And If Thou Wilt, Forget

Tim’s mobile phone sang out from the corner of his desk, the generic ringing that meant it was a number not programmed into his contacts—which startled him, not because he wasn’t expecting a call, but because he could have sworn he’d left it on vibrate. He picked it up quickly before Jon could come out and complain about him interrupting a recording. “Stoker.”

The voice on the other end, a kindly, gentle baritone with its distinctly Sicilian accent, was immediately familiar to Tim, and he understood the words perfectly, although he really wished he didn’t. Switching languages as a matter of habit, he asked several questions, confirmed a few things, and extracted a promise of a call back with more information later before thanking the young priest and ending the call slowly. He barely remembered to adjust his sound settings before setting the phone down on his desk.

Of all the things that could have happened today, this was the last one he needed.

He looked down at the steaming pile of bullshit in front of him. Everything they had been working for the last week had been complete twaddle; they hadn’t even touched anything already on the shelves. Halloween week meant the Institute as a whole was busier than usual. Research was always inundated with statements—credulous people who’d been spooked by convincing displays, teenagers daring one another to get horror film plots entered as actual events, wannabe ghost hunters trying to legitimize their hunts—and, as they usually did, they’d reached out to the Archives for help. Tim had actually thought Jon was going to refuse this year, but he’d surprised him by not only agreeing, but actually doing his share of the research. He certainly seemed a lot more relaxed than he’d been at any time since before Jane Prentiss’s attack, and especially since whatever had happened that had resulted in him needing five stitches in his arm. He’d wondered, briefly, if there was a way he could keep the real statements from ever getting to Jon in the first place, but quickly discounted that. Apart from the fact that he genuinely didn’t think it was possible at this point, Jon was the Archivist now, which meant he was beginning to grow dependent on the statements. If Tim took them away from him, he might be okay, but he might not, and Tim didn’t know how far he was on the path to know if he could survive that. Even aside from the fact that he wasn’t going to kill Jon until and unless he had proof he was the one who’d murdered Gertrude, he wasn’t going to kill him by starving him to death. That was just cruel.

Anyway, it was moot. Jon had taken a real statement the previous day, if Tim was any judge; the man who’d come down had shown clear signs of having been marked by the Corruption, but since he was also the ECDC pest control expert who’d come in response to Jane Prentiss, that wasn’t really a surprise. It still meant Jon had taken in a genuine statement, so he was, at his current rate, probably good for a week.

Between that and the fact that they didn’t have any active cases that wouldn’t go on the laptop, maybe he could justify taking a couple days off.

Logically, he knew this wasn’t a situation where his request for time off would be denied, but…at the same time, he was reluctant to take the time off, even for this, if…things…were continuing to be bad. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to address the situation directly with Jon anyway, let alone Elias. He’d need to talk to Gerry before he made the request, though. Mentally shoring himself up, he tried to put the thought out of his mind and focus on his work.

It had been a long time since he left right at the end of the day—he always tried to stick around until Jon left these days—but when six o’clock rolled around, he shut down his laptop and headed out the door. Part of him worried about that, but the rest of him decided, screw it, he could have one day of letting someone else do the hovering. He didn’t even wait to see if the others were leaving.

Martin caught up to him just before the train pulled into the station. “Everything…okay?” he asked uncertainly.

Tim gave Martin a quick smile. “No, but it’s not related to work. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

It took a lot of willpower not to snap at Martin for being too damn helpful, but Tim swallowed it down. He opened his mouth to tell him no, but what came out was, “I may have to go away for a couple of days. Just promise you’ll keep an eye on Jon while I’m gone if I do.”

“Yeah—yeah, of course. You don’t even need to ask.” Martin’s face softened ever so slightly. “He’s not taking great care of himself these days.”

“No,” Tim agreed. “Not that he ever took great care of himself to begin with.” He cocked his head at Martin. “What about you? Are you doing okay? Taking care of yourself?”

“I’m fine,” Martin said quickly. Too quickly. Tim could hear the lie before the first syllable had left his lips. Martin wasn’t sleeping that much better than he had been when he was living in the Archives, and he was still working himself to death, just less because he worried Jon would figure out he didn’t know what he was doing and more because he was trying to keep Jon from doing too much. He felt almost as guilty as Tim did about whatever had happened to him—or maybe he felt just as guilty, but in a different way—and he was also dealing, or failing to deal, with a massive crush he believed nobody else knew about and fully believed would never go anywhere anyway. Add in whatever was going on in his personal life, between his mum and the shithole he lived in, and he was a hot mess.

