Chapter Text
Her parents finally blow the lid off of their private arrangement towards the end of one Sunday afternoon dinner, when her father turns to her and asks “what are your intentions towards my bagman?” without batting an eye.
Joan nearly chokes on her peas, and her mother has to give her a few raps between the shoulder blades to dislodge them from where they’ve suddenly become wedged in her windpipe. Morse, for his part, has frozen in place with his fork hovering in mid-air and provides no assistance whatsoever. (Sam, whose weekend leave is ostensibly the reason for this dinner, is delighted that his welcome-home entertainment is fun at his sister’s expense. She wouldn’t have expected any help from him, anyway.)
“Breathe, dear,” Win says, and Joan glares at her. She’s still coughing up peas, and her parents did this on purpose. Sam is now fully cackling and even Dad is beginning to crack a smile.
She nervously looks across the table and registers, honestly, a glimmer of fear on Morse’s face. The gap separating the stakes for each of them yawns wide open before her: for Joan, it’s the risk of heartbreak, but for Morse it’s heartbreak and complete professional alienation when work already means too much to him. She had the right to ask a lot of him, and she doesn’t regret any of it, but it was still a lot to ask. He’ll endure quite a bit just to be with her, and she can do him the favor of sparing him the lead role in this one awkward scene.
I’ve got this. Don’t worry about it. This one’s on me.
At long last, he understands her raised eyebrows without needing any words to assist. He nods and puts down his fork, silently, like he can somehow disappear while she draws the fire.
“How long have you known?” she asks her father. Her voice is rough from the coughing.
“I told him a few weeks ago,” says her mother. “Rather, I confirmed his suspicions.”
Joan turns to look at Win so quickly she almost gives herself whiplash. “Wait, how long have you known?”
“Never you mind,” Win replies. “I’ve known long enough.”
“It wasn’t too difficult to work it out,” Fred adds. “You had all the same days off from work. Your mum told me you spent the weekend down the shore, right after this one here comes back from the sudden and unavoidable personal conflict with a sunburn? Not much of a mystery, since he never takes time off to begin with. Plus, you’ve been feeding him. I see what he brings for lunch, when he remembers it.” He nods at Morse, who redirects his attention to the gravy boat in the middle of the table with an intensity he usually reserves for arcane murder weapons.
Joan sighs, and she still wants to protect him but that was explicitly verboten. “I told you those were dinner casseroles,” she says, and Morse just shrugs helplessly as if to say what is lunch if not last night’s dinner persevering?
“This is brilliant,” Sam announces, to no one in particular. “You mean to tell me these two have been running around together, in secret, for months? Oh, good work, Joanie, I always knew you’d get there.”
Joan scowls at him. “Remember this moment, Samuel. Because someday, when you bring home a girl, I’m going to be absolutely horrible about it.”
She’s not nervous anymore, just irritated. She should have figured this out earlier — Mum’s asked Morse over for Sunday dinner plenty of times but she’s never insisted on his attendance before now — but then again, Morse didn’t pick up on it either and he literally gets paid to detect things, so Joan’s not going to feel too bad about it. Plus her mother is an excellent cook, so they can both be forgiven for thinking with their stomachs first.
“Anything to say for yourself?” her father asks Morse, who — to his credit — doesn’t flinch.
“No, sir, not at the moment,” he replies quietly. “Not until Joan says she’s done with her piece.”
She already knows that he can be brave when he needs to be, often recklessly so, and she’s glad that she gets the honor of doing the knight-in-shining-armor act for once. She feels a surge of affection for him and reaches across the table to take his hand in hers. “We love each other,” she declares, looking around the room as though daring her faintly amused family to challenge her. “That’s it. We’re in love. That’s all anyone needs to know, and we don’t need anyone’s permission for it, either.”
“All right, all right, turn the gas down,” says Dad. “This isn’t fair Verona, and no one’s trying to keep you apart. You’re both adults — somehow.”
Her mother jumps back in here. “It’s not as though we’re not happy about this, you two, but why all the subterfuge?”
“That was all me.” Joan exhales heavily, because she’s fine saying that it was her idea but she can still barely explain some of it herself. “How to put this… well. It was June, and there was a lot going on.”
At the mention of June, Win decides this is enough for now, and pats her daughter on the shoulder before getting up to bring in the pudding. Everyone knows what that means, and Sam — who can talk just as much as his sister when the occasion calls for it — steps up with a story about a bag of potato peelings and a determined badger and the end of his stint on kitchen patrol that’s about eighty percent true, maximum.
So that’s the end of that, for the moment.
*
There’s no real chance of them leaving together after dessert. Morse heads back to his while Joan stays on for everyone’s favorite part of Sunday evenings in the Thursday household: watching Meeting Point and needling Dad about current affairs. After that, she knows she’s in for a tiny bit of very casual parental interrogation, and she can only hope that her mum will take pity on her and claim the position of sole investigator. She’s going to need a drink or two before she can face her dad one-on-one after all this — even if this is the outcome he was hoping for, she still seduced his sergeant. Both father and daughter need to take a few days and figure out how to best ignore that fact before settling down for a chat.
She follows Morse out to the doorstep and pulls him close; he rests his chin on top of her head.
“Just remember, while you’re getting your third degree now, at least it’ll be over tonight. I have to wait until tomorrow morning for mine.” She can feel him cringe at this. “That, or he won’t even acknowledge it. I don’t know what would be worse.”
