Chapter Text
The premier carriage of the Eurostar is, at six in the morning, both extremely comfortable and extremely quiet, and JP was treating this as a personal challenge.
"I'm just sayin'," he continues, for what Susie estimates is the fourth time in interments of the past 20 minutes, despite her having responded to the previous three with complete and total silence. "It's a nice name. Callum."
Outside the window there is nothing. The train is still cutting through the dark belly of the Channel Tunnel, and there is nothing to look at, nothing to fix her eyes on, which means she can't convincingly pretend to be absorbed in the scenery. She tries anyway.
"Strong name," JP continues, undeterred, spinning his coffee cup slowly on the table between them. He is wearing sunglasses. Inside. Susie has not addressed this. She does not have the energy. "Classic, but not boring. Like…you can imagine callin' that name across a garden, can't you."
Susie does not deign to give a response. Maybe she should just be glad that he only starts up when Eddie’s out of earshot.
"Or across a kitchen in the mornin'—"
"JP." But her patience does have its limits.
"I'm just paintin' a picture—"
"Stop paintin', then."
He grins at her over the rim of his sunglasses. He is, infuriatingly, exactly as awake as he was when they'd met at St Pancras at quarter past five, bounding across the concourse, simultaneously sipping two coffees, which still couldn’t explain the energy that had made both Susie and Eddie stop and stare at him in something approaching genuine concern. How are you like this, Eddie had asked, and JP had simply shrugged and said I haven't been to sleep yet, have I?
Eddie was currently at the far end of the carriage, where a steward had materialised with a refreshments trolley approximately a minute ago and Eddie, ever the responsible, had gone to get them all tea. The moment he stood up again, JP leaned across the table with the focused energy of a man who had been waiting for precisely this opportunity.
He leans in a little further now, dropping his voice to something that is probably meant to be subtle and absolutely is not. "Look," he says, "all I'm sayin' is—" His eyes flick briefly, pointedly, toward the far end of the carriage, and back to her. "If you're not gonna do anythin' about what's right in front of you—"
Susie shifts to look at him fully for the first time. The look she gives him is the kind that has made grown men shrivel into their seats.
JP does not shrivel, if anything he blooms with the attention. "—then Dr. Ashworth is, objectively, a very good option. Looks like he irons his shirts and knows exactly what to do with a woman’s blood pressure—"
"You want to finish that sentence?" Susie says with faux pleasantry.
"Not particularly," he admits.
"Right." She turns back to the window. The tunnel has given way now, finally, to the flat dark of the countryside, and she can see the very edge of something on the horizon. She wants to laser focus on it.
"He is fit though," JP says, to her reflection in the glass. "Even you'd have to—"
"One more word," Susie says, "and I will throw you off this train."
"We're doin' a hundred and eighty miles an hour."
"I'm aware."
JP raises his hands, leaning back. He picks up his coffee. He is quiet for exactly eleven seconds, which Susie knows because she counts them.
"He's got a lovely jawline though—"
She doesn't look at him. She simply kicks the tip of her boot straight under the table and hard onto his shin.
"Oi!" He leans down to rub at it, betrayed, and she goes back to the window, valiantly trying to avoid the glares of at least 3 other passengers and their interrupted naps, missing Eddie’s concerned look back as well.
The horizon is changing colour, barely, the blue thinning toward something grey-gold at its edges. She watches the dark fields roll past and says nothing, and JP, finally, blessedly, mutters something under his breath and goes back to his coffee.
Eddie reappears at the end of their table, three cups balanced carefully between his hands, and JP brightens immediately.
"Cheers, mate," he says, reaching for the nearest cup. "You're a saint."
"Have you been winding her up?" Eddie asks, looking between them, setting Susie's tea in front of her, along with a pack of jammie dodgers, before sliding into the seat next to her. She tries not to feel too pleased when she notices they’re her favorite raspberry jam, the ones she tends to favor during tea time at Halstead.
"I've been havin' a conversation."
"Has it been a good conversation?"
"One of us has been enjoyin' it," JP says cheerfully, and Susie wraps both hands around her cup and tries not to give any more of herself away glaring straight at him or worse, splashing this tea right into his stupid, smug face.
The thing about recon, Eddie has come to understand, is that it is almost entirely unremarkable and requires you to look like you find it even more unremarkable than it already is.
