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“I T’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH , Fowler.”

Aaron stared at the wall of DDI Colthorne’s office, trying not to react. It wasn’t easy. The DDI was very much speaking ‘more in sorrow than in anger’, but Aaron couldn’t help feeling the kindly tone as a taunt.

He’d have been thrumming with tension anyway. This was the Divisional Detective Inspector hauling him over the coals, and rightly so, while DI Davis watched the whole thing with an unpleasant smile. It would have been bad even if he hadn’t been so horribly conscious of Joel’s words.

I think he would do extraordinarily bad things with open eyes. I think he might have blood on his hands.

Colthorne shook his head, a responsible man sadly disappointed. “You have achieved very little in the past weeks. You’ve ignored other jobs and wasted your time and the public’s on a case that I cannot see is more than an accidental death. What are you playing at?”

Aaron might have asked himself the same. He’d spent the last fortnight, since that catastrophic, wonderful evening with Joel, in surreptitious efforts to observe his superior, as well as pursuing the Marks case, and looking back at the Sammy Beech trial. He’d let other things slide; he’d asked questions that must have seemed meaningless; he’d probably appeared shifty to his colleagues, because he was concealing something huge and the discomfort of it doubtless showed in everything he did.

And he’d achieved damn all. He hadn’t found anything to back up Joel’s intuition on Colthorne’s handwriting, and every futile day and sleepless night was chipping away at his confidence. Maybe he was a gullible fool, taking the word of a fraud or a fantasist and destroying his career over a chimera. Maybe Marks’s death was really an accident, or a killing that had nothing to do with the DDI, and Sammy Beech’s name had cropped up by sheer chance, and if favours were being done to gangs it was at a lower level, and all his unnerving feelings of being cast in a role he didn’t want were just his own awkwardness.

He’d felt a soul-chilling certainty when he’d seen Colthorne’s hand labelled with that lethal seven. He needed to hold on to that.

He stiffened his spine, literally and metaphorically. “Sir, there are a number of suspicious circumstances in the Marks death—”

“The man was drunk, the night dark, the path slippery, the injury consistent with a fall, and the body not robbed. What is suspicious here? Have you witnesses?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what are these circumstances?”

“According to the doorman at his office, someone came in—with keys—on the night of the murder and went up to the first floor, where Marks’s office is. Marks’s keys haven’t been found. And his notebooks for the last three months are missing, meaning we can’t establish the cases he was working on when he was killed, or where his recent flush of wealth came from. That all seems highly suggestive, sir.”

Colthorne tipped his head. “As far as it goes, but it isn’t going far enough. Have you any reason to suppose the man who came in wasn’t Marks himself?”

“The medical examiner believes he went in the water some time between ten and midnight. The doorman thought that the man who came in did so between midnight and two.”

“Where is this office?”

“Macclesfield Road.”

“That’s minutes from the canal, and you know how loose medical timings can be, especially with a body in the water. Not to mention that keys can fall out of pockets. I suppose you haven’t had the canal dragged?”

“No, sir. DI Davis indicated the expense wouldn’t be approved.”

“Not without more grounds. Where have you looked for these missing papers?”

“We’ve searched his home and looked into whether he had a safe deposit box or kept anything at his bank. He didn’t.”

“Who did he talk to? Friends, family? Does anyone know what he was working on?”

“Not that we’ve yet found. He was a loner, and kept his business confidential.”

The DDI leaned back and steepled his hands. “Look, Fowler, I can see why you wanted to look twice at this, quite apart from pot-hunting.”

“From what, sir?”

“Oh, don’t be coy. We all like to have our picture in the newspapers, and once you have a taste of fame, it’s very tempting to pursue more. Well, you have quite the publicity-hungry family, don’t you?”

“Sir—”

“But the Met isn’t here to bolster your public profile,” Colthorne said over his objection, “and we don’t need your egoism getting in the way of your job.”

The injustice of that was a slap. Aaron inhaled involuntarily to protest, met Colthorne’s eyes, saw nothing but mild amusement.

Behind the mask there’s a sodding great void where a person should be.

