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“I thought men your age got this way about their secretaries,” said Win. “Not their bagmen.”
The uncharacteristic note of acerbity in her voice caught Fred by surprise. Had he been talking about Morse again? He hadn’t noticed. He put his hand over hers.
“Aw, pet, it’s not like that,” he told her, smiling. But what was it like? “He’s a good lad, that’s all. Bit of an odd one out, but sharp as a tack. He—“ Fred hesitated—something had just occurred to him that might explain things. “He—reminds me of someone, I think—just can’t think who. Getting old, eh?”
Win’s face softened. She twisted her hand palm up and squeezed his. “Of poor Carter, most like. We all still miss him, too, you know.”
It was easiest to leave it there. Fred kissed Win, as if to thank her for the insight, and they moved on to other things.
It wasn’t Carter Morse reminded him of, though, Fred knew that much. He’d loved Carter like a son, to be sure, and hoped to bring him along as best he could. But Carter had been a big, bluff fellow, not lacking in the wits department, exactly, but getting by mostly on charm—he could charm the birds out of the trees, that one. Fred did miss him, of course, if you could call being haunted by someone a version of missing them, but he was as different from Morse as tea from turnips.
Fred turned it over in his mind some, after that, trying to figure out why Morse held his attention the way he did. It was the cleverness, sure—Fred hadn’t worked with a D.C., even a D.I., that clever since coming to Oxford. But it had as much to do with Morse’s single-mindedness, he thought—his utter disregard for rank and procedure. It had been a long time since anyone had approached him as an equal, and Fred found he enjoyed it, even if that person was an awkward, arrogant scrap of a boy. But Win had a point; there was an undercurrent of something stronger too—some potent memory or half-suppressed emotion. Fred had lived long enough to admit the presence of the thing, even if he couldn’t quite bear to bring it to the surface.
+++
It was perhaps a week after these musings that Fred arrived at an early morning crime scene to find PC Strange interviewing a witness while Morse lounged against a wall, cradling a paper coffee cup in his hands, and watching silently.
“Lazy sod,” DS Jakes muttered in Morse’s general direction, as they got out of the car.
Fred gave Jakes a quelling look, but in truth it wasn’t on. Morse should have been asking the questions while Strange took notes. Still, he didn’t like to interrupt, and Strange was making a decent job of it, even if Morse made no effort to correct his posture at his guv’nor’s approach—somewhat surprising, that, even for him. Fred waited until Strange had sent the witness off with instructions not to leave town without notifying the police before raising a significant eyebrow.
“Lost his voice, he has,” Strange told him, managing to sound both worried and exasperated. “Told him to go home, but he’s a stubborn git, begging your pardon, sir.”
Jakes snorted, but Fred took a closer look a closer look at Morse, who was finally standing at something like attention. He was pale and sunken-eyed, visibly shivering inside his ill-fitting coat. He’d been snuffling and shaky all week, Fred remembered, and the thing had obviously caught up with him at last.
“Laryngitis, is it?” he asked, and Morse made a miserable little squawk of assent. “Right. Jakes, give me the keys. PC Strange will run you back after you’ve canvassed the rest of the neighborhood. Morse, you’re with me.”
Jakes looked at him from under his brows, knowing and incredulous at the same time. But he handed over the keys without comment.
+++
In the car, Morse leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, all resistance wrung out of him. His hair lay lank across his forehead, and Fred knew that if he touched his face he would find it hot and dry. Looking at the pale, fragile skin pulled tight over bone, another of those maddening glimmers of memory teased at him, but, as usual, he couldn’t trace it to its source.
Upstairs in his squalid bedsit, Morse collapsed on the unmade bed with a huff of exhaustion. He mouthed something, but Fred couldn’t make it out. With a weary smile, Morse dug his pad and pencil out of the coat he was still wearing and scrawled, THANKS BE IN TOMORROW.
“Like hell you will,” Fred told him. “You need some proper rest.”
He surveyed the tiny flat. The results were unpromising. There was a kettle, at least, with a tin of tea beside it, but the only other thing approaching sustenance to be seen was a half-empty whiskey bottle on the table. He suspected even the breadbox near the sink was empty.
