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So this is what despair feels like, Nicholas thought as he stood over the sink in the police station toilets, trying to clean the stubborn black ink off the inside of his cap. He’d been there for the whole lunch break and the bin in the corner was starting to overflow with soapy paper towels, and while his hands were now exceptionally clean, the pen had stained the leather sweatband and the word ‘twat’ had barely faded.
It felt like he was fading instead.
Though he was a perfectionist and always felt he ought to do better even when he was already doing his best, Nicholas had never doubted his capabilities as much as he had been since interrogating Skinner. The jeering comments and exasperated looks he’d got from the others had stayed in his head all night and all morning, bouncing around relentlessly inside his skull. Maybe that was why he had such a headache.
Though the lack of sleep also didn’t help.
He’d stayed up late, rereading his notes again and again until the letters crawled across the pages like ants, and even after he put his notebook down he’d spent a good hour or so staring at the ceiling until he finally slept. He’d dreamt he was back in the Met station and it had become a labyrinth, almost like a hall of mirrors, and every phone in the building was ringing but for some reason Nicholas had to answer one specific phone and he was running around looking for it and whenever he thought he was getting close he came to a dead end. He’d woken up before he could reach it.
He gave up on cleaning his cap and went back to his desk. He heard the others coming back and realised he hadn’t eaten anything, but he decided he wasn’t hungry. He just wanted to lay his head on the desk and sleep until either he dreamt up a plan to solve the case, or the case somehow solved itself.
Stop that, Sergeant Angel, he told himself sternly. Cases never solved themselves. And this case was important. People had been murdered, and for all he knew, there might be more to come. As long as he was awake and capable of logical thought, it was his job — his obligation — to figure everything out, because nobody else was going to do it.
Nicholas was about to start poring over his evidence and his notes for the millionth time when someone knocked on the door of his office.
“Who is it?” he asked flatly. He really didn’t want to have to talk to anyone right now. Especially since it seemed everyone in the station was intent on making him feel like an idiot.
“It’s Danny — I mean, Constable Butterman.”
Correction: everyone except Danny was intent on making him feel like an idiot. Maybe talking to him wouldn’t be so bad.
“Come in, Danny,” said Nicholas, automatically sitting up straight and trying to look as if he wasn’t completely exhausted.
Danny shuffled into the cramped office, giving him a slightly awkward smile. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You didn’t join us for lunch.” It wasn’t an accusation, but the fact that Danny had made the effort to point out such an obvious fact led Nicholas to believe he had some feelings about it. He couldn’t tell what those feelings might be.
“I was busy,” he said.
Danny nodded. “‘Course you were. Made any progress?”
“With what?” Nicholas asked, thinking of his vandalised cap.
“The investigation,” said Danny, pointing at the papers on the desk.
“Oh. No.” Nicholas flicked through his pointless pages of evidence with a heavy sigh. He caught Danny’s eye and added, “Not yet anyway,” in an attempt to be optimistic, but whatever hope he may have had was instantly snuffed out when he flicked his way up to the top of the carefully stacked papers and noticed another bit of vandalism. It was so stupid he might have laughed if it wasn’t yet another kick in the teeth. At this point he’d had so many kicks in the teeth that if he were to take the phrase literally, he shouldn’t have had any teeth left.
“What is it?” Danny asked, eagerly leaning over to see what Nicholas was looking at. “Have you found something?”
Nicholas wordlessly pushed the paper across the desk, hanging his head in dejection.
Danny read the biro scrawl at the top of the photocopied newspaper page like it was a second headline. “Angle is totally … bankers. What?” He scrunched up his nose. “Oh, bonkers. Fuckin’ hell.”
Nicholas looked up just as Danny turned around, about to leave the office. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to have a word with the Andes,” said Danny, a rare look of anger on his face. “I’m pretty sure at least one of ‘em did this. And wrote on your hat.”
He was halfway out the door when Nicholas stood up, making himself dizzy. “Don’t, Danny. Just leave it.”
Danny paused, turning back to Nicholas. “Why?”
“Well, they always do shit like this, don’t they?”
“What, and that makes it okay?”
“No, but …” Nicholas rubbed his forehead. “I'll deal with them. Later. I have slightly more pressing matters on my mind right now.”
