Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Crowley loved his car. He’d bought it in 1926, with the royalties from the first Virgil Vane novel. It had been a wholly irresponsible use of the money, particularly since at that point he’d not known whether the reading public’s interest in him would continue beyond a single book, but he loved it all the more for that. When he’d been living with Louis, after things had gone a bit sour but before they’d actually split, Crowley used to slip out at night and go for hours-long, aimless drives in the Bentley, letting the echoes of whatever argument had transpired between them sink under the sound of the engine. 

He found himself vaguely hoping that today’s drive might have that same effect. God knew there was enough he wanted to forget.

It had been six months since he’d been cleared of all charges in Louis Ferno’s murder, since he’d poured out his heart onto a sheet of paper and sent it off to the man responsible for saving him. There had been no answer; Crowley had not realized how much he’d been hoping for one until it became clear that none was forthcoming. But Aziraphale owed him no response—Crowley was the one with the unpayable debt—and he’d done his level best to plunge himself into work.

Book sales had been steady since the trial, a not-unpleasant side effect of his new notoriety. But his former publishers had shuttered—unsurprisingly, given that one of the partners had been found guilty of murder in an attempt to conceal his embezzlement—and much of the money that ought to be Crowley’s by rights was tied up in various legal proceedings as the firm divided up its holdings. He’d been attempting to write a new Vane book, with the hopes of selling it to a new agency, but had found writing about murder rather more distasteful than it had ever been before. It all felt a bit too close to reality, now.

So Crowley had whiled away the days in London, sitting at his desk and trying to write, ordering and re-ordering the books on his shelves, engaging in lengthy staring contests with his more recalcitrant plants. And then, nearly three weeks ago, he’d received a letter. He received a great many letters, of course, more than he ever had before—the usual fan letters commenting on this plot hole or that character choice in the Virgil Vane novels, but now, also, anonymous notes that claimed to believe in his guilt despite the trial’s result, screeds from religious fanatics who thought he was a menace to society even if he hadn’t murdered anyone, even several proposals of marriage from young women with saviour complexes. But this particular batch of mail had contained what amounted to an offer of employment.

It was from a fan: an American-born woman named Harriet, who wrote that she’d read every Virgil Vane novel, and she’d never for a moment believed Crowley guilty. What she was willing to pay him for, apparently, was to create a sort of murder mystery game for her son’s twenty-first birthday party, with clues for the guests to decode and a winner at the end of it all. 

Not the sort of thing Crowley would have ever said yes to before—a fortnight in the country with strangers—but the prospect of ready money, combined with the itch he’d been feeling to leave London and its memories behind for a time, had tipped him over the edge into accepting.

And so here he was, drumming his hands idly on the steering wheel of his car, driving steadily towards Oxfordshire.

The Dowlings, who’d hired him, lived at Tadfield Manor, a sprawling estate of the sort that in these times was more likely to consume a fortune than to generate it. But they’d come over from America, Harriet had said, only recently, after her husband had inherited the place from a distant relative, and apparently had enough money of their own to keep it going in style. 

Rather impressive style, too, he noted as he drove through the gates, which had the sheen of recent upkeep. The trees on the property were equally well-tended, and the grass improbably healthy for this late in the summer. 

He pulled up to the front of the house and stopped the car, sitting for a moment while he considered. It felt—odd, to just go on in the front door. He wasn’t entirely certain of his position here, he realized. Somewhere between hired help and a guest. 

Still, the worst that could happen would be that he’d be sneered at by some butler and instructed to go around back to the servants’ entrance, so Crowley got out of the car and made his way towards the large double doors at the front. 

He was arrested in this endeavour by the presence of a figure he’d not seen from the car; a man, middle-aged and stocky, with ruddy cheeks. He was standing straight-backed by a pillar, smoking a cigar.

“Hello,” Crowley called out.

The man raised a hand in greeting. “You that writer feller?”

“Ah—yes. Anthony Crowley,” Crowley admitted, holding out a hand once he’d got close enough to shake.

“Thaddeus Dowling.” Dowling’s grip was firm, his voice (unsurprisingly) American. “That your car?” 

“Yes,” Crowley said, looking back at it. “Should I park somewhere else, or…”

“I’ll send my man out for it,” Dowling said. He stubbed out the cigar. “Wife doesn’t like these in the house. I’ll bring you in, have her tell you what you’re supposed to do. Not clear on it myself, but, the boy wants it, so…”

“Thank you,” Crowley said.

“Inherited this place a couple of years ago,” Dowling said as they walked inside. “Not exactly my style, but the hunting’s not bad. You a good shot?”

“Er...not really.”

Dowling grunted. “Didn’t see any action in the War, then?”

Crowley nearly stopped walking, borne back on a tide of memory to nearly twenty years before, the conscription notice that had arrived to call him up, the words going fuzzy in front of his eyes, blurs of black on the white paper. How he had filed an appeal, citing conscientious objection to violence, and been assigned alternative service, sent to clear roads for the soldiers. How he had considered refusing even that, but balked at the idea of the court-martial, at the prospect of gaol—ironic, that, given where he’d ended up last year—and how that had been the first and only time in his life he’d done any sort of manual labour, hands that had been unused to the feeling of a shovel gradually growing callused. And how, coming home one day, he had found the first white feather lying on his desk, the first of what became a constant string of reminders that he’d weaseled out of his proper duty, enough white feathers to furnish the wings of some fallen angel.

“Non-combatant,” he said, and caught the scorn on Dowling’s face before he managed to look away. 

“Don’t know what I expected,” Dowling said. “We had to run in and save your sorry asses, after all, didn’t we?”

Crowley bristled, but bit his tongue. There wasn’t any point in antagonizing Dowling, not when he was the one who was about to pay Crowley a truly ridiculous amount of money for a few days’ work. 

“Thad, darling, do I smell smoke, because if you’ve been having cigars in the house again I swear—” A woman poked her head out of a room at the end of the corridor. “Oh!” she said, catching sight of Crowley. “You’re here, that’s wonderful! Please, come join us in here, we’re just finishing tea.” She held out a hand as Crowley approached. “I’m Harriet Dowling; I see you’ve already met my husband. Thank you so much for agreeing to help us with our little soiree, Warlock is going to be just thrilled you’re here.”

“Glad to have been invited,” Crowley said, following her into the room, which was tastefully but unoriginally decorated. He could see the remnants of the tea service on a side table, where a tall man, his back to Crowley, appeared to be filling a cup. “I’ve never really done something like this before, so I, ah. Hope it’s up to snuff.”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure it’ll be delightful,” Harriet said, “I always think your stories are so clever, don’t I, Thad, remember when I was reading Death Among the Ducks and just couldn’t put it down until I found out who poisoned the champagne—”

Dowling grunted an assent.

“Glad you enjoyed it,” Crowley said awkwardly. He was never quite sure what to say in response to compliments on his mysteries. At least Harriet Dowling had confined herself to talking about the plot; he’d had fans attempt to analyse his own character on the basis of whatever insufferable thing he’d made Virgil Vane do in that particular volume. The fact that such analyses were invariably inaccurate only somewhat lessened the discomfort of hearing from a complete stranger that they felt as though they knew him, really they did.

“But, here I am talking shop and you haven’t even met everyone yet. Warlock’s just stepped out for a moment, he’ll be back shortly, but let me introduce you to our other guest. Gabriel!”

The man who’d been getting tea turned around, revealing an improbably handsome face and a general aura of such rollicking good health that he wouldn’t have looked out of place in an advertisement for some patent medicine promising to Erase All Your Worries In Two Teaspoons A Day.

“Mr. Crowley, this is Gabriel Kerux, a business associate of my husband’s. Gabriel, Anthony Crowley, who’ll be helping us with the plot for Warlock’s birthday game.”

“Anthony Crowley,” Gabriel said, stretching out a hand. “Name’s familiar.” His handshake was exactly as firm as Crowley had expected, the confident kind born of long practice. 

“Er—” Crowley began.

“Mr. Crowley writes those delightful Virgil Vane mystery novels,” Harriet said, “no doubt that’s where—”

Gabriel shook his head. “Not much of a one for novels,” he said, frowning. “Ah!” He snapped his fingers. “Got it. That murder case, last year. That was you, wasn’t it? Arsenic in the boyfriend’s teacup, or something?”

Crowley heard Harriet’s sharp intake of breath, and Dowling’s quiet harrumph of discomfort. “Yes,” he said, not looking at either of them, “that’s me. Only—well, it wasn’t me, you know. Who did it. I mean, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here.”

It was refreshing, in a way. Essentially everyone he’d seen since the trial (not that he’d exactly been engaged in a vibrant social life) had done their level best to avoid mentioning anything to do with the whole affair, breaking off awkwardly after accidentally mentioning Louis and glancing surreptitiously at Crowley as though he might either break into tears or a violent rage, they weren’t sure which. So to have this American fix him with a dazzlingly white-toothed grin and blithely identify Crowley as last year’s notorious not-quite-murderer was, if not actually better, at least different. 

“Ah...yes, well, I’m sure Mr. Crowley doesn’t want to go through all of that,” Harriet said. 

Crowley muttered something indistinct, and was saved from having to further clarify by the entrance of a gangly-looking, dark-haired boy, with an expression somehow at once curious and sullen.

“Warlock!” Harriet said, clearly relieved. “Look who’s here!”

Warlock raised a hand slightly in apparent greeting. “Hello,” he said, making eye contact with Crowley for the barest second before fixing his gaze on the ground. 

“Warlock just loves your books, don’t you, dear,” Harriet chattered, “and I’m sure Mr. Crowley will come up with something really thrilling for your party this week-end.”

Warlock made a noise reminiscent less of a youth meeting an admired author than of a donkey expressing displeasure at its lunch.

“Is there anything you like, particularly?” Crowley asked. “For the mystery? Anything I should make sure to include?”

Warlock’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Better make it a surprise,” he said, “going to have a hard enough time stumping me as it is, I think.”

“Warlock solves all your mysteries by the end of the third chapter, he’s so clever, I told him he ought to be on the wireless, the way he figures them out.”

“Always a good thing to hear, that,” Crowley said.

Warlock glanced up in evident surprise. “You don’t feel like you’ve lost? When your reader figures it out?”

“Well, I expect I would if everyone did,” Crowley admitted, “but, you know, between the people who are too stupid to pick up on clues and the people who don’t bother trying to puzzle out the case because they’re too busy enjoying the story, it’s no bad thing to have a bit of evidence I haven’t pulled my solutions completely out of nowhere. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Warlock said, in the instinctive mumble of youth. “But...no, no requests, long as there’s lots of blood and stuff I’ll be happy.”

“Warlock!” Harriet said, voice more shocked than was probably fitting for someone who’d been going on with ghoulish glee about Death Among the Ducks not five minutes ago.

“Blood. Got it.”

“Excuse me, ma’am.” A man had entered the room with the characteristic unobtrusiveness of a well-trained servant. “I only wanted to tell you that I’ve taken care of Mr. Crowley’s car and brought his things up to his room.”

“Thank you, Lesley,” Harriet said. “Would you like to settle in now?” she asked Crowley, “or do you want some tea first? Dinner isn’t until eight, but we can also have something sent up to your room if you’d rather rest.”

“I don’t need anything just now, thanks,” Crowley said, “and yeah, wouldn’t mind a bit of time alone before dinner, get going on the story for the party.”

“Very well, then, we have cocktails at seven, if you’d like to join us. Lesley? Could you show Mr. Crowley up, please?”

Lesley nodded and led Crowley back out into the hallway. So he was to be treated as a guest, then, he supposed, not an employee, despite the fact that he was being paid. It made a certain sort of sense; if part of the point of hiring him was to be able to brag that the party game had been developed by the famous author Anthony Crowley, it stood to reason Harriet would want to accord him whatever prestige she felt he deserved. 

The corridors of Tadfield Manor were high-ceilinged and mostly empty of decoration or furniture, and the sound of Crowley and Lesley’s steps echoed behind them as they walked.

“Have you worked here long?” Crowley asked, for the sake of breaking the silence.

Lesley nodded. “I was valet to old Mr. Dowling for nigh on ten years before he died,” he said. “The present occupants were good enough to keep me on when they arrived last year.”

“How did an American come to inherit this place, anyhow?”

“The present Mr. Dowling is the nephew of my former employer,” Lesley said. “His father had moved to America as a young man—I believe there was some difficulty over money, but that was before my time and I couldn’t say for certain—and married over there. And as old Mr. Dowling’s son had died in the War, Mr. Thaddeus was the next-of-kin. We were quite surprised when he came to live here, you know,” he continued, lowering his voice slightly. “My wife and I, that is—she cooks and we split the housework between us, old Mr. Dowling didn’t believe in having a house full of servants for just one person—we thought he was much more likely to either sell the place off or to keep it as a second home while still living in America most of the time. Not that we’re complaining, you understand,” he added, quickly, “we’ve had no trouble with the new Dowlings, and it was a relief not to have to seek new posts, of course. But we’d heard that Mr. Thaddeus was rather a successful businessman, over in America, and we didn’t suppose he’d like to leave that behind. It’s not as though there’s much income from the estate, after all.”

“So he did give up his business, then?”

Lesley shook his head. “Not entirely—that’s why Mr. Kerux is over here, as I understand. They’re attempting to expand into the British market, and Mr. Thaddeus will run this end of things while Mr. Kerux continues in America.”

“He’s been running the show while Dowling’s been here, then?”

“I believe so, sir,” Lesley said, his tone changing seamlessly from friendly to deferential. “Here’s your room now.”

“Thank you,” Crowley said, fishing in his pocket for a few coins. “Let me just—”

“That won’t be necessary, sir, Mr. Dowling compensates me very adequately—”

Crowley snorted. “Not adequately enough to prevent you from giving me the dope on the setup here, though, I take it? Here. I shan’t tell him I tipped you, don’t worry.” He pressed the coins into Lesley’s unresisting hand. “Thanks again.” He began to push open the door, but stopped. “And—my car’s all right, is it?”

“Perfectly, sir. A very estimable machine, and you needn’t worry; I’ve had a great deal of practice driving all sorts of vehicles. You’ll find the keys in your room.” 

“Thanks,” Crowley said, again, and Lesley faded back into the hall after a brief nod of acknowledgement.

The room was not large, but well-appointed, and Crowley made short work of unpacking. He glanced at his watch—still over an hour till Harriet had said it was time for cocktails. The temptation to lie down on the bed and nap was strong, but he had come here to do a job, after all, and he didn’t much fancy the prospect of being groggy at dinner. 

So he pulled out a sheaf of papers, uncapped a pen, and, feeling less anxious about writing than he had for some time, got to work.

Lord Aziraphale Eastgate stared blankly ahead. He was faintly aware that there was a book in front of him, and that someone was explaining to him that this particular Bible, originating from the sixteenth century, had been set aside for him to look at because of a particularly interesting misprint in the Book of Genesis, but the words washed past without ever quite making the journey from his ears to his brain.

“My lord?” 

“Hm?” Aziraphale was drawn into full consciousness by the voice of his valet, Newton Pulsifer. “What was that? I’m very sorry—”

“Mr. Scaggs was just asking if the price he’d named was acceptable to you, my lord.”

“What—oh, yes, yes, it’s fine, please, pay him, Newt,” Aziraphale said. “Thank you very much,” he added, to no one in particular, and drifted a few steps away, where hopefully no one else would attempt to engage him further in conversation.

This was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not to be. Newt reappeared at his side a few moments later, carefully bearing the wrapped book in his hands. 

“My lord,” he said, again, with rather more assurance than was characteristic of him, “I don’t mean to be...forward, but are you quite all right?”

“Hm? Yes, fine, thank you,” Aziraphale said irritably as they left the shop. “Really, Newt, just because I don’t choose to engage every bookseller in a thirty-five-minute long conversation about his family—”

“But ordinarily you do, my lord,” Newt pointed out. “I’ve rarely seen you so short with a tradesperson. But that wasn’t even what I meant, really, what I meant was that you didn’t try to haggle at all; I’m not entirely certain you heard the price he was asking for.”

“Has there suddenly been a financial crash I’m not aware of?” Aziraphale demanded. “Am I suddenly rendered penniless? Because barring that, I really do think it’s not exactly as though I can’t afford whatever amount was asked, is it?”

“But you always haggle. You like it. You told me it’s half the fun of collecting, trying to get a good price. My lord, I’m sorry if this isn’t my place to say, but you haven’t been yourself lately. Not since…”

Not since the Crowley case, Aziraphale finished internally. Newt was, of course, right. He’d spent the last six months alternating between depression and dissociation, sporadically attempting to engage in his regular activities but unable to derive much pleasure from them. He’d taken to hanging about Scotland Yard in hopes of sniffing out an interesting crime to stick his hand into, until at last Detective-Sergeant Shadwell had grown annoyed enough to ban him from the premises unless he had an actual reason to be there.

He hadn’t replied to Crowley’s letter. Or—he’d written a reply, two versions of it; one where he said all the things he wanted to say, and one where he said all the things he ought to say, and upon reading the second one over again had determined it still revealed entirely too much to be safe. Better, he thought, if Crowley were left with no idea of his real feelings, if he perhaps thought Aziraphale a little rude; it might make it easier for him to forget. Better, certainly, than giving him any sort of unwarranted hope.

Because the thing was impossible, of course, even if Crowley didn’t realise it. Any hint of an improper relationship between them could cast doubt on the entirety of the work Aziraphale had done on the case, could give rise to rumours that he’d faked evidence, or framed Hastur, or even just used his influence inappropriately. Crowley’s innocence was proved beyond doubt in the eyes of the law, but in the court of public opinion it would be all too easy for him to be convicted anew.

And, even setting that aside, the plain fact was that Crowley owed Aziraphale his life, and Aziraphale couldn’t entirely banish the idea that there was just as much of gratitude as of love in Crowley’s advances, that they’d never quite be able to shake the imbalance between them, the one-sided and unpayable debt. He’d always feel as though he were taking advantage of Crowley, of their respective positions, and perhaps it was misplaced vanity, but Aziraphale shied away from the idea of being wanted as anything other than himself.

But even in the letter where he’d explained all of this, laid it out coldly and precisely, he’d still felt that every word gave him away, that it would be impossible for Crowley to read and not hear just how loudly every beat of Aziraphale’s heart longed to say yes.

So he had not answered, and Crowley had not written again, nor called upon him—why would he, when he had no reason to think he’d be wanted? Aziraphale had resolved to forget the entire thing. And a damn poor job he was doing of it, apparently, if even Newt had taken it upon himself to scold him about woolgathering at a book sale.

“I know I’ve been...out of sorts,” he admitted, aloud, “but I’m afraid there isn’t much to be done about it, besides attempting to go on as I have been and hope that eventually something slots back into place and I feel ordinary again.”

“Are you certain?”

“What do you mean?”

“I only wondered, my lord, if perhaps it wouldn’t do you good to get out of London for a bit. Change of air. Change of scenery. Not so many unpleasant associations.”

“What do you suggest?” Aziraphale asked. “South of France? Monte Carlo? I doubt whether Rome is the best notion, at present…”

“I thought perhaps you might reply to your brother’s invitation,” Newt said. “It came last Friday, if you recall; he wrote to ask whether you’d like to come down to the family estate in Oxfordshire for a bit. His wife’s away, just now, and the boy’s off at school, so it should be quiet.”

Aziraphale pursed his lips. “I haven’t been down to Arcadia in quite some time, have I? When did he say I ought to come?”

“He didn’t suggest a particular date, but I could reply and have everything in place for us to go by Wednesday, my lord.”

“Very well, then,” Aziraphale said, with a determined cheerfulness. “Please tell him we’ll be there on Wednesday.” 

Chapter Text

“Right,” said Crowley, rubbing his hands together for lack of anything better to do with them. “That all clear enough?”

The four “actors” (university students Mrs. Dowling had paid to come down from Oxford to help with the murder mystery game) nodded.

“Let’s go over it again, then,” Crowley said, pointedly ignoring the soft groans of protest. “Adam—” he pointed at the boy who seemed to be the ringleader— “ you are going to greet the visitors as they come in and give them the set-up. Which is?”

“That my father’s died, the police have said it’s natural causes, and I don’t believe them. I need you—that’ll be to the guests—to help me investigate.”

“Right. Perfect. And then you hand them the first three clues. Once they’ve solved those, they’ll come to you—” he turned to the girl, Pepper— “and you say—”

“And I tell them that I have the evidence that can help them find the killer, but I won’t give it to them unless they can help me find my long-lost twin brother, and I pass on the next three clues for them to solve that—”

“Which brings them to you,” Crowley said, facing Brian, whom he’d instantly pegged as the member of the group who ought to be given the least demanding role. “You…”

“I’m Pepper’s twin brother,” Brian said, “and I give them a letter to give to her, which is actually also a clue, only I’m not s’posed to tell ‘em that.”

“Right. Exactly,” Crowley said. “If they manage to figure out the letter’s secret message, it’ll bring them directly to the end of the game and they can skip the final steps. Otherwise, they’ll head back to Pepper, who will accept the letter and give them the final three clues, which lead them to that same ending, only a bit slower. You,” he said, indicating Wensleydale, “are going to be wandering around the gardens on the path I’ve drawn on your map there, available to answer questions or help with anything they might be stuck on.”

“And I am to use my own best judgement,” Wensleydale said pompously, “with regard to how much help to provide each individual or group.”

“That’s right. Try to just give them enough of a spur to make the thing solvable.”

Wensleydale nodded. “Understood.”

“Everyone got your clues?” Crowley asked, although he’d just given them out not five minutes ago. “All right, then. The game starts in half an hour; you’d better get to your places. I’ll be doing circuits as well, checking up on all of you and making certain everything’s coming along as it ought.” He exhaled. “Off you go, then.”

The students dispersed, and Crowley made his way back to the house. He’d set up the game to take advantage of the Dowlings’ extensive gardens; there was plenty of room for several different groups of people to be milling about without much chance they’d run into each other. But as things didn’t kick off officially until two, Crowley had every intention of nipping inside to grab a few of the sandwiches he’d seen the cook setting out before he’d left. 

As he got closer to the house, he could hear voices coming from the solarium’s open windows; the guests must have started arriving while he was setting things up. He’d been surprised to learn from Mrs. Dowling that it wasn’t actually Warlock’s friends who’d be playing—a pity, as he’d done most of his plotting with that audience in mind, throwing in plenty of fantastical twists like babies switched at birth and clandestine alliances, along with the “blood and stuff” Warlock had specifically requested. But no, apparently they hadn’t been in England long enough for Warlock to make any friends of his own, so it was the Dowling parents’ friends and neighbors who were to comprise the party attendees. He hadn’t been given a full list, but Lesley had mentioned that it was only about a dozen people, which ought to smooth things along logistically—no long waits to receive the next clue, or anything.

He entered the solarium, his quest for a sandwich hindered by Harriet Dowling, who seized him the second he came in. “Mr. Crowley! All done preparing, then?”

“Yes,” Crowley said, wincing a little from her pressure on his arm. “Everything’s set. Kids should be getting into position now.”

“Wonderful,” Harriet said. “And now you simply must come say hello to the guests, I’m certain they’ll be absolutely thrilled to meet our distinguished author—”

Crowley had half-expected this, that he’d be trotted out as another party attraction, treated like a particularly clever animal that was about to perform its only trick. 

“Course,” he said.

Harriet led him over to a cluster of people. “Mr. Crowley, this is Michael and Sandalphon Inger, who live at Avalon Hall, you’ll have passed it on your way down from London, and their friend Uriel Malak, whom we’re just delighted was able to join us as well. Everyone, this is Anthony Crowley, the author.”