But what could he do? He had a crime scene to attend to; Oxford City Police wouldn’t thank him for letting criminals run free whilst he went down the shops for his ailing DC.
As if reading his mind, Morse started making shooing motions at him. He waved the pad at Fred again: GO BACK TO WORK SIR I’M FINE.
Fred pointed an admonishing finger at him. “Have a lie down, you hear me?” But he struggled with an odd reluctance all the way down the stairs.
+++
Win sent him back after work, of course, laden with soup and throat lozenges and a slice of ham pie (“in case he’s feeling better”).
“Poor lad,” she said. “Perhaps you should bring him back here—he could have the spare room, ‘til he’s on his feet again.”
The thought had crossed Fred’s mind; it was no less than he’d done before, after all. “We’ll see. You know what the young are like—he’s probably feeling better already.”
But Morse didn’t look anything like better when he opened his door. He’d shed the coat, but added at least one thick wool jumper. His hair stuck out at odd angles, and he looked even more exhausted and feverish than he had when Fred left him that morning.
“How’re the pipes?” Fred asked. Morse made a disgusted face and shook his head.
He didn’t object when Fred followed him up the stairs to his flat, though—just led the way, trailing a hand along the wall for support. Inside, a half-drunk cup of tea sat on the table alongside an empty glass tumbler. The level of the whiskey bottle was visibly lower, and Fred had to stop himself pouring the rest of it down the sink.
“Here,” he said instead, concern making him brisk. “You know that stuff’s no good when you’re ill.” He picked up both cup and glass and set Win’s supplies down in their place. “Get back into bed—I’ve seen corpses with better colour than you have right now—and let’s see whether Mrs. Thursday’s finest can put some life back in you.”
Morse didn’t seem to know what to do with the unexpected attention. His brows drew together, and he made an odd little raspy grunt. But then he seemed to decide that obedience was his best option, and he clambered back into the narrow bed, huddling his arms around his drawn-up knees and watching Fred warily as he unpacked his parcels.
It was unnerving, the laryngitis, Fred decided. If there was one thing Morse was good at, it was speaking his mind. To see him deprived of that—to have to guess what was going on behind those glassy, red-rimmed eyes—was…unsettling. It made whatever unruly emotions he felt for Morse harder to control, and he had to resist the urge to ascertain how Morse was feeling by touching him, palming his forehead or neck as he would if it were Sam or Joan.
Instead, Fred busied himself with the food. He turned the kettle on, found the flat’s single, battered pot for the soup, and lit the cooker. He kept up a stream of chatter as he waited for things to heat, as much to distract himself as to entertain Morse. He went over the events of the day, the things they’d already uncovered about this morning’s case.
But when he finally turned around again, a cup of tea in one hand and a mug of soup in the other, he nearly dropped them both.
Morse was asleep. His chills had obviously left him; he’d stripped off both jumper and shirt and lay, an awkward bundle of limbs, in just his vest, looking as overheated as he’d looked cold before. His flushed face had smoothed out, merely serious now, rather than pained.
The memory Fred had been avoiding rose to the surface so swiftly, so clearly, it seemed impossible he’d ever managed to bury it.
It was the voice, Fred decided, placing the cup and mug very carefully on the table and lowering himself shakily onto the room’s lone rickety chair. Their voices were so different that it had obscured the resemblance; Morse going mute like this had allowed the similarity in build and colouring to finally register.
Ralph Tickell—Lieutenant Tickell to his men, Tick to his friends—had had one of those light, plummy, Home County voices—utterly distinct from Morse’s carefully constructed middle-class accent. He’s been quick-spoken, too, sailing from joke to joke, it seemed, all the way from Tobruk to El Alamein. The alphabetical proximity of Tickell and Thursday had brought them together the first day of Officer Training School, and luck, with a healthy dose of bloody-mindedness, had kept them alive through the Desert Campaign.
Fred had loved him. Loved him not just for his magical ability to procure extra chocolate or new tent, but perhaps even more for the grin that had refused to be extinguished by the dust and heat and chaos. Fred could see him now, more vividly than he had in years: fair skin as reddened by the sun as Morse’s was by fever, skinny arms akimbo, as he watched Fred gulp down the pilfered beer or Coca-Cola or strange Egyptian sweet. The sight always seemed to make Tick crow with pleasure.
