And If Thou Wilt, Forget

“Do you really think they’re dating?” Martin asked quietly.

Tim looked up from his laptop, the W already forming on his lips, to see that Martin wasn’t looking at him. He was looking towards the entrance to the Archives. In that instant, Tim put two and two together.

“Who, Jon and that police officer?” Tim glanced over his shoulder in time to see the door shut. “Nah. I think Jon just told me that to keep me from hitting on her when she comes to visit.”

That, thankfully, pulled Martin out of whatever weird head space he was in. He looked at Tim, startled. “You—you have a partner.”

“And I routinely flirt with people to get information out of them,” Tim pointed out. “Didn’t say I was going to do anything serious with her.” He closed his laptop, stood, and patted Martin consolingly on the shoulder. “I don’t think Jon’s in a state to date anyone right now, Martin, but I think it makes him feel better if he thinks I believe that.”

Martin looked beseechingly up at Tim. “Then why does she keep coming by?”

Tim shrugged. “Tell you what. I’m going to lunch. If she’s still out there when I get out, I’ll ask her. Go get a cup of tea, and if Sasha’s not back in twenty minutes, you have my permission to pour it onto her laptop.”

“That’d be a waste of good tea,” Martin mumbled, but he did manage a small smile.

Tim stretched and headed for the door. It was a couple weeks to Halloween, and things were…things were happening. He and Gerry had gone into the tunnels a few times since the first time to see how Jon was progressing, but not often. Tim always wound up oddly drained and shaky when they spent too long down there, which made Gerry worry, and while he’d teased him about fussing it actually touched him. He was also pretty sure he’d seen, heard, or felt someone else down there on a couple of occasions, which wasn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world but definitely wasn’t the best. It was possible that whoever or whatever was down there had killed Gertrude, but they’d seen no evidence that it was armed. Also, why would it have let them continue to wander around down there without confronting or taking them out, too? Still, it was something, and Tim couldn’t help but think about his thoughts the first time he’d been down there about the sorts of creatures that dwelt in labyrinths.

Sasha was still taking extended lunches five days out of eleven. Martin was still working overtime trying to play peacemaker. Tim was still trying to figure out why he cared so much, why he didn’t just leave them all to take whatever was coming to them, metaphorically wash his hands of them all, and focus on stopping the Unknowing. He got why he was so protective of Martin, obviously, not liking Martin would be like kicking a puppy. What he really didn’t understand was his conflict over Jon. He wanted to hate him, wanted to be angry at him for what he’d done, wanted to blame him for Gertrude’s death. And he did. But coupled with that, and often overriding his desires, was an instinct—no, an innate need—to protect him, to make sure he was safe, to keep him whole and secure.

Jon, for his part, was probably still plotting to kill them all.

Tim stepped out the side door into the late October sunlight and almost ran smack into one Officer Basira Hussein of the Metropolitan Police, dressed in plainclothes and hovering in the courtyard like a stage door Johnny. She reeled back a couple steps, looking startled and annoyed. “Oh—sorry. Uh, Tim, right?”

“Yep. And you’re…Basira?” Jon had blurted out her name a while back when Tim had mentioned she’d been by looking for him, but they’d never been formally introduced.

“Yeah.” Basira jerked her chin towards the Institute. “Was looking for Sims. Is he around?”

“It’s his physical therapy day.” Allegedly, anyway. Tim was pretty sure he was actually stalking people when he said he was at the doctor’s, because he sure didn’t look like he was taking proper care of himself despite Martin’s—and Tim’s—best efforts. “He’ll be back in, like…twenty minutes maybe. Anything I can help you with, or is this not professional?”

Basira recoiled slightly, and Tim suppressed a smirk. Score one for Martin’s luck, then. “No! No, it’s nothing like that, I just—we’re working on a project.”