Crowley grinned awkwardly. Michael and Sandalphon Inger might have been husband and wife, or brother and sister—he wasn’t entirely certain which, as both seemed equally unlikely. Michael was icily handsome, wearing an expensively tailored trouser suit and an expression as though Crowley were a rather dull beetle that had been presented for her inspection. She bore little enough family resemblance to Sandalphon, who was short and balding and had the sort of smile Crowley associated with the more predatory variety of literary agent. Uriel was shorter than Michael but equally as forbidding in appearance, although he supposed her vaguely truculent stare was less unnerving than Sandalphon’s leer.

“Delightful to meet you all,” he said mendaciously. “I hope you enjoy the game.”

Michael snorted gently. “I must confess it seems like a rather juvenile amusement, but one can hope it may prove diverting.”

“Well,” said Crowley, stung, “it is Warlock’s party. You can scarcely blame a boy of his age for having juvenile taste in entertainment.”

Michael raised a skeptical eyebrow, but didn’t say anything further.

“Ah—” Harriet dragged him bodily away, the forcedly cheerful smile of a host pasted on her face. “Really must make certain all the guests meet Mr. Crowley!” she called back after them. “Let’s see, who else...over there talking to Thaddeus, that’s Carmine Zuigiber, the journalist, you’ll have heard of her, no doubt, being in the literary world, she’s just taken the place down the road—”

Crowley had heard, vaguely, of Miss Zuigiber, none of it good, but they had never met. Contrary to Harriet Dowling’s apparent belief that everyone whose profession involved a pen knew each other, they’d run in very different circles. 

“Oh yes,” he said, studying her from across the room. It was little surprise she and Dowling seemed to be getting on so well; she’d made her name, Crowley recalled, with her dangerously daring escapades while reporting on the War, and Dowling certainly seemed like the type to jump at any excuse to go on about his own heroism. 

“And these are Raven Sable and Limus White,” Harriet continued, stopping in front of the next pair of guests. “Now, might I say, when I invited you all, I hadn’t realised you and Miss Zuigiber all knew each other, what a charming coincidence!”

“Charming indeed,” White said.

“This is Anthony Crowley, the author; he’s the one who came up with the plot for our little murder mystery game.”

“Pleasure,” Crowley said.

“Anthony Crowley,” said Sable, thoughtfully. “Oh yes, you’re the one who had that fascinating little escapade last year, aren’t you?”

“Not exactly how I’d describe it.”

“I’ve always found poison intriguing,” Sable continued. “To eat...the most basic of human impulses, the most essential to survival...to have that turned into the means of one’s destruction. It’s rather poetic, don’t you think?”

“I think,” Crowley said, dryly, “that I’ll take care not to leave my glass unattended when you’re nearby.” He ignored Sable’s answering laugh in favour of turning to Harriet. “Speaking of food, would you excuse me? I’d be glad to meet the rest of the guests, but if you don’t mind, I was rather hoping…”

“Oh yes!” Harriet said, “please, forgive me, you must think I’m a dreadful host—”

“Not at all.”

“And there’s scarcely anyone left for you to meet, in any case,” she finished. “Only one more party expected. We should be ready to start quite soon.”

“I’ll eat quickly,” Crowley promised, and, disengaging from her grip at last, made his way briskly towards the table he had been eyeing earlier.

Most of the food was gone, but he managed to snatch the last ham sandwich. Taking a bite, he looked towards the door, wondering whether it might not be possible to escape and eat the remainder outside, in relative privacy.

The doorway, however, was occupied by two figures—presumably the final guests Harriet had mentioned.

And one of them was Lord Aziraphale Eastgate.

“When I accepted your invitation to come out to Oxfordshire,” Aziraphale said, turning his gaze from the car window to look at his brother, “I didn’t realise you intended to drag me off to some stranger’s house party. Really, I wanted a quiet stay.”

“I’d have thought it would be rather your sort of thing,” Raphael Eastgate, Duke of Arcadia, said mildly. “Solving a mystery.”

“A make-believe mystery. I highly suspect that it will be, quite literally, child’s play.”

“It won’t be that bad. The boy’s turning twenty-one, not eleven.”

“Well, I’ve come, haven’t I,” Aziraphale said, “no need to go on with the hard sell.”

“Good,” Raphael said, “as we’re here.” He reached forward and tapped Newt on the shoulder. “It’s on the left.”

They pulled up at the entrance to the house, and Newt idled the car for a moment while the brothers got out. 

“I expect the Dowlings’ man will show you where to park,” Raphael said, poking his head back in through the car window. “You can come in after that, if you like.”

“Yes, your grace,” Newt said.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale added.

They proceeded into the house, Aziraphale checking his pocket-watch as they entered.

“We’re not late,” Raphael said easily. “Game doesn’t start till two, that’s what the invitation said.”

“Yes, but we scarcely want them to be waiting around for us to begin.”

Raphael turned to look at his brother. “What’s got into you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Aziraphale said airily, tugging at the hem of his waistcoat and walking a bit more briskly towards the solarium.

“You’ve been out of sorts all week. Your valet told me you’d been in low spirits—”

“Something he should not have done—”

“But I hardly expected to see you so tetchy over a simple party.”

Aziraphale sighed. “Very well, then. I do not concede that I have been inappropriately tetchy, as you put it, but I shall endeavour to make myself more amiable towards your neighbours.”

“Thank you,” Raphael said, and they stepped into the solarium.

Aziraphale’s eyes darted around, taking in the scene—he suspected the short woman with the anxious expression was their hostess, and that must be the guest of honour standing sulkily in the corner by the tea. There was a red-headed woman, who looked vaguely familiar for some reason, and a tall man who reminded Aziraphale forcibly of a certain type of boy he’d gone to school with, the sort that was all-in for traditions and old school ties and that sort of thing; that insisted, when you happened across them in adult life, on dredging up childhood memories that were dull at best and mortifying at worst. A few more people stood in small clusters around the room. Raphael had said it was to be a small party, but Aziraphale was still taken aback by the sparseness of the gathering as well as the fact that the boy—Warlock—seemed to be the only young person there. 

And then, the hearty-looking man moved a bit, and Aziraphale caught sight of another person, who even from behind looked—

Anthony Crowley turned around, and looked straight at Aziraphale.

Aziraphale quickly jerked his head down, breaking the eye contact, but he’d seen the flash of recognition on Crowley’s face.

He swore violently under his breath.

“What on earth,” Raphael muttered, “do you think you’re doing? You said you were going to be more amiable, not break out your impression of a dockhand .”

“That’s Anthony Crowley,” Aziraphale said, voice low, lips barely moving. “The one who...the fellow from my last case.”

“Oh,” Raphael said, frowning. “What’s the matter, then? Don’t you like him? You don’t think he is a murderer, after all—”

“No, no, no,” Aziraphale said, “nothing like that, it’s perfectly fine, of course, he’s very...agreeable, it only took me by surprise, that’s all.”

“All right,” Raphael said, and Aziraphale was, not for the first time, grateful for the fact that the entire Eastgate family share of curiosity seemed to have concentrated itself in the younger son. 

But why on earth was Crowley here? He didn’t seem to have come along with any of the other guests, and Aziraphale highly doubted whether his social circles encompassed American businessmen like their host. The thought—the wholly ridiculous thought— what if he came to see you? darted shamefully through his mind. But of course it couldn’t be that; for one thing, it was the height of presumption to assume that Crowley gave any consideration whatsoever to Aziraphale’s movements, and for another, it was entirely impossible that he could even have known Aziraphale would be here. Aziraphale himself hadn’t known until a few days ago.

“Aziraphale?” 

He became aware that Raphael had moved some distance away from him, and was now beckoning him over to meet a slightly harried-looking, short-haired woman. 

“Forgive my woolgathering,” he said, pasting what he knew had to be a pale echo of his usual bright smile onto his face as he reached out a hand to greet the woman. 

“This is our hostess, Mrs. Harriet Dowling.”

“It’s very kind of you to invite me as well at such short notice,” Aziraphale said.

Mrs. Dowling beamed. “Oh, of course, we’re delighted to have you! I told Warlock that he’d better watch out, he’s not likely to be solving the mystery first, not with a real sleuth on the case!”

“Do you—” Aziraphale hesitated, then plunged forward— “I mean to say, is that Anthony Crowley over there? The writer?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Dowling said, “he’s actually the one who put together the story for our little murder-mystery game. I’m certain it’s going to be so clever, I doubt whether I’ll get anywhere with it. Anytime I read one of his books I have absolutely no idea who the murderer is, and then Virgil Vane makes one of his speeches and it all seems so obvious. Have you read any of them, Lord Aziraphale?”

“Ah—a few,” Aziraphale said, because yes, I’ve read each of them multiple times just for the chance of hearing a faint echo of his voice in the prose seemed a trifle too honest.

“Oh, let me introduce you, then!” Mrs. Dowling hurried off towards Crowley.

“That’s not…” Aziraphale trailed off, realising she either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear him. 

“Mr. Crowley,” she said, leading him up towards Aziraphale, “this is Lord Aziraphale Eastgate, he’s just told me he’s a reader of your work—”

“We’ve, erm. We’ve actually met,” Aziraphale told her. “Not that it’s not very kind of you to introduce us—”

“Oh! I beg your pardon.” Mrs. Dowling looked confused. “I thought you said…”

“I’m certain the miscommunication was all mine,” Aziraphale assured her. 

There was a brief lull in the conversation. Aziraphale kept his gaze fixed on Mrs. Dowling, chiefly so he wouldn’t have to look at Crowley. He could feel that Crowley was watching him, however, could see, out of the corner of his eye, the look of slight amusement on his face. 

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Dowling said, at last, turning to greet another guest and leaving Aziraphale with no choice but to look up and address Crowley.

“I’m dreadfully sorry for the confusion,” he said, twisting his hands together in front of him. “She never actually asked if I knew you, you see. And I didn’t find it quite...I wasn’t certain that you’d have wanted me to explain the circumstances of our acquaintance.”

“Well,” Crowley said, lightly, “I’m glad to know that it’s not a matter of you not wanting to be associated with me, I suppose.”

“Of course not,” Aziraphale said sharply, “please don’t think—”

Crowley held up a hand. “I know. I know. And while I appreciate your discretion, it’s not as though there’s anyone with two eyes and a newspaper subscription who doesn’t know I’ve been tried for murder. Not exactly a secret.”

“No, I suppose not.”

There was another pause.

“You have been...you are well, I hope?” Aziraphale asked.

“As well as can be expected,” Crowley said. “I’m, er. Between publishers, as you might imagine, and when I received the offer to come down here and plot the mystery I thought it sounded a bit of a lark, you know, something different. Get myself out of London for a bit. But how did you...it’s just that I find it hard to imagine you being hand-in-glove with Thaddeus Dowling there, that’s all.”

“Oh, I don’t know him. I don’t know either of them. Any of them. I’ve just come down for a short visit with my brother—he’s over there—and he’d been invited as a neighbour. When Mrs. Dowling heard I was staying here as well, she very kindly included me in the invitation.”

“Makes sense.”

“I—I didn’t know you were going to be here. I do hope you know that. I shouldn’t have come if I did.”

A faint shadow crossed Crowley’s face, so brief that Aziraphale wondered whether he’d imagined it. He waved a hand. “It’s fine. You know? Honestly, takes a bit of the pressure off to only be the second most notorious person associated with crime at the party.”

Aziraphale laughed. “I hadn’t seen it in that light yet.” He covertly scrutinised Crowley’s face. He seemed genuinely unbothered by Aziraphale’s presence. Which was a good thing, of course it was, it wasn’t as though he’d wanted—what, for Crowley to turn scarlet and run from the room at the sight of him? For him to demand the response to his letter that he’d never received, reiterate his protestations of affection in a low, urgent voice, so desperate that Aziraphale would have had to reassure him, out of kindness if nothing else…

Aware that the fantasy had been entirely too vivid for something that he very much didn’t want, Aziraphale wrenched himself back to reality. But, no, of course, he hadn’t wanted Crowley to make a scene, not really. It was only that Crowley’s entire manner, his expression, his words, all seemed without a trace of whatever sentiment had produced his earlier letter. It was as though, to Crowley, they merely were two acquaintances who’d met previously in unfortunate circumstances.

This was good, Aziraphale told himself firmly, this was precisely what he’d wanted; for Crowley to realise the impossibility of his request and put his feelings behind him. It was proof that Aziraphale had been right to attribute the greater part of Crowley’s affection to gratitude, that it had been a brief spark, a fleeting fancy, nothing based in reality. Whatever Crowley might have felt six months ago, he seemed very definitively to have got over it.

For someone whose dearest wish had been for Crowley to get over it, Aziraphale was not as gladdened by this as might have been expected.

“I’d better go see what Mrs. Dowling is doing,” Crowley said, after a moment. “I think we’re starting soon.”

“Oh—yes, quite right, don’t let me keep you,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley smiled fleetingly, and was gone.

Crowley nearly collapsed against the wall of the solarium. It was empty, now—the game had started, all of the guests had headed off in small groups to look for clues (with highly divergent levels of enthusiasm), and even Mr. and Mrs. Dowling had elected to head outside, despite the fact that they weren’t actually intending to participate in the game themselves.

And Crowley, alone, could finally process the fact that Aziraphale was here. 

He’d been almost angry at Mrs. Dowling for not telling him, but then it wasn’t as though he’d asked to be provided with an attendance list, and she’d clearly had no idea of their prior acquaintance.

Aziraphale had seemed deeply uncomfortable throughout their brief conversation—probably afraid, Crowley thought ruefully, that he was about to be subjected to another expression of Crowley’s inconvenient emotions, that he would have to actually refuse with what would no doubt be excruciating politeness. For his part, Crowley had done his best to act as natural as possible, to put Aziraphale at his ease. He thought he’d managed it, for the most part, although he hadn’t been able to hide the abrupt surge of misery he’d felt at hearing Aziraphale admit he wouldn’t have come to the party if he’d known Crowley would be there. Nor had he expected just how much it would hurt in that first moment when their eyes had met and Aziraphale had so quickly glanced away. 

He reluctantly detached himself from the wall. As tempting as it was to linger here feeling sorry for himself for the rest of the party, he was being paid for a job, and there was no reason for Aziraphale’s unexpected presence to interfere with that.

Crowley left the solarium and walked out onto the grounds. He’d spent so much time plotting out the course of the murder-mystery game that he now felt entirely comfortable wandering about the gardens on his own, no longer taken aback by the hedges and clusters of trees that had puzzled him initially. 

He quickly made rounds of the spots where the students were stationed, relieved to discover that everything seemed to be going well so far.

“I haven’t given any help yet,” Wensleydale said anxiously when he approached, “is that all right, I didn’t want it to be over too quickly—”

“It’s fine,” Crowley assured him. “Really. I’ve just been to see Pepper, she’s had three different groups come by to ask for her clues, so it’s not as though they’re stuck entirely.”

He stifled the impulse to slap Wensleydale on the back and send him off like a schoolboy, instead loping away with a wave and what he hoped was a comforting grin.

Crowley glanced at his wristwatch. It was nearly quarter to three, and the game was scheduled to run until four. There wasn’t much point in doing another circuit of the gardens now, not when he’d just checked in with everyone, and he found himself at a slight loss as to what to do next.

He could see the greenhouse, a little ways away, and began heading vaguely in that direction, with the idea of sneaking a glance at the Dowlings’ plants (and escaping from any potential conversations with guests). But he spotted a figure coming out from a clump of trees near one side of the house, and not wanting to risk a run-in with any of the more unpleasant of the party attendees (so, most of them), ducked behind a nearby hedge.

And nearly collided with Lord Aziraphale Eastgate, who made a soft, startled sound from around the cigarette he had between his lips. (Crowley endeavoured to look anywhere but there.)

“Sorry!” he said, quickly, “I didn’t—”

“Know anyone was here?” Aziraphale finished. “Entirely reasonable of you. I shouldn’t have expected there to be. Indeed, there wasn’t, when I came over here, with the same idea you seem to have had.”

“That idea being…”

“To obtain a moment’s peace, of course.”

“Right,” Crowley said. “Uh. I’ll go—”

“If you like,” said Aziraphale, with a slight catch in his voice. 

Crowley halted. “I’ve no wish to bother you,” he said, carefully.

“I doubt whether you could,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley watched his face for a hint of irony, and found none. 

“I am sorry, you know,” Aziraphale continued, “if I gave you the wrong impression earlier. When I said that I shouldn’t have come if I’d known you’d be here. I only meant—I thought that perhaps it wouldn’t be entirely pleasant for you to see me. That you might not wish to be reminded of the circumstances under which you made my acquaintance. I imagine it’s not precisely a treasured memory.” He smiled, the expression not quite reaching his eyes. “But please don’t think I meant it as a slight.”

Crowley swallowed hard. “Thanks,” he said, as lightly as possible. “Glad to know it’s not just that you find me entirely repulsive.”

“Not entirely.”

Crowley grinned. He’d been so worried about being in love with Aziraphale that he’d nearly forgot how much he liked him. “So, slunk off in defeat, have you? I have to say, I’ve always prided myself on my plots, but I didn’t expect to stump the notorious Lord Aziraphale Eastgate quite so quickly.”

“I shouldn’t go bragging about it just yet, if I were you. Who’s to say you’ve stumped me? Perhaps I’ve already solved the entire thing and have stepped aside graciously to let someone else have the glory.”

“Mm, yes, it’s so like you to pass up an opportunity to crow about how much cleverer you are than everyone else.”

“A hit, a hit,” Aziraphale said, laughing. 

“Haven’t you got there yet, then? Or aren’t you bothering to try? Afraid I’ll be too much for you?”

“I’m certain the plot you’ve devised is fiendishly complicated and full of all sorts of very admirable flourishes,” Aziraphale said courteously, “but I am, in fact, confident in my ability to, ah, thwart your every wile.”

“You make it sound like such an agreeable prospect.”

“I do sincerely congratulate you on masterminding this entire affair. It seems to have a great many moving pieces and I expect it can’t have been easy to make it all fit in right.”

“Well,” Crowley said wryly, “we’ve yet to see whether I succeeded.”

“I think at the very least you’ve succeeded with the guest of honour.”

“Warlock?”

“Yes, I saw him running about a few minutes ago, hot on the trail of the clue that very sticky-looking young man had given him. He seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself.”

“I’m glad,” Crowley said. “I mean—it seems sort of a glum set-up for him, don’t you think? Where the only people his age at his own party are there as staff, not guests?”

“You noticed that as well?”

“Difficult not to.”

“Mm. It does make one wonder about these Dowlings. The boy’s twenty-one, surely he ought to have some sort of occupation, even if it’s only learning the family business from his father.”

“I suppose we don’t know for certain that he isn’t.”

Aziraphale exhaled a puff of smoke. Crowley’s eyes tracked the motion of his hand as he brought the cigarette down again, the way his thumb and forefinger flexed, the skin between them bunching into tiny soft rolls.

“You’ve been here some time,” Aziraphale said, “do you think it’s likely the boy is studying Amalgamated Futures at his father’s knee?”

“No,” Crowley admitted. “No, I can’t see it.”

“He hasn’t precisely my idea of good manners, but it’s as I said, this game of yours seems to have perked him up. I think I may envy you that, you know.”

“Envy me what?”

“The knowledge that your work brings another person joy,” Aziraphale said. “The nature of mine tends to be rather the opposite.”

Crowley snorted. “Right, okay, whenever you fancy swapping places, give me a ring, won’t you?” He glanced at his watch again. “Actually,” he said reluctantly, “I ought to do another round, make certain everything’s running smoothly. Given that it’s currently my one job.”

“Oh—of course, don’t let me keep you,” Aziraphale said. He paused a moment, and added, as though against his will, “I’ll see you at tea, then, shall I? Afterwards?”

“Well, yes, how else will you tell me just how you outwitted my foul schemes at every turn?”  

Aziraphale only smiled, and raised a hand in farewell.

Crowley nodded in return, and left him.

He managed to complete another circuit of the gardens without giving in to the urge to forget all about his fictional corpse and instead perform a thorough postmortem on his conversation with Aziraphale. Wensleydale reported back that he’d begun giving out hints to a few of the more baffled groups, and from what Pepper said, it sounded very likely that Warlock would have the solution well before the four o’clock deadline.

Crowley made certain to loop back around to the hedge near the end of his walk, but Aziraphale had evidently gone. It was odd, Crowley reflected; he’d have thought it would hurt more, talking to Aziraphale, when he evidently didn’t want the same things as Crowley. But, much like how Aziraphale’s visits in gaol had caused Crowley to forget, momentarily, that he was in a cell awaiting the noose, the enjoyment of speaking to him again now had mostly superseded any misery.     

When he’d first examined the grounds, he’d noticed a bench, set back into a recess in the wall of the house and surrounded by a few flowering shrubs. It seemed a likely place for a bit of privacy before the end of the game, but as Crowley approached, he saw that someone—an unfamiliar figure—was already sitting there.

He started to change course, but the stranger’s odd posture had piqued his attention, and he came closer, wondering if perhaps a vagrant had wandered into the gardens and decided to have a nap. He was looking down, as though perhaps he’d nodded off while sitting there.

“Hello?” Crowley called, when he was within speaking distance. “Are you all right, there?”

Nothing.

“Hello?” Crowley said again, a bit more loudly. 

Nothing, again. Perhaps he’d been taken ill? 

Crowley, properly worried now, hurried up to him. “Are you quite…”

He looked at the man’s — boy’s? Young man, anyway — face. Certainly no one he knew, and very pale, and there was— 

Heart hammering, Crowley reached to lift the stranger’s chin.

No—

He withdrew his hand quickly, turning it over and over and looking at what had got on it, slowly understanding.

That was very definitely blood.

Fighting the urge to cry, or vomit, or run headlong into the woods—overpowered by the need to know— Crowley tilted up the chin again.

The stranger’s throat had been cut. He was, beyond doubt, dead.

Chapter Text

Crowley let go of the stranger’s—the corpse’s— chin and staggered a few steps backwards. He stood for a moment, a few feet away from the bench, staring in shock. 

He wondered, fleetingly, if this were some kind of joke, or prank, something Mrs. Dowling had set up as part of the murder mystery game. But that was ridiculous, impossible, because surely no dummy or doll could look so real, could feel still warm to the touch, could let its head hang with such limp finality.

Crowley stumbled out past the shrubs. There was no one within sight in the gardens, no one to hear if he shouted for help. He knew where the kids were, of course, but they hardly seemed likely to be helpful, and everyone else was so spread out across the grounds that he’d no way of locating anyone who could actually do something.

He walked a few more yards, more out of the need to have some forward motion than in pursuit of any particular destination.

But a flash of light in the corner of his eye caused him to turn towards the house—light reflecting off the glass walls of the solarium—and he saw through the window the cook woman, Maud, clearing away the tea things.

Crowley ran, skidding to a halt outside the solarium. He rapped on the glass.

Maud turned, her eyes widening as she saw him. Well, of course, he must look half-mad, face flushed and hands still sticky with blood, panting from his run. He made a come here motion with his hands, trying to make the gesture seem both urgent and sane, and Maud put down the stack of plates she was holding and came over, opening the full-length window to let him in.

“Mr. Crowley! Whatever’s the matter—”

“Something’s happened. There’s been an, an accident—”

“With the game?”

Crowley shook his head. “No—or, anyway, I don’t think so—someone’s got to phone the police, could I—”          

“Yes, of course,” Maud said, still looking bewildered. She led him to the telephone, where a calm-voiced operator connected him to the local police headquarters.

“Oxfordshire Constabulary.”

“Hello, yes, I’m calling from Tadfield Manor. There’s been...there’s a dead body here. Someone’s—I mean, his throat’s been cut.”

With some strange detached part of his mind—the part that was in the rather disconcerting habit of remarking upon Crowley’s own life as though narrating one of his stories—he noted his own use of the passive voice, his instinctive shying away from the attribution of blame.

There was a rustling sound on the other end of the line. “Right—Tadfield Manor, you say?”

“Yes.”

“And who is it that’s been killed?”