(Down the road, when both their ineffective deception and the subsequent renegotiation of professional-personal boundaries are safely in the past, Joan will point out to her father how much better she made his life when she decided to take on his bagman as her boyfriend. At her place, he eats balanced meals and sleeps for at least six hours a night. He’s still cranky and he still works too much, but at least he can usually be convinced to take a break to hold her hand down at the pub for a few hours before retreating back into whatever hellscape of an investigation has him despairing over the sorry state of humanity this month. It’s easier for him to recall that he’s a person with Joan popping up to remind him that his corporeal form isn’t just for carting his brain around from place to place. “You have to admit, he’s much easier to be around when he remembers that he’s not just alive to pay bills, solve crimes, and drink.”
Fred will laugh and it will come out as a snort. Maybe that’s where she gets it. “You’ve only partially domesticated him, love. This morning, he told the Chief Constable to go screw himself in front of half the station. Luckily for all of us, it was in Ancient Greek and only DC Trewlove understood it. So yes, thank you for whatever balanced breakfast you fed him. Granola, was it?”)
“I’ll push for the most humane treatment possible,” Joan says. “I wonder how my mum knew.”
“Maybe we’re both rotten at keeping secrets.”
“This particular secret, anyway.”
(Win overhears part of this and can’t help but laugh to herself. She’s suspected this day would come ever since that morning the pipe burst and Joan never returned from answering the door; when Morse finally reappeared, he was bright pink and looked as though someone had just walloped him with a frying pan, so she assumed Joan had dragged him around to the back garden and snogged him senseless before she took off without eating any breakfast. She does indeed question her daughter while Fred and Sam do the washing-up that night, but it’s because she wants to check her timelines and reassure herself that her husband isn’t the only experienced detective in the marriage.)
*
It’s been real the whole time, but there’s a whole new level of reality once they acknowledge their relationship out loud.
Parts of it are terrifying, like the day Shirley calls and immediately tells Joan not to panic, but she’s needed at the Radcliffe Infirmary and she should hurry. Her flat is barely a half-mile from the main entrance and she covers the distance at a trot, wearing the old dungarees and plimsolls she put on to scrub down the bath. Morse’s injury turns out to be relatively minor but he got it in the course of confronting an MI5 operative he suspects of being involved with a decade-old series of murders, and Dad is taking no chances with spooks and wiretaps. She’s surprised at how much they’re sharing with her and learns later that they’d voted on it in advance. (It was four-to-one in favor of full disclosure, with her father as the lone dissenter. “I just didn’t think you needed all of it,” he’ll say when questioned.) Shirley accompanies her back to the house and Joan sleeps on her friend’s sofa that night for comfort, Captain Fancy guarding the flat with the ferocity of an Alsatian.
Parts of it are mundane, like when she finally permits crossword-solving in her flat again after enacting a unilateral ban on click pens. It was never the puzzles she objected to, just the incessant erratic tuneless clicking, and he’s really been rather pathetic about missing her on school nights so she allows him to come over as long as he can keep himself occupied while she’s studying. He reads the trickier clues aloud while she makes fun of the strange ways the people in her statistics textbook behave. ( “Millicent draws two marbles from an urn containing six red marbles and four black marbles. What is the probability that both of the marbles are black? I want to know why Millicent is putting marbles in urns in the first place. What a bizarre hobby.” “Maybe she works at a mortuary.” “That explains how she gets the urns, Morse, but why?” ) She’s bought some very nice biros that all have caps and she notices that he steals them, finds them tucked into his police-issued steno pads. If she’s truly broken him of the clicking habit, all of Cowley CID owes her a thank-you and a few drinks, but she doesn’t think her click-pen ban can be successfully replicated in a larger milieu.
And parts of it are fun. It was thrilling to pretend otherwise sometimes but it’s a relief not to have to do it anymore. First off, she can say “I love you” whenever she wants. (She says it that day in the Infirmary, in front of Dad and Shirley and Jim and Max and maybe even the government, and he says it back even though he blushes to the tips of his ears, which makes Shirley giggle. Max elbows the young DC and reminds her that the autopsy room is a safe space for love; the pathology department at the Radcliffe must be far more interesting than Joan would have expected.) When they leave her flat in the morning, they can walk to the city center and kiss in front of Carfax Tower before he turns down St. Aldate’s to pick up the car and she keeps going down High to reach the poly. They’re free to share pub booths and baskets of chips and that third mug of beer she can’t always finish on her own. He can drape his arm around her and she can rest her head on his shoulder, letting herself revel in her own possessiveness. This one’s mine.
The annual police widows-and-orphans fundraiser is all three at once. Terrifying when more eyes are on them than she’d expected; mundane when he hides at a table in the back and she carries on enough polite conversations for them both; and fun when she finally gets to take his tuxedo off at the end of the night, unwrapping him just like she’s wanted to for so long. (For this event, Joan reworked the bodice of her red shantung sheath and took the hem up by two inches because if she has to be a topic of mild notoriety for a bit, she figures she should at least look the part. One girl-next-door turned femme fatale, coming up. Her lipstick is a bright warm tone and she artfully smeared a bit on Morse’s collar halfway through the evening, mostly because she wanted to kiss him when he smiled at her but a little bit because she wanted to stir the pot. Forget black widows and female dons and French girls — he’s spent the last six months in bed with the beloved only daughter of his famously overprotective DCI, and frankly, his colleagues should respect that kind of nerve.)