“You can’t make up a murder from lost keys,” Colthorne went on. “By the way, I knew Marks slightly. Were you aware of that, Fowler?”

It was a simple question, simply asked. It felt menacing all the same, and Aaron had an instinctive urge to deny everything, but that would put Challice in hot water. “I believe so, sir.”

“Mmm. He approached me over an old case, one where the guilty man’s family felt justice had not been done. He didn’t make a good impression, I must say. He was all too clearly a drinker, and in my view he was milking the Beech family for what he could get. That conviction was one of the surest of my career and I rather resent the attacks on my character that resulted.”

“Sir.”

“I understand the Beeches have given up their efforts to get him cleared?”

“They’ve emigrated, sir.”

“Good. Good. A new start. I do despise charlatans like Marks who whip up grudges. I don’t suppose any of us would look marvellous if someone set out to dissect every act and motive and mistake of our lives.” His eyes locked with Aaron’s. “Do you, Fowler? Would your character survive close examination—from an uncharitable perspective?”

Aaron’s throat felt thick. “No, sir.”

Colthorne gave it a long few seconds, then clicked his tongue. “Well. Marks met a bad end, and if it was foul play it must be dealt with, but on the face of things, it seems to me that you’ve a bee in your bonnet. From now on you will report directly to me regarding any further lines of enquiry on the Marks case, and I will tell you if I think your theories have merit.”

He sounded so reasonable. Aaron said, “Sir.”

“I want you to pull yourself together, Fowler. You’re a good officer, but you’ve been erratic. There are questions being asked about your commitment and your attitude. I want to see you succeed, and I am going to put you to work accordingly.”

“On what, sir?”

“There’s talk of another canal workers’ strike. Trouble in the Midlands, mostly, but you’ll know that the Watermen’s Society joined that new amalgamated union—”

“The Transport and General Workers’ Union, sir.”

“And we know what that means. One out, all out, and union organisers putting pressure on decent working men. A lot of Reds trying to bring the country to a standstill. That’s where we need to have our focus right now, not drunken accidents. I want you on the canals, Fowler. You’ve got the inside knowledge, the connections. Find out what’s going on. We’ll make them toe the line, and come down on them like a ton of bricks if they cross it.”

“You want me to investigate union activity, sir,” Aaron repeated in a voice that didn’t quite sound his.

“Investigate it, and put a stop to it. Someone will be going too far; they always do, and then we can nail the lot of them. Let’s see you put some work in, Fowler. And—I will tell you frankly, there are questions as to where your loyalties lie, and we can’t have that.” He smiled. “So show me.”

Aaron said, “Yes, sir.” He repeated “Yes, sir,” at every suitable point in the subsequent briefing until Davis asked him if he had any more questions, to which he replied, “No, sir.”

Then he got out of there, went straight to his desk, dialled 190 for the Central Telegraph Office, and sent a telegram to 22 Great Percy Street. It read: WILDSMITH SHAFIS RESTAURANT GERRARD ST 7PM.

***

A T TEN PAST SEVEN THAT evening, the wave of fury had ebbed somewhat and Aaron was sitting alone in Shafi’s, wondering if Joel would arrive, and whether he wanted him to.

He still didn’t know how to feel about that damned stupid perfect evening, except for ‘guilty’. He’d felt Joel flinch and withdraw when he’d turned down his offer, or assumption, and hated himself for it. Joel had been so generous, so easy, so warm; he had deserved more. Aaron had wanted to give more, to bury his face in the pale neck and beg to stay as long as Joel would have him.

That couldn’t happen, for more reasons than he wanted to consider at this moment. And this was the worst possible time to be continually distracted by illicit desires, by memories of the taste of skin or the sound of moaning, by the overwhelming urge to talk to someone who cared.

Joel didn’t care, he reminded himself. He couldn’t, because they barely knew one another. Yes, they’d fucked, but then, he’d fucked an undercover constable in a public lavatory: he wasn’t like Aaron, holding back from the sins of the flesh until it felt like that flesh had turned to stone. Aaron wouldn’t find the answer to anything in his arms, unless he counted the question, ‘How can I most quickly ruin my career?’

