Chapter Ten

Ben

"Good of you to show up," I ground out when Griffin finally showed his face thirty minutes later than the time he'd been supposed to turn up.

He shrugged, eying the building I'd been pacing outside for the last forty-five minutes with a distinct lack of interest. "Given there's no body, I don't really know why I have to be here."

The casual way he said it made me want to punch him, my fingers curling into fists. Only two days had passed since Rupert Shaw's untimely demise and I was already lying awake at night, expecting the call to tell me that Satanic Romeo had struck again. No lying awake for Griffin, though. We both knew what he'd been up to the previous night. "You're my partner," I said with a great deal of scorn. "You're meant to know what's going on with the case."

"You could fill me in."

I rounded on him, the offhanded way he was talking about the case that had consumed my every waking moment for weeks really grating on me. "If you think I'm going to give you daily reports just so you can spend the day in bed with your latest conquest, then you're insane."

A sly smile tugged at the corner of Griffin's lips. "Ah, so that's why you're pissed."

"I couldn't give a flying fuck which skank you stuck your dick in last night." I poked him in the chest, ignoring the spark that flew between us when we touched. "All I care about is catching the twisted maniac going around cutting people's fingers off. Remember him?"

Griffin's step backward meant that my second attempt at a poke fell short. "I remember." He eyed the building again. "You'd better tell me why we're here, then."

I remembered we were in a public place as the rage seeped out of me, a passerby almost walking into a lamppost so she didn't have to take her eyes off the scene we were making. Thank God I was plain clothes. Standing in the middle of the street in uniform having an argument didn't bear thinking about. Biting down on the urge to ask her whether she wanted a picture, I started toward the entrance to the building, Griffin displaying enough self preservation to fall into step at my side. "Rupert had an ex-boyfriend," I explained as I yanked the door open. "Apparently, it was quite a rocky relationship and didn't end well."

"Which means what?"

I jammed my finger on the button to call the lift. "Rupert went to the police to report him for making threats. The ex apparently struggled to accept that their relationship was really over."

Griffin rocked back slightly on his heels. "What sort of threats? "

"Not chopping his fingers off if that's what you're thinking."

"Of course not," Griffin said drily as the lift arrived and we stepped into it. "That would be too easy."

I pressed the button for the fifth floor and then leaned back against the wall, the doors closing with no one else getting in and the lift lurching into motion. "Rupert decided not to press charges in the end."

"So the threats weren't that serious?" Griffin queried.

I shrugged. "That's why we're going to talk to him. Ask him that and a few other questions. Every avenue is worth following up." At least Griffin didn't argue with that. "Oh, and he matches the description."

Griffin's eyebrow arched. "Brown hair and blue eyes?"

I nodded.

Griffin frowned. "Common sense would dictate that had it been his ex, Rupert would have said that rather than give a physical description." He shrugged. "Still, death can do funny things to the brain. It's worth checking out."

His sudden compliance jarred. "Five minutes ago you didn't even want to be here."

"A man can change his mind." Couldn't he just. And Griffin should know all about that, having gone from a man who showered me with compliments and told me I was the best thing that had ever happened to him, to someone who never wanted to see me again, almost overnight. I'd gone to sleep smiling, and I'd woken up to a nightmare. And no matter what they said, time didn't make things easier. Not when you shared as much as Griffin and I did, and I wasn't talking about memories and past events.

"Ben?"

"What? "

"You were frowning."

"I didn't realize it wasn't allowed." The quicker we caught Satanic Romeo, the quicker I could get him out of my life and return to some semblance of normality.

The address was flat twelve, the door identical to all the others in the corridor. As soon as I knocked, a diminutive woman with dark hair with streaks of gray, and round glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they were, answered the door and stared curiously at us from the inside. "DCI Ben Weaver," I said, holding up my badge for her to see. "And this is Griffin Caldwell. He's a special police liaison. Can we come in? We need to ask Douglas Elrod a few questions. It shouldn't take longer than an hour."

"Dougie," the woman said. "No one calls him Douglas. Not even me."

I took it from her comment and her age that she was his mother. "Dougie," I agreed. "Is he here? Can we speak to him?" I didn't wait for her to agree, carrying out the tried and tested police move of stepping forward and leaving her little choice but to step back and grant access. "If he's not here, we can wait."

She blinked. "He is here, but he's very upset. He's not really up to speaking to anyone."