Under any other circumstances, Tim would have called him out on it, or at the very least invited him over for dinner and an opportunity to play with Rowlf. Given him an opportunity to vent and let off some stress and get some things off his chest. Maybe he even would have helped him out with it. But right now he had his own shit to deal with and he was too stressed about the possibility of leaving the Archives—and the Archivist—unguarded to take on Martin’s problems too, so he just let it slide. He could pick up the pieces of that next week. Maybe. Hopefully.

Just as they switched lines to head for home, Tim’s mobile phone rang again. He glanced at it before answering. Same number as earlier. With an apologetic grimace at Martin, he accepted the call. “Assa binidica?”

He took a seat in one corner of the car and carried on the conversation as quietly and unobtrusively as he could, keeping half an eye on Martin as he did so; Martin sat a couple seats away and stared out the window with an air of studied, determined nonchalance, clearly trying to give Tim his space and not pry while also making himself available if Tim wanted to talk. There was also a figure in the opposite corner bundled up in a trench coat and doing a very poor job of not letting on that he was watching them. Since Tim didn’t get any bad vibes from whoever it was—they weren’t an agent of one of the other Thirteen, certainly not the Stranger, and they didn’t feel like a mugger or someone who meant immediate harm to them—he assumed it was just some nosy racist bastard trying to figure out what language Tim was talking so he could insult him accurately. It probably wasn’t helped when Martin, obviously responding to the stress or maybe just reminded of his own past by Tim’s conversation in Sicilian, began quietly reciting an old Polish nursery rhyme not quite under his breath.

Tim gave a little bit of his attention to Martin as he got off at Stockwell, waving distractedly and tracking his departure through the window, but mostly he was caught up in his conversation. It ended at last, and he sat back with a small sigh, just in time for his own stop to approach. He got up and trudged off the train. It did not escape his notice that the figure in the trench coat got off as well, but since they were close to the end of the line, he didn’t really think anything of it.

It was well past sundown at this point, but between the street lamps and the porch lights flickering on as people got home, there was enough light to see by. Not that it mattered. By now, Tim knew every step of this walk by heart. Which was good; his feet went on autopilot as his brain ticked over logistics, plans, and contingencies, until he was letting himself into the front door of the flat.

Rowlf, as usual, met him at the door in a whirlwind of tail and tongue. Tim automatically bent down to scratch his ears with one hand as he dropped wallet and keys into the bowl by the door with the other. “Hey, boy. You behaving yourself today?”

“I haven’t taken him out yet,” Gerry’s distracted voice called from another room, probably the kitchen. “Wanted to get dinner going first.”

“It’s okay, I’ll take him,” Tim called back, reaching for the lead hanging on the hook.

“Could you pick up some milk while you’re out?”

“Do my best.” It would be a bit out of the way of their normal route, but the walk would probably do him good. Tim clipped the lead to Rowlf’s collar and stepped back out onto the street.

A flash from across the street caught his attention, along with a quiet curse, barely audible over the usual sounds of a November evening in this part of London. Tim glanced over, seemingly without interest, just a passing look, and spotted the trench coat that he’d noticed on the Tube bending over an object. He connected that with the flash and determined this was a private investigator of some kind. Possibly one of Tim’s former flings trying to get something on him, possibly a current lover of one of Tim’s former flings trying to get evidence for a divorce, but most likely either somebody thoroughly mistaken in their target or who was actually supposed to be watching the building next door and had just taken a picture of the wrong one, hence the cursing. They weren’t very good at their job, though, if they’d forgotten to turn the flash off on their camera.

Tim set off with Rowlf, who had already peed once and was standing at his side like he was supposed to, but was thrumming with nervous energy. Evidently he’d been trapped inside for longer than usual and really needed to get out. He wasn’t pulling as they walked, but he kept shooting glances up at Tim.

Since Tim was also wound a bit too tight and afraid he was going to go firing in a hundred different directions if the wrong thing touched him off, and probably take most of the Greater London area down with him, he waited until they had reached the first corner, then picked up the pace—first a fast walk, then a jog, then into a flat out run as they hit the A24 and headed for the green space on the other side.