“I’ve no idea,” Crowley said impatiently, “I’m only a guest here, look, are you going to send someone, or—”

“Oh yes,” the voice on the other end said phlegmatically. “We’ll have an officer and a doctor over straightaway. Just stay calm, sir.”

“Right, great, thanks, really excellent advice,” Crowley snapped, and rang off. He turned back to Maud, who was now openly gaping at him. “Sorry,” he said, “I should’ve said—I wanted to phone the police first thing, I didn’t think—”

“Yes, of course,” Maud said, voice shaky. Her eyes flitted again to the blood on his hands.

“Do you know where—we’d better fetch everybody back, if we can,” Crowley said.

“I’ll go and find Lesley,” Maud said, with an approximation of her usual composure. 

Crowley nodded. “And someone had better go and wait by the body until the police come.” (Was that what you did? He had the idea that was what you did. He wasn’t quite certain why. It wasn’t as though the corpse were likely to wander off if left unsupervised.)

“Hadn’t that better be you, then? As you’re the one who knows where it is?”

“No,” Crowley said, quickly, partly because he didn’t much fancy being left alone with the body, and partly because he was rapidly becoming conscious of the fact that his position was distinctly dubious. After all, he’d stumbled in here with literal blood on his hands and a thin story—there was absolutely nothing to say that he hadn’t committed the murder himself. Under the circumstances, it seemed foolhardy to spend any more time unobserved at the scene. 

Maud looked surprised, but didn’t argue. “Come on, then,” she said, and, walking briskly, led them down the hallway and back towards a part of the house Crowley hadn’t seen before; the servants’ wing, presumably. She poked her head in a few different rooms before opening the door to a sort of small parlour, where Lesley was seated, talking with a man who looked vaguely familiar to Crowley. It took him a moment to place him as Aziraphale’s valet.

“Maud?” Lesley stood up, his eyes darting past his wife and widening as they took in Crowley. “What’s happened?”

“Someone’s been killed,” Maud said (and there was the passive voice again). “Mr. Crowley found him. The police are coming, but we’ll need to gather up all the guests, and someone ought to come and wait with the body until they arrive.”

Lesley nodded, looking for all the world as though he heard about corpses in the gardens every day. “Why don’t you and I go about collecting people, Maud, and Newt, perhaps you wouldn’t mind…”

The valet—Newt—stood as well. “Watching the body? Not at all.”

Of course, Crowley thought bitterly. Newt wouldn’t be bothered by such a small thing as a corpse, he’d doubtless seen dozens of them in his time working for Aziraphale. And Lesley was old enough to have served in the War; he’d be no stranger to death, either. No, it was Crowley who was the outlier, Crowley who was the only one shocked and revolted and terrified by what he’d seen.

(He was aware, intellectually, that this wasn’t fair—that whatever war did to one’s mind, it might well not be enough to harden it against stumbling upon the scene of what was undoubtedly either murder or suicide, might even have made it worse , that Newt or Lesley might well have been just as confused and overwhelmed in his position—but he couldn’t shake the instinctive feeling of inadequacy and alienation.)

Newt was staring politely at him, and it took Crowley a moment to realise why. “I’ll show you where it is,” he said abruptly.

“Thank you, sir, that would be most helpful.”

They followed after Maud and Lesley—thankfully, Crowley thought, otherwise he’d have had difficulty finding his way out of the house again—and parted ways with them when they reached the gardens again.

“It’s this way,” Crowley told Newt, leading him towards the corner of shrubs where he’d found the body. “I’m, er. I’m Anthony Crowley, by the way, I don’t think we’ve ever actually met—”

“No,” Newt said, shaking his head. “I’ve been in your flat, though.”

“Sorry?”

“Oh—not on my own. With Lord Aziraphale. As part of the investigation. You were in gaol at the time,” Newt added helpfully. “So you weren’t there.”

“Right. Well. Sorry to make your acquaintance under such...unusual circumstances.”

Newt smiled. “Oh, don’t worry about that, sir, at this point I’m fairly certain I meet more people in conjunction with murder cases than otherwise. Puts something of a damper on my social life.”

“I...can imagine. And, please, it’s just Crowley.”

Newt nodded, with the expression of someone who was very definitely planning to skirt the issue by avoiding addressing Crowley as anything other than you for as long as humanly possible.           

“I very much enjoy your books,” Newt continued, “if you don’t mind my saying. Read them all last year, after Lord Aziraphale had me run about buying all of them. Much more entertaining than the usual sort of thing he has me pick up, I can tell you that.”

“He—sorry, he had you buy my books? All of them?”

Newt nodded. “Oh yes. He said it had something to do with understanding the case, although I’m not entirely certain what that was. But I suppose that’s why Lord Aziraphale’s the detective and not me.”

Crowley remembered Aziraphale saying that he’d been reading the Virgil Vane novels, when they’d still been meeting in the visiting room of the gaol. But he hadn’t realised that Aziraphale had bought every single one. Although, he reflected, perhaps best not to read overmuch into that; with Aziraphale’s money, it was probably much the same thing to buy one book or all of them. It wasn’t necessarily personal.

“It’s just here,” Crowley said, as they approached the shrubs surrounding the bench. 

Newt, perhaps sensing Crowley’s reluctance, nodded and slipped ahead into the small recess.

Crowley followed.

He was obscurely relieved to see that the body was still there, everything just as he’d seen it earlier; his errands had taken more time than he’d anticipated, and it would have been completely possible for someone to have disturbed the scene, or even removed the corpse entirely.

Newt bent over the bench, taking clear care not to touch anything. “I wish I had my camera,” he said, straightening up. “I’ve been attempting to assist Lord Aziraphale by procuring photographic evidence of some of our crime scenes. To make certain no details are left out later.”

“ Attempting to assist?”

Newt flushed. “Ah. Well. I don’t seem quite to have got the knack of developing the film yet—at least, I think that’s what it must be. At any rate the pictures never come out properly. But I think if I only keep trying…”  

He kept talking, but Crowley was only half-listening. His eyes had skated over the scene when they’d first returned, not looking for detail—not wanting to see those details he’d seen before—but now he forced himself past the instinctive repulsion to look more closely. Something was wrong, something was missing, had been missing from the beginning—

“There’s no weapon,” he said.

Newt, who had been explaining something about apertures, stopped. “Pardon?”

“There’s no weapon,” Crowley repeated. “Look.” He gestured at the space around them. “Nothing. And I’ll swear there wasn’t one there when I first saw him.”

Newt nodded slowly. “Which means…”

“Which means,” Crowley finished, “that this almost certainly wasn’t suicide. It was murder. Or—I suppose, someone could’ve come and taken the weapon away, after they’d found the body, but I hardly think that’s likely.”

“It would certainly require an explanation,” Newt agreed. “But—”

Newt never finished his thought, however, because just then Lesley came through the shrubs, a rabbity-faced policeman following close behind him.

“Just about everyone’s been rounded up, sir,” Lesley said, nodding at Crowley. “They’re all in the solarium now. I explained the full situation to Mr. and Mrs. Dowling, and they’ve told everyone else only that there’s been an accident and they’ll have to wait.”

“Just about everyone?” Crowley asked.

Lesley frowned. “Maud’s still out there looking for young Warlock,” he admitted. “Last we were able to hear of him, he’d gone off on a tear after some clue or other. Not certain where he’s got to yet.”

“I’ll go back to join the others, then, shall I?” Newt said. “Now that the appropriate authorities are here. I really ought to be with Lord Aziraphale—”

Crowley looked around and realised Newt was asking him. “Oh—yes, of course, I think—I don’t see any reason why not.”

“Thank you,” Newt said, and, with a general nod of farewell, exited the bushes.  

The policeman coughed suggestively.

“Oh! Sorry, sir,” Lesley said, turning to him. “Mr. Crowley, this is Inspector R.P. Tyler, from the Oxfordshire police.”

“Er. Pleasure?” Crowley almost instinctively reached out a hand in greeting, remembering just in time that his palms were still bloodied. 

Tyler grunted. “You’re the one who found him, then, young man?”

“Yes,” Crowley said, deciding to let the young slip by without comment. “I was just coming towards the bench to have a bit of a rest, and I saw him, and I thought something seemed off, so I went for a closer look, and, well, saw what had happened. His throat.”

“H’m,” Tyler said, writing assiduously in a notebook. “And you were unable to ascertain the identity of the victim?”

“I don’t know who he was, no.”

“I do,” Lesley said suddenly. “At least—I could almost swear to it, that’s the Johnson boy. Lives in a little cottage just outside the estate. He does odd jobs about the place for us, from time to time.”

“Was he supposed to be doing a job here today?” Tyler asked.

Lesley shook his head. “You’d have to ask Mr. and Mrs. Dowling to be certain, but I certainly wasn’t aware of him having been brought on for any reason.”     

“Anyone who ought to be notified? Family anywhere about?”

“I don’t think so,” Lesley said. “The cottage belonged to old Frank Johnson, the boy’s grandfather, but he died a few years back. As far as I know, he’s lived alone since then.”

“We’ll check up on that, of course,” Tyler said, making another note. He turned back to the body. “Cause of death seems clear enough, but we’ll have the doctor confirm once he turns up. I don’t suppose you made a note of the time when you found him?”

“Not exactly, but it wasn’t much before half-past three.”

“Nothing’s changed since then?”

“Well, I wasn’t here the entire time, and I wouldn’t be prepared to swear to it, but I’d say things look the same way they did when I first discovered him, yes.”

Tyler nodded and snapped his notebook shut. “I think that’ll do for now, then, sir. We’ll have some more questions for you once the doctor’s done his examination. In the meantime—”

“I’ve solved it!”

Crowley, Lesley, and Tyler turned in unison towards the sound.

“I’ve solved it!” Warlock Dowling cried again, and burst past the shrubs, looking more animated than Crowley had yet seen him. “Mr. Crowley, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, I’ve no idea where everyone’s got to but I’ve solved the mystery, it’s the daughter herself who did it, because she wanted to marry that Hungarian scientist—”

“Warlock!” Lesley said, sharply. 

Warlock stopped, and Crowley saw him blink slowly as he processed the scene in front of him. “What’s happened?” he asked, voice suddenly very quiet and young. “Is this—is it part of—”

“There’s been an accident,” Lesley said, gently. 

Warlock’s eyes darted to the body. “Oh, God,” he said, and, turning towards one of the shrubs, retched violently.

Probably not his best birthday, all things considered.

Aziraphale twisted his hands together as he paced round and round a corner of the solarium. Newt had come directly to him once he’d arrived and quickly explained the situation, and Aziraphale had only with difficulty resisted the impulse to run to the scene of the crime himself. But it would have been wildly inappropriate for a dozen reasons, not least of which was that almost no one else knew what had happened, and so Aziraphale paced and fretted and observed the expressions of his fellow party guests, looking for any hint of guilty knowledge in their eyes.

At length, the door to the solarium opened, and the butler came in with Warlock, hand on his shoulder. Crowley was close behind, and Aziraphale felt his chest tighten at the drawn lines of his face, the look of shock and terror in his eyes.

Not bothering to think about how it would look, he walked quickly across the room to meet him. “I’ve heard what happened,” he said, speaking under his breath. “I’m so dreadfully sorry. Are you all right?”

Crowley smiled. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I'll be fine. Really, I ought to look at this as a good thing, detective author finding a mysterious corpse, that’ll be a nice spot of publicity for me, yeah?”

“I find myself uncertain whether to commend your optimism or deplore your opportunism,” Aziraphale said, taking his tonal cue from Crowley. It certainly wasn’t as though he had—what, the right to demand to know Crowley’s actual feelings on the matter. If he was going to be all flippant about it, very well.

“Don’t suppose you’ve figured out who’s done it already, by any chance? Might save us all a bit of bother.”

“As charming as your faith in me is—” Aziraphale broke off as Crowley lifted a hand to brush back his hair. “You’ve got blood,” he said, stupidly. “On your hands.” 

Crowley looked at his palm. “So I have. I’d meant to wash it off, but somehow…”

“We’ll wash it now, then,” Aziraphale said firmly. 

“It won’t be needed as a, a clue…?”

“A clue to what? That someone’s throat’s been slit? I think the corpse itself is a fairly sufficient clue to establish that.”

Crowley nodded. “Yeah—I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking—”

“Well, it’ll be a great deal easier for you to think clearly when you’re not stumbling about the place like a particularly ineffectual Lady Macbeth. Come on.”

Aziraphale had noted the washroom’s location earlier, and he led Crowley there now, steering him by the elbow, careful not to touch him anywhere else.   

The door swung closed behind them. Aziraphale’s first instinct was to reach for it and prop it open, out of the vague notion that it was somehow improper for them to be closeted together. He resisted the impulse, however; there was nothing improper, Aziraphale had seen to that, and they could leave the door closed precisely because they’d nothing to hide.

“There’s a bit on my shirt, too,” Crowley said, running the sink at the basin and glancing down at himself. “Thought I’d avoided it, but it seems not.”

“Cold water,” Aziraphale said absently.

“Sorry?”

“For bloodstains. It’s better.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you,” Crowley said.

“What, hasn’t that come up for Virgil Vane yet?”

“It will now,” Crowley said, grinning. He stepped away from the basin and dried his hands. “If I had to suffer through all that unpleasantness, the least I can get out of it is some material for my next book.”

“I am sorry,” Aziraphale said. “That you should have had to see this...unpleasantness, as you put it. It’s not even been a year since your trial, it seems damnably unfair that you should have to suffer through another criminal investigation so soon—”

“Well. At least this time I’m not likely to be the only suspect.”

“I shouldn’t think you’re a suspect at all,” Aziraphale said sharply. “You didn’t even know this Johnson boy, did you? What possible reason could anyone have for thinking you’d have killed him?”

Crowley shrugged. “That, I’ve no idea. But I can’t help thinking...perhaps it’s simply still the sting of what happened last year, but I didn’t much like the way that policeman looked at me. I can scarcely blame him, either, I’d run down to the house like a madman, I’d got literal blood on my hands—”

“Nonsense,” said Aziraphale robustly. “It would have been perfectly idiotic of you to put yourself in that position if you had killed him, instead of letting some other unlucky soul find the body, and whatever else anyone may think of you they’ve got to accept that you’re not an idiot.”

“Thanks,” Crowley said, not sounding convinced.

Truthfully, Aziraphale had his own doubts. It was far too early to tell—after all, the thing might turn out to be open-and-shut, someone with a clear motive and opportunity, but in the absence of any such compelling evidence, it was entirely possible that Crowley might come under suspicion. Being uncomfortably close to one murder was rotten luck; being close to two began to look rather like a pattern. And although Aziraphale knew, and Scotland Yard knew, that the evidence proving Crowley’s innocence in the Ferno murder was incontrovertible, the real criminal established beyond doubt, the popular imagination had a tendency to skate over such things in favour of the easy connection. 

But Crowley was already shaken enough; there was no need to worry him further. So Aziraphale kept silent.

They returned to the solarium, Crowley breaking away as Aziraphale went to go join Newt. 

“Anything of interest occur while I was away?” he asked, under his breath.

Newt shook his head. “Not particularly. Haven’t observed any sign that anyone besides the Dowlings and the servants—well, and Mr. Crowley—know what’s happened.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Thank you.”

It wasn’t much help—it was plenty likely that if the murderer were in this room, that they’d taken pains to appear as ignorant as everyone else—but any information was good information at this stage.         

The door to the solarium opened, and Inspector Tyler entered. He coughed slightly. “I’m sorry to have to inform you all that a violent death has recently occurred on the estate.”

General shock and surprise, at that, and Aziraphale glanced around the room, reading faces for any hint of guilty knowledge. Nothing stood out: Michael Inger and Uriel Malak were carrying out a hushed conversation with more animation than he’d seen thus far from either of them, Carmine Zuigiber looked rather excited than otherwise, and Gabriel Kerux’s preternaturally handsome face was screwed up in confusion, murders clearly not being something dreamt of in his (undoubtedly banal) philosophy.

“There will, of course, have to be an inquest,” Tyler continued, “and as we embark upon our initial investigations I must order you all to stay here in Oxfordshire at least until that time. Are there any questions?”

“Yes,” said a quiet, precise voice, and everyone’s head turned to the corner where the four student actors were standing. It was the spectacled one with the serious face who had spoken, and he said now, “Could you tell us who it is? That’s died?”

Aziraphale studied him for a moment: surely this boy, who, along with his friends, was only down for the day, couldn’t be worried that the victim might be someone he knew? But looking at his face, the severe set of his chin, Aziraphale realised that this was someone who simply wanted to know.

“The deceased,” Tyler said, “is a young man called Greasy Johnson, aged twenty-one, resident at Beryl Cottage. Will there be anything else?”

There was nothing else, and Tyler nodded and left again, muttering something under his breath about today’s youth and their damn fool questions that Aziraphale only caught a few words of as he brushed past.

“Lord Aziraphale?” Harriet Dowling was standing next to him, looking a good ten years older than she’d seemed at luncheon. “I hope you won’t view this as being too forward of me, and I know you’re staying with your brother, but I thought perhaps I would ask—would you be willing to stay on here at Tadfield Manor?”

“For the inquest?”

“For the inquest,” Harriet said, “and perhaps—well, of course, everyone knows you’re so terribly clever at investigating crimes, and I thought maybe—if you would consider—”

“I didn’t much like the way that policeman looked at me,” Crowley had said—

“If you are asking for my help,” Aziraphale said, “I should be extremely honoured to accept your invitation.”

“Oh— thank you, it’s really too kind of you—”

“Not at all,” Aziraphale said politely. “I ought rather to thank you for the offer of your hospitality.”

The furrow in Harriet’s brow, which had relaxed slightly upon Aziraphale’s acceptance of her offer, deepened again. “It’s odd,” she said, “that we’d all been so excited about the make-believe murder, it was so clever and elegant and fun, and now the real thing happens and even though it’s not as though it were someone I really knew, I can’t help finding the whole thing completely sordid. It’s not a bit exciting. I’d have thought it’d be at least a bit.”

What could Aziraphale tell her? That the sheer depressing reality of the thing never went away, but that with enough mental distance, it became entirely possible to see a case as a puzzle, that it did become exciting, and that he’d never quite been able to shake the sense of disgust that he felt with himself every time he got so caught up in unraveling the story that he forgot about the flesh-and-blood victim?

“A completely natural reaction,” he said, instead. “If you’ll excuse me, I shall need to let my valet know we’ll be staying on…”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Harriet said distractedly, and Aziraphale escaped.

He scanned the room, which was now a great deal emptier, for Newt, and found him over by a fern talking to Crowley.

“Newt,” Aziraphale said, making certain his gaze was fixed steadily on his valet and not on Crowley, “we’ve been asked by the Dowlings to stay in the house while the investigation begins. You shall have to motor Raphael back to the house this afternoon, of course, and then bring my luggage back here.”

“Yes, sir,” Newt said. He glanced from Aziraphale to Crowley, opened his mouth as though he were going to say something, evidently thought better of it, shut it again, and bobbed his head quickly before leaving them.

“You’re staying here?” Crowley asked, once Newt had gone.

“Yes. Indefinitely, in fact, while the investigation proceeds. And you—I do hope it won’t cause you any inconvenience, having to stay out here at least till the inquest. I imagine you’re rather an essential witness.”

Crowley shrugged. “Not much keeping me in London at the moment, is there?” 

Aziraphale, unsure of how to answer that, confined himself to a nod.

“You don’t need to worry, you know,” Crowley said, lightly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I shan’t make a nuisance of myself.”

“I’m afraid I don’t…”

“No forcing any unwanted attentions upon you, I mean. In case you were wasting investigative brain-space on coming up with polite rejections.”

Aziraphale turned sharply to look at him. Crowley’s jaw was set, his eyes fixed straight ahead, a muscle twitching in his neck.

So he hadn’t got over it, after all.

Aziraphale was not so adept at self-deception as to be able to deny the bolt of joy that rushed through him at this realisation. If, however, some part of that joy was mingled with a slight disappointment at the idea that there wouldn’t be any unwanted attentions, he quickly quashed it. Crowley was being polite, and self-restrained, and it would be entirely ridiculous for Aziraphale to entertain any sort of fantasy of having his objections swept away, walls crumbling against a passionate assault. 

Ridiculous, because Crowley had no way of knowing Aziraphale’s true feelings, and Aziraphale had every intention of preserving that state of affairs indefinitely—an ambition that would, he realised, be somewhat impeded by the proximity necessitated by staying in the same house, however large it might be. And, of course, by the knowledge that Crowley still felt the way he had six months ago, that his heart was Aziraphale’s for him to take as he chose. 

It had the makings of a particularly excruciating temptation—everything he wanted dangling just out of reach, a piece of tantalizingly ripe fruit on a forbidden tree—and the only thing keeping them from ruin was Aziraphale’s own willpower.

If nothing else, he thought grimly, it should make for an interesting stay.

Chapter Text

The Dowlings breakfasted early; Crowley had discovered this on his first full day staying at Tadfield Manor, when he’d come down at nine to find cold sausage and congealed eggs awaiting him.

Maud had apologised profusely and offered to freshly prepare whatever he requested, but Crowley had made do with a piece of toast and a few stray tomatoes. Apparently Thaddeus Dowling had got in the habit of early rising during his time in the Army, and Harriet had adapted to join him. Warlock didn’t join them for breakfast most days, eating in his room if he did at all, and Gabriel Kerux was, according to Maud, in the habit of following up his morning exercise with half a grapefruit and a cup of black coffee.

So it oughtn’t to have been as surprising as it was when Crowley came down the morning after the murder and found the breakfast-table occupied only by Lord Aziraphale Eastgate.

“Good morning,” Aziraphale said, looking up from his (doubtless fresh, thanks to Maud’s adjusted schedule) eggs. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen our hosts—”

“No, they’ll have been and gone already,” Crowley said, and explained what he’d learned about the Dowlings’ breakfast habits.

“Americans,” Aziraphale said, as though that explained everything. “Thank you for telling me, though, it’s most useful. In fact—oh, but I’m sorry, you haven’t eaten yet—”

“What?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Nothing that can’t wait till you’ve got some food in you.”

He said this in such a tone and with such an accompanying glance as to strongly imply that Crowley appeared so starved that to delay his breakfast would be an act of unimaginable cruelty.

Which wasn’t fair at all, Crowley thought, as he headed to the sideboard to fill up his plate. He wasn’t that thin. In fact, he’d put on weight since he’d last seen Aziraphale—although it was perhaps the height of presumption to imagine that Aziraphale had been paying enough attention to his appearance back in gaol to notice that it had changed now.

“They do feed you here?” Aziraphale had asked, sitting across the table in that grey room, eyes full of sincere concern, like a beam of light illuminating every dull corner of the space—

Crowley shook his head, tried not to wonder whether Aziraphale was watching him, and carried on serving himself.

“So,” Aziraphale said once he’d sat down, “I had the thought that, as you’ve been here a good deal longer than I have, you’re in a much better position to judge the personalities of everyone in this house. And I wondered whether you might consider perhaps sharing any notions that might have come to mind, anything you’ve noticed that’s worth mentioning.”

Crowley nearly dropped his bacon. “You’re asking for my help?”

“If it’s not a bother.”

“Yes,” Crowley said, with perhaps more alacrity than was strictly necessary. “Of course. I’d have offered if I hadn’t been worried I’d only get in your way.” If I hadn’t thought it might seem like I was demanding too much, imposing myself upon you.

“Splendid. I’ve got Newt off collecting information on the servants’ end of things, and I thought perhaps you could help me with the guests.”

“Course. Where do we start?”

Aziraphale laughed. “After you’ve finished breakfast, of course, I may be a detective but I’m not a heathen—”

“Right, fine, done, then,” Crowley said, and pushed his half-eaten plate away from him. 