He'd learned that in a different context, standing checkpoint on the Afghan border at twenty-five, in forty-degree heat, watching vehicles queue in the distance and running the same calculation on a loop: normal, normal, normal, not normal. The skill, his commanding officer had told him, wasn't in spotting the threat. It was looking like you hadn't. Looking like you were just standing there. Looking like you had absolutely nowhere better to be and nothing particular on your mind. He'd been decent at it then. He was better at it now, though he suspected the version of himself that had earned the rank of Captain would find the current application, standing outside a Belgian port in a peacoat, hands in pockets, watching a dock worker eat a sandwich, faintly undignified.
Still. The principle held.
They'd arrived in Bruges mid-morning, taken a car straight to Zeebrugge, and spent the better part of the day doing precisely nothing that would register as notable to anyone watching, which was the entire point. Eleven names on the list, all port workers, a mix of middling enough in rank to be overlooked and senior enough to matter. The kind of people you needed onside if you wanted cargo to move through without anyone getting curious about it.
JP had lasted until about half two before his cousins had materialised somewhere near the harbour mouth and he'd looked between them both with a slightly too-casual expression and said I'll, er, catch yous up, and that had been that.
"You're not surprised," Eddie said, watching him go.
"Are you?" Susie didn't look up from the dossier.
She had a way of watching people that didn't look like watching. To anyone clocking her she was just a woman waiting for something, mildly bored, coffee in hand, eyes on the middle distance. Not worth a second look. Eddie had noticed the reality of it some time ago and found it impressive in a way that was, if he was being honest with himself, beyond professional admiration.
What struck him now was the way she was doing it. The cargo supervisor had moved off the yard and onto the street alongside it, and Susie hadn't turned to follow him once. She didn't need to. Eddie tracked her eyeline and understood it slowly, the wing mirror of a parked lorry, angled just enough. The broad dark window of the chandlery across the road. The curved chrome of a van's side panel two vehicles back, catching the afternoon light. She'd mapped them before he'd even clocked why she was standing still. The supervisor moved through the street and Susie watched him in pieces, on surfaces, and the whole thing was so unhurried and so quietly precise that if Eddie hadn't been paying close attention he'd have seen nothing but a woman finishing her coffee.
You didn't get that calibrated from training. It came from somewhere else. From situations where not having it would have cost you something serious. The thought arrived quietly and sat badly; the image it produced, of a younger Susie, in some situation that had demanded exactly this, produced in him something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite unease but lived uncomfortably between the two.
He made himself look back at the yard. At the workers. At anything else.
They'd ticked off the first six names by five o'clock. The fourth had knocked off early — a stroke of luck, actually, because it meant they'd have a better window tomorrow — and by the time they'd crossed off the last notation on Susie's list, the afternoon had settled into the specific quality of grey particular to Belgian port towns in the shoulder season: flat-skied, sea-smelling, not entirely unpleasant.
By then Eddie had also established, with some certainty, that unless he physically moved them both to somewhere with actual food on a menu, Susie would simply carry on indefinitely, sustained by too many cups of tea, four biscuits, and a single protein bar he'd watched her eat at three like it was a full meal. He found himself wondering, not for the first time, whether she was like this back in London too, whether she simply forgot, or whether there was nobody around to notice. And then, because his brain was apparently committed to making his life difficult, he found himself thinking that it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable, would it, to show up occasionally. With food. Maybe a movie too. Just to make sure. Perfectly normal thing for a — partner — to do. And then: what if she already had someone over.
The thought had absolutely no business producing the reaction it did. It was gone in a second, sharp and sourceless and completely without justification, but a second was apparently long enough, because Susie glanced back at him with her forehead slightly creased.
"You alright?"
"Starving," he said, and his eyes dropped, just briefly, just for the span of a single catastrophic moment, to her mouth, and then back up, and then immediately to the middle distance, somewhere over her left shoulder, where they were going to stay indefinitely. The back of his neck went fully, traitorously hot. He cleared his throat.
"I mean — have you eaten anything today that wasn't a biscuit?"
The wind coming off the North Sea was vicious. It pulled at Eddie’s coat and sent Susie’s hair into her eyes as they walked towards the sea wall. They settled on a weathered bench overlooking the harbour. Between them, they held a paper cone of chips, a pair of shrimp croquettes and a portion of bitterballen neither of them had ordered. The kind old lady at the kiosk insisted on it the moment she heard their accents, already reaching before they'd finished ordering. Her eyes moved between them, unhurried and entirely certain.
First time in Zeebrugge?
Second, Eddie said, with a slight nod toward Susie that made it theirs.