But all that aside, Aaron owed Joel a meal, and he wanted to see him. He’d wanted to see him so much that he’d delayed and delayed what he owed, until fury had driven him to send the telegram.

Perhaps he’d delayed so long that Joel had thrown his telegram in the waste-paper bin. Perhaps that was for the best. He usually ate alone anyway, and he came to Shafi’s often enough that he was on excellent terms with the owners. Rahim Mohammed was on the floor tonight, with his brother in the kitchen.

“You ready to order, Mr. Fowler?” Rahim asked. He was a forward-thinking young man who’d come to England to study, recoiled in horror at the food, and seen a gap in the market for feeding his equally appalled compatriots. Business was thriving.

“I’m hoping a friend will join me, so I’ll wait a few more minutes, if I may.”

“Something to nibble on,” Rahim decreed, and waved at the overworked waiter. “You’re well, Mr. Fowler?”

Aaron agreed he was, and asked after the family. They chatted for a couple of moments, until the doorbell jangled and Rahim looked over. “Is that your friend?”

It wasn’t a great deductive leap, since most of the clientele here was Indian, and the few other white faces belonged to regulars. “It is, yes.” Aaron raised a hand.

Joel’s cheeks were pinked from the cold, and he had a slightly wary look on his face which flickered into a smile as he saw Aaron, then dropped away almost immediately.

If he wanted to change his mind and leave, he didn’t stand a chance. Rahim scooped him up with an enthusiastic cry of “Mr. Fowler’s friend!” relieving him of coat, hat, and umbrella like a top-class pickpocket.

“Goodness,” Joel said, sitting down since he wasn’t being given a choice. “They seem to like you here.”

“I come a lot. The food is excellent and it’s very peaceful.”

Joel glanced round at approximately fifty Indians talking at full volume in multiple languages. “It is?”

“Well, I find it so. Everyone here is entirely concerned with their own business, and nobody gives a damn about me. Whereas there’s quite a few restaurants where a CID man walks in and half the clientele leaves.”

“And who could blame them. It seems nice, anyway. Smells marvellous. Is the food very hot? My landlady’s beef curry was a painful experience.”

“I don’t find it particularly hot. I believe the food is the type served in North India where it’s less hot than in the south, but ask Rahim. Are you averse to spices?”

“I was averse to that beef curry, but I’ll reserve judgement till I’ve eaten the real thing. You order.”

Aaron did so for them both, requesting a couple of bottles of Bass. He waited until those arrived, along with a plate of fried battered vegetables and some pickles and chutneys, before saying, “Thank you for coming. I wasn’t sure you would.”

“No, nor was I,” Joel said. “Actually I’d concluded some days ago that you were welshing on me, and had decided to tell you where to stick your dinner if you did ever trouble to get in touch.”

“Oh.”

“Then I thought, perhaps you’d fallen under an omnibus and were lying in a hospital bed. Clearly you aren’t, which is disappointing on the face of it. But since you telegraphed, and you owe me a meal, I thought I’d give you a chance to tell me how terribly busy you’ve been and why it was completely impossible to fulfil your obligations in a timely fashion.”

“You don’t hold back, do you?” Aaron said.

“Not usually. Do we eat these?”

“It’s the usual practice. Try them with the green sauce.”

Joel did. His eyes widened. “God. That’s delicious.”

“Try the others.”

Joel launched into the chutneys. “I might forgive you if it’s all this good,” he said after a few moments. “So have you been terribly busy?”

“I’ve been having hell’s own time,” Aaron said, and he didn’t manage to match Joel’s light tone at all.

Joel paused, fork in hand. “The thing you talked about?”

“Yes.”

“Not good?”

“Not good at all. It’s— Never mind. I didn’t invite you here to listen to me complain.”

“All right, but, since you raise it, why did you invite me?” Joel said. “Settling your debts? Because I’d resigned myself to our last meeting being our last meeting, and I’m intrigued what you’re hoping for now.”

