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kingofdirtandnothing · 4 years ago

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@polyfacetious whoops this is four thousand words long

“So Parker was right. This is where you’ve been spending your gardening leave.” Rose Teller has a remarkable gift for looking exhausted, no matter the time of day. Alice has always respected her for it, for not giving in to wearing make up, for not slipping into the loo to touch up lipstick or eyeliner before dealing with a suspect. They played to different roles, and Teller’s role was that of the put upon school marm.

Even here, where she’s followed Peter’s lack of good sense to find Alice where she wasn’t supposed to be.

It was a bit like a bruise, or a bad tooth. Something Alice couldn’t stop probing, feeling the pang that came with sitting here and remembering Henry Madsen, hanging by his fingernails and begging to be saved. He didn’t much like when she asked if Adrian had begged to be saved as well. Or Gabriella. Or Emma, who Alice dug out with her own two hands.

Liar! Her voice had rung out through the big, empty space around them, ricocheting accusingly back down on them both. There were few things in this world that Alice hated more than a liar. But Madsen had given her the information she needed, and Peter Parker, he of the endlessly loyal friend variety, had hung up the phone. Plausible deniability.

Teller was still talking. Alice blinks, dragging her mind up through the depths of the past and into the present, just in time to hear “- have the Madsen verdict. Given the exceptional circumstances, the inquiry have found no grounds for disciplinary action. Which means you’re back...if you want it.”

Alice had thought about it once, very briefly. What it would be like to give up the job. To bin her badge and walk away. Travel the world. Swim with the sharks. Be an honest to God person and not a string of late nights turned second shifts with corpses dancing behind her eyelids every time she dared close them.

“I want it.”

She gets the speech about following orders and being a good girl. Alice makes sure to compliment Teller on the speech. Staying on the boss’s good side was paramount right now. And it’s the thought that fills her head until she’s brought up to the car, and the green eyed little puppy of a Sergeant who was waiting for them. He says welcome back, or whatever.

DS Klaus Hargreeves. Alice shakes his hand. Teller leaves them be. Well, it looked like she’d have a new babysitter. “Do we need to have the talk, DS Hargreeves?” It was like Rose’s exhaustion was contagious. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning and already Alice felt like she was swimming in mud. Hargreeves murmurs a worried little the talk, ma’am and Alice waves that away. “Ma’am is Teller. Boss is fine. The talk is simply...I was unwell.” Liar. “I got better. Nothing more.”

Hargreeves nods along, an eager little puppy. Alice would guess middle child. Only ever managed to get attention by acting out. Now he was trying to do it the “right way”. He tells her that he’s been lobbying to work with her for nine months now. Chasing it up in writing three times a week. Well. The puppy was very stubborn. Some of the ice in her chest thaws. “Tell me about the case.”

Conversation is easy after that. Hargreeves--Klaus hands her the folder and starts towards the scene. “Home invasion.” Alice hides her smile in the manila folder as Klaus swallows a ‘ma’am’. Mommy issues, maybe. He didn’t feel like daddy issues. “Victim is Zoe Luther. Humanitarian lawyer. Found dead in the home. Trauma to the back of the head. Broken neck.”

Alice flips the page over, asks who found her. “The husband. John Luther. Owns a used bookshop. He said he was at the shops, got a call from the wife saying someone was in the home. By the time he made it back, she was dead. Call records do show that Zoe Luther’s phone had a seven minute outbound call to the husband’s phone. 999 call was made an additional four minutes after, from the husband’s phone.”

She bites down on her thumbnail, looking over the words. Alice tries not to let herself make any assumptions this early. She lets the data points wash over her, so that the sediment of them can settle into her mind. “Witnesses?”

Klaus turns onto a quaint little street, lit up by blues and twos splashing their colors along the sides of the houses. There were couples and families huddled on their porches, breathing through the relief of knowing they’d survived something terrible, somehow. “Neighbors saw the husband come home in a rush. Heard screams. One called 999 approximately thirty seconds after the husband did.”