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows. “Very well, then.” He drew a small notebook and pencil out of his waistcoat pocket, affixed his eyeglass, and, angling the page so that Crowley could see, wrote in neat copperplate script at the top: GREASY JOHNSON. “Generally, one begins with the victim.” He frowned at the name. “We shall have to find out his real name. The boy can scarcely have been christened Greasy.”

“It does seem unlikely.”

“Well, putting that aside for now, what we know about young Mr. Johnson is that he was twenty-one years old, lived in a small cottage, and was occasionally hired to do work around the manor. The Dowlings deny having asked him to come help with the party, and this is corroborated by their servants. Is there anything else? Anything you might have overheard someone mention?”

Crowley thought for a moment and shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”

Aziraphale sighed. “Well, it’s not very much to go on, but it’s what we’ve got. Now—” he flipped to the next page of the notebook— “let us move on to the crime itself. We know that he was found dead—by the distinguished mystery author Anthony Crowley—at approximately half past three. The doctor who examined the body later that afternoon gave the time of death as likely after one p.m. His throat was slit by some sort of sharp implement—we shall return to this in a moment—and there were no signs of struggle, although that is not necessarily suggestive. He was found on a bench set back from the main gardens and partially enclosed by shrubs; the pattern of the bloodstains on the bench and surrounding grass, and the lack of any traces beyond the immediate area, make it likely that he was killed in that spot rather than moved there post-mortem. 

“Now, having established the manner of Mr. Johnson’s death, let us, like an elementary Latin class introducing the ablative case, proceed to the instrument . According to the aforementioned Mr. Crowley, whose detective novels are uniformly delightful if a trifle lacking in realism—”

“No one reads detective novels for realism—”

“According to him,” Aziraphale swept on, only the crinkle of his eyes betraying amusement, “there was no weapon present at the time of the body’s discovery, and the police were unable to turn one up in their search of the area. So.” He drew a line in the middle of the notebook page and slid it and the pencil across the table to Crowley. “Your turn. What are possible explanations for the lack of weapon?”

Crowley eyed him suspiciously. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that Aziraphale had no theories of his own. He had the distinct feeling of being twelve years old again, solving mathematics equations on the blackboard with the entire classroom watching. “Right. Well. The fact that there was no weapon present at the scene is the major evidence that Johnson didn’t take his own life—although perhaps the angle of the cut was inconsistent with self-infliction?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Not definitively, no.”

“So then, if the blade had been left with the body, we’d be sitting around now debating whether it mightn’t have been suicide after all. Which would put our murderer in a much better position than they’re in now. But as they didn’t leave the blade, we have to ask why not.”

“Not forgetting the possibility that the idea of disguising their crime as suicide simply didn’t occur to the murderer.”

“Rather a stupid murderer, then.”

“Unfortunately,” Aziraphale said dryly, “not all criminals are so full of intelligence and forethought as the ones pursued by Virgil Vane. This mayn’t have been a very clever murder at all. But—we shall, for the moment, set that notion aside, and accept your postulate. You were saying?”

“Well—if they didn’t leave the weapon, and if ‘murder with unknown instrument’ seemed a safer discovery than ‘murder or suicide, with known instrument,’ it’s possible that the blade is something that could be tied to our culprit in some way. Something that might expose their identity if we saw it.”

“Very good,” Aziraphale said. “Go on.”

“So then we wonder—why choose something identifiable for the job? Any number of blades could have made that cut, couldn’t they? If the murderer went to that meeting intending to kill, you’d think they’d have brought along a nice anonymous knife to do it with. So, again, we have to wonder why they couldn’t do that.”

“Incidentally, I must have Newt ask the servants whether they’ve noticed anything missing from the kitchen—but I’ve interrupted you, I’m sorry.”

“I suppose it’s possible they didn’t know they were going to kill Johnson when they set out that afternoon. So they wouldn’t have thought to bring something along and had to use whatever was on hand, and panicked in the aftermath. Or it mayn’t have been a meeting at all. Perhaps they just seized an opportunity when they saw it. Or, or—maybe they did bring something anonymous along, but grew afraid we should be able to find their finger-prints. It might have excited comment to wear gloves in this weather, but one could wrap the handle in a handkerchief, and I’d imagine that’s quite easy to muck up. They could have wiped it after the fact, of course, and put it in Johnson’s hand, pressed his fingers to it, but—”

“What?”

Crowley swallowed. “The—the blood. There was rather a lot of it, and I’d imagine it got—everywhere—it might not have been possible to get the blade into the corpse’s hand without risking that some of it would get on them. And a blade with the handle wiped of all prints is no better than no blade at all when it comes to implying suicide, and then why bother leaving it at all, because you have to think that even the most nondescript weapon might have somehow been traced back to them—if they were seen carrying it away from the kitchens, or something—so perhaps they decided not to bother with the risk. Although, I suppose then they’d be taking on the risk of having to put it back…”

“Not necessarily,” Aziraphale said. “The police didn’t find a weapon near the body, it’s true, but this house’s gardens are massive, and I imagine it would be trivially easy to find somewhere to dispose of the weapon. I’ll see if Inspector Tyler can spare a few men to go through the place more thoroughly—otherwise we shall have to do it ourselves, along with Newt, and I don’t suppose you fancy spending hours searching underneath every forsythia.”

Crowley shrugged. “I’ve had worse week-ends.”

“We must also ask the doctor whether there’s anything about the wound to indicate whether the cut was made by a knife, or a razor, or something else. It would give us an idea of what to look for.”

“Hang on, though, have we actually established that our murderer has to be one of the people who was here yesterday? There aren’t precisely armed guards manning the estate’s borders. Couldn’t anyone have snuck onto the grounds and done the job? And then they could very easily just have taken their weapon on home with them.”

Aziraphale nodded. “It is possible. The police are searching for any signs that someone might have approached through the woods. They couldn’t very well have come by car without being seen, and the police are also trying to determine whether there were any cars parked in the area, within walking distance—although with the way the entrance is set up, it would be rather difficult to sneak in unnoticed even on foot. If it doesn’t appear anyone came in through the woods, we shall have to keep The Mysterious Unknown as only an outside—forgive me the pun—possibility. Which isn’t even addressing the question of why anyone who wasn’t already here would have chosen it as the location for a clandestine meeting or anticipated crime.”

“Mightn’t it have been random?”

“It might be anything, of course, but if the Dowlings aren’t involved they’re likely not lying about not having hired him that day, and then we’ve no reason for Johnson to be here at all, and still less for the coincidence that a stranger full of indiscriminate murderous rage should have happened upon him and chosen a spot so close to the house for his crime. No, I think it’s a great deal more likely that Greasy came here to meet someone at the party, and that someone either went to the rendezvous with the intention of murder or was driven to it by something that happened there.”

Crowley nodded. “So then we’re left with checking up on alibis for everyone living here as well as the party guests—oh, and I suppose the students who came down to help out, although I find it difficult to imagine what motive any of them might have had.”

“The difficulty at this stage,” Aziraphale said ruefully, “is that it’s rather difficult to imagine what motive anybody might have had. But I’ve got leave from Inspector Tyler to go over and have a look at the boy’s cottage after his men are through with it, and I hope that perhaps that might spark some insight into why anyone should want him dead. I expect to receive the key this afternoon.”

“Oh,” Crowley said. “Erm, I don’t—forgive me if it’s impertinent to ask, but would you like—that is, could I come along?”

Aziraphale smiled, and like the dull gaol cell before it, the breakfast room at Tadfield Manor suddenly seemed illuminated by an angelic glow. “Of course you must come along. Otherwise I shan’t have anyone to be clever in front of.”

Crowley grinned back. “Well. We certainly can’t have that.”

The servants’ sitting-room at Tadfield Manor was certainly not the most luxurious example of its kind—Newt, having spent much of his time in service to Lord Aziraphale at some one or other of the Duke of Arcadia’s various properties, was well aware of that—but it was comfortable enough as he settled in with notebook and pencil opposite Lesley and Maud. Newt had been tasked, as usual, with gathering information from the servants, who tended to be either overawed by Aziraphale’s title or distrustful of his mannerisms. 

“I can’t claim to have known him very well,” Maud said, shaking her head. “Poor boy.”

“About how often would you say the Dowlings hired him?”

“It wasn’t consistent by any means,” Lesley explained. “The last time was a few weeks ago—I’d hurt my back, and Mrs. Dowling asked him to come up and tend to some of the heavier work for us.”

“He wasn’t asked to help with the party at all?”

“Oh, no,” Maud said. “He was scarcely the sort of person you’d want to parade in front of the guests.”

Newt made a note of this, reflecting that perhaps the sobriquet Greasy had not been ill-chosen.  

“No,” Maud continued, “it was more...fixing a broken window, or freshening up a paint job, that sort of thing.”

“Was it the current occupants who first hired Mr. Johnson? Or did the previous Mr. Dowling also employ him?”

“Yes, the old man brought him on from time to time. He wasn’t the only one, either. I’d wager a good number of the families in this neighbourhood have had young Greasy over to help with one thing or another.”

“Really?” asked Newt, sensing possibility. “Would that include, for example, the Inger family?”

“I can’t say for certain,” Lesley said, frowning, “but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’d had him up at Avalon Hall.”

“And—” Newt flipped back in his notebook— “any of the other party guests? Would they have been likely to have employed him?”

“It’s certainly possible. Well—except—” Lesley broke off awkwardly.

“What?”

“I’d forgot for a moment that you—that Lord Aziraphale—”

“What is it?” Newt asked, keeping his voice carefully patient. He closed the notebook. “You can speak freely.”

“Oh, it’s nothing bad!” Lesley said quickly. “I was only going to say that it’s not very likely as the Duke of Arcadia would have used young Greasy, as he’s hardly even at that house most of the time and the staff there’s more than large enough for anything he could need. That’s all. But then I thought, perhaps I oughtn’t to imply that the Duke’s a suspect, what with him being Lord Aziraphale’s brother…”

“Everyone’s a suspect at present,” Newt said. “Don’t think for a moment my lord would balk at exposing his own brother, if it turned out he’d done it. He’s not the sort that shields his friends from justice, not if they deserve what’s coming to them.”

But Newt thought, uneasily, about the conversation he’d had with Lord Aziraphale that morning, where he’d been summarily instructed that under no circumstances was he to consider Anthony Crowley under any suspicion whatsoever, and wondered whether he’d spoken truth. 

“You implied that the young man wasn’t precisely...presentable,” he said, changing tactics. “Was he unpleasant? The sort of boy who made enemies?”

Maud shook her head. “I take it you’re wondering why anyone would want to murder him?”

“Yes. If there’s anything…”

“I can’t say that I found him good company,” Maud said, frowning, “but I never thought there was any harm in him. You can’t exactly blame him for being a bit behindhand in his manners, growing up there with only his old grandfather to talk to.”

“You mentioned that the old man had died?”

“About three or four years back. The boy’d already left school at that point and was earning his own living.”

“From the odd jobs?”

“I don’t know of anything else.”

Newt made a note to look into Greasy’s potential other sources of income. But the picture he was forming in his mind was of a generally unremarkable young man, and it was difficult to see what anyone might have had to gain by his death. Certainly not any of the party guests, all of whom were a good deal more well-off than he was. 

Although—perhaps that was the answer in itself. An odd-job man had opportunities to observe things—perhaps things the gentry of Oxfordshire wouldn’t want exposed to their social circle…

Newt wrote one more word in his notebook.

BLACKMAIL?

Aziraphale had been planning to have Newt drive him to the Johnson cottage—a duty somewhat extraneous to the traditional responsibilities of a valet but one which he had gladly undertaken, “as long as I can name the car, m’lord, I’ve got a fantastic idea—” but when Crowley had offered to come along, and Aziraphale had gone against his better judgement and accepted, it seemed only prudent to let Newt continue his interviews with the servants and take Crowley’s car.

Now, hurtling down the road at what the speedometer claimed to be a mere seventy miles per hour but Aziraphale felt completely certain had to be at least ninety, he was beginning to regret this particular piece of efficiency.

“Crowley!” he said, after a particularly wrenching turn, “for Heaven’s sake, if you don’t slow down we shall have another death on our hands.”

Crowley grinned at him (which did not seem at all safe, if he was looking at Aziraphale like that he couldn’t possibly be paying enough attention to the road—and given these concerns it was entirely natural for Aziraphale’s breath to catch in his throat). “Don’t tell me you’re scared.”

“For myself? Don’t be ridiculous,” Aziraphale said, drawing upon seventeen generations of inbred haughtiness. “I’m merely pointing out that it’s less than three miles to the cottage and driving like a demon won’t get us there appreciably sooner.”

Crowley made a face and muttered something about “a likely story,” but slowed down. “So what are we looking for in this cottage, anyhow?”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, “I’ve some good news about that, actually. Of course it wouldn’t do to go into this investigation with too much of a fixed notion, but from everything we’ve learned it seems extremely unlikely that Greasy Johnson was killed because of who he was. Which leaves the idea that he was killed because of something he knew, or saw, or heard. A matter of circumstance rather than character. Do you follow?”

Crowley’s eyebrows drew together. “Think so. Though I can’t say I entirely agree with your distinction between the sets of motives—but I get your point.”

“Newt’s been interviewing the servants, and they told him that apparently Johnson was accustomed to do odd jobs at a number of the estates in the area, including a number of the guests at the party. It’s quite likely that he could have witnessed something that one of the Dowlings’ neighbours wouldn’t want getting about.”

“And so you think they killed him to protect—what, some secret?”

“It’s certainly a possibility—or Johnson might have been using his knowledge to his own benefit.”

“You mean blackmail.”

“Perhaps,” Aziraphale said. “But, as I said, we mustn’t get blinkered by a theory. We should look for anything that might be relevant, blackmail material or not. Oh—I believe that’s it, just there.”

Crowley nodded and turned into the small drive near the cottage. Unsurprisingly, Greasy Johnson didn’t appear to have had a car, but a slightly rusty bicycle was leaning up against the side of the building. 

“So he didn’t cycle to the manor, then,” Crowley said, striding towards it.

Aziraphale closed the car door behind him. “Apparently not. Which lends credence to the theory of a secret rendezvous of sorts; I imagine he’d have been less noticeable on foot.”

Crowley nodded. “Right, so, let’s find whatever guilty secret our murderer killed to protect,” he said, and opened the cottage door. “I assume we’re not worried about leaving finger-prints, or anything of that sort, yeah?”

“That’s right,” Aziraphale said, following him inside, “the police have been over everything already.”

“But not with the idea of looking for blackmail material, is that the idea?”

“More or less.”

“Hang on, though,” Crowley said, pulling open a drawer and beginning to rifle through it, “won’t the murderer have destroyed the—whatever it was? The proof? If there even was any? Seems logical.”

“Well, I’ve no doubt that would have been their intention,” Aziraphale allowed, “but it seems unlikely anyone would have had time to get here and back before you raised the alarm and we all gathered in the house.”

“Assuming it was someone at the party.”

“Well, yes, but that’s the likelihood that lines up best with the blackmail theory in the first place. No, I think it’s a good deal more likely that they’d have asked Johnson to bring whatever proof he had with him. If, as you say, he had any proof beyond his own knowledge. But there might still be something here, some sort of clue.”

“All right,” Crowley said, dubiously, and opened another drawer. “There’s an awful lot of papers in here.”

Aziraphale joined him at the desk, keeping a careful distance. “Anything of interest?”

Crowley frowned. “Don’t think so—look, the dates on most of these’re years old.” He held out one of the sheets. Aziraphale took it.

“It looks as though these belonged to young Greasy’s grandfather,” he said, scrutinising what appeared to be a laundry bill addressed to Frank Johnson.

“Well, the old man must’ve had a mania for documentation,” Crowley said, “because it appears he kept absolutely everything. It’d take hours to go through it all.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Yes, but it ought to be done. We’ve so little to go on at this point that it’s foolish to pass up any possibility of gaining more evidence. But there’s no reason we can’t split the papers up between us—Newt can help as well—and go over them another time.”

Crowley closed the desk drawer. “Right.”

They searched the cottage in near-silence for a few more minutes. Aziraphale felt keenly and uncomfortably aware of his own physical presence, and of Crowley’s not far away; the effort of making certain never to come too close made it impossible for him to move about naturally. What did one do with one’s arms, generally, anyway? Surely they didn’t ordinarily feel so leaden and awkward. 

Aziraphale exhaled heavily through his nostrils in frustration, and strove to think solely of the task at hand. There was a cupboard in front of him, and he stared at it for an embarrassingly long time before realising he’d better open the door.

“Hey!” Crowley’s voice rang out from the other room (the bed room, a very unhelpful part of Aziraphale’s brain pointed out). “Think I’ve got something!”

Aziraphale grit his teeth and went in.

Crowley was standing in front of the bedside table, something glittering in his hands. 

“Jewelry,” he said, triumphantly, and poured a necklace into Aziraphale’s hands. “There’s this, and a couple of rings, and a few bracelets—someone’ll have to check on it, obviously, but I don’t think it’s costume, and it hardly seems like the sort of thing you’d expect Greasy Johnson to have laying about the place in ordinary circumstances.”

Aziraphale held the necklace up to the window. “It could be a family heirloom, of course,” he said, watching how the light reflected off one of the stones. “But I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you were right.”

“So you think—blackmail proceeds?”

“Certainly possible. Although why he wouldn’t have sold them already—”

“Maybe he hadn’t time,” Crowley said. He was as animated as Aziraphale had yet seen him, eyes bright with excitement, a slight flush suffusing his cheekbones. “If it was a recent thing. I mean, he’d have had to have found a shop that’d take them without asking too many questions, and he only had that bicycle…”

“Perhaps.”

“D’you think this means it’s a woman? The murderer?”

“Using jewelry to buy off one’s blackmailer does seem like a peculiarly female circumstance,” Aziraphale allowed.

“If she couldn’t get hold of money without her husband knowing, or something…”

“But I shouldn’t go crossing all of our male possibilities off the suspect list just yet,” Aziraphale said, rubbing the necklace between his fingers and sitting down on the bed. “For one thing, there’s nothing to say that Greasy was blackmailing only one person—if he was blackmailing anybody, which we’ve by no means established for certain as yet. The jewelry might belong to someone else he was extorting. Or, if it was our murderer who gave it to him, there’s no reason they couldn’t have...I don’t know, stolen it, or something, in the first place.”

“What, on the grounds that as they clearly didn’t balk at murder, theft would be comparatively venial?”

Aziraphale smiled. “Yes, precisely. But if the jewelry is real, it’s quite possible the police will be able to trace it, if it was bought anytime recently. I don’t know how likely that is, but it’s certainly worth a shot.”

Crowley sank down on the bed next to Aziraphale. “Something to go on, anyhow.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, and promptly lost the bulk of his capacity for rational thought, because Crowley was leaning over, his face unbearably close, his breath warm on Aziraphale’s neck—

“Can I see that?” 

“I beg your pardon? Oh, the, the— yes, of course,” Aziraphale said, idiotically, and gave Crowley the necklace, unable to entirely avoid brushing his fingertips as he handed it over. 

“Thanks,” Crowley said, and grinned at him, and this was ridiculous, outrageous, that Aziraphale should feel as though he were about to burst into a pillar of flame right there on Greasy Johnson’s bed. It seemed impossible that Crowley wouldn’t notice, and Aziraphale thought bitterly that perhaps things had been a great deal safer when they’d been trapped on either side of a table in a gaol cell.

“Look,” Crowley said, “has it got—is there something engraved there?” He held part of the necklace between two of his fingers. “Do you see it?”

Aziraphale leaned in to look. “I’m not sure,” he said, peering at it. “It could be, but I’ve no idea what it might say. Or it could simply be a scratch. I expect a jeweller could get a better look at it. We’ll have to mention it to the police.”

Without thinking, he turned away from the necklace to face Crowley, and their eyes met. Aziraphale felt momentarily arrested, locked in place, unable to break free from the golden chain of Crowley’s gaze— 

With great effort, he tore his eyes away, inhaled sharply, and practically jumped up off of the bed. “Ah—I’ll go—we’d better look at the rest of the cottage,” he said, looking at the ground, and walked into the next room with what he hoped appeared like purpose.      

There was a large fish tank in the corner, the quality and opulence of which were at odds with the slightly shabby surroundings. Drawing closer, Aziraphale could see that there were several tropical fish swimming about inside.

“Must’ve been Greasy Johnson’s fish, right?” Crowley’s voice came from the doorway.

“It seems so,” Aziraphale said, not turning round.

“Someone had better feed them, hadn’t they?”

“Yes.” Aziraphale watched a bright blue fish pass a red one, fins rippling in the water. “I’ll mention it to Inspector Tyler, I’m certain there’s someone who can—”

“No,” Crowley said, almost harshly. “No, I—I’d rather we did it. I did it. If that’s...if it’s all right.”

Aziraphale turned to look at him. Crowley’s expression was at once earnest and ashamed of that earnestness. 

Of course—last year, when Crowley had been in gaol, the police had completely mucked up looking after his plants, until Aziraphale had intervened and hired a gardener to come by, someone who knew what they were about. 

Except Greasy Johnson wouldn’t be returning to see his fish again.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, hearing his voice soften. “Yes—all right. We’ll look after the fish, then. You and I.”

Chapter Text

“We needn’t do this now, you know,” Aziraphale said. “If it’s too soon, too unpleasant...it’s quite likely that we shan’t find anything of use in any event, and if you’d rather wait—”

Crowley shook his head. “Nah. Totally fine. Might as well get it over with, yeah?”

They were standing just outside the small clearing where Crowley had discovered Greasy Johnson’s corpse. While the quest to determine a potential motive for the murder continued—Newt had been deputised to interview servants at the surrounding estates and see whether he could ferret out any potential guilty secrets—Aziraphale had suggested that they go back to approaching the matter from the perspective of what was logistically most possible or likely. Which had meant returning to the scene of the crime.

Crowley had been worried that he’d be unable to revisit the place without being overwhelmed by revulsion, but it appeared his mind and body were more resilient than he’d given them credit for. (He realised, half to his amusement, half to his disgust, that he was mentally taking note of this for future novels.) 

Aziraphale nodded, but he didn’t quite look convinced. Crowley found himself rather more irritated by this than was perhaps reasonable. Aziraphale had been acting odd for days now; he’d seemed distracted and not quite all there when they’d been investigating the cottage, and now here he was acting as though Crowley were liable to faint at any moment. This was not precisely in line with the image of himself Crowley would have ideally been presenting to the world in general and Aziraphale in particular, and he resented being made to once again feel inferior, the victim rather than the hero in his own story.

“Shall we, then?” Aziraphale asked, and gestured towards the clearing. “After you.”

Crowley stepped forward. 

The bench had been roped off, but it wasn’t as though Crowley’s fingerprints weren’t all over the place anyway, so he only hesitated a moment before ducking underneath and taking a closer look. The stone was still stained with Greasy Johnson’s blood, and as Crowley inhaled he fancied he could still smell death in the air (although that might simply have been an overactive imagination). 

Behind him, Aziraphale made a wordless noise that sounded pleased.

“What is it?”

“The angles,” Aziraphale explained, pointing up at the house. “We’ll have to check from inside to make certain, but I’d wager that it isn’t possible to see inside this clearing from any of the windows in the house.”

“And that’s a good thing? It means we haven’t any hope of eye-witnesses, doesn’t it?”

“We hadn’t much hope of that to begin with,” Aziraphale pointed out. “No, it’s that I think our murderer must have chosen their location strategically. If they knew they were asking Greasy Johnson to meet them during the party, they’d have wanted to make certain there was as little chance as possible of anyone seeing them. And the selection of this bench perhaps suggests that they were familiar enough with the house that they knew they wouldn’t be seen from indoors.”

“Or they simply got lucky.”

“Or that, of course.”

“But we were focusing on party guests in any event, weren’t we? So I don’t see how, even if we do assume the bench was chosen for a reason, that gets us any further along.”