Tim studied Basira for a moment. She was a cop, not a detective, and he didn’t think she’d been with the force long, maybe five years. She struck him as someone who’d joined to fix the system from within, to do good, to help people, who really believed—or had once—in the whole “serve and protect” thing. Maybe a bit jaded now. Point was, she hadn’t joined to hunt down bad guys, which meant she probably hadn’t been Hunt-touched beforehand. She showed signs of having come in contact with it, but in the sense of sitting on the fence watching the chase go past than actually participating in it herself. Maybe she’d followed the hounds a time or two, but she wasn’t out front baying for vulpine blood.

That was good. It meant he didn’t have to put her down to keep her from spending time with the Archivist, and where had that thought come from?

Aloud, he said, “If it’s related to…you know, all this…I’ve actually been at the job longer than Jon has. I was Gertrude Robinson’s assistant before he came down here.”

At that, Basira’s gaze sharpened, just slightly. “You were?”

“You on duty, Officer….?” Tim prompted. He knew she wasn’t, but it never hurt to get it out in the open.

“Hussein. No, it’s my day off, ‘s why I’m here.” Basira’s hand strayed briefly to her pocket, then away. “Still. Mind if I talk to you? Off the record. Didn’t know Gertrude had an assistant before she died.”

“I don’t mind.” Unconsciously, Tim touched his own pocket and wasn’t surprised to feel the hard, vibrating little square of a tape recorder running full blast. The damn things turned up sometimes. He didn’t bother bringing it out, instead nodding at the wall. “We can sit here and chat. It’s pretty private.”

“Sure.” Basira sat down. “When did you start working for Gertrude Robinson?”

“Three years ago. Thirty-seven months and ten days, if you want to get technical. About a year and a half before she—died, I guess.” Tim sighed. “Still getting used to that.”

“After a year and a half?”

“For the first year I was convinced she was just missing,” Tim said ruefully. “No body, you know? I know there was all that blood, but honestly, I figured there was no way it could all be Gertrude’s. And nothing else was messed up.”

Basira eyed him. “You weren’t around when Bouchard found the blood, were you?”

Tim shook his head. “She had me on a trip to the Faroe Islands. Investigating one of the statements…did you nab that case when they first found the blood?”

“Honestly, don’t think the brass took it too seriously until we found the body,” Basira admitted. “What do you know about Section Thirty-One?”

“Of the Freedom of Information Act? It’s the part that restricts certain information regarding certain cases from being accessible by the public, right?”

“Yeah. Well, stuff like what you lot do here? That’s a Section Thirty-One.”

Tim nodded. “Makes sense. The general public thinks what we do is bullshit anyway, so I can only imagine how they’d react if they pulled a murder file and found that the cause of death was officially determined to be ‘removal of all bones without damaging the skin’. But just finding blood on a desk wouldn’t qualify for that, would it?”

Basira sighed. “Anything involving you lot is an automatic Section Thirty-One, so I don’t think they really bothered to investigate when it was just inexplicable blood. Then your boy found the body, and now we have to investigate. I tried arguing that it doesn’t look paranormal, but no dice.” She sighed. “What was she like, anyway? Nobody really seems to know, except Bouchard, and Daisy says she’d rather chew off her own arm and beat him to death with it than talk to him more than she has to. Even if she had the time, which she doesn’t.”

“Daisy?”

“Tonner. My partner. She’s CID, which means this is technically her case, but she’s the only Sectioned detective right now, so she’s swamped.” Basira eyed Tim. “So, Gertrude?”

“She was…how would you describe her?” Tim asked rhetorically. “Tough. No nonsense. Honestly, she could be a stone cold bitch when she wanted, or needed, to be. Ruthlessly efficient and suffered no fools.” He grinned rakishly. “Clowns were okay, though, so we got on fine.”

Basira didn’t seem impressed, which, fair. “How was she as a boss?”

“Great. She made sure I knew what I needed to do and left me to it. And she always listened when I had a suggestion. Didn’t necessarily take it, but at least she gave me a fair hearing, and she never said no just for the sake of saying no, you feel me? It wasn’t about power. If she said no, it was because she had a good reason, and she’d always tell me what that reason was.” Tim snorted. “She’d been doing this fifty years, so she was a little set in her ways sometimes, but she was living proof that you can teach an old dog new tricks.”