They step out of the car, and Alice is grateful she chose flats today. Heels were for office days, when she needed to cut a particular image when dealing with the suspect. She kept a pair in the bottom drawer of her desk, just for that reason. Alice badges the uniform standing guard in front of all the rubber-neckers with their phones. Klaus holds the caution tape up for her to slip under. What a gentleman.

There are flowers on the front stoop, petals spilling out of the cheap plastic lining. A few have been trampled by CSI, carrying bootprints against soft yellows and pinks. There’s dust on the forced lock, though she doubts they’ll get any fingerprints that belong to someone other than the homeowners.

The living room is a picture of normalcy. A glass of wine on the coffee table, the TV turned low and the news playing on in the background. It was only stepping into the kitchen that the truth of the night unfolded. Alice stays there, just inside of the doorway and lets all of it wash over her.

A broken glass, a broken dish. A photo frame knocked over onto the floor. Scratches on the parquette from the kitchen table being forcefully pushed back. And Zoe Luther. A cold heap on the floor, looking like a discarded doll with her halo of dark curls and her wool socks. “Cutlery isn’t silver. The coffee machine is nice, expensive enough to pawn.”

Klaus steps up behind her, and clever boy, he picks up the thread of her thought and keeps going. “Nothing was taken, according to the husband.” There it is. The heavy stone growing in the pit of her stomach. A feeling of going against the grain, beneath her skin.

“So we have a home invasion. Obvious signs of rage.” Alice gestures idly towards the broken pantry door. “No sexual abuse. Nothing stolen. Does any of this sound right to you, DS Hargreeves?”

She likes Hargreeves all the more for the fact that he doesn’t answer immediately. He looks the room over, looks the body over. “No. Nothing about this seems right.”

“Because it’s not.”

-------------------

They stop off on the way back to the station to get real coffee, and Alice gets a muffin that she picks at during the drive. She bins the bottom half of it when they walk into the precinct. Teller is already waiting. The husband is in the interview room. Hargreeves mutters christ, that’s a big lad and Alice has to agree.

John Luther nearly fills the side of the screen where he’s slumped in the interview chair, wearing one of the paper suits they give to suspects and pick ups who come in covered in blood. Uniforms that responded to the call wrote in the file that he was cradling his wife’s body when they made it to the scene. Which means he spent at least ten or fifteen minutes in the back of a patrol car with his wife’s brain matter stuck to his shirt.

Teller gives her a look. Alice stops by her desk. She touches up her red lipstick and pulls the pair of black patent leather pumps from her bottom drawer and replaces her sensible flats with those. Hargreeves steals a look, and then looks away. Good boy.

Alice knows how it changes her. Her demeanor, her gait. Her posture. She plucks the folder from the desk and strides into the interview room, so that she can get her first real impression of John Luther.

“Mr. Luther. I’m DCI Alice Morgan. I’m the senior investigating officer on the case. Do you mind if I sit?” His eyes flit briefly to her legs, and then skip away. A normal response. And given the day he’s had, it may well be the sound of them drawing his attention. Luther nods, big hands curled into loose fists on the table in front of him.

On first whiff, nothing about him rings any alarm bells. A big lad, as Hargreeves phrased it, but Luther wasn’t weaponizing it. His slouch didn’t feel calculated. It felt tired. She asks him as much, gets a gravelly ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired’ in response. Alice touches the corner of her mouth with her thumb, and comes away with a smudge of red.

“I know everything must seem bleak right now, Mr. Luther.” Alice has given this speech so many times that she could do it in her sleep. She’s learned to make her voice soft, her eyes soft. No matter what she’s really thinking, families of victims needed to feel empathized with. “But I promise you, I will do everything in my power to find who did this, and bring them to justice.”

