Chapter Text
Tim Derry was not a smart man.
He’d known this—
Well, maybe not known.
But he’d been given a lot of evidence over the years that he was, and maybe is, unequivocally dumb.
The first piece of evidence came from a maths worksheet in Year Four. Mrs. Calloway had written See me in red pen at the top, and when Tim had shuffled to her desk after the bell, she’d looked at him with something between pity and exhaustion and said, “Timothy, for question twelve, you’ve written ‘because it’s sad.’ Question twelve was a two-step multiplication problem.”
Tim had stared at the page. The words were there in his own careful rounded handwriting, sitting in the answer box.
He remembered writing them.
Though, he remembered the problem. Something about sheep?
And feeling, with absolute certainty, that the number wasn't the point. The sheep were being counted by a butcher!
It was sad.
“I got distracted,” he’d said.
Mrs. Calloway had sighed. She hadn’t called his parents. No one ever called his parents.
There were other moments. They stacked up over time until they became a wall.
In Year Six, he'd asked Mr. Hendricks why the sky was blue. Mr. Hendricks had said, "Because it is, Timothy. Now open your textbook to page forty-seven."
…Tim had sort of wanted to know about light maybe, about the why behind the colour.
But Mr. Hendricks had already moved on, and Tim had learned that some questions weren't going to be answered, and maybe that it wasn’t worth asking them.
In Year Eight, he'd handed in a story for English. It was about a detective who solved crimes by talking to animals. He'd been proud of it. He'd stayed up late writing it, which he never did. Mrs. Albright had given him a D and written unrealistic in the margin. She hadn't said a single word about the plot, or the characters, or the fact that Tim had stayed up late for the first time in his life because he actually cared about something.
He hadn't written another story after that.
In Year Ten, he'd been placed in the bottom set for everything. Apparently not because he was stupid. He'd tested average on the cognitive assessments, whatever that meant!
But he’d later find out that sometimes, they put kids there who didn't raise their hands, who didn't finish their homework, or who didn't cause trouble but didn't excel either. Sometimes, the ones they don’t quite have the time for that.
Tim had looked around that classroom and seen fourteen other kids. Some rambunctious, some dull. All… uninterested in learning.
And he'd thought:
This is where he belongs.
That was the thing about growing up in Denbrook. The town didn’t have high expectations, and it certainly didn’t have the resources to enforce the ones it pretended to have. The school had one textbook per three students, a science lab that hadn’t been updated since the seventies, and a careers advisor who told every boy the same thing: Follow the family business, farm work, trade school, or the military, if you want to see something different.
And clearly, he wasn’t good or lucky enough for any of those really.
There were other professions maybe. If he looked hard enough.
But he never did.
So, he’d drifted. Through secondary school with C’s and D’s and the occasional pity pass. Through a brief humiliating attempt at community college where he’d failed a basic writing course because he didn’t even read a single book they asked. Because he just… didn’t want to.
Or maybe he did want to, but the books had been thick and boring and no one had explained why they mattered. The instructor had talked about themes and narrative structure, and Tim had stared at the pages and seen nothing but words.
He'd gone to office hours once and asked for help.
The instructor had said, "Have you tried reading slower?"
Tim had not gone back.
After leaving that unhelpful place, that left him with far less opportunities.
But thankfully, while people usually care about smart people with potential and growth, people generally just appreciated someone who would do what they’re told.
Even if that didn’t quite work out too well.
He stocked shelves at the Co-op, where the manager had timed him with a stopwatch and told him he was too slow. He cleaned gutters for old Mrs. Pembroke, who'd paid him half what she'd promised because he'd missed a spot. He also helped Mr. Pritchard muck out his stables, which was the only job he'd actually liked because the horses didn't judge him and didn't expect him to be anything other than what he was but even then it didn't pay enough to live on.
However, that was enough, right?
Just work.
He didn’t need to think at all if all he had to do… was do as he was told.
So, he'd learned in those years to keep his head down. To not ask questions and to do what he was told and collect his pay and go home.
Because in truth, asking questions led to raised eyebrows and the quiet message that he, specifically, wasn't meant to know things.
Tim had internalized that message and swallowed it whole. Made it a part of himself until he didn’t realize he was even doing it.
You're not smart. You're not capable. Don't try. You'll only embarrass yourself.
So, he'd stopped trying.
Then, the police.
Denbrook’s constabulary was a joke. Everyone knew it. It was one part-time sergeant and two community support officers who mostly just patrolled without actually paying attention.