Rowlf, of course, was all for it; he stayed right at Tim’s side, matching him in stride, tail somehow still going ninety to the dozen as he went. Tim let his feet pound into the pavement and his mind clear itself of everything but the number of steps from here to the grocer’s and how he would have to adjust that for his running stride versus his walking stride. He forgot about the phone call, about what it would mean for the rest of the week, about what was going on in the Institute and the Archives, about whether Jon had murdered Gertrude Robinson or someone else had, about whether any of them were in danger, about all of it. It was just him, and Rowlf, and the sheer joy and relief of running.

Maybe he ought to start doing this on his lunch break.

He slowed to a jog again, then a rolling walk, as he got closer to the market on the far side of the green space. For a moment, he thought about just bringing Rowlf inside with him, but before he could run the likelihood of the owner letting it slide or there being someone else in there who called him out on it, his brain registered the sounds he hadn’t heard over his own blood in his ears: the scrape of shoe on pavement staggering to a halt and ragged, labored, yet half stifled breathing. Either he’d accidentally been following someone who was now crouched in hiding and trying not to be observed, or he’d been the one followed.

Since he didn’t have an imminent sense of danger, he was guessing on the former, but just to be on the safe side, he paused outside the shop and told Rowlf to sit. When the spaniel complied, Tim unclipped the lead, looped it around the stop sign on the corner and through the handle, and bent to reattach it to Rowlf’s collar. As he did so, he casually glanced out of the corner of his eye towards where he had heard the sounds.

The person in the trench coat who had followed him off the Tube—he was sure it was the same one—was leaning against a street lamp on the shadowed side, visible but still shadowed enough for an amateur to think they were hidden, evidently struggling to catch their breath. Clearly whoever it was had run to try and keep up with Tim and Rowlf. Good job for them that Tim had moved in with Gerry and not the other way around; Tim had had at least three wannabe Jane Marples in his old neighborhood, which would have meant more than one call to the cops about someone chasing him. Around here, nobody saw more than was good for them, so they’d probably escaped notice.

Tim straightened up, considering his options. Ignoring the person was probably the smart option; they weren’t dangerous, after all, and whatever reason they were following Tim for, they’d either finish what they were after and go away or keep following him hoping for something juicier than a grocery run. Either way, it was no skin off his nose how some busybody chose to waste their time. As long as they weren’t out to steal the dog.

“Stay,” he told Rowlf firmly, and then went into the shop.

It didn’t take him long to grab the milk, along with a loaf of bread and a wedge of hard cheese. As he handed over the money and agreed with the man behind the counter that he was tired and should have an early night, he spared a brief look for the window. Usually the difference in lighting between market and street would have meant that the window was more or less an opaque mirror from this side and clear as a millpond on a still day on the other, but he could make out the figure lurking just outside the circle of lamplight, hands shaking as they tried to light a cigarette, as clearly as if they were stood right next to each other on a summer’s afternoon.

It was Jon.

For a moment, Tim stood perfectly still. Several emotions hit him all at once. Relief. Concern. Anger. Irritation. Fear. More anger. Even more anger.

Then he turned back to the clerk, very calmly took his change, and stepped out the side door of the market.

The door stuck a bit, which wasn’t surprising; it led to a side yard where, in the summer, there was usually an offering of fresh produce and baked goods presided over by the owner’s wife under a striped awning stretched between the market and the Oxfam shop next door, but which was rarely used after the almanac turned to autumn and never after the time change. The yard itself was dark and barren, save a few scraps of rubbish and a bucket of sand bearing testament to the fact that at least one of the regular employees smoked as well. Tim quietly pulled the door to, gave himself a moment to adjust to the low lighting, and made a wide circle around to avoid the lights as he crossed the road. Jon—seemingly—didn’t notice. He’d managed to get the cigarette lit, and it dangled from his lips as he fumbled with what was clearly an actual film camera, his eyes fixed on the market across the street.

“See anything you want?” Tim said, directly in Jon’s ear.

Jon jumped, and almost swallowed the cigarette, as he whirled around, camera still firmly in hand. “Tim! What—where did you come from?”

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Tim said, unimpressed.

“That’s none of your business,” Jon blustered, but the fact that he pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and hid it behind his back as he spoke belied his guilty feelings about it. Not that Tim cared, he told himself, just that it was something better to focus on than the real problem. “What were you doing back there?”

“A better question is, why are you here?” Tim narrowed his eyes at Jon. “Are you following me?”