Alice reaches across the table, finger hovering over the button for the recorder. Luther nods before she has the chance to ask. The sound of the recorder spinning up carries in the quiet. “Unfortunately, John-” A calculated risk. He doesn’t seem upset by it. Alice pushes on. “I’ll need to ask you some very uncomfortable questions. Can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against your wife? You don’t need proof or excuses, it can simply be a feeling of unease.”

Like the one sitting at the base of her skull that Alice couldn’t banish, no matter the evidence laid out in front of her. The primal part of her mind, the dark corners who existed solely to keep her alive, they were ringing hard bells. This man was a killer. She didn’t know how, but she knew.

Luther scrubs a hand over his mouth. His voice shakes when he tells her that he can’t think of anyone, that Zoe was a good woman, a gracious woman that used her time to help people, that he couldn’t think of anyone who would want to hurt her-

His voice breaks, and the emotion in it is genuine. Just like the emotion in his dark eyes.

“Alright. Take a breath for me now. It’s alright.” It feels like rote sometimes, coming in here and saying these things. Alice’s strengths were in the field, it was in reading the minds of the corrupt and the cruel. She wasn’t made for dealing with bereaved loved ones. “Now I have to ask. Were there any marital problems? Were you two working on things? Zoe didn’t have her wedding ring on.”

John’s head tilts there, just a fraction of an inch. Alice thinks gotcha gleefully to herself. “We had a trial separation. We tried it, we didn’t like it. Zoe told me to come home. So I did.” There. There, there, there, each warning clang of a church bell in the back of her skull was watching some of that grief get burned away. By anger. (No mention of the ring. He knew it was gone. Bastard.)

“The thing is John, this is a very singular crime. There was no sign of robbery, and I’m very sorry for having to say these things... no sign of sexual assault.” Alice watches for a flinch, for some kind of reaction. Nothing. Just dark, clever eyes focused on her. But his hands were perfectly still on the table. Not fists. “Crimes like this aren’t random, they’re never without motive. And you can see why our first thought would be here, with you.”

He breaks then, looking away for a moment as the tears well and he blinks them back. Well. No time like the present. Alice puts on a big yawn, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m very sorry. It’s been an exhausting day, as I’m sure it has been for you.” John watches her with watery eyes. He speaks gently, tells her he understands. “How about a coffee?” He asks for tea. It’s the perfect chance to step out.

Alice strides back over to the desk where Teller, Hargreeves and Parker have ringed around Alice’s computer, watching the video footage straight from the interview room. “He killed her.” Alice gestures at the screen. “Peter, am I wrong?”

Peter Parker, perennially single and married to his work all at once, nods. The words are given into his cup of coffee, but she hears them all the same. “You’re not wrong.”

“He didn’t yawn.” Peter is rolling his eyes, and Hargreeves is watching her like she’s mad. “Yawning is contagious.” Teller yawns, because she’s nothing if not suggestible. Hargreeves is looking a little green around the gills, but he works up the nerve to speak up. Ma’am, that research has been debunked- Alice waves the sentence away, though she does appreciate the puppy being brave enough to speak up.

“It’s not about empathy or the brain or anything like that. He’s working so hard to put on that grieving husband facade that he didn’t have time to realize he should have reacted. By the time he did. It was too late. He’s our killer.”

Teller is pleased, but Alice can see the ultimatum coming. We have nothing. Timeline alone is enough to get this laughed out. I need proof. Solid proof. All we have right now is - “Absence.” It smacks her right in the bloody face. “The absence of proof. The door screams crime of passion, but everything else is meticulous. Why stay at the scene if he could have alibi’ed himself at the shops and been done with all of this?”

Little Hargreeves, already worth his weight in silver, if not gold, lifts his hand like this is primary school. Peter laughs so hard he inhales coffee and has to turn away to cough. “I spoke to the neighbors. They said that Zoe has been having a gentleman caller. That Luther hasn’t been home in months. Found the bloke’s name, it’s Mark North. He was at work the entire time, airtight alibi. But he says the only person who didn’t know the separation was final was John.”