“The exception that proves the rule, huh?”

“That’s not actually what that phrase means, or at least not what it meant originally, but based on how it’s understood now, yeah.” Tim stretched and sighed. “I miss her.”

“Better to work under than Sims?” Basira asked shrewdly.

“She certainly knew her job better than he does,” Tim said, allowing a bit of bitterness to creep into his tone. “He’s not great at taking suggestions, either. Thinks it’s a judgment on his authority or his ability or whatever. And he’s so goddamned paranoid and secretive lately, it makes it really hard to get anything done.”

Basira’s gaze wandered across the courtyard without really focusing on anything. “What do you mean, paranoid and secretive?”

A warning klaxon, loud and clear, sounded in Tim’s head. Despite seeming distracted by the turning leaves, Basira’s attention was one hundred and ten percent laser focused on him. She was fishing for information. No conversations with a cop were ever truly off the record, even without the tape recorder spooling out in his pocket and archiving them, and she would absolutely use anything she got from him in her investigation. She might or might not reveal her source, probably wouldn’t, but the fact of the matter remained that if—when—she took what he gave her and used it, it would be on him for giving it to her, no matter how innocently. He knew better, even if Jon didn’t. Whatever Jon believed their “project” to be, Basira—and her partner—believed Jon had murdered Gertrude Robinson and were looking for proof.

So are you, whispered a small voice in his brain, but the rest of him—the part that had activated and enfolded itself like armor around him as soon as the alarm started going off, snapped back at it. That was different! He was looking for proof before acting, not looking for proof so he could act. More importantly, the Archivist was his responsibility, his to protect and defend, and his to avenge. Outsiders and others had no right to interfere in finding that truth and exacting that justice, and whatever Jonathan Sims had done, even to Gertrude Robinson, he was the Archivist now. If he had killed the last Archivist, then Tim could and would deal with that in whatever way he needed to, but nobody else got to make that decision, nobody else could make that decision.

Okay, where had that come from?

All of that passed through Tim’s mind in a flash, quick enough that there was no noticeable break in the conversation before he shrugged. “Like a long-tailed cat in a rocking chair factory, you know? Won’t eat anything we try to give him, won’t drink anything unless Martin is the one that brings it to him, first one in and last one out. He’s making backup recordings of everything and thinks we don’t know about it. He’s afraid that whatever happened to Gertrude, he’ll be next.”

Basira tilted her head at Tim. “Do you have any suspects? Any idea who might have wanted her dead, I mean?”

“I mean, everybody? She’d been doing this for fifty years. All the world was her enemy, and when they caught her, they would kill her.” Tim shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I can only aspire to be as hated as she was by the time I’m her age. Doing a pretty good job of it, if I do say so myself. Gertrude didn’t care about making friends, just about getting the job done. She told me ‘thank you’ once and I thought Elias was going to have a heart attack from the shock. But if you’re asking me if I can think of who might have shot her and then hidden her body in the tunnels under the Institute that even I wasn’t aware of, no, not a clue.”

“If you had to take a guess,” Basira pressed.

“If I had to take a guess,” Tim said thoughtfully. “Well. It would be someone with access to the Institute, who would have had a reason to go down into the Archives—maybe to ask about information on a statement. It would be someone who had a vested interest in Gertrude Robinson no longer being in charge of those Archives, and maybe with having someone specific take her place. It would be someone she wouldn’t expect to even try to kill her, at least not right then, and it would be someone she trusted, or at least pretended to trust, enough to let them get close enough to shoot her, probably because they were the most boring, inoffensive looking person in the entire Institute. So when I put it like that, it’s obvious. It has to be Elias Bouchard.”

Basira’s eyes narrowed. “You’re mocking me.”