“I don’t have an ulterior motive, if that’s what you mean,” Aaron said stiffly.

“Ulterior motive? God above. I’m not a fainting lady from the nineteenth century.”

Aaron inhaled deeply. “I don’t expect anything from you. My situation hasn’t changed. I owed you a meal, that’s all.”

“That’s all. Right. Glad I bothered.”

Joel could be making this easy and pleasant if he wanted to. For God’s sake , Aaron wanted to say, I invited you, is that not enough of an olive branch?

Maybe it wasn’t.

“I owed you a meal,” he repeated, “and I wanted your company.”

“Did you.”

“I’ve had a bloody awful couple of weeks which, yes, have been terribly busy too. I’m sick to the back teeth of a lot of things, and I thought it would be good to see you. A lot better than anything else I’ve been doing. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

“Better.” Joel leaned back as Rahim and the waiter arrived, bearing a small banquet between them. “Good Lord. Are you particularly hungry?”

“I’ve seen you eat,” Aaron pointed out. “We’ll finish it, don’t worry.”

The food was as good as ever. Joel dug gleefully into an aromatic slow-cooked mutton dish, made indescribable noises over the curd with spinach, and had a religious experience with the fish, which was served whole and rubbed red with spices, then fried till the skin was crisp perfection and the flesh flaked effortlessly off the bone. Aaron ate with quieter enjoyment, watching him.

He’d never taken a man out for a meal before. Well, of course he had: colleagues, old friends. But he’d never taken a man for dinner as others might take a girl.

He wasn’t doing that now, of course. His situation hadn’t changed and he wouldn’t be going back to Pentonville Road with Joel. He was just eating with him, watching his eyes light up at flavours, enjoying his pleasure.

Joel cleared his first plateful like a starving wolf and leaned back. “I am taking a breather, and then I’m going to eat literally everything else and not move for days,” he said. “Amazing. Consider yourself forgiven.”

“Good to know.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Aaron hesitated. “About what?”

“The hell’s own time you’ve been having. Whatever it is that made you so explosively annoyed that you felt compelled to arrange this dinner at a few hours’ notice, presumably as a ‘go-to-the-devil’ gesture to someone. We don’t have to talk about it, of course. I’d be perfectly happy with witty banter, or simply stuffing my face. But if you want to...” He let that hang.

Aaron did want to talk about it, all of it. He wished he could.

“There has been quite a lot,” he said carefully. “The business we discussed last time—I won’t talk about that. A frustrating case, too. But then, today, my superior told me I’m being put on a new job.” He had to force the word out. “Unions.”

“Unions?”

“There’s a possible strike being fomented. It’s our role to keep an eye on the organisers to make sure it’s all being done legally.”

“Hang around in an intimidating way, breathe down people’s necks, make heavy-handed threats, pretend the organisers are in the direct pay of Moscow, and bring the hobnailed boot of the law down on anyone you can at the shade of an excuse?”

Aaron blinked at him. Joel shrugged. “I did a bit of work on a left-wing newspaper. You know what I mean, though.”

“Yes. And...yes, that’s my superior’s intent. I have no problem with ensuring the law is observed, but that’s not what he’s asked for.”

“And that’s a problem? I mean, joking apart, you’re in the Met. Isn’t that what you do?”

He didn’t know, Aaron reminded himself, couldn’t know how much that simple syllogism hurt. You’re in the Met, the Met breaks unions, that’s what you do. Who you are .

He took a deep breath. “My father was a union organiser. Quite well known. His name was Terry Fowler.”

Joel blinked. “Terry—you don’t mean Firebrand Fowler? Oh good God, you do. How on earth are you in the police? No, wait. How are you related to Paul Napier-Fox if you’re Firebrand Fowler’s son?”

“He’s my father but I’m not his son. That’s rather the point.”

Joel raised a finger for a pause, and carefully eased more fish off the bone. He added rice and more saag paneer to his plate, plus a dollop of pickle. “Right, I’m ready. Enlighten me.”

“My mother was a Napier-Fox. Wealthy upper-crust family, high society, a Bright Young Person before her time. She went to Italy to study art one summer when she was nineteen, and married an Italian painter on a whim.”