That was it, then. Alice can feel her heart racing. “That’s what it is. He’s a narcissist. Acting on compulsion. Everything we found out, it’s because he wanted us to find it. He wanted us to know that his wife was being unfaithful. He wants to punish her, that’s why he took the ring. He wants the media to crow that the loving husband did no wrong, that it’s the wife who went astray and paid for it.” The next words out of Teller’s mouth are the ones Alice doesn’t want to hear.

Find me the ring, then. Or we have to cut him loose.

Tea, first. Alice makes them both a cup, and just like John Luther, she cuts the bullshit when she walks back into the room, sliding him over a cup. Asks if he’s comfortable. The mask is firmly back in place now, the exhausted, grieving husband who tells her that it’s fine, really.

“Sometimes.” Alice was hitting the ground running, now. No room left in her brain for Henry Madsen or her empty flat. Just the chase. “We like to make one of the legs shorter than the other, you know. It keeps the suspect off balance. It makes it so that they can never get comfortable.” It’s only because she’s watching near his elbow that Alice sees the nearly imperceptible bunch of muscle at his hip. Testing out the chair.

“We also use the right police officers for the job. Take me, for instance.” Alice gestures to herself, and takes a sip of her tea. She’ll blame that wave of warmth on weak, too hot tea and not on the feel of those eyes moving over her. “I’ll be sent in to deal with men who are narcissists. Men who are women beaters, who are rapists. Who think they’re better than a woman. It makes them angry, to have to deal with someone they see as beneath them.”

There isn’t so much as a flicker of anger across John Luther’s expressive face. But there is something there, tucked into the corners of his eyes. Curiosity.

“Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?” John nods, watching her when she stands from her seat and paces over to lean against the wall, hands tucked behind her. It keeps them from fluttering. John rumbles back the definition. But he’s waiting for something. “The only person known to have been at the house was you, John.”

John scoffs a little at her. “Absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily mean evidence of absence.” He’s got Alice’s attention now. And it seems to be mutual. Luther leans forward, tapping his temple. “I see what you’re doing there. A leap.” Alice answers without thinking. A hop, really. “But you’re wrong. Was my marriage strained? Yes. Was my wife sleeping around? Yes. Did I kill her? No.”

John’s entire affect has changed now. No hint of tears at the eyes, no downturned mouth. He’s watching Alice like she’s the only thing in the world and it’s making her feel a little dizzy as she asks can you prove that? John laughs. He actually laughs. It’s faint and over in an instant, but it’s a laugh. “Can’t prove a negative, that means the burden of proof is on you, DCI Morgan. If you think I did this, then you need to demonstrate how and when.”

They were so deeply beyond is he the killer that Alice has circled back around to how can I prove that he’s the killer? No doubt in her mind. “But I won’t be able to do that, now will I?” The audio on the camera, even the recorder won’t have picked it up. But Alice hears that you can try as if it were whispered against her ear. She has goosebumps. “Because you, John, you don’t interact with the world in the way it assumes you will. It makes you hard to understand. And it’s your absence that’s more telling than your speech.”

“Is that a compliment?” There is something predatory in the way his curls those words over his tongue, eyes like a shark and long, powerful body like a crouched panther. Alice doesn’t know why she says it. But ‘yes’ slips past her lips like a confession. Bloody hell.

John leans back in the chair, a pleased little ‘ah’ slipping past his lips. Just like that, his demeanor has softened. Gone was the hunter. “Are you trying to beguile me?”

They’re sparring now. Alice crosses her legs so that she doesn’t have the urge to bounce her knee. “No, John. I wouldn’t be so foolish.” He was a narcissist. The best thing she could do was play to his ego. (It wasn’t a lie.) “But.” She lifts a careful, manicured finger there. “You can be sure that I will find the proof I need. And you will go down. Criminals are never as clever as they think they are.”