"If we don't speak to him today," I said. "We'll need to come back tomorrow. It might be better for Dougie if he just gets it over and done with."

"He didn't do it, if that's what you're thinking," she blurted out. "Dougie loved Rupert. He'd never hurt a single hair on his head. Never mind…" She swallowed, the words seeming to dry up in her throat.

"If we could just speak to him," I insisted .

She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, a man appeared at her shoulder. Although, boy was probably a better description given how young he looked and his willowy frame—made even more so by the oversize gray jumper he wore. Dougie was the archetypal twink. His blue eyes were red-rimmed, like he'd spent most of the day crying. "It's okay, Mum," he said, his voice soft. "I don't mind talking to them." He offered a tremulous smile before leading us into a small but cozy living room, the sofa barely visible beneath all the cushions that covered it. I picked three of them up and moved them aside, Griffin doing the same before we sat.

Dougie glanced at his mum as he took the armchair at right angles to the sofa and pulled the overlong sleeves down to cover most of his hands. "Maybe you could make us some tea."

She nodded, looking relieved at the excuse to be elsewhere and then disappeared back the way she'd come, the kitchen presumably lying in that direction. There was a goldfish bowl in the middle of the coffee table, one lone goldfish swimming around in it.

"That's Neptune," Dougie said.

"Sorry?"

"The fish. He seemed shy when we got him, so we wanted to give him a name that made him feel more powerful. Neptune is the god of the sea." He gave an embarrassed little laugh. "It sounds stupid when I say it out loud."

"Not at all." I sat forward on the sofa, offering the introductions again for Dougie's benefit, seeing as he'd missed the earlier ones. There were no handshakes, none of us feeling the need to initiate one.

Dougie picked at a piece of loose skin on his nail. "I guess you want to ask me about Rupert."

"We do," I agreed, Griffin staying silent and letting me do my job. "We're speaking to all of Rupert's friends and family. It's standard practice after a…" I hesitated. Dougie already looked like it wouldn't take much to push him over the edge.

"You can say it," he said. "I won't keel over just because you use the word murder."

It might have been convincing if a single tear hadn't streaked its way down his cheek. I sat up straighter, already feeling like a bastard for the questions I was going to have to ask him. "How long ago were you and Rupert together?"

"We met three years ago," Dougie said. At Griffin's slight raise of an eyebrow, he confirmed what we'd both been thinking. "I was seventeen. He was twenty-two."

Not that big an age gap, all things considered, if you took Dougie being under eighteen out of the equation. "How did you meet?"

"In a bar."

For the next few minutes, we ran through the circumstances of their past relationship, Griffin chipping in with a few questions when he thought they were necessary. Yes, Dougie had used fake ID. Yes, he'd lied about his age at first, but had come clean before anything had happened between them. Yes, they had been serious, only growing apart when Rupert changed jobs and let his new colleagues' opinions influence him. No, Rupert hadn't admitted that was the reason, but it had been obvious. Yes, Dougie hadn't taken it that well. Rupert had been his first love. He hadn't been ready for things to end so suddenly between them.

It was at that point that Dougie's mum came in with the tea, her hands trembling slightly as she placed mugs in front of us, along with a jug of milk and an old-fashioned sugar bowl with a spoon in it so we could add our own if need be.

"Can we have some biscuits, Mum?" Dougie asked, the intention to keep her out of the room obvious to everyone except her apparently, as she readily agreed and disappeared back to the kitchen. While I ignored the mug of tea, Griffin set about adding milk and sugar.

"You made some threats to Rupert," I said while his mum wasn't in the room, figuring that it would be easier for him to talk about without a matriarchal presence. After all, what person wanted to talk about their flaws in front of the person who had given birth to them? I knew I wouldn't. "After you'd split up. Bad enough that he reported you to the police."

Dougie let out a sigh, his eyes now dry. "It wasn't like that."

"So tell me what it was like."

He pulled his sleeves even further down so that only the tips of his fingers peeked out. "I couldn't accept that things were over between us. I thought if I showed him how much I loved him, he'd see sense, that he wanted a grand gesture." He peeked up at me from beneath his lashes, the coquettish look an attractive one. "Have you ever been in love?"

I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of Griffin's proximity, his hand having stilled in the process of stirring his tea. How was I supposed to answer that when he was sitting right fucking next to me? "Unfortunately, yes."

Griffin gave a barely audible snort before resuming his stirring, the action far too prolonged for the single spoonful of sugar he'd added to the mug.