*
Joan gets a baby photo in the mail, postmarked Missoula, USA, where Dr. Hope Norman-Jakes has gotten a tenure-track position teaching cultural anthropology to the hippie children of Montana ranchers. (In her third trimester? Joan is impressed.) The new father is a little sad about abandoning his wild cowboy dreams for yet another uni town, but he’s taken up fly fishing and writes a full-page letter about the overwhelming magic of his new daughter. She pins little Michelle to her refrigerator door with a magnet shaped like a rocket ship.
Funny how things turn out.
She thinks about how Shirley described Clyde Barrow some weeks back — an ain’t-shit man. Peter Jakes easily could have fallen into that category at one point, all hard angles and mild corruption, but he gradually got better at doing the right thing and ended up with a chance to start over. It’s rewarding to see someone grow even if she’s uncomfortably aware of how close Miss Hope Norman came to disaster. What if he doesn’t marry you? What if you don’t finish your degree? You slink back home unmarried and pregnant with the child of a man who doesn’t care for you enough to take responsibility for himself? You can still start over, but it becomes so much harder.
She’s run through the scenario herself already, of course, intrusive thoughts when her period is a day or two late. Morse would marry her immediately, which is as comforting as it is dreadful — because then what? No matter how she feels about him, she’s not ready to be anyone’s wife and she’s certainly not ready to be anyone’s mother. So birth control is something she proactively manages now, rather than simply relying on being a copper’s daughter (a barrier method in and of itself, forever seeing them all off at the end of the garden path) like she did for so long. The NHS has finally begun offering the Pill to unmarried women and she makes a mental note to ask one of the nurses at work about it on Monday. She knows he’ll always do the right thing by her, but that’s not a choice she wants either of them to have to make.
*
It’s the darkest day of the year and Joan just can’t get up. Maybe she’s been too steady for too long, because today a bunch of feelings have sneaked up and coshed her on the head and she doesn’t know how to manage them anymore when they’re all stacked on top of each other like this. It’s like she’s gone soft, sticking to a schedule and being in love, and she feels foolish for letting her guard down. She stays in bed with her head under the pillow, insulated from everything outside because it’s too loud in her brain today.
At least it’s her day off, so she doesn’t have to make any excuses to anyone, but she was going to meet up with Morse for lunch. Until around eleven-thirty, she tells herself she might really get up and shower and go, but when she feels her stomach lurch and her heart race at the idea of moving, she can’t put it off any longer. With great difficulty, she rallies and grabs the slimline telephone extension from her bedside table.
The call rings twice before it’s picked up. “Trewlove.”
“Did I dial the wrong number?”
“No, it’s his desk. He colonized mine with a stack of old newspapers so I’m eating my lunch over here. It’s Joan… please hold while I transfer you,” Shirley says, in a faux-smooth operator voice.
“Joan?”
Morse sounds so pleased that she’s calling, and she hates that she’s about to cancel on him. “I can’t do lunch.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Everything.”
He seems unfazed by this. “Okay. Do you want me to come over?”
Hmm. This option hadn’t occurred to her. She doesn’t especially want him (or anyone else, for that matter) to see her like this, but it’s not as though being on her own right now is doing her any good. “Yes, I think? Okay, I do. But not if you’re doing something. Shirley said you’re deep in old newspapers.”
“I’m not doing anything that can’t wait until the afternoon. The newspapers will still be here.”
“Okay. You’ll have to use your key, though. I’m… ” Ugh, in bed doesn’t feel right. Dreadful raw specificity it is. “I’m having a very hard time leaving my room today.”
“I’m heading over now.”
“Don’t say anything to Dad.”
“I won’t.”
“You can tell Shirley. But only if she asks.”
“All right.”
When Morse arrives, less than fifteen minutes later, he lets himself in and crawls under the covers with her, fully dressed.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” She doesn’t move from her cave under the pillow.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
She feels him settle in and appreciates that he doesn’t try to touch her, because she doesn’t think she could handle it right now. He just lies next to her, breathing in and out like he’s reminding her how respiration works. They’ve always got their hands all over each other and it’s strange to lie here like this, no physical contact or anything. She hates feeling so small and overwhelmed and helpless in this place where she usually reigns supreme. What good are personal reinventions if they don’t stick when you need them to?
“Thank you for coming by,” she says, bizarrely formal for someone talking to her boyfriend from halfway inside a pillowcase. “As you can see, I’ve been better.”
She hears him roll over to face her. “Did you eat anything today?”
“I had some toast around three o’clock in the morning. Does that count?”
“Do you want me to make you something while I’m here?”
“Can you do it without burning down my house?”
“Mmm, probably.”
The corners of her mouth quirk upwards. He’s such a disaster, but he’s her disaster. “You don’t sound as confident as I’d like you to.”
“How about I put some soda crackers on a platter and leave them on the nightstand?”
“That sounds like something we both can handle.”
The mattress shifts as he gets up, and she hears him rustling around her pantry in search of blandly realistic depression provisions. They both speak the same silent subconscious language, she’s relieved to realize, and he understands what she’s saying: My breath and my body and my mind have all come unstuck from each other, and the reassembly is exhausting.
Morse comes back in and sits on the edge of the bed. “There’s crackers and water, nothing too outrageous. I have to head back now. Can I see you before I go?”
“Okay.” She slithers out from beneath the pillow and knows she looks like a squashed red mess; he kisses her forehead and tells her he’ll see her later.
After he leaves, she rolls over and finds that he’s left her a glass of cold water, a thermos of hot water, a tin of tea, and a few sugar packets along with the crackers. On the strength of hot, sweet tea, she can crawl out from under the covers and read a few of her more frivolous magazines to distract herself from the mess inside her head. She is unable to develop an opinion on John Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce but the inconsequence of it all is a balm for her shattered nerves.