“That must get monotonous, for someone as brilliant as you, Alice.” Her name feels illicit where it sits on the tip of his tongue. Alice closes the folder and gathers it in hands that she keeps still and straight with sheer force of will. Out in the hall, she has to take a deep breath before she can face the peanut gallery again.

Time was up. They couldn’t hold him any longer, and no amount of possible ideas to hold him from Hargreeves (good boy) was enough to stop the inevitable. It didn’t matter that it was obvious, that anyone with eyes could see that Luther was excited by them knowing. (She doesn’t say them, Alice says he’s excited that I know and she ignores the look from Peter it gets her.) Teller gives the call to cut him loose. Peter, protective in his own silly way, offers to be the one to let him know. Alice wonders if her cheeks are as pink as they feel.

On his way out, John Luther, used book salesman and murderer, stops by Alice’s desk. “I did enjoy our little chat. You’re very interesting.” He pats the edge of her folder and walks away. Alice has never wanted to break a chair over someone’s back so fiercely in all her life.

------------------------

Her apartment is chilly and uninviting, even with a light left on in every room, an old habit left over from her time in University that she’s never been able to shake. Alice kicks off her ridiculous heels and her overcoat, and pads to the kitchen on bare feet. The curry in the styrofoam box in her refrigerator still smells passable.

She eats it right there in the kitchen, because her table is overflowing with cold case files and the kind of photographs that would put anyone off of their dinner. Alice’s mind wanders while she eats, replaying the crime scene over in her mind’s eye with startling clarity. There was something she was missing. Something that wasn’t right.

Stomach full but no more satisfied, Alice sits on the side of the tub and draws herself a bath. While it’s running, she cleans the lipstick away, spending a moment staring at the red smear on the cloth wipe.

Once the tub is full and dusted with soft smelling bubbles, Alice strips down, leaving her work clothes in a heap outside of the bathroom door, like maybe she can hide from all of it if she just shuts the door behind her.

The water is deliciously hot, and it eases the ache building in her arches from wearing those heels for the rest of the afternoon. Alice pins her hair up off of her nape with a pen balanced on the notepad she kept next to the sink, and slips down into the water, her eyes falling closed.

It’s been a long time since Alice made an attempt at a life. Bertrand had been wonderful in his own way, full of fire and intellect. But the challenge of arguments lost their luster when they always came back to the same thing. Her job. You spend more time with the dead than you do with me, Alice. By the time he moved out, she was more angry than hurt.

Without any direct input from her mind, her thoughts trail back to the morning. To John Luther, cut from marble even in the paltry paper suit that sat too short on his forearms and his calves, because of his size. With his bright, clever eyes and his lovely, long fingered hands…

It’s only because she hasn’t been on a date in a few years. That’s why her fingers trace down the inside of her thigh, with the thought of John’s careful mask slipping away dancing behind her closed eyelids.

She thinks of what it would be like to put herself across his lap. In this ridiculous fantasy, she’s wearing a skirt. They’re never practical for work, but there’s nothing practical about fingering yourself while thinking about a murderer.

In her fantasy, he’s in trousers she can work the zipper down. And he’s running his big palms up from her knee to her hip, her skin lit up like streelights following the dusk beneath his touch. His eyes never leave hers, clever and sure of what he’s doing to her.

In her fantasy, he catches a finger at the hip of her knickers and pulls, the flimsy fabric rending like wet paper beneath the strength of his hands. Alice moans, both in the place in her mind and the place in her tub.

In her fantasy, John balls up the fabric and shoves it into his pocket. A trophy to keep. A reminder of what he was doing.

In her bathroom, Alice sits bolt upright in her bath, hands catching on the sides and sending water sloshing onto the floor with loud slaps.

“The ring!”

#ch: alice #polyfacetious #polyfacetious | luther #v: dci morgan #boy did this ever get away from me #my brain is tired now #queued

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