Tim had applied on a dare from his mate Craig, who’d said, “Mate, you couldn’t police a playground.”
Tim had gotten the job.
The sergeant, old Bill Hopkins, who was three months from retirement and had stopped caring sometime in the early nineties, had looked at Tim’s application, looked at Tim’s face, and said, “You can read and write?”
“Mostly,” Tim had said.
It was said with hardly any confidence.
…
“Good enough.”
Apparently, the police around here were desperate for applicants, because no one wanted to be a cop in this place. There was a bunch of empty space in the office because no one with a badge wanted to live somewhere the biggest crime was Mrs. Ogilvy’s prize marrows getting nicked. And truly, if they did want to stay here, it’s because they wanted to be a cop elsewhere eventually. No one who actually wanted to improve themselves by being an officer actually stayed here. Let alone apply.
So, he got it.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, there’d been no academy and definitely no training. He was told to don a uniform that didn’t quite fit and then was told to start working.
Bill had handed him some spare keys and said, “Don’t start any fires, and don’t talk to reporters.”
And Tim, twenty-two years old and already tired in a way he couldn’t name, had said, “Right.”
By the time he was twenty-four, everyone else had left the police. The sergeant retired, one of the officers found a better posting elsewhere, and the other just gave up on policing altogether.
For those two years, all he really did was follow orders.
And turns out, he was basically the last person interested in being a cop in Denbrook… at all.
So now, there really was no one else to tell him what to do.
In that time, he tried to be—uh, he was a bad cop for over five years doing… nothing really.
He went through the motions really, though most of the citizens just told him what was wrong if there was anything they noticed that he wasn’t doing well or right.
And he did that.
That was at least listening, right?
But he was still bad.
He… wasn’t corrupt at least? There was never any opportunity to be corrupt really. No one ever really tried to bribe him, at least as far as he remembers. Maybe the occasional free lunch to look the other way once, but it also wasn’t that serious, he thought.
There really wasn’t technically much crime to care about in Denbrook really. Even the slaughterhouse was just farming, something he knows the town kind of needed. Where else will they get their meats?
Really, he’d never been given the opportunity to actually be corrupt in a way that actually mattered. Maybe because he just wasn’t aware enough to actively be evil.
He doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.
He can also hardly be called cruel. He’s heard the horror stories of when the previous sergeant here actually cared. Turns out, having both a short temper and a misplaced sense of justice created an atmosphere of overwhelming fear.
The guy toned it down once he made a little girl cry.
No, he was bad in a different way.
One that people liked, only because he never actually did his job enough for people to be concerned about.
Useless.
The kind of useless that came from never being taught and from never asking.
Just fill out the form, Derry. Don’t worry about the boxes you don’t understand.
Sign here. It’s standard.
You don’t need to know why. Just do it.
And Tim had done it.
Because following was easier. He didn’t need to know anything to just follow what everyone wanted him to do. Which was mostly to stay out of the way and do his job.
And maybe because, he didn’t have to contend with the fact that he was not capable and not nearly intelligent enough for anything more.
And really, not knowing was easier! Not knowing meant he couldn’t be blamed when things went wrong. Not knowing meant the weight of a mistake landed on someone else: on whoever had told him to sign, whoever had handed him the form, and whoever had decided that Tim Derry didn’t need the full story.
There was a word for that, probably. A psychological term. Something a proper detective would learn in a proper training course.
Tim didn’t know it.
But he knew the feeling.
The way when the people asked him for something he wasn’t sure about, and he paused for far far too long, before trying to act like he knew so they wouldn’t realize he didn’t quite know what to do. They told him anyway.
The way his brain would slide off a difficult question like water off a waxed car. Where some part of him generally pondered about it, before deciding it wasn’t worth the time to actually think about it.
The way his eyes would glaze over when paperwork got complicated. It’d take a Youtube tutorial or two for him to finally get it down. If he got it done. Otherwise, it’d sit there unfinished.
The way he’d reach for the laptop after one paperwork and watch something else instead of another piece of paperwork again, 90% of the time.
He wasn’t worthless per se. Not exactly.
He could solve problems when they were right in front of him or things they told him to do. Mend the stuck gate latch, unclog a backed-up drain. He can even sort out a bloody sheep that has wandered onto the main road, no bother at all.
But abstract things? Complex problems that needed more than a hand or two? Things with multiple steps with mixed results and devastating consequences?
Consequences that rippled out like stones in a pond?
Those, he’d learned to ignore.
Because if he didn’t see the ripples, he didn’t have to feel them.