He’s back by sunset, by which point she’s managed to drag herself into the shower and has at least opened her statistics textbook. She hasn’t bothered to think about eating since the crackers but he’s brought a takeaway and she appreciates the effort; it’s nice to be taken care of like this, when it’s all a bit too much for her to manage solo. Her hair is wrapped in a towel and she’s got huge dark crescents under her eyes, because while she may have spent the rest of the day in bed she still didn’t sleep for any of it. She’s not especially hungry but she sips herbal tea and picks at some plain butter rice while he tucks into the curry. They’re quiet, and there’s nothing on the turntable.
Joan once heard that stories enter your mind as a memory, and in that moment, she’s struck by one such memory that can’t possibly be her own — a young boy and his sick mum sitting in their kitchen as the sun goes down, he’s brought home dinner from the shop but she’s not feeling well enough to eat much. She loves him more than anything in the world but her time is limited; she knows he’s about to suffer the mother of all wounds and she’s miserably powerless to stop it. She doesn’t trust her ex-husband and the new wife any more than she can throw them, and all she can do is make sure he knows how much he is loved in this moment because someday, much too soon, his welfare will be out of her hands.
Almost two decades later, the boy looks across another kitchen table and asks his debilitated and miserable girlfriend: “Do you want to know how I spent the rest of the afternoon?”
In spite of it all, Joan has to smile a little. She recognizes her own favorite tactic — the student has become the teacher. “Back to the old newspapers? Taking over Shirley’s desk?”
“I didn’t take it over, it’s her case too. We just got the transcripts back from the translator — these are Moscow publications, from around the time of the 1956 Olympics. I think there’s a connection with the Konstantinov killing.” This is the retired spook investigation, the one she thinks they might be keeping off the books for their own safety. Bright knows about it, so it’s got to be authorized on some level, but it’s possible he only knows what Shirley wants him to know. “At the time, in ‘57, the original investigators were stumped: how could someone have gotten into that room? It didn’t seem humanly possible, because it wouldn’t have been — for ninety-nine percent of people. But not for a gymnast, a small one.”
“So you’re buried in Soviet gymnastics lore.” Joan reaches over and scoops up a bit of his curry, mixing it into her butter rice. “I thought Shirley spoke Russian?”
“Just enough for chess pleasantries. Her German’s better than mine, but neither of us have Russian.” He tips his chair back far enough to make her nervous and snags a paper bag off the counter. “Here, I got you plain paratha.”
He’s never going to be able to leave any of it in the hall, and asking him to do that would be shooting herself in the foot anyway. For better or worse, the work is a part of him, and she doesn’t want him to show up on her doorstep as anything less than his whole self. That’s not what the two of them are about. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth when the cases cut too close, but once he really gets going, he’ll enthusiastically outline his theories at the kitchen table using silverware to represent corpse positions and she feels a bit like the attentive Watson to his disaster Holmes. (Joan Watson? No. Joan Watdaughter? Ha! But no. Joan Thursday, Girl Friday? Now that’s a possibility.) Morse’s complete disregard for case confidentiality borders on recklessness — Joan probably knows more about the current CID investigation portfolio than the new PC they just hired — but it’s always been easier for her to keep other people’s secrets than to keep her own.
He continues talking for the rest of the evening — as they put the takeaway in the refrigerator, as she weaves two braids into her wet hair so she won’t have to deal with a mess tomorrow, as she halfheartedly reviews her statistics study guide and he makes fun of the inane crosswords in her gossip magazines. (“Six letters, BEATLE JOHN? Come on, even I know that one. He’s on the cover, for god’s sake. Anyway, it’s the same thing in the safehouse out by the quarry, the room’s locked from the inside with tiny windows and a miniature ventilation shaft. Again, how do you get in and out of there to kill someone? You can do it, if your killer is petite and has better-than-average grip strength.”) She keeps up with most of it, but by the time he starts listing individual Soviet gymnastics coaches and their ties to suspected KGB agents on British shores, she lets the study guide flutter to the floor and falls asleep next to him on the sofa, her cheek smooshed into his shoulder.
Two hours later, when the pins and needles in his right arm have grown too excruciating to be borne in silence any longer, he gently shakes her awake and steers her towards bed. She’s still tired but a bit of actual sleep has done her good; she feels ready to articulate something that’s causing her grief these days.
In the dark, wrapped in one of the now three jumpers he’s left at hers, she rolls over to face him. “I have never been dreading Christmas as much as I am this year.”
It’s not that Joan doesn’t like the holidays — she doesn’t mind them, she just wishes they came at a less depressing time in the calendar. Late December in the British Isles is slippery and raw, and Joan thinks all major celebrations should take place between April and October. (The upper classes may not have much to recommend them, but at least they understand the necessity of scheduling their social season during warmer weather.) This year, Christmas is set to be a uniquely excruciating experience. Not only will two sets of relatives descend on the house on the day of, but after months of empty-nesting, her parents are insisting that their adult children, plus their adult daughter’s boyfriend who is the oldest man alive inside, all sleep over on Christmas Eve so they can open presents in the morning. She’ll be back in her old room and Morse is bunking with Sam, for god’s sake. She’s mortified.
He picks up her hand and tangles their fingers together. “I hope it’s not because I’m going to be there.”
“Of course not.” She squeezes back. “I’d obviously rather have you there than any of the extended family. But it’s going to be excruciating. Oh, look, Joanie’s brought her boyfriend — and he’s Fred’s deputy, isn’t that just darling? And there are going to be questions about how you and I came to be, and the chances that someone brings up the bank are just going to skyrocket, and I don’t know how I’m going to react to that when I’m already on edge.”