Dougie cocked his head to the side. "Why unfortunately?"

I should have said yes and left it at that. Why hadn't I? Because the temptation to twist the knife had been too much. Just like when I'd asked Griffin if he wished we'd never met, the intimation being that I did. "It didn't end well." My voice was spiky enough that it could have been a cactus. "He ended it over…"

"Over what?" Dougie asked, his interest clearly piqued. He didn't seem surprised that I'd said "he." His gaydar was obviously in full working order.

I'd been going to say something stupid. But categorizing the death of Griffin's sister as something stupid was a one-way trip to not only ending this interview, but to ending the partnership altogether and finding ourselves without a necromancer. Which would piss everybody off, including me. "Never mind. We're not supposed to be talking about me."

"I just wondered if you understood," Dougie offered with a watery smile.

"Understood what?" In contrast to my sweaty palms, Griffin sounded as cool as the proverbial cucumber when he asked the question.

Dougie's smile died. "That love can make you do stupid things. Yes, I threatened him, but I would never have done any of the things I said I would. And why I thought that would make him change his mind about us, I have no idea. I can see that now. Back then…" He gave an embarrassed shrug.

"What threats did you make?"

Dougie cast a quick look to the open door, his mum not having reappeared yet. Apparently, the biscuits were difficult to find. Either that or she didn't have any, and she was up to her elbows in flour rustling up a batch. "Do I have to say?"

"It would help us if you were honest."

He'd produced a tissue from somewhere, presumably up his sleeve. He shredded it between his fingers, bits of it dropping to the carpet like snow. "I told him I would wait until he was in bed asleep and then I would let myself into his flat and carve out his heart, that if I couldn't have him, then no one else could either." Griffin choked on his tea while I stared at Dougie in stunned shock, not sure what I was supposed to say to that. Dougie sniffed. "I would never have done it. I don't even like blood."

"He must have believed it to have gone to the police about it?"

"I had a key to his flat," Dougie admitted, bright spots of color appearing on his cheeks. "And I refused to give it back to him. I guess it freaked him out that I'd said that, and I could gain access whenever I wanted to. I think he went to the police mainly to force me to give the key back."

"And did you?" I asked.

He nodded. "I had little choice. They weren't very nice to me."

I decided against asking him whether that had surprised him. "When did you last see Rupert?"

More shredding of the tissue. "Two years ago. We bumped into each other at a party."

"Did you speak to him?"

He grimaced. "Not really. He wasn't very pleased to see me, so I stayed as far from him as I could. I thought that was for the best."

"A wise decision," I said. There was hardly anything of the tissue left now and Dougie looked close to tears again. "Just a couple more questions and then we'll leave you be." Dougie nodded, reaching for another tissue from the box on the table and using it to dab his eyes. "Where were you on Tuesday night between the hours of ten and two in the morning? "

"Here," Dougie said. "Watching TV with my mum. We stayed up late to watch a film."

His mum chose that moment to walk back in, carrying a plate piled high with enough custard creams for ten people. "We did," she announced as she deposited them on the table with a gravitas that wouldn't have been out of place in a royal court. "We watched Saltburn . It perhaps wasn't the best choice of film to watch together. There were parts I didn't particularly enjoy. Quite a lot of parts, actually," she said with a frown. "I've insisted on picking the next film. Something with less"—her face flamed—"bodily fluids."

I signaled my intention to leave by standing, Griffin finishing the last dregs of his tea and then following suit. Her face fell. "Won't you have a biscuit?"

"I'm afraid not." I patted my stomach. "I'm still full from breakfast."

Griffin offered her a smile and then picked one off the plate. He lifted it in a silent toast. "One for the road. I didn't have breakfast."

I turned my attention to Dougie, the boy looking about as lost and alone as it was possible to in the armchair. "Someone will be in touch to confirm your alibi, but it should just be a formality."

After thanking them for their time and completing the necessary small talk on the way out, Griffin and I left, neither of us saying a word until we were in the lift and the door had closed. And even then I had to start the ball rolling. "Well?"

He took an unhurried bite of the custard cream, chewing it slowly and swallowing before responding. "Well, what?"

"What do you make of Dougie?"

Griffin shrugged. "You're the detective. Not me. "

"That doesn't mean you can't have an opinion. It would be nice if you could be useful for something other than raising the dead."

