the east, of violence and sinister forces rippling around their ankles like eddies of water. And yet they did pretend, for those moments. They spoke of conventional things, and Whitstable feels a dull ache when he lets his mind slip away to what they might have been had she been a different woman and he a different man.
If she did not know so much in the way of knick-knacks, if he had not gone to Borneo, if she had no sons, if he had been a poet instead of an Inspector—Oh, if only. He could see that future now, the one that didn't exist and could never exist. He saw a life with Agatha, sharing a cigarette in the sun, sheafs of paper spread out on a table, no pain speaking from his hip to his thigh, no strange book or scrawled letter, nothing to obscure it, just the sharp, bitter taste of January in his mouth.
He saw her hands moving, lighting another cigarette. He did not reach out to take her hand. He did not ask her if she could see the future that was not. But when they said goodbye, her hand lingered for a moment in his, and he suspected that she could see it just as near and just as far as he could. He suspected that they were both watching it disappear as quickly as it had come into view.
Agatha is gone now, and with her the woman she could've been and the man he could've been. The two of them, and the Agatha that was, all destroyed with a single bullet. Sometimes Whitstable is surprised that there's no bullethole in his own head.
He never wrote a column about that case. It feels too strange to write a record of his own destruction.