He hmms. “What if you fake a headache?”
She laughs ruefully. “You’re supposed to help me think of ways to get through it.”
“I just did. If it gets to be too much, no one’s entitled to an explanation from you. Just say you don’t feel well and go upstairs.”
Joan shakes her head. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s rude.”
Morse scoffs. “Ruder than asking someone about surviving a bank robbery? I mean, is that even something they’d ask?”
“Auntie Renie, no.” Joan relaxes a little. Renie brought her to get her hair done about a month after it happened and she’d cheerfully spoken of nothing but spaniel-breeding and Billie Jean King. She won’t ask any uncomfortable questions because Win probably updated her in real time, during their weekly phone calls. “Uncle Charlie, sure, guaranteed — but they never come. They’re always invited, though, and what if it’s my luck that this is the year they decide to show up?”
“When was the last time they came?”
“1958.”
“Nine years ago, then.”
She knows it sounds ridiculous, but — “There’s always a chance.”
“Sure,” Morse replies. “But if your uncle really shows up at Christmas for the express purpose of quizzing you about the worst day of your life, do you really think your father wouldn’t strike him where he stood? And that’s only if your mother didn’t get there first.”
This is true. She’s already far too aware of how far Dad will go to protect her, and while she can’t imagine her mother with a gun in her hand she can easily see her in the Mrs. Lovett role. The worst pies in Oxford! “So you’re saying it won’t be a nightmare of a holiday.”
“I’m not saying it won’t be incredibly awkward in ways we have yet to even anticipate.” He props himself up on his elbow, resting his cheek on his free hand. “I’m just saying that this particular scenario is unlikely to happen. And even if it does, you’re going to be surrounded by people who would sooner risk jail time than see you suffer unnecessarily. So that’s one less thing you have to worry about.”
Usually, when Morse is being calm and reasonable like this, it reminds her almost uncomfortably of her father. Tonight, though, he sounds like Sam more than anyone else — Sam on the other end of the phone line in June, reminding her that she’s loved almost to the point of absurdity. “I can’t believe you’re the one telling me that things can’t be as bad as I think.”
“I know, it’s a winter solstice miracle.” He rolls over onto his back and takes her hand along with him. “Look, I still don’t believe most things are going to turn out well, because they don’t. But I have perfect faith in your ability to come back from whatever any given day throws at you, Miss Thursday, because you always do.”
Her eyelids are growing heavy again. “You’d really go to jail for me?”
Another squeeze of his hand. “Without hesitation. At least this time I’d actually be guilty of something.”
“I do think Dad would get there first.”
“I agree. Your mum would organize the clean-up. And she’d have your brother and I hide the evidence.”
“What about me? What’s my job in all this?”
“You get on a train to London so you can start establishing an alibi. I’ll sow confusion around the timeline so if it ever comes up, everyone will think they’ll have seen your uncle two hours later than they actually did. I can’t say we’ll avoid suspicion altogether, but... no body, no crime, right?”
“I love this. You’re fully prepared to obstruct justice for me. Just what every little girl dreams of.” She yawns and snuggles deep beneath the down comforter. “It’s morally questionable but very romantic.”
(The next morning, over breakfast, she asks Morse if they’ve looked at the smaller Eastern Bloc countries too, and he runs across the hall with a piece of toast in his mouth to find out if Shirley happens to speak Czech. She doesn’t, but she knows someone who can: Jim’s mum, who grew up over a Polish bakery in Slough. The two detectives take off down the stairs, spouting theories about satellite state dependencies and rumored KGB recruitment patterns. Joan’s appetite has come roaring back overnight and she eats the rest of Morse’s abandoned breakfast before calling Jim to warn him about the incipient ambush, and also to tell his mum she says hello.)
*
Christmas Eve isn’t as bad as she’d been prepared for it to be, but it’s still less-than-ideal. Mum got out the baby albums after dinner and Joan briefly contemplated running away for real this time with her money and passport and everything, but she endured the indignity of her mother showing her boyfriend photos of her having a bath in the kitchen sink with what she imagines was great poise under the circumstances.
Dad is a bit unsettled by the whole thing — it’s one thing to spend sixty hours a week in the trenches with someone, but they’re still navigating the outside-of-work shift from faithful bagman to Joanie’s boyfriend and he begs off after an hour or so of post-dinner chatter, claiming that he needs to be well-rested to tackle the feast she and Mum will be preparing. Everyone drifts upstairs fairly soon after that, leaving the sitting room in darkness. It reminds Joan of twenty years ago, going to bed early so ‘Santa’ could come down the chimney without a fuss — only later did she learn that her parents used that time to retrieve their presents from where they’d been stashed in the neighbors’ shed, well beyond the reach of little Joan and baby Sam.
She tries to cajole Morse into sneaking across the hall to her bedroom, but he refuses; after that fateful Sunday dinner, after her father greeted him at work the next morning like nothing had happened, Shirley reported back that he’d spent a few days sorting through the personnel files when they had three uniformed officers who could easily have done it and the whole station assumed he was being reprimanded for something. Only after that would DCI Thursday acknowledge in front of the rest of the bullpen that his sergeant has legitimate claims upon his daughter’s time. Joan’s clearly not going to win this battle — Morse is prepared to observe six full feet of distance from her in this house if he thinks it’ll keep him out of that horrible file room down on the basement mezzanine.