The woman smiled so wide her eyes crinkled closed. Said something in Flemish Susie only half caught, but didn't need to. She pressed the bitterballen into Eddie's hands and waved off the money.
Such a good-looking couple she said, in English this time, as they walked out.
The cold coming off the water was explanation enough for whatever was happening in her chest.
Beyond them, the grey water rolled beneath a pale gray sky. Cranes moved slowly over the port, their metal arms rising and dipping between stacks of containers. Ferries groaned in the distance, and gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking whenever anyone came too close to their food.
Susie watched the waves break white against the harbour wall, slow and inevitable. Eddie watched the same sea reflected in her eyes, more grey-blue today and shifting, stormy in the flat afternoon light, pulling at something in him the way deep water pulls, quiet and constant and impossible to reason with. He looked away. He looked back. He thought of sirens. He thought of sailors who heard the song and understood, maybe, that drowning was not the worst thing. That some men let go of the rope on purpose.
He wanted her to look at him. What came out was: "You're not going to say it's beneath you, then."
She glanced at him sideways. "Beneath me?"
"This." He nodded at the dossier sitting between them on the bench. "Port workers. Hand-shaking. Low level." He paused. "You said once—"
"Oh, I remember." She was quiet for a moment. A cargo ship moved at the mouth of the harbour, enormous and slow and almost silent from this distance.
"Well, after everything with that shit-eating belgian cunt, it doesn't hurt to be on top of this."
Eddie felt something flicker in him at the mention of de Groot. He thought of the first time they'd come here, how she'd turned to him and asked, plainly and without performance, if he could accompany her? Like his answer mattered. Like she'd come to him specifically. He hadn't forgotten what that felt like. He wasn't sure he was done wanting to feel it again.
"Even if it's further down the chain than I'd normally bother with." She tilted her head, just slightly. "I trust my own ability to read people well enough, at least. May as well make use of it."
"Right." Eddie nodded, looking out at the water. After a moment he said, "How'd you get so good at that, anyway? Reading people."
Susie gave him a look which said: are you serious?
"I mean it," he said.
She was quiet long enough that he thought she wasn't going to answer.
"I imagine it started around the time I realised I was heir to a criminal syndicate."
He laughed, a little surprised, and leaned forward on his knees. ‘That must have been formative.’
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘What about you, Captain?’
‘Me?’
‘You’re rather good at it too. Understanding people.’
He considered the question, his gaze fixed on the water.
‘Growing up in my family helped.’
‘I suppose the Hornimans are an eccentric bunch.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’ He picked up a chip but didn’t eat it. ‘There were a lot of strong personalities. Freddy’s swings. My mother’s…pretenses. My father’s temper.’
He exhaled. "Makes you hyperaware of everyone around you. You stop takin' things at face value pretty quickly." He shook his head. "It's a miracle Charly turned out as steady as she did, with all of that."
"It's not much of a miracle," Susie said, matter-of-factly, "if she had a big brother as thoughtful as you."
Eddie went still. He opened his mouth, closed it, and turned back to the sea, and the back of his neck went very slightly pink, which Susie filed away without comment.
"I — that's not really—" he started.
"It's not a compliment that needs deflecting," she said. "It's just an observation." A pause, and something shifted in her expression. "I only say it because I hope I managed something similar. For Jack."
Eddie turned to look at her properly. Getting anything personal from Susie Glass was, as a general rule, like trying to pull something out of solid concrete, and he knew enough to know that when she offered something, you didn't interrupt.
She kept her eyes on the harbour. "After Mum died, I became — his main adult influence. More or less. Wasn't much of an adult myself at the time." The wind came off the water and moved through her hair and she let it. Her cheeks were red with the cold, and looked soft. Eddie dug his fingers into a tight fist, resisting the instinct to reach over and tuck it back, the strand across her cheek, the ones the wind kept finding.
"I did my best. We've always had each other, Jack and I — that's never been in question." A beat. "But I wonder sometimes. Whether I did enough. Emotionally. Whether my—tendency to manage things. To keep moving and not sit with it—" She cut off. "Whether that shaped things for him more than it should've."
The water shifted below the promenade, restless and grey-green, and the cranes stood still against the flat sky.
"Jack turned out well, Susie." Eddie's voice was quiet, not soft, she wouldn't have wanted soft. Just certain. "He cares for you as much as you care for him. From what I've seen, he's a good person. Respectful." A pause, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "A gentleman, really."