“Well, that’s where we’ll have to do a bit more digging, I think,” Aziraphale said. “Although most of the guests do live in the neighbourhood, I’m not certain whether any of them have been to the house before. So it might be fruitful to determine just how familiar everyone was with the layout of the place. Newt’s already interviewing the servants at all the nearby houses to get a sense of whether there’s anything Greasy might have seen or heard. I’ll make certain that he also asks around about any of the guests having visited Tadfield Manor before. But we know at least the people living in the house would have been familiar with the place—so that’s the Dowlings, Gabriel Kerux, and the servants.”

“And me,” Crowley said.

“And no such thing,” Aziraphale said indignantly. “For one, everyone else I’ve listed was here in the house a good deal longer than you were, and for another, you aren’t a suspect.”

“Not to you, maybe. But the police—”

“I shall handle the police,” Aziraphale said, and the arrogance in his voice probably ought to have irritated Crowley more than it did. “In any event, I don’t think there’s much more to see here, do you?”

Crowley shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

As they left the clearing, Crowley started towards the house, but Aziraphale reached out a hand to stop him. “It might be worth looking around out here a bit more,” he said. “If—that is, I don’t mean to presume that you haven’t any other plans—”

Crowley snorted. “Obviously I haven’t any other plans. I’m stuck in this strange house with an effusive fan of mine, a pair of obnoxious American businessmen, and a sullen boy just out of adolescence. What do you imagine I’d be doing if not this?”

Aziraphale flushed slightly. “Well, I don’t know, I thought perhaps you might want some time to write—”

Crowley grinned at him. “You obviously haven’t been acquainted with enough writers, or you’d know that we jump at every opportunity to avoid writing.”

“Very well, then,” Aziraphale said, smiling. “I was thinking that perhaps we might try to determine where our murderer could have gone in the immediate aftermath of their crime. There were a good many people about, obviously, and although it doesn’t seem as though anyone did see them, I’m curious as to whether they had an exit strategy.”

“I did see someone,” Crowley said, “around here, actually, it was just before I saw you. Ducked behind the hedge, and found you there.”

Aziraphale’s eyes lit up. “You didn’t recognise them, I take it?”

Crowley shook his head. “Too far away. And I was chiefly concerned with not getting dragged into another tedious conversation.”

“Well, in that case, let us be grateful it was I behind that hedge,” Aziraphale said dryly. “Do you remember what direction they went in?”

Crowley shut his eyes. “Let me think. I was heading towards the greenhouse—I thought I might be able to catch a moment alone there—but I doubled back towards the hedge when I saw someone coming out from the clearing. I’m not certain which direction they were going, but it certainly might have been towards the greenhouse.”

“Did you ever end up going in there? After we talked?”

“No. Didn’t get around to it.”

“So someone could have been in there, then,” Aziraphale said. “We shall have to have the police enquire as to whether anyone says they went in between, say, 2:45 and 3:15.”

“Seems like less than an ideal hiding spot, though. What with the glass walls. I mean, me trying to pop in there to get away from the party is one thing, someone hiding out after having committed murder’s another, don’t you think?”

“Well, let’s look more closely, then. Come along.” 

The greenhouse was more impressive than Crowley had expected, with several unusual specimens and a great number of more common species that were impressively well-cared-for. He ran a hand down the leaf of a bird-of-paradise, and must have made some unconscious noise, because Aziraphale turned from where he’d been observing a small fruit tree and smiled at him.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked, joining Crowley in front of the plant.

Crowley nodded. “Well, you know, it’s sort of an interest of mine—”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, sounding—unbelievably—as though he were faintly offended that Crowley thought he might not have remembered. “I ought to have asked—have you got someone to look after them? While you’re here? Your plants, I mean.”

“I have, actually—downstairs neighbour’s done it a few times before and I know I can trust her not to coddle ‘em. Of course, it was only supposed to be until the party, but…” Crowley shrugged. “I called and explained the change in circumstances, and she agreed to keep doing it indefinitely.”

“Good,” Aziraphale said, and paused briefly before continuing, in an entirely different tone, “Now, then, I don’t know whether you were paying attention as we went in, but I was looking at the angles, and I don’t actually think it would have been possible for the murderer to sneak in here without you seeing that’s where they went.”

“Are you certain?” Crowley squinted at the glass. The plants were dense and lush enough that they could certainly have blocked the casual observer from seeing anyone inside the greenhouse; they were certainly blocking him from seeing out. 

“Not entirely,” Aziraphale admitted, “and of course they might have simply got lucky, but look at where the entrance is. They’d have had to come right in front of the hedges in order to get in this way. Awfully risky.”

“So you don’t think they came in here at all, then?”

“I don’t think they came in through the main door,” Aziraphale said, face now alight with interest. He hurried over to a particularly large fern and brushed one of its fronds aside, revealing a smaller side door. “Look.” 

“Secret door? Sounds like the sort of thing I’d come up with, honestly.”

“Not really secret,” Aziraphale said. “I rather fancy it leads to the gardening shed.”

Crowley frowned, attempting to remember. “Gardening shed?”

“It’s set back a bit into the trees. Well, I suppose that makes sense—one doesn’t want to have one’s guests noticing that there’s any actual work that goes into maintaining one’s gardens, after all.”

“Is this where I register for your correspondence course on Horticulture Etiquette in Rural England, or—”

Aziraphale fixed him with the sort of look that might well have required its own correspondence course on Haughty Expressions of the British Aristocracy to master, and swept on. “So,” he said, “we’ll have to look more carefully, but I do imagine it would have been easy enough to get to the gardening shed from the bench area without being seen. And then, of course—” he opened the door— “one can get into the greenhouse easily.”

Crowley peered ahead into the shed. Perhaps it was just in contrast with the sunlit greenhouse, but the building seemed unpleasantly dark and dank, with gardening tools hanging haphazardly from hooks on the walls, watering cans in a jumble on the shelves, and at least one pile of what appeared to be dirty aprons in a corner. “So you think they came in here first?”

“It seems a distinct possibility. And it would also have been a great deal safer to assume that there would be no one in the shed than in the greenhouse—after all, a guest—or a detective-author-for-hire, as the case may be—might have conceivably wandered in here for a look at the plants, but they’d have no reason to go into the shed—”

“Well—” Crowley began, and thought better of it.

Aziraphale eyed him suspiciously. “Well, what?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“I shall do no such thing, if you’ve found a flaw in my logic I insist upon hearing it—”

“No, no, it’s not a flaw, it’s just—”

“What?” Aziraphale demanded.

“It’s just that I can think of a reason why a guest might have wanted to go into the shed,” Crowley muttered. “Well. I suppose not just a guest. Two, more likely. Or, I mean, more than two, far be it from me to judge, but, beside the point, anyway, you, erm. Get my meaning.”

It was actually rather edifying, watching Aziraphale’s face over the span of the next two seconds or so. His expression shifted from bewilderment to speculation to enlightenment to sincere amusement to prim disapproval like lightning, with Crowley barely able to identify each look before being confronted with the next. “I see,” he said, at last. “Yes. Well. That…would certainly have been a possibility, but let us for the present assume that our murderer had the faith in humanity not to suspect that anyone might sneak away from a birthday party to...disport themselves. And, of course, the servants were busy with the celebration, so they’d have been out of the picture as well.” He’d turned, Crowley noticed, to his intense amusement, slightly pink. “So then, if they got in through the shed, they could ascertain there wasn’t anyone in the greenhouse, rid themselves of any criminal paraphernalia, and stroll out of the greenhouse whenever they chose, appearing perfectly innocent.”

“All of this—it would definitely have to be someone familiar with the house, then. Really familiar.”

“Yes—although we haven’t any proof that’s how it was done. But that’s what we said about the bench, too, isn’t it? More likely to have been chosen by someone who knew the gardens well. I do wish there were some sort of physical evidence that we could use to substantiate these ideas, though.”

Crowley nodded. “Well. Let’s try and find some.”

He strode into the shed, brushing by Aziraphale as he did so. He tried and failed not to notice how Aziraphale instinctively recoiled as their sleeves briefly touched, tried and failed not to be disappointed by it. What the devil had got into him lately? Crowley had always imagined that Aziraphale at least liked him, and he’d seemed more than happy to have Crowley’s help with the investigation, so why this sudden distancing? Was he afraid that Crowley might take friendliness as encouragement? That his cordiality might be misconstrued? 

Well, he needn’t worry, Crowley resolved. He’d thought he’d done the right thing by speaking up, by assuring Aziraphale that he hadn’t any intention of pressing an unwanted suit. But if Aziraphale were determined to act as though Crowley were liable to pounce on him at any moment, he was just going to have to be as emphatically non-pounce-y as possible. 

“We still haven’t determined where the weapon’s got to, have we?” Crowley asked, taking a hoe off the wall and examining it (he wasn’t certain for what). “I suppose there’s no chance it might be here, if the murderer came through after they’d done the job?”

“There’s a chance, of course, there’s a chance of everything, but even if they had stashed the weapon in this shed there’d have been plenty of opportunity to go back and dispose of it later.”

“Even with the police crawling about everywhere?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Tadfield police force is not precisely what you might describe as substantial, and nipping out here for a moment would be a sight easier than getting down to Greasy Johnson’s cottage for anyone staying in the house.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said, and picked up another hoe.

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows. “What exactly, might I ask, are you doing with that?Because if you say that you’re looking for hidden blades in the garden implements I shall have to reconsider my stance on the ability of mystery writers to distinguish reality from fiction—”

“No!” Crowley said, and put down the hoe. “No, I’m just—I don’t know what I’m looking for, I suppose.”

“Then I confess I don’t see any reason for us to stand about in this grubby shed any longer.”

“So—what, you’re done? We’re done?”

“I didn’t say that. Come along.” Aziraphale, who hadn’t gone particularly far into the shed, stepped back over the threshold.

Crowley followed him back into the greenhouse.

“Let’s think about what might have happened next,” Aziraphale said, “if our theory is accurate. They’d have left anything incriminating in the shed, and then come in here.”

“Right,” Crowley said, walking up to the glass. “Can we test something?”

“Certainly.”

“I want to see whether it is possible to tell from in here whether there’s anyone outside.”

“Not the other way round?”

“No—what I’m thinking is, if it happened the way we’ve been saying, the murderer will have wanted to see whether the coast was clear before coming out again. So if I go out and walk about like I did that day, and you stay in here watching for me, we’ll know if they’d have been able to see anyone walking around.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Yes, all right. Go on, then.”

Crowley left the greenhouse and walked back and forth in front of it for a short time, glancing over occasionally to see whether he could spot Aziraphale inside, before heading over to the hedge where he’d met Aziraphale on the day of the party and walking from there almost all the way to the bench where he’d found the body. He wasn’t certain whether Aziraphale was actually trying to hide, but even looking for him, even knowing there was someone in there, he wasn’t able to see him inside the greenhouse.

He came back inside and was surprised to find that Aziraphale remained out of sight. 

“Hello?” he called.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale popped up from behind a fiddle-leaf fig tree, beaming widely. “Come and see what I’ve found.”

Crowley strode over. Aziraphale was looking at a ceramic pot containing a Devil's Tongue. “What is it?”

“See?” Aziraphale pointed. “Unless I am very much mistaken, that is a bloodstain.”

Crowley peered at it. “So—”

“So either someone simply got a bit too careless with the trimming shears, or our murderer was here. And, look.” He stepped aside, allowing Crowley to take his place. “I found that if I looked out through here, I had a fairly good view of the outside. And I did see you—not continuously, but I did see you several times as you walked past.”

Crowley touched one of the leaves. “Hm. And I didn’t spot you at all.”

“Yes, I think that’s the really clever thing. The fronds really camouflage quite well from that angle, but I was still able to see through them.”

“So we’ve got a bloodstain in just the spot the murderer might’ve concealed themselves. I mean, that’s terrific, isn’t it? We’re probably on the right track?”

“I do hope so. Certainly we haven’t found anything to indicate that our theory isn’t possible.” 

“Right, then, the murderer checks that the coast is clear, and then—”

“Comes out of the greenhouse,” Aziraphale said, suiting the action to the word. Crowley followed him. “And goes...where?”

“Anywhere, I suppose,” Crowley said. “If they stowed any incriminating evidence in the shed, and presuming they were a party guest, they’d be at perfect liberty to continue wandering about.”

“Yes—but I do think we ought to be able to eliminate some people based upon this theory. Those students, the ones that were helping out—three of them were stationed at particular locations, yes?”

“Yes, and the fourth was sort of patrolling the area.”

“Perfect. So if we have one of them witnessing a suspect in their location at a certain time, and another one witnessing that same suspect in their location a short time later, we can try to reconstruct the paths that the guests might have taken, and from there attempt to determine whether they would have been physically able to reach the bench, the shed, and the greenhouse in between sightings.”

“That sounds like rather a lot of work, doesn’t it?” Crowley asked.

“Hopefully not. Most people were travelling in groups, and it was rather a small party, so there oughtn’t to be too many different movement patterns to check up on. But we will need to speak with those students of yours.”

“They’ve gone back up to Oxford. Police said they could.”

“Well, I suppose they’re not very likely suspects, are they? We know that three of them were in their places the entire time—their stations were all far enough away from the bench that it wouldn’t have been possible to carry out the murder and get back without being missed. I suppose the spectacled one—Stilton, or whatever his name was—could’ve done it, but you saw him not long before and after, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Mmm. I do wish they’d stayed here long enough for us to get their reports on everyone’s movements. Although—”

“What?”

“I suppose I could send Newt up to Oxford. Have him interview them.”

“Or we could do it,” Crowley said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, not far, is it? And this seems like the best lead we’ve got. Might as well do it ourselves. I can drive—”

“Can you?” Aziraphale muttered. Crowley chose not to hear this. 

“And I know I’d be glad of the chance to get out of here for a bit. Change of scene.”

“Yes, very well,” Aziraphale said. “The inquest’s tomorrow—we can plan to go up the day after, if that suits.”

“Perfectly.”

“Right. So. Here our murderer comes, out of the greenhouse—”

Crowley glanced around. “Perhaps they headed away from the scene of the crime? Seems logical to want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the corpse.”

“It’s a reasonable postulate, at any rate. So that would mean…” Aziraphale walked forward. “Not much good looking for footprints, or anything of that nature,” he said, keeping a few paces ahead of Crowley. “Not with the amount of people trodding about everywhere.”

“Well, we could keep a look-out for other things, though, couldn’t we?”

“Such as?”

“Blood, maybe? Like you found in the greenhouse.”

“Mmm. Yes. I believe that policeman has a dog, doesn’t he? Inspector Tyler? We’ll see if the hound can sniff out anything worth noting. There’s no use you and I trudging through the greenery.”

“I’m not entirely certain you’re not just saying that because you’re wearing a cream-coloured coat and don’t want it to get soiled.”

“Have you any idea how difficult it is to get a stain out of this fabric?” Aziraphale demanded. “Not, I assure you, something within Newt’s capacity.”

“Right, and I forgot, you, the brother of the literal richest man in England, can’t afford to replace your dirty coats—”

“It’s the principle of the thing, obviously. I’ve kept this coat in absolutely pristine condition for—”

Crowley waved a hand at him. “I’m only joking. Don’t worry. I don’t much fancy crawling about in the mud myself.”

“Have you seen this before?” Aziraphale asked, indicating the structure that they were now approaching. “This gazebo?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, a bit thrown by the sudden change of subject. “I mean, just quickly, when I was doing my initial survey of the grounds to determine where to place the actors. Why?”

“Mmm. Only that it might make a convenient landmark to use when we go back and try to establish movement patterns and timetables. It isn’t very likely, you know, that most people will actually be aware of how far they walked—particularly when they’re distracted by something like your very engaging mystery story—but we can ask whether they passed the gazebo, and they’re much more likely to remember that.”

“Seems memorable enough,” Crowley said, and, gripping one of the railings, swung himself up onto the deck. 

Aziraphale did something with his face that managed to be neither an eyeroll nor a smile but conveyed the sense of both, and marched primly up the steps to join him. 

“You know,” Crowley said, drumming his fingers on a whorl in the woodwork, “this is the sort of place that I’d put a bloodstain, if I were writing this story. Nice clear spot, none of this business with leaves and twigs.”

“Let’s look for one, then,” Aziraphale said promptly, and began methodically examining the floorboards. 

Crowley grinned and started his own perusal of the railings and balusters. 

“No joy?” he asked, once he’d come all the way round the gazebo.

“No joy,” said Aziraphale, straightening up. A piece of paper fell out of the interior pocket of his coat. “Oh—”

“Here, let me,” Crowley said, and leaned forward to grab it.   

And, well—curiosity was indeed one of Crowley’s (myriad) flaws, but he genuinely and truly had no intention of reading whatever was on that paper.

Except that the quickest of glances revealed—

“Hang on, that’s my handwriting.”

“Oh, is it?” Aziraphale asked. As a performance, it was spectacularly unconvincing. “Funny—” He held out a hand.

Crowley yanked the paper back out of his reach. “This is my letter. The one—” the one where I said a lot of disgustingly sentimental and vulnerable things, the one where I all but confessed that I’m hopelessly in love with you, the one you never answered. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, stiffly. “That one.”

“And you’re carrying it around with you. In your pocket.” 

“I must have, erm, put it in there. At some point. And forgot about it.”

“Six months.”

“Hm?”

“You’ve been carrying my letter about with you in your pocket for six months.”

“An obvious oversight,” said Aziraphale, but his face was flushed, his hands were shaking, and his voice didn’t quite strike the right peremptory note when he said, “so, please, if you wouldn’t mind—”

And Crowley might not be the detective, but pieces of a puzzle were slotting together in his mind, the oddity of Aziraphale’s recent behaviour revealed in a new light. Yesterday, on the bed in Greasy Johnson’s cottage, the way he’d looked at Crowley, the way his breath had caught...what if his physical touchiness wasn’t caused by revulsion (which had never made much sense) but by attraction? Because, if he’d kept Crowley’s letter on purpose (because Crowley didn’t, couldn’t, believe for a moment that he’d simply stowed it absentmindedly), surely that meant…

He became aware that Aziraphale was still standing there, hand stretched out, waiting to take the letter back. 

“Uh. Here.” He handed it over.

There followed a delicate silence, because what was Crowley supposed to say? If you feel that way about it, for God’s sake why haven’t you said anything, it’s not as though I’ve been particularly subtle, and if you haven’t got designs on me why on earth did you keep my letter? Why do you keep looking at me as though I’m about to leap at you, and as though you wouldn’t mind in the slightest if I did? 

“I’m—” Aziraphale began. He straightened the hem of his waistcoat. “I’m quite finished here, so if you haven’t anything else you think we ought to take a look at, perhaps we might head back to the house. I, ah. Thought perhaps you might appreciate the chance to review some things before you have to testify at the inquest.”

Crowley opened his mouth and closed it again. Surely it couldn’t be left at that, not when Aziraphale had to have an inkling of how much Crowley had just understood—but if he didn’t want to talk about it at the moment, then Crowley was scarcely about to insist on having it out here and now.

“Yeah, all right,” he said, aloud. “Let’s get ready for the inquest.”

 The coroner’s name was Death.

“Really,” Aziraphale said, “it seems almost too fitting to be in good taste.”

“It’s pronounced to rhyme with teeth,” Raphael told him. The Duke of Arcadia wasn’t slated to testify at the inquest itself, but he’d come to observe the proceedings. This was also to be the extent of Aziraphale’s involvement; although he hadn’t much expectation of gathering any new information, it would be a good opportunity to hear statements from witnesses again in an official setting.

Aziraphale and Raphael had seated themselves on a bench about halfway back from the witness-box. Crowley, whose testimony was obviously crucial, was some distance away from them. He’d turned to look behind when they’d come in, and Aziraphale had smiled—he feared weakly—by way of encouragement. 

“Your friend all right?” Raphael asked.

“I hope so.”

“Rotten luck for him, isn’t it? Having to go through another murder investigation so soon after that other business? Seems to be bearing up reasonably well under the circs, though.”

“Yes, I’m afraid it is rather dreadful,” Aziraphale said. “But I do believe he’s looking on the bright side. Keeps talking about how it’ll be publicity for his next book.”

“Bit cold-blooded of him, what?”

“Positively reptilian,” Aziraphale said dryly. “No, really, you can’t expect me of all people to agree that an intellectual interest in murder is anything other than perfectly understandable, can you?”

“Suppose not,” said Raphael. He glanced around. “And you clearly aren’t alone in that. This place is positively stuffed to the gills with observers. I hadn’t realised inquests were so bustling.”

“Well, a fair number of these people were asked to come. The Dowlings, their servants, a number of the guests at the party...anyone who might have evidence that’ll help the jury come to their decision.”

“Mm, yes, I do recognise a fair few faces.”

And indeed, what had seemed like an unusually sparsely attended birthday party had translated into a relatively crowded inquest, as Aziraphale, too, recognised Michael and Sandalphon Inger, Uriel Malaika, Carmine Zuigiber, Raven Sable, Limus White, and the entire Dowling menage. 

The coroner cleared his throat. “Let us commence the inquest upon the body of Gerald Johnson, aged twenty-one.”

“Gerald,” Aziraphale said under his breath. “Well, it had to be something other than Greasy, I suppose.”

Raphael leaned over. “Bit of a funny coincidence, isn’t it?” he asked, quietly. “Boy bein’ named Gerald?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh—I suppose you don’t spend much time in this part of the world, do you? The old man, old Mr. Dowling, who had Tadfield Manor before the present owner—his name was Gerald, too.”

Aziraphale started. “Was it?”

“I mean, common enough name, I suppose, hardly like the chap was named Aziraphale, but all the same…”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, more to himself than to his brother. “I find that...suggestive.”

He filed the information away for later consideration and turned his attention back to the witness-box. Inspector Tyler was getting down, and the police doctor coming up to give his evidence.

“I should say death was very nearly immediate.”

“The cause being, beyond doubt, the wound to the throat?”

“Indeed beyond doubt. I understand there has yet been no weapon found, but I should say it was most likely a razor of the sort commonly used for shaving, and which, as far as I can tell, had few distinguishing features.”

“Is it possible that the deceased could have inflicted the wound himself?”

“It is,” the doctor said cautiously, “but given the lack of any weapon—”

“But from a purely theoretical medical perspective, apart from any other considerations, the angle and depth of the wound were consistent with possible self-infliction?”

“I should say it was a possibility but not a probability.”

The coroner asked a few more questions regarding physical details of the corpse, and the doctor was dismissed.

The next witness was Anthony Crowley.

Aziraphale had seen him in a witness-box once before, of course—that had been the first time he’d ever seen Crowley, before he’d known him, before he’d—well, anyway, it had been the first time. He had noticed, then, the way Crowley’s hands shook with anxiety, how he’d been both arrestingly frank and disconcertingly flippant under the circumstances.

This was, obviously, hardly such a fraught situation—Crowley was merely giving evidence, not standing trial for his life. And Aziraphale, observing him, was relieved to note that he seemed mostly untroubled.

He related, in clear, unemotional language, the set-up of the birthday party, his own reasons for wandering around the grounds, and his eventual noticing of the corpse.

“At first I thought perhaps he was sleeping, or that he’d taken ill, and as I didn’t recognise him or know what he might be doing on the property I went to go see. It became apparent by the time I reached the clearing that something was amiss, and I realised upon lifting his chin that his throat had been cut. I did attempt to return the body to the position I had found it in once I realised what it was, but I can’t be certain whether the head was replaced at the same angle, if that makes any difference. There was sufficient blood on the body that a certain quantity of it got on my hands. I came out of the clearing and looked around for someone to help, but as I didn’t see anyone I returned to the house and used the telephone there to inform the police. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed in the clearing between the time I left after the initial discovery and the time I returned after calling the police, but it’s not as though I made a comprehensive survey of details, so…”

“You did not observe any weapon in the hand of the deceased, or in the immediate area?”