Joel’s eyes flicked over his face. “Ah.”

“The family got the marriage annulled without much difficulty, but it was already too late. She was packed off to an aunt’s house in the Midlands for a year to have the baby, regain her figure, return, marry, pretend it had never happened. I’ve never known what they intended to do with me. A childless family, an orphanage, the doorway of a police station?”

“Lovely.”

“But instead she met Terry Fowler. The family, the Napier-Foxes, were livid. She was told she’d be cut off without a penny, but she didn’t care and nor did my father. He married her, knowing she had nothing and with another man’s child in her belly.”

“Gosh. He must have loved her very much,” Joel said. “Or been a very good man. Or both.”

“Oh, he was a good man,” Aaron said. “An excellent man. He was willing to take on a child that wasn’t his. He let everyone—her, me, everyone we ever spoke to—know how he had taken on this child that wasn’t his, all the time. I never had a chance to forget how good he was about that.”

“Oh.”

“It was what he did. He sacrificed himself—for the Cause mostly, but for anything else he could see going, and he never asked for anything in return, despite all he’d done for you. I was always, unchangeably, drowningly, in his debt.”

“Oh God,” Joel said. “I’m so sorry.”

“My mother got back in touch with her family when I was around seven, and insisted on me and Sarah, my sister, spending time with them. My father hated that. Well, so did I: they were mostly dreadful to us. Paul’s mother was particularly vile, and he was a shocking bully, but I rather liked my grandmother: she was a fierce, proud old woman. She detested my father. She paid for my schooling, Harrow. I didn’t like it—Paul was there too, and made it very clear I oughtn’t be—and my father loathed the very idea, but Mother put her foot down.”

“It sounds like you couldn’t please anyone.”

“No,” Aaron said. “I couldn’t. Too common for the Napier-Foxes, too stuck-up for the Fowlers, and too visibly foreign for my father to forget, even for a second, what a good thing he’d done in taking me on.”

“Shit.”

“Mother died when I was thirteen. Grandmama died a few years after, and left me a generous legacy. She left Sarah nothing: she said that since her father despised the Napier-Fox family so greatly, he wouldn’t want them funding his child.”

“Oof.”

“It was spiteful. But she had outlived her daughter and missed the greater part of her life, and I suppose she preferred spite to regret. Happy families. Anyway, my father made it clear that he didn’t want a penny of my legacy. He had provided for me all my life, another man’s child, without ever asking for anything and he didn’t expect any return for it now. So I told him that was an admirable attitude, and by the way, I was joining the Met.”

“Just as a slap at him?”

“No,” Aaron said. “Or, not only. I really did want to do something useful.”

“To sacrifice yourself thanklessly for others?” Joel suggested.

“Ouch. No, I truly wanted to serve. I believe in service, and I believe there ought to be law and justice, and someone has to make that happen. I thought the police was the answer to everything that felt wrong. But also, yes. I knew very well my father would be furious, and indeed he was. He never spoke to me again.”

“Actually never spoke?”

“I last saw him at my sister’s wedding. I said hello, and he turned and walked away. He died earlier this year. I told Sarah that I would come to see him if he wanted me to, but he refused. He didn’t want to set eyes on me.”

Joel put his fork down and reached across the table, covering Aaron’s hand with his own. “I’m so sorry. I really am.”

Aaron wanted to cap Joel’s hand with his own, or to turn his and interlace their fingers, but he was very conscious of the public place. “It’s nothing. Or, at least, it’s done. He wasn’t a bad man.”

“He sounds bloody awful.”

“No, truly. He never expressed a regret about taking me on. He gave us everything he could. When I was seven or so, a group of bigger boys was bullying me, and he came out and gave them what for, then laid into their fathers too when they came round. Absolutely furious, defending me to the hilt. My father looking out for me. I felt so safe in that moment.” He sighed. “And then he shouted, ‘Don’t you touch my wife’s boy,’ so there we were.”