Susie let out a breath that was almost a laugh, brief and real and slightly unwilling, and shook her head, and Eddie looked quietly pleased with himself in a way he was trying very hard to hide.
"Thanks, Edward," she said, and there was something underneath it that neither of them was going to acknowledge.
A moment passed. The cargo ship had disappeared around the breakwater.
"My mum loved the sea," Susie said, without transition, without preamble, in the same tone you'd use to remark on the weather. "Any body of water, really. She could sit for hours at a river, a lake, didn't matter which. Insisted we live near the coast so she could hear it at night." She looked down at the paper wrapper in her lap, then back at the water, eye tracking the way the wind dragged long lines across its surface, up to the low clouds sitting so heavy you couldn't quite tell where the sea ended and the sky began. "I think that's part of why this doesn't bother me. Comin' somewhere like this. Sitting here like this." She was quiet for a moment. "She'd have liked it."
Eddie said nothing. He filed it away, carefully, in the part of his mind where he kept the things she'd let slip without meaning to, which was not a large collection. Jack had told him once, offhandedly, that they didn't really talk about their mum, in the tone of someone who'd long since stopped registering the silence as strange. Eddie had thought about that more than was probably warranted. He thought about a lot of things where Susie Glass was concerned more than was probably warranted.
He sat, and the water moved below them, and the wind came and went, and after a while Susie stood up, folded the paper wrapper in half, and looked for a bin.
"Come on, then," she said. "We've still got notes to type up before tonight."
The bar was not what Susie had expected. For a Tuesday evening in what was, by any measure, a quietly unremarkable hotel, it was buzzing, tables filled and voices overlapping. She'd noticed it when they walked in and filed it away without comment, the way she filed most things away, that faint background note of something doesn't quite add up here. Some kind of event on, maybe. She hadn't thought to ask.
Their table was in the corner, which Susie had chosen without making a thing of it, her back to the wall and a clear sightline to the door.
JP had reappeared near seven, inexplicably cheerful and smelling faintly of herring, and dropped into the chair across from them with the energy of a man that didn't match someone supposedly awake for more than twenty-four hours.
They'd gone over the day's notes. They'd mapped tomorrow. They'd finished a round. JP was now on his second beer and had that terrible look in his eyes again, which Susie recognised from the train and had been quietly watching approach for the past ten minutes like a weather front.
"So," JP drawled out, swirling his glass. "The accountant."
Eddie looked up from his phone.
Susie narrowed her eyes. "What about him?"
"Reckon he's a yes?"
"He's viable," Susie said carefully. "We'll confirm tomorrow once we've—"
"Yeah, yeah, 'course." JP waved a hand. "I meant—" He paused, pressing his lips together, and she could see the exact moment he decided to just go for it.
By a stroke of luck, Eddie's phone buzzed. He glanced at it, then around the table, with the mild frown. "I'll go see about the rooms," he said, already pushing his chair back. "Haven't had confirmation from the hotel yet." He looked between them. "Won't be a minute."
"Take your time," JP said, with suspect generosity.
Eddie headed toward the bar, where the front desk attendant had been hovering in and out of view for the past hour, and JP waited until he was a reasonable distance away before he leaned conspiratorily, without preamble.
"The accountant."
Susie’s fingers tightened over the beer glass. “Why the sudden interest?”
“Reckon he caught your eye a bit?" The bar noise swelled briefly and JP's voice lifted automatically to compensate. "He was fit."
"Do you know how unprofessional you’re being right now?," Susie said, her voice reaching a deadly tone.
"I—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "Fair enough." He held up a hand. Then, with the expression of someone who has merely changed tactics rather than retreated: "Back to Dr. Ashworth, then."
"He's clever, yeah?" JP continued, deciding on bulldozing on, voice pitched slightly too high for Susie's liking, slightly too carrying. "You need someone who's not gonna bore you ‘nd he's got a proper job that doesn't involve" he gestured at the general vicinity of everything — "all this. And he's clearly not shy — comin' round the farm as regular as he does—"
"He's there for Charly—"
"He stays for tea only when you’re ‘round." The crowd noise swelled again and JP went with it, and Susie felt her fingers tighten around her glass in a way that had nothing to do with holding it steady. “Bit hard to keep your eyes on the patient when you can't keep 'em off someone else, innit."
Her jaw tightened. One beat. Two.