He took another bite of the custard cream, the urge to knock it out of his hand almost overwhelming. Finally, after chewing that seemed to take hours, he swallowed. "I'm having a hard time picturing him chopping up a cucumber without finding it an upsetting experience, never mind chopping someone's fingers off."

I sighed. "Yeah. Me too." I ran back over the conversation. "But he did threaten Rupert."

Griffin snorted. "He thought it was romantic."

"Romantic?" The lift came to a stop, and we both stepped out of it. "If you think that's romantic, then you need to hang about with more people with a pulse."

"I didn't say it was romantic. I said he thought it was romantic. Dougie was seventeen. He probably thought the if I can't have you, no one else can approach was the way to go."

"And instead it got him a police interview." I held the door onto the street open for Griffin so he could step through first. When he didn't bother to say thank you, I wished I hadn't bothered. "What did you think of the alibi?"

Griffin shrugged. "If anyone is going to lie for you, a mother would."

"Would yours?" Griffin's mother didn't live in London, so I could count the number of times I'd met her on the fingers of one hand. Although we'd gotten along well enough on the few occasions when we had spent time together. I'd gotten along with all of Griffin's family, his sister included.

"Probably. "

"Good to know. I'll remember that for if you ever murder anyone." My phone rang once we were out on the street, Lou on the other end of it. The conversation was fairly brief and left a nasty taste in my mouth and a cannonball in place of my stomach by the time I hung up. Something must have shown on my face, Griffin narrowing his eyes. "Anything I need to know?"

"Yeah. You need to pack an overnight bag."

"Where are we going? I'm assuming it's a case of we?"

"Manchester." I didn't respond to the other part, the sense of dread at being stuck with Griffin for that length of time refusing to go away.

"Any particular reason?"

"We have a meeting scheduled with a Professor Rafferty Hart."

"And he is?"

"One of the world's foremost expert on satanic symbols and their purpose, apparently."

Griffin nodded slowly. "And what if there's another murder while we're in Manchester? Have you thought about that? Resurrection is time sensitive in case you've forgotten."

It was the perfect out, relief surging through me. "You're right. You should stay here."

Griffin rounded on me, the scowl on his face making it clear I'd given the wrong answer as far as he was concerned. "Make up your mind, Ben. Which is it? I'm your partner and you don't have time to be briefing me about any of the findings in the case? Or I'm your partner as long as it takes place in London? If they're sending you rather than someone else, then I assume they think this guy is going to have some useful information."

"I just do what I'm told," I said.

Griffin snorted. "Since when? You never used to. "

"Since I got promoted."

"Right." Griffin's voice was dripping with cynicism. "They made you chief inspector, and you immediately started toeing the line and kowtowing to your superiors. Bullshit, you did."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

Griffin laughed. "I know you, Ben. I know the way you think. I know the way you react to things."

His words lit a fuse. Only instead of fire, a pervasive coldness spread through me. How dare he pull the "I know you" card when he'd been the one to end it? The one who'd refused to have anything to do with me until fate had laughed in our faces once more and brought us back together. "You used to know me."

"You think you've changed that much in three years?"

"If I didn't do what my superiors wanted," I said, infusing my words with a saccharine sweetness that I knew would grate on Griffin, "I wouldn't have said yes to working with you, would I? I would have told them to get somebody else. Anybody else. Necromancers are rare, but it's not like you're the only one in the world. You're not even the best one. You were just the one who was available."

Griffin's brow furrowed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

I'd gone too far to pass it off as mere hyperbole. Besides, I was getting a twisted satisfaction out of hurting Griffin. Lord knew I'd been biting my tongue—mostly—since he'd come barreling back into my life. "One without a drink problem. One who can last five minutes without a shot of whiskey. One who—"

"You've said enough." Griffin's voice was like ice.

Yeah, I probably had. I forced myself to take a deep breath, realizing too late that our little spat had taken place out on the street—again—a homeless man and his dog in a shop doorway, our interested audience this time. No doubt they'd heard every word, and while the dog might not have been able to understand it, the man could. "I won't apologize."

Griffin said nothing, just continued to stare at me like he was waiting for something. The realization was slowly sinking in that I still had to work with him, that Baros wouldn't say yes to him being replaced without me spilling our history, which, I had no intention of doing. I cleared my throat. "I'll talk to you when I get back from Manchester."

I walked off before he could offer a response, glad that at least one thing was sorted. It might make me a hypocrite, but it was worth it not to have to spend the best part of a day in Griffin's company.