“I did not. But, again, I wasn’t looking, particularly, and I wouldn’t be able to swear that there wasn’t any.”

“Thank you, Mr. Crowley.”

Aziraphale watched as Crowley got down from the witness-box, his face impassive. His eyes flicked back and forth over the crowd of people assembled—and Aziraphale hadn’t realised how certain he’d been that Crowley was looking for him until their eyes met and he didn’t answer Aziraphale’s smile.

Which was quite all right, it was fine, of course, and surely there wasn’t any good reason for Aziraphale’s heart to feel as though it’d been plunged into Greasy Johnson’s fishtank.           

Still, he found that he was hardly able to concentrate on the next few witnesses, who were called to attest to the identification of the corpse and to the fact that although Johnson was accustomed to perform odd jobs around the neighbourhood, he had not been engaged at Tadfield Manor that day.

The verdict—Murder by Person or Persons Unknown—was hardly a surprise, but it produced sensation in the courtroom nevertheless. Well, it was likely the most exciting thing to happen in Tadfield in some years, Aziraphale supposed. Entirely understandable of the public to want to get its money’s worth of drama.

He stood up from the bench, waiting for the queue of spectators to thin enough to admit him in.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley had somehow made his way through the crush of people to join Aziraphale and Raphael. 

So he had been looking for him, then, a very unhelpful voice in Aziraphale’s head pointed out.

“I do hope it wasn’t too dreadful of an experience,” he said, forcing good-humour into his tone. “I know it can’t have been pleasant, but I must say you did a fine job, clear and accurate.”

“Thank you,” Crowley said. “Look, I—I’d like to talk to you. Privately. Today.”  

Aziraphale, whose mouth seemed to have gone completely dry, swallowed. “Very well.”             

Chapter Text

Crowley was silent as he led them upstairs, through the wood-panelled corridors of Tadfield Manor and into the living quarters. Aziraphale’s heart was pounding. It wasn’t from the walk, although Crowley was proceeding rather more briskly than was his custom, his long legs striding forward in such large steps that Aziraphale had to practically scurry to keep up. No, it was a heady mixture of anticipation and dread that was causing his face to flush with heat and his breath to come in quick gasps. Because Crowley had caught him keeping the letter, and Aziraphale had done a frankly terrible job of dissembling, and it seemed overwhelmingly likely that he was about to be asked a question for which he’d no satisfactory answer.

(A detached part of his mind observed that it would be highly amusing if it turned out that Crowley only wished to talk about some new break in the case, and Aziraphale had got all excited over nothing.)

“Here we are,” Crowley said, shortly, and threw open a door. Aziraphale followed him inside.

“This is...your bedroom,” he said, stupidly.

“No wonder your detection skills are renowned,” Crowley said, a grin flashing briefly over his face. “I wasn’t certain where else to go. You don’t...mind, surely?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

Crowley gestured to an armchair with a small end table beside it. “Please.”

Aziraphale sat. 

Crowley pulled another chair out from behind the desk and turned it to face Aziraphale. He sat down, legs jutting apart, but instead of leaning backwards, as Aziraphale might have expected, he placed his elbows on his thighs, folded his hands, and bent forwards.

“It’s occurred to me,” he said, “that while I’ve been, I think, extremely clear about my own feelings, I’ve never actually put them into the form of a question. Oh, I mean, I think I’ve given you opportunity to respond—ample opportunity—but I should very much like to actually ask you something, and get an answer that isn’t just silence. Because I’d sort of...got an idea, from the silence, and now it’s started to seem to me like that idea might have been wrong, and so I’d really prefer if we could put things into words. So, uh...forgive the ceremony, but—do you want to have dinner with me? I don’t mean tonight,” he added hastily. “Because, I mean, obviously, we’re staying at the same house, can’t very well avoid that, I mean...after. When we’re back in London. When the investigation’s over. I’d like to keep seeing you. I’d like not to have to rely on another murder happening in my vicinity to get the chance to talk to you again. So...do you want to? Keep seeing each other, I mean?”      

Aziraphale twisted the signet ring on his finger. “I...don’t believe that would be wise.”

Crowley shook his head. “That’s not what I asked. I asked do you want to, not do you think it’d be wise. So. Do you want to?”

“I—” Aziraphale floundered. “I’m not—that’s not—”

“Because,” Crowley said, his voice so low that Aziraphale felt as though he must be dragging the words out of some place deep inside himself, “if I’m misunderstanding, if you don’t want this, want me, if that’s all that’s going on here, just say it now and I swear to—anything you like, that I won’t ever ask you again. But, Aziraphale—” his voice rose, and cracked. “If it’s something else, if there’s some other reason you kept my letter but never answered it, if you do want it but something’s stopping you, then, please, just tell me what it is.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, miserably, not able to meet Crowley’s gaze. “I haven’t meant to—confuse you, or lead you on, or anything of that sort. But I can see how my behaviour may have been...perplexing.” He took a deep breath. “You are quite correct that my own actions have not been motivated by any lack of regard for you personally. But I fear...given the circumstances under which we met, given the role which I played in proving your innocence, that if we were to, well, to see each other, that it would be altogether too easy for the world at large to misinterpret the nature of our relationship and the influence it had over the result of your trial.”

“You’re worried about what people will say?”

“Yes, of course I am, even if you don’t give a damn about what others think of you, you must allow me to—”

“What on earth,” asked Crowley, eyes blank, “makes you think they’re not saying it already?”

Aziraphale felt a horrible wrenching in his chest. “Oh, my dear,” he said, quietly, “you don’t mean—”

Crowley got up and walked stiffly over to a chest-of-drawers in the corner of the room. He pulled out a handful of sheets of paper, crossed back to Aziraphale, and deposited them on the table in front of him before sitting down. “There you are,” he said.

Aziraphale reached for the papers with trembling fingers. The most perfunctory perusal made their nature altogether too clear.

Must be nice to have a noble boy-friend getting you out of trouble—I hear you go cheap, just have to throw a few pounds at a policeman—Eastgate had better watch out or you’ll be poisoning him next.

He pushed the letters away. “I see.”

Guilt wormed its way through his stomach. He’d been so preoccupied with staying away from Crowley to avoid speculation and scandal that he’d entirely failed to realize that such things would dog him no matter what they did or didn’t do. 

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “not to have considered—”

Crowley waved a hand. “Eh. It’s all right. Nothing compared to the sort of thing people send me when they don’t like a plot point.” He smiled. Aziraphale couldn’t bring himself to return it. “Don’t go thinking this is your fault,” he said, voice serious. “I didn’t trot these out to send you into some spiral of self-blame. I only—well, thought you should know that I’m already getting this sort of muck thrown at me. Bit late to try to lend me an umbrella for it.” 

Aziraphale took a deep breath. “Be that as it may, it doesn’t change my opinion. In fact—it’s all the more reason, really, not to give them more grist for the rumour-mill.”

“But I don’t care what people say about me. About us. I know that everything’s been perfectly above-board, and you know that, and anyone who thinks otherwise can go to the devil.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, not looking at him, “but it’s not possible.”

“For—” Crowley stood up. “Are you not listening to me? I’m telling you I don’t care.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Do you think you’re...what, protecting me? Casting yourself as the guardian angel again, saving me from ruin? Because I’ve had quite enough of that, thanks, I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like a bit player in my own life, and it’s not your job to decide what’s best for me. I know my own mind.”

Do you, though? Aziraphale thought miserably. For, after all, his concern for Crowley’s good name, real though it was, was hardly the only obstacle in their path. Equally as worrying—perhaps more so—was the thought that Crowley might always feel as though he owed Aziraphale something, that the burden of his life-debt could crush any genuine feeling under the weight of gratitude. Already, clearly, Crowley had begun to chafe at the unequal positions they held. How much worse would it be if they were to attempt to be together? If Crowley grew to resent Aziraphale for the hold he had upon him, if Aziraphale came to worry that Crowley wished to leave and felt he could not?

He wondered, briefly, whether that argument might not be more effective than the other, but found he couldn’t bring himself to put it forward, to attempt to make Crowley understand. There was too great a risk of it coming off as insulting, as though he were accusing Crowley of not fully comprehending his own feelings.

“Would you rather I had lied to you?” he asked, glancing up at Crowley. “That I had said oh, no, you’ve misunderstood, I don’t feel that sort of way about you at all, just to get you to leave me be? I thought you’d appreciate common honesty.”

“I do,” Crowley said, sounding somewhat chastened. “No, of course, I do appreciate—knowing—I mean, I sort of knew already, but I appreciate hearing you say it. But you’ll have to forgive me for being something other than delighted by the news that you care more for other people’s words than for your own happiness. Or mine.”

Aziraphale’s eyes stung suddenly. “If what you’ve got from this conversation is anything to do with me not caring about your happiness, then I don’t think we have anything further to say to each other.”

“I’m sorry,” Crowley said, immediately. “You’re right. That was unfair of me. You’re being perfectly considerate and kind and righteous about the whole thing, and that’s the absolute Hell of it, but you can scarcely help that.”

Aziraphale forced himself to smile. “You really mustn’t accuse me of being perfect. It’s dreadful for my self-esteem. I shall have to go and make a complete fool of myself in order to properly puncture my swollen ego.”

“I shouldn’t bother. I think we’ve both been plenty foolish for one day.”

There was a knock at the door. Crowley raised his eyebrows in evident surprise, but went to open it. “Lesley!” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m actually looking for Lord Aziraphale,” Lesley said. “I was told I might find him here.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale stood. “What is it?”

“There’s a telephone call for you. It’s Inspector Tyler.”

“I’ll come straightaway,” Aziraphale said. He glanced at Crowley, who looked somewhat hesitant. “You’ll—come too, won’t you? To hear what it is?”

“Of course,” Crowley said, and Lesley led them down the hall to the telephone. 

“Inspector Tyler? This is Lord Aziraphale.”

“Sorry to bother you, m’lord, but I thought you’d like to hear this as soon as possible. We had that jewelry you gave us traced. Took a bit of time, as it seems the pieces were purchased some time ago. By a Mr. Gerald Dowling.”

“Really,” Aziraphale said, his pulse quickening. “Would that be Gerald Dowling Senior, or—”

“No. His son. The one what died in the War. Gerald Dowling, Junior.”

“Thank you very much,” Aziraphale said. “I do appreciate it.” He rang off and turned to Crowley. “Did you get that?”

“Yes,” Crowley said, frowning. “So do you think…”

“I suspected it when I heard his name at the inquest,” Aziraphale said, “but this seems to strengthen the evidence. I would wager a great deal of money that Greasy Johnson was Gerald Dowling’s illegitimate son, and that those pieces of jewelry were gifts that his father gave to his mistress.”

Crowley blinked slowly. “Wow. Huh. So...what does that mean, then? I mean, did he even know?”

“We’ll have to try and figure that out,” Aziraphale said. “It may not mean anything at all, even if it is true. Greasy was born during the War, so it’s very possible that Gerald never even knew he had a son, and his mother mightn’t have wanted to tell anyone who the natural father of her child was.”

“D’you think the present Dowlings knew?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Impossible to say. But I can scarcely imagine any of them committing murder just to prevent anyone from hearing about their relative’s by-blow.”

“And here I thought you cared so much about appearances,” Crowley muttered. Aziraphale chose to ignore this.

“And—well, we’ll have to check up on the terms of old Mr. Dowling’s will, but as an illegitimate child Greasy Johnson would only have been able to inherit if he’d been named directly, and he obviously wasn’t.”

“Lesley told me that the estate’s not worth much, either, so no joy there in any event. So—where does that leave us? Back at blackmail?”

“Perhaps. It does open the possibilities a bit. We ought to go through those papers that were at the cottage more thoroughly, now that we’ve hit upon this connection. It may be that Greasy found something there worth using as leverage, something he might have had access to on account of his parentage, even if it doesn’t relate to it directly. But—we can’t get too caught on this. Not when we aren’t even entirely certain that it’s true.”

“Right. So we go through the papers. And…?”

“And we go to Oxford tomorrow, just as we planned,” Aziraphale said, “to see those students and get their testimony about the guests’ movements. That is, assuming you still want to go,” he added, quickly. “If, under the circumstances, you’d be more comfortable just sending Newt, I entirely understand—”

Crowley shook his head. “No, I’m still up for it. If you are. No need to let...things...get in the way of the investigation, right?”  

“My thoughts precisely,” said Aziraphale. “Then we’ll go tomorrow.”

By any logical assessment of the situation, Crowley had no reason to feel as happy as he did, he reflected as he stood outside of Tadfield Manor waiting for Lesley to bring his car around. After all, Aziraphale had rejected him in an entirely unambiguous fashion, and the cause of his rejection was an obstacle that Crowley couldn’t see any easy way around, not when Aziraphale seemed so intent upon protecting Crowley’s reputation—whether he cared about it or not. 

But Crowley was, despite his unfortunate penchant for landing in difficult situations, at heart, an optimist, and a night’s sleep had gone a long way towards improving his outlook on the situation. Because the only really insurmountable obstacle would’ve been Aziraphale’s indifference, and he now knew for certain that was emphatically not the case. So, even if he couldn’t yet see how exactly he might manage to talk Aziraphale round on the issue, he had a (possibly-misplaced) confidence that he’d figure something out eventually.

Lesley pulled the car up in front of the house and got out. 

“Running all right?” Crowley asked.

“Perfectly.”

“Thanks.” Crowley shook Lesley’s hand and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Are we ready to go, then?” Aziraphale was standing just outside the house; he must’ve come outside while Crowley was getting in the car.

Crowley nodded. “What’s that you’ve got there?” he asked, gesturing to the small tin Aziraphale placed in the back seat before getting in the car himself.

“Oh—I had Maud make us some sandwiches, as it’s not likely we’ll be back here by lunch. I hope you like fish paste; I didn’t imagine egg would travel as well.”

“Probably wise,” Crowley agreed. “And a gesture of unexpected economy on your part, I must say,” he said as they pulled out into the road. “Or can’t the Eastgate fortune stand splitting a cafe bill with a mere author?”

He’d meant it lightly, but Aziraphale recoiled a bit and looked down.

“What? Only joking.”

“I know,” Aziraphale said, “but, in point of fact, you’re not so far off. What I mean is—I did think of that, and then I thought about how I should feel uncomfortable if I didn’t pay the whole thing—because the Dowlings haven’t even paid you for your work here yet, have they? — and how you should probably make a fuss if you weren’t allowed to pay for at least yourself and very possibly me as well, because you don’t appreciate being reminded of any inequity in our positions, and I determined the whole thing was best avoided via sandwich.”

“Hmph,” Crowley said, because he didn’t want to say you’re right, I would’ve felt awful if you’d tried to pay for me and there very well might have been a dreadful scene. “Well, it’s fine today, so we can make a sort of picnic out of it. I remember a spot by the river where I used to go to read firmly non-intellectual novels and eat vast quantities of apples.”

Aziraphale laughed. “We must’ve been there around the same time, mustn’t we? Just before the War?”

Crowley nodded. “Can’t imagine we met, though. I think I’d remember.”

“Well, I was at Balliol, you know, and you were…”

“Magdalen. Read English.”

“Classics,” Aziraphale said, “and yes, I don’t think we ever did come across each other.”

“Oh, but you’re not going to say you’d have remembered me? Can’t say I’m flattered.”

“Yes, well, you’re so entirely forgettable, I’m afraid. It’s absolutely old hat for me to run across tall gentlemen with golden eyes and sharp cheekbones. Simply can’t keep track of all of the fellows I meet who fit that description.”

Crowley had the strong suspicion that said cheekbones were presently flushed, but he said, “Right, of course. It’s a miracle you even recognised me at a house-party, really.”

“A miracle indeed,” Aziraphale said. 

“At any rate, I doubt we should have got along if we’d known each other twenty years ago, don’t you think?”

“You’re probably right. It was before the War, and…” He trailed off. “Well,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “I doubt whether any of us are the same people as we were before the War, that’s all.”

Even those of us who didn’t fight. Aziraphale had to know Crowley had been a conscientious objector—he’d certainly learnt enough about him while working on the Ferno case—and while Crowley was far from ashamed of his decisions, he still shied away from the prospect of justifying the ways of his younger self to Aziraphale. 

Whether or not Aziraphale sensed this discomfort, he cleared his throat and said with possibly-forced joviality, “In any event, we can’t be frittering away the entire journey with reminiscing over the good old days. I’ve a few new developments in the case I want to tell you about before we reach Oxford.”

“What’ve you found?”

“It’s not so much what I’ve found. Do you remember that I had asked Newt to go round and interview the servants at all the surrounding houses? Well, he’s managed to ferret out a few things that I do believe are somewhat suggestive.”

“Such as?”

“It seems that Carmine Zuigiber has only been living in Tadfield for a few weeks. She rented the place a few months ago, hired staff and everything, but then got called away on a journalistic assignment. She’d only returned a few days before the party, and it seems she was very involved in the moving process. The servants say she was practically breathing fire down their necks the entire time. Of course, it’s by no means conclusive, but…”

“But it seems unlikely that she would have had much of a chance to expose a guilty secret to Greasy Johnson, and even less time for her to successfully blackmail her in.” 

“Precisely. As I say, we can’t exactly eliminate her, but it does seem to reduce the likelihood.”

“Half a moment, though. Wasn’t a large part of our thinking that Greasy Johnson might be blackmailing someone—particularly a woman—based upon the fact that we found that jewelry in his cottage? But now we’ve learned that jewelry was actually his, quite legitimately, or—bad word choice, but you understand—so does that theory actually hold water any longer? And, I mean, if he really was Gerald Dowling’s natural son, all that thinking we did initially about how no one can have wanted to murder Greasy qua Greasy—that’s not true any longer, is it?”

“Well, we don’t know either of those things for certain. All Inspector Tyler was able to tell us was that it was Gerald Dowling Junior who purchased the jewelry, not what he did with it after. We’ve no evidence they were a gift for Greasy’s mother Clara Johnson. And yes, I do think it’s extremely likely that he was Gerald’s son, but I also think it’s a great deal less likely that any of the present Dowlings actually knew that. Remember, Thaddeus Dowling was born and lived his entire life in America up until last year. How much insight into his cousin’s love life is he likely to have had?”

“But,” Crowley said, stubbornly, “I can’t believe that it could mean nothing. What about—I dunno, Lesley and Maud? They might’ve known what was going on with Gerald. What if they had something to do with it?”

“Like what?”

“Well, I’m not sure yet, but isn’t that what the detection bit’s for?”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, a slight note of impatience creeping into his voice, “I think you may be a trifle blinkered at present by your occupation.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that you’re a detective-story writer. You wouldn’t ever make the murder victim turn out to be the illegitimate son of the former heir and have it come to nothing, not in a Virgil Vane novel. You’d make it tie up with the plot somehow, and quite right too, because that makes for a better story. But you must allow that I have a good deal more experience than you at solving real murders, and unfortunately I can tell you that things don’t always shake out as neatly as all that in real life.”

“You don’t need to come all condescending about it,” Crowley said irritably. “I’m well aware that sometimes significant clues come to nothing. Things like a philandering author having stopped in for coffee with his resentful ex-partner the same night he died of poisoning. Or isn’t that a good enough example?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be condescending, but I do think you are putting more weight on Greasy Johnson’s potential parentage than is warranted at this juncture! We don’t even know if the boy himself knew who his father was. We can’t just assume that’s why he was killed.”

“We can’t just assume it isn’t,” Crowley shot back. “It’s not like the blackmail theory’s any better at this point.”

“Well, he must have been killed for some reason,” Aziraphale said sharply.

“Maybe not! Maybe a tramp wandered onto the grounds and stabbed the first person he saw! Maybe one of the party guests was so excited by the idea of a murder mystery party that they decided to spice it up a bit by throwing a real corpse into the mix! Maybe—maybe no one did want to kill Greasy Johnson, hmm? Maybe they—I don’t know, maybe they thought he was Warlock Dowling!” Crowley’s mouth snapped shut. “I—sorry, I don’t know what—”

“No,” Aziraphale said, in a queer sort of tone, “no, I think...I mean, it’s an idea, isn’t it? They were the same age, weren’t they, and while neither of us ever saw Greasy Johnson alive and can’t speak to a family resemblance, it’s not unlikely that they might have been sufficiently similar in appearance for someone to mistake one for the other, particularly as the killer would’ve been approaching from behind…”

“And they got the wrong boy?”

“And they got the wrong boy.”

“And it was Warlock’s party, and his twenty-first birthday, meaning he’d reached majority—”

“Which might well have meant something to someone. Oh yes, it’s not difficult to see why someone might want to kill Warlock Dowling, rich young American. Certainly he seems a more likely victim than Greasy Johnson.”

“But then what was Greasy doing there?” Crowley asked. “I mean, we thought he’d got a summons of some kind from his murderer, but if he wasn’t the one they meant to kill…”

“Mmm, yes. No, I’m not by any means saying that you’re right that Warlock might’ve been the intended victim. But it does open up another avenue of possibilities.”

“It also means,” Crowley said darkly, “that if they got the wrong boy the first time—”

“That they might try again. Yes. I’ll ’phone Inspector Tyler directly we reach Oxford and let him know that Warlock needs police protection.” 

“I’m sorry for snapping,” Crowley said, after a moment. “I think I’ve got...a bit of a thing about our respective positions and areas of experience and I just...yeah. Sorry.”

Aziraphale’s mouth twitched. “Well, we did get a new theory out of your outburst, so I find it difficult to be too bothered by it.”

“Oh, terrific, in that case, I’ll make sure to get in a snit on a regular basis. Provide us with some more inspiration.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Aziraphale said, but he was smiling with his whole face now, and Crowley glanced away from the road for a moment to grin back.

Crowley hadn’t been back to Oxford since he’d graduated. He’d been invited to a reunion—a Gaudy—a few years previously, but couldn’t stomach the prospect of having to explain that yes he wrote books, yes he knew Louis Ferno, quite well actually, yes they did live together, no his books weren’t anything like Louis’, just commercial stuff...  

Not to mention, of course, that a great many members of the Class of 1913 were permanently in absentia, their shadows hanging over the ones who’d lived to remember them.

Still, though, the place was much as he remembered it, he thought, walking along the path with Aziraphale to meet the students after they’d found a telephone to let Inspector Tyler know to place Warlock under immediate police supervision. It was oddly comforting. Some things were constant, anyway. Eternal.

“Mr. Crowley!” The leader boy—Adam—was waving to them from where he and the other three had gathered underneath a convenient oak. “Lord Aziraphale!”

“Hello,” Aziraphale said, advancing towards them and shaking Adam’s outstretched hand. “Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us, I’m certain you must be very busy—”

The girl, Pepper, snorted. “Hardly. It’s deadly dull here. I’d leave, honestly, only it’d be a blow to the head for Women’s Rights to have a Somerville undergraduate drop out, when it’s practically only yesterday we were permitted to actually take degrees.”

“Good to know the education of our young women is driven primarily out of spite,” Crowley said. 

Pepper scowled at him cheerfully. “There are worse motivators.”

“Well, we’re very grateful,” Aziraphale said, “and as we really don’t want to take up too much of your time, I think we had better get down to business. As I said on the telephone, what we’re attempting to do is to establish the whereabouts of each party guest at the approximate time of the murder. I know you likely won’t have noticed everyone, or the exact time at which you saw them, but whatever information we can get that might help us eliminate a few possibilities would be most appreciated.”

“Of course,” said Wensleydale, the spectacled one. 

The following half-hour was spent in assiduous questioning of the four students, and at its conclusion Aziraphale had assembled the following chart:

Suspect         Whereabouts between 2:30 pm and 3:30 pm

Harriet Dowling     Seen by Pepper near gazebo at 2:45 

Thaddeus Dowling     Seen by Wensleydale near hedges at 3:15

Warlock Dowling     Received clue from Pepper at gazebo at 3:00

(“Should we be considering Warlock a suspect?” Crowley asked. “I mean, if we think he was actually the intended victim…” 

“We’ve no actual evidence of that yet,” Aziraphale said, “and for the time being, yes, he, along with everyone else, remains a suspect.”)