“Why would you—I have the right to be here, too,” Jon snapped, obviously scrambling for the remains of his dignity.

Tim ground his teeth and reminded himself that ripping Jon’s head off before he had actual proof he’d killed Gertrude Robinson would be counterproductive and only make him feel better for, like, five minutes, tops. “Fine. Be wherever the fuck you like. Do whatever the fuck you want. I don’t care.” He was lying, and he didn’t know why, and it pissed him off more than he already was. “But leave me out of it. Your rights end where our property begins, so stop. Following. Me.” He pushed past Jon, then paused just before crossing the street and added, without looking over his shoulder, “And text Martin when you get home so he knows you’re safe. And put that fucking cigarette out before you set your arse on fire.”

Without giving Jon a chance to respond, he stomped across the road, unfastened Rowlf from the sign, and set off for home.

Rowlf seemed content to go at a fast walk rather than a flat-out run, which was good; Tim didn’t know if Jon was following them again and he told himself he didn’t care, he just wanted to go home. He gripped the lead in one hand and the bag in the other and concentrated on counting steps and running plans. Now he really didn’t want to explain what was going on to Jon if he didn’t absolutely have to.

Soon enough, they reached the flat. Tim opened the door, dropped keys and wallet in the bowl again, unclipped Rowlf’s lead, hung up his coat, and headed into the kitchen. Rowlf had his head in his water dish, and Gerry was reaching into the cupboard where they kept the dishes. Tim didn’t break stride, just headed across to put the milk and cheese in the fridge.

“Sorry, I didn’t think about how far of a walk it would be to get milk, we could have waited,” Gerry said apologetically, pulling down two plates. He turned to look at Tim, and his smile slipped. “Hey?”

“Hey.” Tim closed the distance between them and hugged Gerry. “Don’t go outside for a bit. Jon’s stalking me, he might still be out there.”

Tentatively, Gerry put his arms around Tim and pulled him close, one hand sliding into the hair on the back of his head. “Is that what’s got you looking like a thundercloud?”

“No. I got a call from Don Filippo today.” Tim slumped against Gerry, finally safe enough to stop pretending he was fine, and said the words he’d been avoiding saying since just before noon. “My grandfather died.”

“Oh, Tim.” Gerry held Tim tighter. “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. Was it…?”

“Peaceful. He went in his sleep. Nothing got him, just…old age. It’s the best I could have hoped for, really.”

“I take it you need to go out there, then.”

“Yeah. The vigil is Friday night, the funeral mass will be Saturday.”

“You set that up already?” Gerry asked, surprised.

Tim sighed. “No, that’s why Don Filippo called me. Apparently someone got hold of Mum right away. She’s already out there. She made all the arrangements.” He pulled back just enough that he could look up at Gerry, who was looking at him with such genuine sympathy and compassion it almost hurt. “I understand if you don’t want to put yourself through this, but—”

“Tim, if you’re going to face burying your grandfather and seeing your mother for the first time in at least three years, the least I can do is be there with you,” Gerry interrupted. “Besides, he told me to call him my grandfather, too. Be kind of a dick move not to come. Do we have time to fly there after you get off work Friday?”

Tim managed a smile. He knew what a huge concession that was; Gerry had sworn never to get on another plane as long as he lived. “No, travel time would be too long. Our best bet’s probably going to be taking the train and leaving Thursday. I just…don’t know if I want to tell Jon why. Especially not now.”

“So don’t. Just say you’re taking a few days off and you’ll be back Tuesday. If he was actually worthy to fill Gertrude Robinson’s shoes, he’d know where and why you were going anyway,” Gerry said under his breath. “Do you think Martin would be willing to dogsit while we were gone, or should we kennel him?”

“I’m sure he’d be happy to, if we ask.” Tim sighed and leaned against Gerry again. “Thank you.”

“Of course. You’d do the same for me, assuming I had any relatives and they weren’t complete dicks.” Gerry kissed Tim on the top of his head. “Do you think you can manage to eat dinner? And then we can talk about Inspector Clouseau and why he’s tailing you.”

“He’s doing a terrible job of it, too,” Tim grumbled. “Either he’s being performatively bad so that I’ll underestimate him and he can slip past my defenses, or he really is that paranoid and incompetent. Either way, I’m going to need strength for this discussion. Let’s eat. I wasn’t in any state to eat lunch today and I’m absolutely starving.”