There’s a knock on her door around ten, but it turns out to be her brother. “I gave your boyfriend the bed, like a gentleman,” he says.
Joan sticks out her tongue, because Sam threw her under the bus earlier and fetched her baby albums when Mum asked, but she lets him in because she’s figured out his big secret and wants to lord it over him. “Thank you for your sacrifice, Private Thursday.”
“He’s out cold. As a family, we may be too much for him.” Sam produces a packet of Navy Cut. “Can I smoke in here?” he asks conspiratorially, and they end up passing a cigarette back and forth out the window like they did a few times as teenagers. She’s a compassionate executioner, and she lets him get in a few good puffs before pouncing.
“You’re hiding something,” she finally sing-songs. “I’m not the only one around here who’s had a secret companion recently.”
Sam stills. “What makes you say that?”
“A few things.” Joan lets herself preen a bit and draw it out; she’s learned plenty from Shirley about theatrically organizing one’s deductions aloud. “Number one: your good shirt, from earlier today. You didn’t have that shirt when you lived at home, so it’s new, but besides that, it’s got French cuffs, and you’d never pick a shirt with French cuffs. Ergo, someone bought it for you, and I know it wasn’t Mum because she shows me everything she gets for you in advance. Number two: you have a massive love bite at the base of your neck. I saw it when you hopped across the room to grab my baby pictures like a little toad.” Sam squirms. “Now, a young man out on the town might find himself accompanied by any number of ladies, but in a new shirt, with French cuffs to boot? Someone else is dressing you, and I bet it’s the same someone who’s been marking you up. Spill. Who is she?”
Sam looks away for a long while, at the house across the road with lights enough to make Tesla blush.
“Not she,” he says, and it’s quieter than anything he’s said in years.
Ah. Joan hands him the cigarette. “Okay. He?”
Sam nods and takes a long drag. He seems a bit surprised by her lack of surprise, but she’d rather have him confused than ashamed or afraid. “There’s this bar. I heard about it from some of the lads and when I went to see for myself… I met someone.” He passes the smoke back. “He’d never been there, either.”
Joan takes the last puff and grinds out the butt on the underside of the brick windowsill. “Well, if he’s putting you in French cuffs, he’s probably not really the rough-bars-and-beers type, now is he?”
“No, he’s not. You aren’t shocked by this,” Sam says slowly, as she ushers him out of the window so she can close it. “All par for the course in your new bohemian student life?”
“It’s been an interesting year,” Joan acknowledges. She sits up against the head of the bed and motions for Sam to make himself comfortable at the foot. “But as long as you’re happy, and healthy, and safe, all I have to say is that I hope I get to meet him someday.”
Sam snickers as he situates himself opposite her. “You sounded so much like Mum there. Happy and healthy and safe, that’s all that matters.”
“Well, she’s right! And she’d say so, too.” Joan is reasonably confident about this; Auntie Renie’s a confirmed spinster and she’s the only relative any of the Thursdays genuinely likes. “And who am I to judge anyone’s choices?” She gestures towards the hallway. “After watching Mum worry her head off about Dad every day for decades, I went and fell in love with someone who seems determined to get himself killed in the line of duty by the time he turns thirty-five. It isn’t rational.”
He shakes his head. “Let’s not throw the L-word around yet, okay? We’re still figuring it out.”
She nods. “I get it.” Do I ever.
“What about you?” Sam picks up a pillow and hugs it to his chest. “Are you happy and healthy and safe, too?”
“For the most part. Some days are better than others.” She comes clean, because she owes him a secret now and it’s just fair play to tell him. “Couldn’t get out of bed a few days ago. Nerves, this time.”
Sam buries his chin in the pillow. “Anything in particular?”
“This, actually.” She waves in the direction of the rest of the house. “Christmas with the family. Bringing Morse here to meet Auntie Renie and everyone, being totally out in the open about it, wondering who’s going to ask me about what… a lot of feelings, is all.”
“It’ll be fine.” Sam grins. She can see the upper part of it, at least. “I’ll try to suck up as much of the attention as I can, with all my heroic stories from the Army. Once they hear about my exploits on KP, no one will even notice that you’re attached at the lips to Dad’s bagman.” He lifts his head then and makes several exaggerated and completely inaccurate smooching noises.
“Ugh, you’re awful.”
Sam sways back and forth with the pillow. “I saw you petting him right before everyone went to bed. Are you suuure you don’t want to come over and see me?” He dodges the kick she aims in his direction. “If you two are always this touchy-feely, I genuinely do not know how you thought you were keeping this a secret from everyone else.”
She scowls, but he’s right. They’re awfully tactile, as a pair. “Well, it took us two years to get around to it. There’s a lot of catching up to do.”
“So weird but so gorgeous,” Sam trills, mocking her words from a morning long ago. “And you’ve finally gotten your weird, gorgeous admirer to fall at your feet. He knows you’re an absolute monster once it drops below freezing in the mornings, right?” Her kick lands this time, so Sam gets up and tosses the pillow back to her before opening the door.
“Top floor flat, remember? Heat rises.”
“Ha!” He’s almost gone, but he pokes his head back around the edge of the door. He always took forever to say goodnight when they were children and she can’t believe he’s going to be twenty-three soon. “I really do mean this — good for you, Joan Thursday.”
“Back at you, Sam Thursday.” She smiles and turns on her reading lamp.
*
“This is too twee,” Shirley says, sprawled across the bed while Joan folds laundry. “Waiting around for our little boyfriends on New Year’s Eve, all of us bestest friends forever and ever.” She mimes sticking a finger down her throat. “I cannot even tell you how much I need to discover a dead body tonight. Solving a murder is the only thing that’ll give me some peace.”