A happy scene, though the memory put a lump in Fred’s throat. It was queer to think of himself as the same age Morse was now, younger even, laughing with Tick in that relentless sun.
Fred had seen Tick completely serious only twice. The first time had been after the fourth battle of Monte Cassino. All through all those bloody, brutal, rain-soaked months, Tick had kept his smile, his quick patter of wit; Fred had sometimes been more grateful for that smile than he had for a hot meal. In May, at enormous cost, the allies had broken through. When Tick appeared after that final battle, he brought with him not booze, nor food, but girls.
They weren’t prostitutes, Fred didn’t think—just skinny Italian girls who’d weathered the storm of war—but in those days all the rules seemed to have been overturned, and most people would do anything for an extra army ration or a wool shirt. The girls knew a barn where only half the roof had been blown away by the bombardments, and the four of them had ended up there, in the damp straw, naked as children, demonstrating that they were still alive. It was nothing Fred had done before or since, making love with another couple so close by, but he hadn’t thought twice about it that night. He could remember nothing about the girl he’d bedded, except the way her ribs felt sharp under his hands, and the way her hipbones pushed against her skin. But he could remember the sound Tick made as he came—loud and surprised and joyful.
Afterwards, the girls gathered their tattered clothes around them, ransacked Fred and Tick’s pockets for anything of value, and disappeared into the night. Fred lay next to Tick in the straw, still naked, smoking the one cigarette he’d managed to save for himself.
“Bloody war,” said Tick, his voice, for once, flat and humourless. He pushed himself up on one elbow, leaned over Fred, and kissed him on the lips.
It was not a chaste kiss. Tick’s lips were chapped from the long winter, but hot, and a bit swollen from kissing the girl before. He pillaged Fred’s mouth, ferocious, single-minded, his usual light, playful manner gone. But just as Fred felt himself beginning to respond, just as he started to push his hands into Tick’s unruly, sand-coloured hair, Tick pulled back.
For long seconds, he hung over Fred, utterly serious, as if recording something, drinking it in. Then he cracked a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes, slapped Fred on the chest, and said, “Come on, Thursday, ‘all’s fair’ and what have you, but we’d best get back to the men.”
The second time Fred saw Tick that serious was only a week later. On that occasion, the expression was entirely explained by the sniper’s bullet that had penetrated his skull and taken his life.
In the gloom of Morse’s room, Fred shuddered. There was a reason he never let himself think about Tick—a reason he hadn’t let himself see Morse’s resemblance to him until today. That kind of thing could drive you mad, or sink you so deep in grief you’d never get out. He took a pull of Morse’s whisky, straight from the bottle, but it didn’t quite chase away the pall. Morse himself slept on, but now his immobility seemed ominous.
Without really planning to, Fred moved to the bed and laid his hand on Morse’s face. It was sticky and over-warm, but definitely alive. The relief Fred felt was out of all proportion to the situation; tears pricked his eyes and he sniffed, loud and undignified—an unmistakably middle-aged sniff, he thought, incongruously—no dignity for old men.
At any rate, the sound was loud enough to wake Morse, who blinked and started, pushing himself upright in a flurry of dry coughs. His brows furrowed when he saw Fred hovering so close to the bed, but Fred bluffed his way through.
“Didn’t want you to sleep through your tea,” he said, retrieving the mug of soup from the table. Despite the years Fred had traveled in memory, so little real time had passed that it was still hot.
Fred settled himself back on the chair and frankly stared as Morse took cautious sips. Now that Morse was awake, his face wearing its habitual expression of worried inquiry, he no longer looked so much like Tick’s ghost. For a moment, Fred saw them both very clearly, as if they stood side by side—their differences as well as their similarities. Would he ever kiss Morse the way Tick had kissed him, he wondered; then shoved the thought away without answering it. A sudden longing for his home and family, for the life he’d worked so hard to build after the war, swept over him.
He fished his handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose with a resounding honk. “Must be coming down with whatever you’ve got,” he said to Morse’s questioning look. “I’ll tell you what: Win said I was to take you home with me if you were still poorly, and I think I should do just that. Let’s let her take care of both of us, shall we?”