Raphael Eastgate     Not seen by anyone during interval

(“Oh, now, surely your own brother—”

“It would be the height of stupidity to assume that Raphael’s blood relationship to me renders him incapable of murder.”

“But you know him. You know his, his personality, his tendencies—”

“I will concede that I do not consider my brother to be a likely suspect,” Aziraphale said, “and my knowledge of his character supports that, but he stays on the list. It’s as I said. We can’t rule out anyone just yet.”

“Then shouldn’t I be on there?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”)

Michael Inger     Seen (with Uriel and Sandalphon) by Wensleydale west of hedges at 3:00    

Sandalphon Inger     See Michael Inger

Gabriel Kerux     Not seen by anyone during interval    

Uriel Malak         See Michael Inger

Raven Sable         Seen (with White and Zuigiber) by Brian near fountain at 2:50

Limus White         See Raven Sable        

Carmine Zuigiber     See Raven Sable

Lesley             Not seen by anyone during interval (not surprising, as he claims to have been inside the house the entire time)

Maud             Not seen by anyone during interval (same reasoning as Lesley)

“Well,” Crowley said, looking it over, “I don’t know whether that suggests anything to you, but I can tell you it doesn’t suggest a damn thing to me.”

Aziraphale sighed. “I confess I don’t see much to go on there either, but perhaps it will prove more illuminating in light of future discoveries.”

Adam stood up and stretched. “If that’s all the questions you’ve got, I’m off. Fencing practice.”

Aziraphale waved his hands. “Oh, no, of course, we shan’t keep you any longer. Your help is most appreciated, of course.”

“I do hope it gets you somewhere,” Wensleydale offered. “And if there’s anything else you need…”

“That’s very kind of you,” Aziraphale said. “I shall call again if we think of any further questions. But, yes, that’s all for now…do enjoy your fencing practice, dear boy…”

“I say,” Adam said, “you know, I’ve seen a fencing trophy marked Eastgate. Happen to be any relation?”

Aziraphale coughed. “Ah…in a manner of speaking, yes.”

“You don’t mean…”

“It was a very long time ago.”

“Fencing?” Crowley asked, half-under his breath. “Really?”

“You needn’t sound so surprised. I understand I mightn’t be much of an athlete now, but—”

“No,” Crowley said quickly, “it’s not that, it’s that it was fencing. Can’t make it fit with you, somehow. More the…I don’t know, the cricket type.”

“Oh,” said Adam, “but if that’s you, you’ve absolutely got to come and have a bout with me.”

Aziraphale laughed. “Oh no, my dear boy, I’ve long ago turned my foils into ploughshares, as it were.”

“I’ll go easy on you, honest! Promise!”

Crowley wasn’t certain whether there had been anything calculated in Adam’s offer, but if it had been a stratagem, it was certainly a successful one, as Aziraphale’s eyes flashed at the implied challenge, and he said, “I don’t imagine you will do any such thing.”

“Ha,” Adam said, delighted, “so you’ll come, then?”

Aziraphale smiled. “Yes, very well.”

The…what did you call the building where fencers practised? Crowley’d no idea, but whatever it was, it wasn’t far from where they’d met the students, and Aziraphale quickly disappeared with Adam, who’d offered to find him the appropriate protective clothing. 

“He any good? Adam?” Crowley asked Pepper, who was standing next to him.

She shrugged. “S’pose so. I can’t say I know much about the sport, honestly, on account of how all combat exercises are clear substitutes for the male rage inherent in war and are thus chiefly concerned with inculcating violence in a new generation of soldiers.”

“...Right.”

“Adam’s top at our college,” Wensleydale offered, poking his head around from where he stood next to Pepper. “But if Lord Aziraphale’s the Eastgate on that trophy, then he was quite a bit more successful back in his day than Adam is in ours. But that was twenty years ago, of course. Actually, this should be quite interesting from a scientific perspective—we’ll actually get to observe what happens when age and experience take on youth and energy…”

He broke off as Adam and Aziraphale emerged, both now wearing fencing whites. Aziraphale had his mask tucked under his arm, so Crowley could see the slight flush in his cheeks, the sparkle of competitive fire in his eyes. 

Adam was holding both the foils, and he handed one to Aziraphale, who took it and stepped away, giving it a few experimental swishes. He nodded at Adam, and both fencers stepped away from each other and put on their masks. Aziraphale’s eyes darted to Crowley, and he smiled briefly at him before pulling the mask over his head.

Crowley didn’t know much about fencing—or, really, anything about fencing—but he watched the bout intently. Wensleydale was serving as judge, and periodically he, or one of the two fencers, would call out a touch and they would stop and return to their starting positions before attacking again. It was difficult to tell who was winning—not without keeping track of the points, which Crowley gave up trying to do within a minute—and with Aziraphale’s face covered by the mask, he found himself unable even to glean anything from his expression.

He allowed himself, instead, to enjoy the luxury of simply watching Aziraphale fence. It was deliciously permissible, at present, to notice every movement of his thighs, every damp patch of sweat beneath his clothing, every fluid flick of his hand as he blocked and parried.

Crowley had—obviously, and disastrously—been in love before. He was hardly unacquainted with longing or desire. But what was new to him was the particular confounding blend of camaraderie and ardor that Aziraphale seemed to have inspired. It was easy , being around Aziraphale—and then, all in a moment, it would become difficult, exquisitely torturous in a way that cut all the more deeply for its unexpectedness. It was as though he were constantly rubbing his fingers over a scabbed wound, idly enjoying the sensation until a nail slipped too deep and drew blood.

Pepper nudged him. “It’s over, you know.”

Crowley started. “Oh—right. Er, well done…”

“Adam,” Pepper said, as though she were speaking to a not-particularly-bright slug. “Adam’s won.”

“Your Lord Aziraphale put up a good show, though,” Brian added. “Don’t know that I’ve seen Adam have to work that hard for ages.”

Crowley briefly considered disclaiming the possessive, but decided it wasn’t worth the bother, Aziraphale’s concerns about propriety be damned. (If anything, it was another point in his favour, the fact that everyone so clearly thought it was happening already. If you were going to get kicked out of the Garden anyway, you might as well get to taste the apple, in Crowley’s view.) 

Aziraphale and Adam had shaken hands and were coming towards the others now, masks under their arms, and Crowley could see the sheen of sweat on Aziraphale’s forehead, the rosy glow of his cheeks as he beamed down at the boy. “Really most impressive,” he was saying. “You know, I don’t think I had quite the technician’s touch at that age, but you’re remarkably precise. A well-deserved victory.”

“It’s been an honour, sir, really,” Adam said, pushing his own damp curls back from his forehead. 

Aziraphale made a noise that stopped just shy of contradiction and smiled. “Well,” he said, “we ought really to be on our way back to Tadfield by now.” He glanced at Crowley. “If you’ll just wait a moment while I change…?”

“I’ll wait,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale nodded and withdrew, returning a few minutes later dressed in his own clothes. Or, rather, dressed in most of his own clothes. He’d tucked his overcoat over his arm, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and left his bowtie undone, along with the top button of his shirt.

“Still overheated, then?”

“A bit, yes,” Aziraphale admitted. “It’s been some time since I exerted myself to that extent, I must say.”

Crowley bit back his instinctive response, and said instead, “Come along, then. We’re going to the river so you can cool off a bit. I’m not having you in my car in that state.”

Aziraphale looked as though he might argue, but said only, “I suppose I wouldn’t mind a moment’s rest before we start off.”

Aziraphale nattered on about fencing technique the entire walk to the river, and Crowley nodded along and made what he hoped sounded like intelligent noises and tried not to stare too obviously at the sweat-soaked curls sticking to the back of Aziraphale’s neck.

But when they arrived, and Aziraphale sighed happily and cupped his hands in the water and splashed it on his face,  tilting his head back, so that the droplets ran down the exposed column of his neck, gathering for a moment in the divot at its base before continuing down his chest—that was absolutely and entirely more than Crowley could be expected to stand.

“We don’t have to go back, you know,” he said. “Not right away, I mean. The police’ve got things handled on their end for a bit, it’s not as though we’ll miss anything if we stay out here a bit longer.”

Aziraphale righted himself and looked quizzically at Crowley. “Has the Dowlings’ hospitality begun to grate so quickly?”

“It’s not that,” Crowley said. “I, I just thought, you know, if we’re both enjoying it here, we could…I don’t know, walk around a bit more. Find some inn to spend the night at. You know.”

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows. “I imagine I do.”

“There’d hardly be anything scandalous about that,” Crowley wheedled. “No one’d give it a second thought.”

“And am I to imagine that you would refrain from any advance against my virtue?” 

Crowley snorted. “Oh, right, your virtue, so the rumours I keep hearing about you and every tenor at the Paris Opera are, what…”

“None of your business,” Aziraphale said primly. 

“Right. Well. Anyway. Shall I start asking ‘round to see if anywhere’s got a room?”

“Absolutely not,” Aziraphale said, not as firmly as he might have. “Really, Crowley, I seem to remember you saying you weren’t intending to—what was it?—make a nuisance of yourself.”

“Ah,” said Crowley, grinning, “but that was before I realized that you were wildly attracted to me and are only tamping it down out of some ridiculous worry about my reputation. I now have every intention of being a nuisance.”

“Splendid,” Aziraphale said dryly, “just what I need in the midst of a murder investigation.”

“You’re at perfect liberty to tell me to go to Hell, you know,” Crowley said, more seriously. “I won’t take offence.”

Aziraphale was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said, at last. “I don’t think I shall. It wouldn’t be very sporting of me, after all, forcing you to forfeit the game before it’s even started. I’ll meet you on the field, and we can have it out like gentlemen.”

“Are you envisioning some sort of gladiatorial arena, here, or…?”

“Oh yes, that’s an excellent strategy, poking holes in my metaphor. I can feel myself swooning already.”  

“I’m only asking,” Crowley said.

“You do seem to do rather a lot of that.” Aziraphale stood up. “I think I’m quite presentable enough now even for your precious automobile. So, if you don’t mind, we really should get back to Tadfield.”

“Right,” Crowley said, and felt about in his pocket for the keys to his car. “Ought to be back well before dinner, if we make decent time.”

“Oh—” Aziraphale frowned. “Do you know, I think I’d better ’phone Inspector Tyler before we set out, just to confirm everything’s all right with young Warlock.”

“Not a bad thought,” Crowley agreed. 

They retraced their steps to the telephone Aziraphale had used to reach Tadfield earlier. Crowley, not much wanting to listen in, lingered against a tree while Aziraphale placed the call.

But he straightened abruptly when Aziraphale emerged, surprise and a hint of excitement writ on his face.

“What is it?”

“Good news, of a sort,” Aziraphale said, slowly. “They’ve found the murder weapon.”

Chapter Text

“Here you are, m’lord.” Inspector Tyler held his hands out in front of him. 

Aziraphale leaned in to look. He could sense Crowley hovering excitedly behind him, but forced himself to concentrate instead on the object in question.

It was a razor—a gentleman’s shaving razor, straight, with a mother-of-pearl handle and a blade whose sheen was slightly marred by what might, at first glance, have been rust, but which, Aziraphale realised with an unpleasant jolt, was very likely dried blood.

“May I?” he asked. Tyler nodded, and Aziraphale reached out and took the razor, turning it over in his hands.

“No monogram,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “But it’s distinctive enough that I imagine we should be able to trace its provenance, yes?”

Inspector Tyler frowned. “Possibly, m’lord, but I imagine that might take some time. Particularly as we’ve no idea whether it was even bought anywhere near here. No fingerprints on it, of course. Wiped clean.”

“Hardly surprising,” Aziraphale agreed.

“Er—” Crowley stepped forward. “Sorry, I know, not really officially an investigator or anything, but wouldn’t it be worth checking out the shaving kits of the party guests? See whether anyone’s missing a razor?”

“Not as though they’d be likely to admit it,” Tyler said.

“Perhaps not,” Aziraphale said, “but it’s certainly somewhere to start. After all, all of the men at the party were clean-shaven. So we might as well ask everyone to produce his razor and see whether anyone comes up short. And it’s not as though anyone had time to go out and purchase a new one since the murder, not without being noticed.”

“Fellow might’ve bought it just for the purpose, though, m’lord,” Tyler said. “You don’t think it’s likely someone used his own personal shaving razor to commit a murder, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what’s likely,” Aziraphale admitted. “But the fact that the perpetrator seems to have gone to some lengths to hide the weapon does suggest to me that it may be connected to them in some way. Which—I never asked, did I? Where did you end up finding it?”

“There’s a little sort of gazebo thing back in the woods there. We found it in the bushes just next to it.”

“But—” Crowley began, but trailed off. 

But we looked there, Aziraphale mentally finished. Yes. They had looked there, they’d gone over every inch of that gazebo and they surely must have checked the bushes next to it as well. It would have been idiotic to do otherwise. And yet Aziraphale felt a stinging suspicion that, perhaps, they had been idiots.

Because, after all, it had been while they were searching that gazebo that Crowley’s letter had fallen out of Aziraphale’s pocket, inconveniently revealing all the things he’d been endeavouring mightily to hide. And it was possible—just possible—that in the confusion and heightened emotion of the aftermath, they might not have searched the area quite so thoroughly as they could have. And that, he told himself grimly, was yet another reason why it wouldn’t do at all to take Crowley up on his offer. He was obviously far too distracting to have around.

“Very interesting, thank you,” he said aloud, handing the razor back to Inspector Tyler. “I’d suppose there’s nothing very much we can do to be helpful in terms of checking up on every guest’s razor ownership, but do let me know what you find out.”

He worried for a moment, by the look of faint annoyance on Tyler’s face, that he’d been too imperious, but the inspector only said, “Of course, m’lord.” 

“What’ll we do, then?” Crowley asked, once the police had gone, leaving them alone in the Dowlings’ parlour. “While they’re checking up on the razors, I mean.”

“There’s plenty, I should think,” Aziraphale said. He felt faintly irritated with Crowley, and it took him a moment to realise that it was lingering resentment from the fact that they’d missed finding the razor—which didn’t seem quite fair to Crowley. “To start with, we did retrieve rather a lot of letters and things from Greasy Johnson’s cottage. We might go through those and see if there’s anything of interest to be found.”

“Sure—” Crowley started to say, but Aziraphale cut him off.

“But if you don’t mind, I’d really prefer to spend the remainder of the afternoon not detecting anything. Apart from anything else, I need a bath.”

“Right, course you do,” Crowley said, glancing at Aziraphale’s still-damp (and no doubt odorous) clothing. “And you need to…rest, I imagine.”

“Precisely,” Aziraphale said, finding himself yet again at once relieved and disappointed that Crowley seemed to have no intention of arguing his way into further fraternization. “So, we’ll take the rest of the night off, then, and resume looking at the papers tomorrow, along with any other information we may have learnt by then from the police as to the provenance of that razor.”

“Tomorrow?” Crowley asked. “Is there some reason we can’t keep on tonight? I mean—after we’ve rested up a bit, had some dinner. Night’ll still be young.”

And there it was, Aziraphale thought ruefully. “No,” he said, aloud, “really, Crowley, it’s not as though anything’s changed since earlier this afternoon, I still have no intention whatsoever of spending the night with you—”

“Wait, wait,” Crowley said, holding his hands up. “I genuinely just meant that we could talk about the case. No…ulterior motives. Seriously.”

“Oh!” Aziraphale said, feeling suddenly rather foolish. “Oh, I’m sorry. You want to talk about the case. Yes. Obviously.”

Crowley grinned. “But I do think it’s very interesting that your first thought was—”

“No, it—that’s only—”

“Because, you know, going over evidence is compelling, but I’m sure I could let myself be distracted—”

“Absolutely not,” Aziraphale said, firmly, and swept out of the parlour with all the dudgeon he could muster.

Apparently, Crowley thought, one of the disadvantages to being extremely rich and surrounded by servants was that one never learned to be tidy. Staring at the mountain of disorganised papers on the desk in Aziraphale’s rooms, he felt his fingers twitching with the urge to neaten them up. 

“Aren’t you worried about losing something?” he asked, gesturing to the pile.

Aziraphale looked up from the letter he was perusing and blinked. “Pardon?”

“Well, I don’t know, it just seems to me as though it’d be terribly easy to misplace a document in all that….in all that.”

“Oh no, I’ve got a very solid system,” Aziraphale said unconvincingly. 

“Right,” said Crowley, picking up one of the papers. “Bill from a launderer’s, that can’t be anything useful, can it?”

“Not unless it’s itemised to include blood removal and dated the day after the murder,” Aziraphale said dryly.

“Unfortunately not,” Crowley said, and tossed the sheet back onto the desk.

They worked in near-silence for the next while, voicing stray observations aloud, but finding nothing of consequence. Old Mr. Johnson didn’t seem to have had any sort of rhyme or reason to what he’d opted to store, and for every possibly-useful letter or memorandum there were ten pieces of complete junk.

It appeared, too, that Aziraphale hadn’t been entirely wrong when he’d said there was some order to the ink-stained chaos; the papers appeared to be vaguely in chronological order, with the most recent documents at the top of the pile and the older ones towards the bottom. This meant, however, that the longer they looked, the less likely, in Crowley’s estimation, it became that they might happen upon anything of relevance to the murder.

The letter he was looking at now, in fact, was dated 1912, and addressed to Greasy’s mother Clara, who’d died not long after the birth of her son (after which time the boy had been raised by his grandfather, also dead some years since). He ran his eye down the page, not expecting to find much of interest, but a few phrases jumped out: rest assured that my regard for you remains the same as ever it was… After our meeting at the village fete I am worried that my actions may have been misconstrued… 

He flipped the letter over to read the signature: Yours, G.

“Huh,” said Crowley, aloud.

Aziraphale glanced up. “What is it?”

Crowley brandished the paper. “I think I’ve just found a letter from Greasy’s father to his mother.”

“Really?” Aziraphale asked, putting down his own document. “What does it say?”

“Uh…” Crowley flipped back to the beginning. “‘My dear Clara: I know that it has been some time since my last letter, and you rightfully reproach me with my negligence. Pray do not ascribe this deficit to any lack of inclination on my own part, but rather blame the few opportunities that I have had to write and send this letter unobserved. The nature of our attachment being what it is, I regret that I am unable to make my feelings for you known to my family, but the world is as it is, and I dare not risk it. I keep my silence not only for my own sake, but out of care for the consequences you might face if my people were set against you. Know, however, that—’”

“That’s enough,” Aziraphale said, cutting in.

“Really? Don’t you want…” Crowley looked up, quickly scrutinising Aziraphale’s face. He looked distinctly uncomfortable, almost embarrassed, a slight flush staining his cheeks and a line knit between his eyebrows. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Aziraphale said stiffly. “I simply think it very unlikely there’s anything of use to be found in that letter.”

“You were all eager to hear it a moment ago—” Crowley broke off, an idea forming in his mind. “Oh. I see. You have some objection to the content?”

“Of course not—”

“You have some objection to hearing me read the content?”

“Not everything is about you, you know.”

“Sure, but this is. You,” Crowley said triumphantly, “are letting your personal feelings get in the way of the investigation. Terribly unprofessional—”

“Read it silently, then,” Aziraphale snapped.

“Oh, no. I’m not the detective. You really ought to take in every detail. You never know what might be important. Here—” He cleared his throat dramatically. “‘Know, however, that although our stations in life are so severed, although I am forced by my family and the world’s judgement to keep our attachment hidden, I wish desperately that circumstances were such that I might claim you publicly as my own.’”

He found himself obliged to stop in order to clear his throat again—not, this time, merely for effect. 

“Are we done with this little exercise?” Aziraphale demanded. 

“Oh, no,” Crowley said, loath to lose his advantage. “There’s scads of letters.” He brandished the papers gleefully. “Of course, you know, if you’d prefer to do the reading aloud, I do think I could hold up tolerably well against hearing you bemoan the sordid considerations of the world and your inability to express the depths of your love.”

“Really, Crowley, this isn’t at all the time—”

“Warned you, didn’t I?” Crowley said, grinning. “That I was going to be a nuisance? Wouldn’t be very nuisance-y of me if I confined myself to appropriate times. Not remotely the thing. The Nuisance Licensing Board’s been known to send out very strict letters about it. And I really can’t afford to lose my membership just now. I’m three meetings away from earning my gold watch-chain.”

“Oh, do stop,” Aziraphale said, but he’d begun smiling, too, and if there had been genuine irritation in his tone before, it was gone now. “I can’t imagine you’re in any danger of being censured as insufficiently bothersome. I’d be quite happy to submit a letter of reference attesting to that fact to the—what was it?—the Nuisance Licensing Board.”

“My lord?” They both turned to see Lesley standing in the doorway—he must have approached, Crowley thought, with his silent, well-trained servant’s tread. “I apologise for disturbing you, but I was given instructions that it was urgent.”

“No apology needed,” Aziraphale said, waving a hand. “What is it?”

“Inspector Tyler is in the drawing room. He’d be much obliged if you were to join him, as he believes he’s found the owner of the razor.”

Aziraphale stood up so quickly that he nearly toppled his chair. “Already?” he asked, eyes lighting up. “I really didn’t think…well, come on, Crowley, do you want to find out or don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Crowley said, rising from his own chair with only slightly less alacrity. “Don’t suppose you could drop us a hint as to who, Lesley, hmmm?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know myself.”

“That’s quite all right, we’ll find out soon enough, come on,” Aziraphale said, and practically bounded out of the room, Crowley following behind.

Crowley half-expected to find a scene from one of his Virgil Vane novels awaiting him—the Inspector in a chair, surrounded by suspects, ready to make a pronouncement as to guilt. But the policeman was alone, when they arrived, and one glance at his vaguely rodent-ish face was enough to remind Crowley of how very far from the efficiency of his fictional detective this real one was shaping up to be.

“Hello,” Aziraphale said, more perfunctorily than was his wont. “I’ve been informed that you’ve ascertained the ownership of the razor?”

“I believe so, m’lord,” Tyler said. “As we discussed yesterday, I’ve been inquiring of all the males who were either staying in this house or at the party as to the status of their shaving equipment. Started with the people in the house, out of efficiency, and only one of the men was unable to produce his razor to show me. Gabriel Kerux.”

“Really,” Aziraphale said, sounding absurdly satisfied. “And what answer did Mr. Kerux offer as to the location of his razor?”

“Said he hadn’t brought one,” Tyler said, “but of course the man’s clean-shaven. He claimed he forgot to bring one along with him over from America and had been borrowing Thaddeus Dowling’s, but Dowling says that Kerux only asked about using his razor last week.”

“Before or after the murder?” Aziraphale asked.

Tyler frowned. “Dowling claims he doesn’t remember. That’s the trouble with these Americans, if you don’t mind me saying, m’lord, never take good note of things as they should.”

“Well, it shouldn’t matter,” Aziraphale said, “not if we can definitively trace the razor to Mr. Kerux. It seems likely he bought it in America, given that he’s only been in England a few months and the razor seems to be older than that.”

“He could’ve bought it second-hand,” Crowley put in.

“I will admit that my knowledge of Mr. Kerux’s character is necessarily somewhat limited,” Aziraphale said, “but I should be very surprised if he bought anything second-hand.”

“The young people these days,” Tyler muttered. “Nothing built to last any longer, all these new gadgets and what-not, not like it was when I was a boy…”

Crowley opened his mouth to point out that Gabriel Kerux was almost certainly on the wrong side of forty, but immediately thought better of it and settled for exchanging an amused eyebrow raise with Aziraphale. 

“In any event,” Aziraphale said, “it’s something to go on. Although I do admit I’d much prefer if Mr. Kerux simply confessed the razor was his.”