“Defeat from the jaws of victory.” Joel kept his hand on Aaron’s a moment longer, then pulled it away, leaving Aaron’s skin bereft. “If not bloody awful, at least bloody difficult?”

“Definitely that. My mother said that he only knew how to love in the abstract. He loved ‘the people’ or ‘the workers’, and he loved the idea of taking on a fallen woman and her child. And he worked damned hard for us all, did his best, and sacrificed a great deal. There’s plenty who consider him something close to a saint, although they’re largely people who didn’t know him.”

“Ha.”

“But they knew what he did, and what you do is surely what counts, in the end,” Aaron said. “And I don’t expect any saints are easy to live with. It’s asking a lot of anyone to do so much and be cheerful about it.”

“Then he perhaps should have done less, better,” Joel said tartly. “Or stuck to labour disputes rather than raising children. I don’t have a great deal of time for grown men who can’t manage their own moods.”

“You’re not without a temper yourself,” Aaron felt compelled to observe.

“Oh, I am—I mentioned this, I think?—a stroppy bitch, but I try not to ask other people to soothe my feelings for me. I also don’t look after orphaned children or fight for workers’ rights, so perhaps I’ve no room to criticise those who do. I’m quite prepared to agree your father was a better person than me. But he sounds like a prick.”

Terry Fowler had loomed very large through Aaron’s life: a hero to some, a bogeyman to others, a constant presence for good or ill. Everyone had strong opinions on him; Aaron did himself. ‘Prick’ was a welcome deflation.

“Maybe a bit of one,” he said, and couldn’t help a smile, and Joel smiled back.

“You call him father,” Joel went on after a comfortable moment broken only by a last attack on the skeleton of the fish. “Not stepfather?”

“He insisted on Father. I wanted to change that at one point but Sarah was about six then, and got very upset at me not being her real brother. So I left it. And I didn’t change my name for the same reason when my grandmother suggested I should—not that I greatly wanted to be a Napier-Fox either, and Lord knows the rest of the family would have objected. Fowler is my name now, however I got it.”

“Do you know your, uh, original father?”

“Never met him. He knew my mother was pregnant when the family paid him off, but he never sought us out. And he was forty-eight when he married a nineteen-year-old, so I’ve no great desire to make his acquaintance. I really don’t know what I’d say to him.”

“Was there something you wanted to say to your father?”

That hit home. Aaron stared at the wreckage of the fish between them. “I would have liked to thank him. To tell him I really was, am, grateful. I think if I could have done that, it would be easier to remember him for what he did well instead of dwelling on what he failed at. But he didn’t want to see me. I had gone over to the enemy and that was that.”

“Not a man for compromise. I suppose saints aren’t. And now they, the Met, want you to work on unions,” Joel said. “Does your boss know who your father was?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Is the idea that you’ll be excessively keen to stamp out union activity because of him?”

“No. No, I don’t think they can think that.”

Joel put his fork down. “Aaron. For want of a better way to put it, what the bloody hell? Without knowing how the Met or CID normally conducts itself—”

“It’s not normal,” Aaron said, although his mind flickered to Helen Challice weeping in a dark room, sobbing, It’s again and again every day and I can’t bear it, into his shoulder. “Or at least, it’s extremely hostile.”

Joel was searching his face, light eyes flickering. “If I were to ask you if this is related to the other thing we talked about—”

“Best not.”

“Right.” Joel sat back. “Well, this sounds absolutely awful.”

“It is rather.” He smiled on the words, as one had to, and knew that it didn’t look right.

Joel puffed out his cheeks. “Look, I couldn’t eat another bite. I don’t suppose you’d care to walk this off?”

“Where to?”

“Home. That is, that’s where I’m going and you could come in that direction. You could come with me as far as you’d like to go.” His eyes locked on Aaron’s. “Why don’t we find out how far that is?”

Aaron’s heart was thumping. He ought not. It would be wildly reckless to go back to Joel’s room, to be there late into the evening, again. But he was angry and tired, and he didn’t want the evening to end. Even if he could just speak to Joel a little longer, that would be a bright light in a long, dark time.

“I’d like that,” he said.