"I'm just sayin'," JP said, at a volume that Susie felt was genuinely unnecessary, "someone ought to—" and something in his tone made Susie glance up, past his shoulder, to where Eddie was still at the far end of the bar, head down, waiting on the attendant. She looked back at JP. His eyes slid sideways, briefly, in a direction that was not toward his beer, and snapped back. "—and it doesn't seem like anyone else is movin' anytime soon. So it might as well be someone worth your time."
Susie looked at him for a long, steady moment, considering whether the relentless chatter of the crowd around them could hide a kick somewhere that would put him off his opinions for at least a week.
"Are you finished?" She strained out, rationality winning at the very last second.
"Largely, yeah."
EDM throbbed somewhere through the walls. JP drank his beer. Susie had almost successfully convinced herself the conversation was over.
When her phone buzzed.
She looked at it. Unknown number.
JP made a sound. It was a very small sound, barely anything, a sort of compressed inhale that nonetheless contained enormous amounts of information.
Susie looked up at him slowly.
His face was doing something between triumphant and slightly nervous, which was a new combination on him.
"JP," she said, very quietly. "What did you do."
He said nothing. He looked, for once in his life, like he was thinking carefully about his next sentence. She looked down at the message.
Hi Susie, this is Callum Ashworth — Callum, the doctor, from Charly's.
Sorry, I realise that's a fairly odd way to introduce myself over text. I got your number from a JP? That I met around Halstead. Hope it’s not too abrupt and so no pressure at all if this is entirely unwelcome. He mentioned a business trip? Hope it’s going well.
Susie stared at it.
It was not what she'd expected. Confident, smooth, some variation on whatever JP's idea of charming was, which would have made the whole thing easy to dismiss. Instead it was a bit genuine. And disarming, honestly, in a way she was choosing not to examine.
She put the phone face-down on the table.
"Poor lad's probably been absolutely agonising over how to word that," JP said, with the sympathy of someone who found the whole thing deeply entertaining. "I only thought to text him, what, this morning. He must've thought a bunch."
"You gave my number to someone I've met thrice," Susie said, "without asking me."
"You'd have said no."
"Exactly."
"Which is why I didn't ask." He looked entirely unrepentant. "Look, I'm not sayin' marry him. I'm sayin' see what happens. He's clearly not the cocky prat I thought he might be, which is a point in his favour if you ask me—"
"Nobody asked—"
"And you're sat there pretendin' you don't think he's fit when we both know you clocked him on day one—"
"This conversation," Susie said, with enormous control, "is over."
She picked up her glass. She took a long sip. She did not look at her phone, which was still face-down on the table, and which she was absolutely not thinking about. The text was surprising, that's all. That was a neutral observation. It didn't mean anything.
Susie looked at the ceiling briefly, with the expression of someone requesting patience from a higher power, and received none.
She was formulating a response to JP that would end this definitively when she noticed him look to the side, past her shoulder, and his expression settled into an impression of innocence.
She turned.
Eddie was making his way back to the table, looking like he had a mildly unfortunate conversation at a front desk, and in his hand, held up slightly as he approached, was a single key card, dangling between two fingers.
"Right," he said, setting it on the table. "So there's been a bit of a situation with the reservation." He looked between them both. "Hotel's fully booked. Cactus festival, apparently, been sold out for days."
Susie stared at him. "We're clearly in the wrong plant business."
"It's a music thing," JP said.
Both of them looked at him.
"How do you know that," Eddie said.
JP opened his mouth. Closed it. Picked up his beer.
"I've rung round," Eddie continued, watching him. "There's nothin' else available. Not here—"
"Not that there's much choice here," Susie said, muttered under her breath.
"—not Lissewege, nothing within any reasonable distance." Eddie gestured at the key card. "There's one room left." Another pause.
The silence that followed felt like years.
JP inhaled very slowly through his nose. His mouth pressed together. His eyes moved between Eddie and Susie and back to Eddie with the careful, deliberate energy of a man exercising the most profound self-restraint of his entire life, and losing.
Without prompt, he downed the last of his beer in one go.
"Ah," JP said, sitting up straight and with great ceremony. "Cousins are callin'." He was on his feet before either of them had processed it, jacket grabbed off the back of the chair in one smooth motion. "Pub near the ‘arbour. Offer still stands if either of yous fancy it, but—" He looked between them one final time, and the wink he produced was slow, enormous, and completely without shame. "Don't go doing anythin' I wouldn't."
"JP—" Susie started.
But he was already gone, weaving between the tables toward the door, the grin on his face visible even from the back.