Danny bit the inside of his cheek and gave the papers back. “All right.” He stayed in the doorway as Nicholas sat back down, watching him with a mix of sympathy and curiosity. “Want some help?”
Nicholas shrugged slowly, as if his shoulders were made of lead. “Sure.”
He spread everything out over the desk as Danny closed the door. How exactly they were going to figure anything out when they had as much evidence as they could find and it had already been disproved, Nicholas had no idea.
“So it’s not Skinner?” said Danny, coming round to join him on his side of the desk.
“Apparently not.” Nicholas picked up a pen, not to write anything with but just to hold.
“Y’know, I thought your theory actually made a lot of sense.” Danny grabbed a pen too and wiggled it between his fingers. “At least until we saw Skinner’s legs. And the tapes.”
“Yes.” Nicholas tapped his pen on the table. “I suppose it’s possible that he might have got the tapes from different days but put the wrong dates on the labels.”
“Oh yeah, good point!”
“But the legs still don’t make sense.”
Danny wiggled his pen faster. “Well, we only saw the bottom half of his legs. Maybe the cut’s on his knee or something.”
“Maybe.”
Danny’s pen suddenly went flying into a corner. He picked it up and sheepishly put it back on the desk. “Or, y’know, maybe it’s someone else. You got any more suspects?”
“No.” Nicholas pressed his knuckles into his eyes as his headache grew more intense. “If it’s not Skinner we’re back to square one. No suspects, no evidence, no way of finding anything out because the Andes won’t do their fucking job, and if we don’t know who the killer is then we won’t be able to stop them from killing anyone else, and even if we did know who the killer was, the time it takes us to find out who their next victim is … they could kill them in that time, and that would just be yet another death that everyone thinks is an accident, and yet another reason for everyone to say that” — he choked on his words and cut himself off abruptly to take a breath — “I’m going crazy.”
Danny had moved to be right next to him, leaning his elbows on the desk, looking up and down Nicholas’s face as if he was trying to find something. Probably taking in the dark circles and heavy eyelids and creased forehead. Nicholas looked away from him.
“I don’t think you’re going crazy,” Danny said gently.
Nicholas had to squeeze his eyes shut again.
The door opened suddenly and Frank came in uninvited, as was his habit. “All right, boys?”
“Hi Dad,” said Danny, standing up straight. “We’ve just —”
“Apparently that swan’s been spotted near the park,” Frank interrupted.
“Oh! We’ll go find it.” Danny hesitated and turned to Nicholas. “Right, Sergeant?”
No, we never catch that bloody swan and this is just delaying the investigation!
“Right,” said Nicholas.
On their way out of the station, Danny nudged his arm. “This is good, if we’re out on the beat we can be on the lookout for anything suspicious.”
The fact that this hadn't occurred to Nicholas made him think his cap that now labelled him as a twat might be accurate. Despite his face feeling heavy as stone, he managed to lift one corner of his mouth in what he hoped looked like enough of a smile to show his approval.
To absolutely nobody's surprise, the search for the swan ended up being a wild goose chase. Or a wild swan chase. As was the search for any potential killers. The most suspicious thing they saw was Mr Treacher's big coat, which Nicholas hardly noticed even when Danny pointed it out to him. The small glimmer of hope he'd felt leaving the station had well and truly buggered off, along with the bloody swan.
Imagine if the Andes' stupid jokes were true and the swan really is the killer.
It was definitely a bad day if Nicholas was starting to agree with the Andes.
He wasn't so much switched off as shut down. Or maybe just stuck. Jammed. Something had got caught in the gears in his mind, stopping them from turning, and sorting it out wasn't just a matter of "turn it off and on again". As far as he could tell, the only way he could get his gears unstuck was to solve the fucking case and he could only do that if his fucking gears were turning.
"Want anything from the shop?"
"Cornetto."
He might as well follow Danny's example. At the very least, it couldn't make things worse.
"No luck catching them killers, then?" Annette Roper asked as Danny bought the Cornettos and Nicholas stood at the back of the shop, staring into space until he actually processed her question. His previously blank face shifted into its familiar frown of concentration.
How the hell did she know about that?
"It's just the one killer actually," said Danny.
A spark of energy ignited somewhere inside Nicholas. Maybe it's not.
And just like that, the gears were turning again.