“This is one of the key ways in which we differ,” Joan deadpans. “I like a bubble bath; you like investigating a spree killer or two. How many cold cases did you crack on your little jaunt home?”
“Just the one, but I can’t tell you about it until the confidentiality agreement expires.”
Joan pauses her folding. “Wait, seriously? Are you having me on?”
Shirley shakes her head. “No, ma’am. You can ask Grandmama. I can do whatever I want with the story but not until ten days after she dies. She wants to make sure her death sticks before I go public.”
“Am I now an accessory to something after the fact?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” Shirley waves it away, signaling a change in topic. (Her grandmother will live long enough to accuse Margaret Thatcher of being ill-bred, and Joan never does find out exactly what her friend did that Christmas.) “Did I mention that work is just awful now?”
Joan eases a clean pillowcase out from beneath Captain Fancy, who is having his afternoon nap in the clothes basket. “You mean now that you’re out of uniform and making more money?”
“No, now that they’ve filled my old post with this dish of a boy who has to call me ma’am.” Shirley shivers. “It’s all very sexy until I remember that I outrank him, and then I feel like a dirty old cat.”
“Jim outranks you, how’s this different?” asks Joan.
“It’s different because I started that.” Shirley scoops Fancy out of the basket and picks up a floral-sprigged blouse. “Can I borrow this?”
“Isn’t that yours anyway?”
“Might be.” Shirley holds the blouse up to the light like it’ll reveal its true owner if she just squints hard enough. “Sure you don’t want to come out tonight?”
“I thought this was already too twee for you,” Joan points out. “Do you really want to go on a double date with us?”
“No, no, you’re right. I love you dearly but you’ve been a real sop lately and I can only imagine he’s even worse. Better if you just stay home and stare deeply into each other’s eyes while he reads you Petrarchan love sonnets, or whatever it is you do.”
(Joan would be fine with that, actually, as long as it came immediately before or after sex — or even during, if he got ambitious. She doesn’t tell Shirley, though.)
“You could call up Police Constable Dishy,” she suggests instead. “That would make it a lot less twee.”
Shirley pulls a face. “Ugh, don’t I know it. But I think I can only have one officer on the go at a time.” She tosses the blouse in her bag and gets up. “Gets too complicated, otherwise, and if it gets too complicated then I’ll never make Inspector.”
Joan still isn’t totally clear on the exact boundaries of Shirley’s relationship with Jim, because Cassandra the art student still comes over from time to time, but everyone seems happy enough and Shirley never takes her eye off the ball.
“What about Jane?” she asks. Jane is a DC from the Met, another in the new mold of tough and pretty detectives who are slowly but surely popping up across Britain. Shirley’s on first-name terms with most of them, since they’re all encouraged to attend the same endless ‘professional development’ seminars so they can have nice quiet publicity-friendly careers in administration rather than in CID, where they might break a nail and take a real job away from a man.
“Jane?” Shirley scoffs. “I’m not sleeping with Jane.”
Joan is honestly surprised by this; she had dinner with them a few weekends ago and she swore she saw Jane making eyes at Shirley over the Chinese takeaway. “Could have fooled me.”
“Jane doesn’t like women, plus she has a drinking problem.”
“You’re a detective, at least half the people you know have a drinking problem.”
“And that’s exactly why I can only have one copper on the go at a time,” Shirley says with finality. “That said, should we be very twee indeed and have lunch together tomorrow? Boyfriends optional.”
Joan shakes her head. “We’re actually heading up to London tomorrow, for a few days. We’re seeing his sister for dinner.”
“You’re meeting his sister?” Shirley grasps the import; Joyce is terra incognita for most. When Morse suggested it, Joan felt as though she could have been knocked over with a feather. “You have it so bad.”
Joan laughs. She certainly can’t claim otherwise, can she?
*
New Year’s Eve 1967 is spent in her bedroom, at her request — she moved her fairy lights inside for the winter and their warm, low illumination is perfect for a night in. They’ve both been working too late and too much in the week between the holidays so the sex is sleepy and slow, and they make a deal after: she’ll pay for dinner if he does all the legwork. Morse returns from his expedition with fish and chips and they eat in bed because it’s a holiday, and she can always wash the sheets later. It’s still a relief when neither of them spills anything and she can relax with a drink afterwards. She sometimes feels like she spends a disproportionate amount of time doing laundry and appreciates any opportunity to put it off for another day.
When the clock strikes twelve, and the cheers and Auld Lang Synes float up from the pubs in the next street, they clink their glasses together and Morse says he wants to ask her a question. Joan freezes, because it’s New Year’s and she still suspects her father of hinting that Gretna Green makes a wonderful holiday destination.
“Yes?” she says, cautiously.
“Don’t worry. I’m not proposing to you.” It’s mostly reassuring, with an undertone of regret he can’t totally hide. They’d be married tomorrow, if it were entirely up to him — but her way of doing things is just a bit more practical than his, and he knows it just as well as she does.
“I do want you to ask me.” She turns her head to the side and presses a kiss against his shoulder. “Someday — ”
“ — just not yet,” he finishes for her.
“No.” She shakes her head. “Not yet.”
In all those classical myths — Hades and Persephone, Perseus and Andromeda — the woman is a passive object to be acted upon, to be abducted or to be won as some kind of prize for heroism. Joan doesn’t want myths. She doesn’t want stories, doesn’t want tragedies or dramas. She wants clear eyes and honesty and something that will last. She wants him to listen to her, and to ask her only when they’re both certain she’ll say yes.