“I’m not mocking you. I just don’t know what you want me to tell you,” Tim said, spreading his hands out, palms up. “I don’t know who killed Gertrude Robinson, and if I did, believe me, I would have done something about it. I have no proof. Do I have vague suspicions? Yeah, sure, everybody does. Maybe if we were closer friends I’d be willing to share them with you, but the fact is, Miss Hussein, I don’t know you from Adam. I don’t know you well enough to know if you’ll take my ‘vague suspicions’ as actionable tips or engage in an intellectual exercise like we’re discussing the season finale of Dallas. And I cannot run that risk, because I will become responsible for the results. We don’t have an Owslafa here.”

“A what?”

“Don’t—nothing. Inside joke.” Tim took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry. I’m happy to tell you anything you want to know about Gertrude Robinson, up to and including the last conversation I had with her, since I doubt Elias actually reported to the police that I got texts from her after he supposedly reported her missing…then again, Jon got texts allegedly from Martin that were definitely sent by Jane Prentiss, so who knows who actually sent me those texts. Maybe it was her killer, I dunno. Or maybe she didn’t die when he said she did. Whatever the case, I’m glad to talk to you about that. But I will not help you narrow down suspects. I don’t get paid for that and I haven’t been trained in how to mitigate the risks in doing it.”

There was a brief—very brief—flash of anger in Basira’s eyes, there and gone in a second as she shrugged casually. “Fair enough. I was just asking. What’s this about texts?”

Tim did not let himself relax, but he did shift his posture to give the appearance of it. “Oh. I told you I was in the Faroe Islands for her, right? Actually, at first I’d been on the way to Çukurova to track something down, but she’d called and told me to come back to London. Then she texted me the day she allegedly went missing—earlier in the day, I think—telling me, change of plans, she needed me to go investigate something in the Faroe Islands. Which, you know, I figured, she’s the boss, she’s got her reasons. One of the first things she taught me was not to question her orders, so I went. I texted her a few days later to let her know the thing was done and she told me to go ahead and take the next week off to recuperate and then come back to the office. That was the twentieth.”

Basira pursed her lips. “She was definitely reported missing on the fifteenth. Time of death is a bit tricky to be precise about after all this time, but that seemed like the most likely date for it, especially given…you know, the blood.”

“Yeah, how was it the police had a sample of Gertrude Robinson’s blood to test, anyway?”

“Dunno. Didn’t ask. Wasn’t my case then. Anyway, the ‘take the time off’ text was definitely not from her. Did anybody say anything to you when you got back?”

“No, but you’ve got to understand that we tend to operate independent of the rest of the Institute down here,” Tim said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the door of the Archives. “Gertrude had sent me on an open-ended mission, so it wasn’t like I had an expected return date that Elias knew of. And I guess he never thought to call me and find out what my plans were. Had other stuff on his mind, you know?”

“I guess.” Basira glanced up the road. “That looks like Sims. I’d better go work on this project with him. Good talking to you, Tim.” She pushed to her feet and added, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell him we talked.”

“I don’t give a damn if you do or not, frankly,” Tim said, getting to his feet as well and glancing at his watch. He still had half an hour for lunch, might as well get something. “Tell him we talked, tell him I accused Elias in the library with a goddamned candlestick, tell him I was serenading you in bad Spanish with a full band to back me up. Whatever you want. It’s your…project. His opinion of me can’t be any worse than it is, and you can’t really change anything about our working relationship. It is what it is and it is what it will be.”

Basira raised an eyebrow and looked him up and down. “You’re not worried?”

“No. I have my job and I’m going to do it, whatever he says or thinks.”

“Yeah. That makes two of us, I guess.” Basira scoffed and started to turn away. “Take care of yourself, Tim.”

Tim took a step sideways, blocking her path, and looked her squarely in the eye. “Be careful, Officer Hussein,” he growled. “When it comes to the reckoning of deeds, it won’t matter if you were the spaniel or the mastiff.”

Basira took a half step backwards, looking suddenly tense and uncertain. Before she could formulate a response, though, Tim turned on his heel and strode away.

His head was spinning. He needed a sandwich, a hug, a stiff drink, and a long talk with his partner, not necessarily in that exact order.

Where the actual fuck had that come from?