He takes her hand. “You promise you’ll tell me?” he asks, like he thinks there’s a chance she’d forget.
“I promise, I’ll tell you.” She clears her throat, swallowing a lump before it can form. “So what did you want to ask me?”
“Where were you going, that morning when you left?”
“I was going to go to Ireland.”
“Ireland, really?” Morse looks a bit surprised. “You know they wouldn’t let you in now, because of the foot-in-mouth outbreak.”
(This is what being a New Liberated Woman gets you, she thinks: pillow talk about zoonotic disease. And that’s after she chose the right lover. Imagine how awful it could have been if she’d picked differently!)
“If you ever mention foot-in-mouth disease in my bed again, so help me god, I will make you leave,” she says. “You can go cuddle up with Shirley and Jim, stay nice and warm. You’re already living with Jim before marriage, it’s only fair if he lets you slip it in — “ here she has to dodge not one, but two throw-pillow grenades.
“I can do this all night.”
“I can think of better ways to spend that time, can’t you?”
“No, no, you did this to yourself. No one needs this many decorative pillows.”
“You’re the one who makes a whole nest out of them.” It’s true, she usually just sweeps them all into the corner when she’s sleeping alone. He’s the one who likes surrounding himself with comfort in her bed, as though this is the only place he allows himself to find it and he has to fill up each time he’s there. She motions for him to give her his glass and tops up his drink as a sign of non-aggression.
“Thanks.” He takes a long sip. “Do you realize how wonderfully peaceful it is at your place, compared to mine?”
“I honestly thought you already knew about the trombone when you agreed to live with him.”
“As we’ve established, no, I did not know about the trombone.” She knows he expects to move in with her when his lease with Jim is up next fall and she hasn’t decided how she feels about it yet. They’d probably need a bigger flat than this one, and they’d have to figure out custody sharing of record players in advance, and she can’t even imagine what her parents will say. (Living apart affords them the plausible deniability her father’s sanity demands; if he doesn’t look at it too closely, it’s not happening. She’s not telling him about London until after they get back.) “You didn’t tell me about the trombone, and you didn’t tell me about Cassandra, either.”
“Wait, Cassandra’s been over at your place?”
“So you did know about her.”
“I thought she was seeing them separately, not together.”
“I think they’re all seeing each other. I asked Strange and he said variety is the spice of life, then he went back to watching television.” He frowns. “Are they more interesting than we are?”
“I think we’re all just doing what we need to be doing,” Joan replies, and she means it.
“As long as we’re sharing information, did you know Trewlove’s one of the landed gentry? Her father is Baron Trewlove and her emergency contact person is listed as The Dowager Countess, no territorial designation.”
“Yeah, that’s her gran. She’s not actually a countess, Shirley just calls her that as a kind of… honorific, I guess? Posh people are weird like that.”
“Mmm.” She doesn’t have to tell him exactly how weird posh people can be; he investigates them at a pretty good clip. “It’s in the personnel files. I had to sort through them earlier this month and put together an emergency contact list for everyone in CID. I think your father was trying to make a point.”
Joan agrees, though with this added context, she thinks it was less about punishment for secretly dating his daughter for six months and more about the consequences of needlessly endangering yourself when people care about you. (Besides, the secrecy was a misdemeanor and he’s easily the most appropriate man she’s ever brought home.) She knows what she signed up for but appreciates the gesture.
“So who’s your emergency contact?” she asks. “Is it me?”
She doesn’t know if she wants to be or not, so it’s a relief when he shakes his head and goes a little pink. “No, I didn’t want to assume. Mine… it’s your mum, actually.”
Oh, lord. She can’t look at this straight-on for too long before it gets kind of incestuous. “Really?”
“If anything ever happens, I don’t want Joyce to get that phone call out of the blue, and your father would likely be the one making the call to begin with. When they made me put down a name, she was the first one I thought of. She’d know exactly what to do.” He shrugs. “I thought it made sense, but is that very odd?”
“No, you’re fine. She’s good in a crisis.” Joan thinks back to late July, throwing up at the credit union and her mother’s calm, steady presence. He needs all the stability he can get, and Winifred Thursday is safe as houses.
“So. Ireland.”
“Yes, Ireland. I’m glad I didn’t go.” He never has to know that she never would have made it past Leamington. She needs to guard that from even him, she thinks, how closely she flirted with disaster; that knowledge is hers and hers alone. “In the moment, I just wanted to get as far away as I could, as quickly as I could.”
“What were you going to do when you got there?”
“The usual stuff, I suppose,” she replies. “Work in a shop, go to school, get a boyfriend… guess we’ll never know.”
“No, I guess not.” He huffs out a short laugh.
She bumps her thigh against his under the sheets. “Funny how things turn out.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I think things turned out exactly how you wanted them to.”
Joan lights a cigarette and blows a smoke ring in his face, determined to start the year as she means to go on: doing exactly as she pleases and teasing her hopelessly uncool boyfriend, whom she loves very much but whom she cannot have living in her house just yet.
He’s going to be her last — she knows her heart’s done for, has been for years. They’re going to orbit each other until the end of the universe, but she needs to finish up her tour of the outer limits before she lets his surface gravity pull her home.
To her surprise, Morse plucks the cigarette from her fingers and before she can warn him, he takes a deep, thoughtful drag. Realization dawns as he narrows his eyes at her.
“Is there grass in this?”
And he coughs a bit, but he still follows her as she sails headlong into the final third of the twentieth century.