Tyler shrugged. “He dug in his heels, that’s all I can say. One of those types that’ll say the same line over and over again till Doomsday.”

“Yes, that doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Aziraphale said. “All the same, though, would you mind terribly if I were to try my hand at a little interrogation of my own? Occasionally I find that the, er, less professional approach may yield results with those less inclined to reveal any implicating information to the police.”

Crowley grinned. While he’d no doubt that the fact that Aziraphale could and did keep some of the information he gained off the record and out of the police’s inquiries went a long way towards ingratiating him with suspects, he also knew that Aziraphale’s unofficial position was hardly the only thing that made people want to talk to him. He’d felt it himself, the day they’d met, when Crowley was near-certain he was bound for the gallows and Aziraphale a complete stranger offering to help clear his name; the sort of halo of radiating sincerity that Aziraphale projected, the feeling he’d got that this man actually wanted to find the truth. And within the hour, Crowley had found himself admitting things to this near-stranger that he’d privately sworn would go to his (unfortunately imminent) grave. Everyone had something to hide, after all. Aziraphale’s knack was for convincing them he was a secure place to store it.

He wondered, briefly, whether Aziraphale’s approach would have been half so effective if Crowley had actually been guilty of Louis’ murder—and whether, if Gabriel Kerux was guilty of Greasy Johnson’s, it would succeed with him.

“You’re welcome to talk to him, m’lord,” Tyler said, with only a hint of truculence. “He’s been instructed not to leave his rooms until further notice, so you’ll find him there. For all the good it may do you,” he said, muttering the last bit out of the side of his mouth, so quietly that Crowley only knew Aziraphale, too, had heard by the slight twitching of his mouth, an expression somewhere between annoyance and amusement.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, with no indication that he’d heard Tyler’s last remark, and smiled brightly at him. “Come along, Crowley. Time we asked Mr. Kerux a few questions.”

Crowley, resenting the casually imperious come along but pleased by the ease with which Aziraphale said we, followed him out of the room.

“I find,” Aziraphale said, once they were some distance away, “that our Inspector Tyler begins to grate on me somewhat.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Crowley said, deadpan. “Or don’t you appreciate being treated as one of the young people these days when you’re practically a greying elder?”

Aziraphale stopped short. “Greying?” he demanded. “I don’t think—” He plucked at his hair. “Have you noticed something?”

Crowley laughed. Aziraphale looked even more put out, and Crowley laughed harder. “I meant metaphorically, you great vain peacock. No, I haven’t noticed any grey hairs. Or white ones, for that matter, though I suppose they’d hardly be obvious, on you. If you like,” he said, unwilling to let an advantage go unseized, “I could check them all very thoroughly for you—”

“That will not be necessary, thank you,” Aziraphale said, and walked on.

Gabriel Kerux’s rooms were at the opposite end of the house from Crowley’s, a part of the residential area he’d not been to before. Despite the several easy chairs present, the American had elected to sit in a straight-backed, wooden one, his own spine so perfectly ramrod that it made Crowley’s back twinge. He was wearing an expertly-tailored grey suit, and his face was bereft of the patent-medicine grin that Crowley remembered from their first meeting.

“Mr. Kerux,” Aziraphale said, nodding to him.

“Lord Eastgate,” Gabriel said, and Crowley noticed the almost imperceptible wrinkle of Aziraphale’s nose at being incorrectly addressed. “What can I do you for?”

“Inspector Tyler has authorised me to ask you a few questions,” Aziraphale said, “although, of course, I do not hold any sort of official capacity and you’re perfectly within your rights to refuse to speak with me.”

“Why would I do that?” Gabriel asked, with forced heartiness. “I’m an open book, your honor. Nothing to hide.”

“It’s…it’s not your honor,” Aziraphale said, clearly unable to stop himself. “But, erm, yes, thank you, then, if you don’t mind—” He gestured to one of the open chairs.

“By all means,” said Gabriel, and Aziraphale and Crowley sat.

“I understand that you were unable to produce a shaving razor of your own when Inspector Tyler asked you to do so?”

“I told the policeman. Never brought one over from the States. Well, I can’t say it was the wisest thing I ever did, but nobody’s perfect, right?” He smiled, revealing a set of straight white teeth that belied their owner’s professed disregard for his personal grooming.

“You are, however, clean-shaven,” Aziraphale pointed out. “Why didn’t you purchase a razor upon your arrival in England several months ago? Surely you could have found a spare moment to run to a barber?”

“I was going to, of course,” Gabriel said. “But Thad offered me one of his, and I’ve been using it since, and I guess I just haven’t gotten around to picking one up for myself.”

“But Mr. Dowling claims you only asked to borrow his razor last week.”

“He must be misremembering,” Gabriel said stubbornly.

Aziraphale leaned forward. “Mr. Kerux,” he said, practically oozing helpfulness and sincerity with every word, “if you will allow me to make an observation, the police will eventually be able to track that razor to you. It may take some time, and there may be some false starts, but if they know it’s you they’re looking for they will find the proof. Now. You can continue to insist that you didn’t bring a razor with you from America, and we can all waste a great deal of time and effort proving that you’re lying, or you can co-operate with the investigation and we’ll all be extremely grateful to you.”

Gabriel remained silent, but Crowley detected a slight shift in his gaze.

“You’re an intelligent man, I’m certain,” Aziraphale said, managing to sound, somehow, as though he believed it, “and so you’ll probably have gathered that the police have found your razor in a location that strongly suggests it may have been used as the weapon in the murder of Gerald Johnson. I understand that you will naturally be afraid that admitting ownership of the razor might imply to the police that you were involved in the crime. But if you look at the matter logically, there’s absolutely no reason that it would have to be you who did the killing, just because it was your razor that was used. And you must see that if you tell me what actually happened, I’ll be able to work from that information to attempt to trace how the murderer got hold of your razor. But if you sit there and deny everything, then we’ve nothing to go on besides the fact that you’re obviously lying. Do you see my point?”

Gabriel was quiet for a moment. Crowley imagined it was taking some time for Aziraphale’s argument to make its way through his skull.

“Right,” he said, at last, nodding. “I wouldn’t want to waste police resources—I mean, you know, that’s taxpayer money, right there—if it can be avoided.” He took a deep breath. “That is my razor,” he admitted, “and I did bring it here to Tadfield Manor when I came over from the States. But it disappeared from my shaving kit last week and I asked Thad for a replacement. I wasn’t lying about that. I haven’t seen the thing for days.” He turned slightly green. “Do you think…whoever took it…do you think they meant to kill the boy with it?”

“It’s possible,” Aziraphale said. “Do you remember exactly what day it went missing?”

“I noticed it was missing the day after the party, actually,” Gabriel admitted. “Asked Thad if I could borrow his that night.”

“So theoretically, anyone at the party could have taken the razor?”

“Well—they’d need to get up here, I mean, wouldn’t they?”

“Do you keep this door locked?” Aziraphale asked, gesturing to the entrance.

Gabriel frowned. “I think so. But I guess I could’ve forgotten at some point.”

“Then it’s not difficult to imagine that someone might have taken it.”

“You don’t know it’s the murder weapon, though,” Gabriel said hopefully. “I mean, I see how it looks like it, but you can’t be certain—”

“Not certain, no, but in the absence of any compelling alternative, it is by far the most likely.”

“Right,” Gabriel said, and swallowed. Crowley almost felt bad for him for a moment, right up until he pasted on an unnervingly toothy grin and said, “So—I take it you’ll be reporting this all back to the police, then, yes? Tell ‘em how I co-operated and everything? Because, you know, I only want to do my duty to society, help out in any way I can.”

“I can report it back,” Aziraphale said, “but if you’d prefer, you can go and tell Inspector Tyler yourself. He’s waiting downstairs. Then you can assure him of how very, ah, eager you are to be helpful, and he can ask you any follow-up questions I mightn’t have thought of. Yes, it’s probably best if he hears it from you. A more official record.”

“Do you think I’ll have to give evidence? At the trial, I mean, once you figure out whodunit and all that? Am I a key witness?”

“That will depend upon—”

“Because if I’m a key witness,” Gabriel said, excited, “then couldn’t my life be in danger, too? If the murderer decides to silence me before I testify? Am I going to need police protection, or…”

“I hardly think that’s likely,” Aziraphale said repressively. “And,” he added, “by far the best way to ensure your safety is to go and make a report to the Inspector directly, so that he’ll have your sworn statement and there’ll be no need to, ah...”

“Bump me off?”

“As you say. Bump you off.”

“Right,” Gabriel said, getting up, “I’m off to tell him, then.” He looked expectantly at Aziraphale and Crowley, who realised after a moment that these were, after all, Gabriel’s rooms, and he very likely wasn’t expecting them to hang about after he’d left. 

“Thanks very much for your help,” he said, and, nodding awkwardly, went out into the corridor, Aziraphale following behind.

“What do you think, then?” Crowley asked, once they’d got some distance between themselves and Gabriel. “Did he do it?”

“I really couldn’t say, as yet. On the one hand, it is his razor—on the other, it would seem most unwise to have committed a murder with something so easily traced back to him.”

“Maybe he didn’t plan to do it. Maybe he just…had it on him?”

“A razor? At a birthday party? I’ll grant you Mr. Kerux does seem the type to be checking up on his appearance regularly, but I find it hard to imagine he brought along a shaving kit with him on the off chance an opportunity for grooming popped up.”

“So then you think it wasn’t him?”

“I don’t know. Certainly someone else could’ve taken the razor, with the idea of it pointing as a clue towards Gabriel to misdirect us, but then why hide it? Why not leave it by the body for us to find?”

“Maybe they thought that was too obvious,” Crowley said. “That we’d be less likely to think it was a plant if we had difficulty finding it.”

“Now that sounds like something out of a Virgil Vane story,” Aziraphale said. “Not that murderers are incapable of thinking things out to that degree, I suppose, but it seems rather an awkward bit of business for someone to come up with. After all, they’d no guarantee we’d ever find the razor.”

“We almost didn’t,” Crowley pointed out, thinking of how he and Aziraphale had searched the gazebo and surrounding area and come up blank. “Oh—here’s a thought, though. If they’d wanted to kill Warlock Dowling, and found out right after that they’d got the wrong boy, mightn’t they have been confused enough to run off with the razor and hide it when they realised?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, eyes sparking, “yes, I do like that. It hinges much more on the idea of murderer as fallible being rather than manipulative mastermind—because, to be honest with you, I can’t quite imagine that this crime was that subtly planned. Let’s not forget, our murderer likely thought the only people investigating them would be the local constabulary. So on the grounds that they were planning to match wits with Inspector Tyler—well, then, I don’t think we’re dealing with any great intelligence here, do you?”

Crowley shrugged. “I’d as soon not underestimate someone who’s already killed. If for nothing else than the sake of my own neck. I mean,” he added, grinning, “don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve got rather a nice neck, I think. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, but Crowley thought he detected a moment’s flicker over his collarbones. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see whether Gabriel told the Inspector the full story.”

Aziraphale stood in front of the mirror in his room, turning his own razor over and over in his hands. He’d come in with the intention of shaving himself, but had hardly got the brush out before the sight of the blade had distracted him.

“Got a moment?”

He turned to see Crowley standing in his doorway. “What? Oh, I, yes, I suppose,” Aziraphale said, only belatedly becoming aware that he was still in his dressing-gown.

Crowley, however, seemed unaffected by his state of déshabillé (which Aziraphale found not even the slightest bit disappointing, he told himself), and he nodded to the razor in Aziraphale’s hands. “Thinking it over?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, relieved to be so immediately understood. 

Crowley nodded again. “Me too,” he said, and, looking closer, Aziraphale could see the faint marks indicating he’d just shaved himself. “Could barely make myself do it, honestly. The idea that a thing like that could kill someone… did kill someone…”

“It’s hardly likely to happen by accident,” Aziraphale pointed out. “But I do see why you’d be bothered.”

“It’s just—I saw him, you know? I touched him. Touched his neck, felt all that blood, the horrible way his head sort of sagged into my hand—”

“Yes. I imagine that can’t have been very pleasant for you.”

“Not half.”

“I wonder how it was done,” Aziraphale said, thinking out loud. “To avoid getting blood all over their clothes—”

Crowley shook his head. “I couldn’t even avoid it. Although, I suppose I wasn’t trying to, but…”

“Here,” Aziraphale said, holding out his razor.

Crowley looked at him blankly. “What?”

“Let’s run through it. I’ll be Greasy Johnson, and you can come up and murder me—I mean, not actually, obviously, but take the razor and sneak up behind me and act like you’re about to pull it across my neck.”

Crowley blinked.

“Come on!” Aziraphale said impatiently. “I think it’s worth trying, don’t you? Might spur a new perspective on the case. Here, take it—” He wiggled the razor in his hand.

Crowley reached out and slowly took it from him. “You,” he said, shaking his head, “are far too enthusiastic about the prospect of being make-believe-murdered.”

“Says the make-believe-murder writer—”

“Didn’t say I wouldn’t try it, did I?”

Aziraphale nodded in approval and sat down. “So, here I am, Greasy Johnson, sitting on the bench, waiting for whomever I’m supposed to meet—”

“And I come up behind,” Crowley continued. He stepped towards him, coming so near that the fabric of his shirt brushed against the back of Aziraphale’s hair. Seated like this, Aziraphale could feel the warmth of Crowley’s body behind him, could hear the steady beating of his heart. 

He forced his attention away from the physical and towards the theoretical. “I wonder that Greasy didn’t hear his murderer approaching. They must have been taking great pains to move quietly.”

“Makes it more likely it’s someone who was familiar with the area, doesn’t it?” 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, “and when you take into account that they’d have had to be able to steal Gabriel’s razor from his rooms, it does rather suggest that it’s more likely to be either a member of the family or one of the guests who was actually staying in the house at the time.”

“Narrows it down a bit, at least.”

“Yes. So, you come up behind—very quietly—and you draw the razor across my throat—”

Crowley placed one hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder, the pressure just enough to keep him sitting in the chair, and brought the other—holding the razor—a hairsbreadth away from the front of his neck.

“Like this?” he asked.

Aziraphale swallowed, and was half-surprised the jutting of his throat didn’t touch the razor. “Yes. Exactly so.”

“You know,” Crowley said, keeping the razor in place, “some people might find it unnerving. Having a blade held to your throat, I mean.” 

“And some people might find it exciting,” Aziraphale said without thinking.

Crowley made a choking sound. “Sorry, what—”

“Nothing!” Aziraphale said hurriedly. “Only an observation. About the, ah, the general nature of humanity. So. Erm. Let’s see, I do think it’s very interesting that you—or, rather, you-as-murderer—touched the victim’s shoulder.”

“Do you think that’s right? I mean, it was just sort of…instinct. Keep you from struggling, I suppose.”

“No, it does make sense. But we’d talked before, if you remember, about the fact that the murderer must have had some method of avoiding getting blood all over their hands—gloves, or a handkerchief, or something. And if they were this close, and there was rather a lot of blood—”

“There was,” Crowley said fervently.

“Then they must have been wearing something, because no-one at the party had blood all over their hands and clothes.”

“Well, it’s like we said the other day, isn’t it? They could’ve stored their gloves, or whatever it was, in the gardening shed and then hopped back to get rid of it later.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Aziraphale made the mistake of glancing up at the mirror. He saw himself, head framed by Crowley’s arms, the razor glinting at his neck. His dressing-gown, he saw, had fallen slightly open, revealing the hollow of his throat just beneath Crowley’s fingers.

His eyes met Crowley’s in the reflection, and he felt Crowley’s hand tense against his shoulder.

“You’re—” Crowley began, voice hoarse. He cleared his throat, shook his head, and said again: “You’re really not frightened?”

“Of course not.”

“I’ve got a blade at your throat,” Crowley said. 

“Well, yes,” Aziraphale said, impatiently, “but it’s not as though you’re going to do anything with it.”

“Obviously.” Crowley still didn’t look satisfied, his forehead wrinkling as he scrutinised them in the mirror. 

“If you’d rather I pretended to find you terrifying—”

Crowley snorted. “Oh, no. No, I’ll just knock threatening half-dressed members of the aristocracy off my list of careers to consider if writing doesn’t work out—”

So he had noticed, then. 

“At any rate,” Aziraphale said quickly, “you’ve made a very passable murderer, thank you, but I believe we’ve nothing more to gain from this little exercise, so, if you don’t mind…?”

“Right.” Crowley withdrew the blade and stepped back. 

Aziraphale relaxed into the chair. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” Crowley said, mouth quirking. “And—here.” He held the razor out. “Suppose you’ll be wanting to finish your shave.”

“Oh yes,” Aziraphale said, taking the blade from him carefully. “Do you know, I’d quite forgotten that was what I intended to do here in the first place.”

Crowley shrugged. “Mix a little detection in with the toilette, seems like you.”

“I can’t say it ended up being much good,” Aziraphale said. “Bit of a waste of time, really. We didn’t learn anything.”

Crowley grinned suddenly. “Didn’t we?”

Chapter Text

The old house was silent save for the creaking of the floorboards beneath his feet. There was a musty sort of smell, as though a pile of wet clothes had been left to moulder in a corner. Possibly, Vane reflected, for several years, judging by the strength of it. 

But there were more important matters to be dealt with than someone’s old laundry. Vane glanced down the hallway, which was lit only by the slivers of sunlight that had squeezed their way through the slats that boarded up the windows. Ahead, the bedroom—his destination—waited, door ajar, like a gaping maw about to swallow him whole—

Crowley threw the pen across the room. Gaping maw, honestly, who did he think he was, Louis Ferno?

In truth, writing was the last thing he wanted to be doing at present. The gory reality of Greasy Johnson’s corpse, the way its head had sagged forward, the feeling of the blood on his hands—those images, still altogether too clear, made it difficult to write about a fictional victim with his accustomed indifference. 

Still, though, he’d been avoiding Virgil Vane long enough. While the payment for Warlock’s birthday mystery had been generous, he’d also ended up—for reasons obviously unanticipated—staying in Tadfield far longer than he’d initially planned to. And while the amateur-sleuth bit was all right for Aziraphale, the unfortunate lack of a revoltingly large family fortune meant that Crowley regrettably needed to earn money in order to live. 

He briefly considered giving it all up and becoming a motor-car salesman, on the grounds that at the moment, almost any job seemed more palatable than mystery author, but decided against it—because after all, would anyone actually want to buy a car from someone who’d only escaped a conviction for murder by the skin of his teeth?

Crowley sighed and crumpled up the sheet in front of him, tossed it in the wastebasket, and went to go fetch his pen from the floor. He pulled out another piece of paper. If he didn’t feel up to actually writing the thing just now, at least he could get a bit of work in on the plot. 

The latest Virgil Vane novel was tentatively titled The Chattering at St Beryl’s and revolved around an old house that was rumoured to be haunted on account of its last six owners having died under suspicious circumstances. Crowley intended to leave the reader guessing until (hopefully) the very end of the story as to whether or not there was a supernatural element to the proceedings. He’d decided on the culprit—the local vicar, whom nobody had suspected on account of him being the local vicar, and had a lovely red herring set up involving the cranky old estate caretaker and some incriminating evidence.

He began jotting down notes about each of the deaths. The murderous vicar had changed up his methods each time, to avoid suspicion of foul play, so there would have to be a few different ones—poison, some sort of an accident with the chimney-piece, possibly something involving a wild animal…

And then, of course, Virgil Vane would put the clues together and gather up the suspects for a thorough explication of exactly what the vicar had done—and why he’d done it.

Which, now that Crowley came to think of it, could use a bit more fleshing out. He’d been so enamoured of the killer-vicar concept that he’d only vaguely considered motive. Why would he have wanted to kill all the house’s owners? Oh—well, there was always the religious angle, if he thought the house was…sinful, or something, and thought he was doing God’s will…yes, there might be something there.

He was just writing this down when a knock came at the door.

“It’s open!”

“So it is,” said Aziraphale, coming in. “Oh—I’m sorry, are you working? I didn’t mean to interrupt—”

Crowley shook his head. “Nah. Not interrupting. What is it? Assuming, of course, that you haven’t stopped by merely for the pleasure of my company.”

He was pleased to note that Aziraphale flushed slightly at this. “Not quite. I, erm, I’ve actually come to ask if you’d like to come to lunch.”

Crowley glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s only half past eleven. Have the Dowlings changed up the schedule, or…”

“Not here,” Aziraphale said. “My brother, you may remember, lives in the vicinity at a family residence, and he’s invited me to come eat there today. And I thought perhaps you might like to come along. Only if you like, of course,” he added quickly. “I shan’t be offended if you’d rather stay here.”

“Not a chance,” Crowley said, standing up. “No offence to Maud’s cooking, which is impeccable, but I could certainly use a meal without Thaddeus Dowling grunting at me every five minutes about how much better Sam Spade is than Virgil Vane.”

“Yes, I can’t imagine that’s pleasant,” Aziraphale said. “Well, good, then, I’ll have Newt bring the car round, unless you’d rather take yours?” He frowned. “Although, do forgive me, but the, erm, the vigour of your driving is perhaps not ideal for a preprandial trip.”

Crowley grinned. “What if I promise to go under thirty the whole way?”

Aziraphale eyed him suspiciously. “And the way back?”

“And the way back.”

“Very well, then, we’ll give Newt the afternoon off. He deserves it, poor boy, he’s been trying to develop these photographs of his all week and they simply won’t come out.”

“Oh yes,” Crowley said, remembering the photographic apparatus that Newt had had with him on the day of the party. “Do you think he needs lessons, or…?” He held the door open for Aziraphale and followed him out into the hallway.

“Oh, he’s had lessons,” Aziraphale said. “With Newt, it’s never the theoretical foundations that are amiss, I believe, but the actual execution of the thing.”

“Hm,” Crowley said. “Unfortunate for him, that.”

“Indeed.” 

They continued down the stairs and out the front door, then around the corner of the house to where Crowley’s car was parked. 

“Were you working on a new book, though?” Aziraphale asked as they got in. “Virgil Vane’s next adventure?”

“It’s not going any too smoothly,” Crowley admitted, pulling out of the drive and onto the road. “Here—you’ll have to tell me the way, I’ve no idea where your noble brother lives, you know.”

“Straight ahead for now,” Aziraphale said. “And I’m sorry to hear that. Er—I do hope it’s not too forward of me, but if you should need any help just…talking things out…?”

Crowley shook his head. “Thanks, but no. I’m afraid the source of my block is less theoretical and more…visceral.”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.”

Crowley shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road. “It’ll pass. Well, I hope.”

“It’s just to the right here,” Aziraphale said, indicating a junction ahead.

Crowley made the turn with all possible care (and was both annoyed and amused to notice that Aziraphale braced himself for a crash regardless). The house that loomed before them was a great deal larger than Tadfield Manor, and obviously much older. Crowley was reminded anew of the gulf that lay between his own comfortable-yet-modest upbringing and strapped adulthood and the nearly-incomprehensible wealth of the Dukes of Arcadia. And while Crowley might not have cared a whit for that sort of thing—was by way of being a republican, in fact—he couldn’t shake the idea that, despite all of Aziraphale’s assurances that his reluctance to pursue Crowley was caused only by concern for his good name, there might be some good old-fashioned snobbery at the bottom of it all.

“Thinking it’s a bit much, are you?” Aziraphale asked, sounding almost ashamed, and Crowley’s heart lightened. “Well, contrary to popular belief, old money can’t buy taste any more than new money can, I’m afraid.”

“Ah—it’s not so bad,” Crowley said, honestly. “As far as, you know, ancestral seats go, and all that.”

As they pulled up towards the entrance, Crowley could see Raphael Eastgate waving cheerily at them from the doorstep. The Duke of Arcadia bore only a slight resemblance to his younger brother, but they had, Crowley noticed, the same arrestingly sincere way of smiling.

“Come in, come in,” Raphael said, waving Crowley out of the car. “It’s absolutely splendid to see you again, old man. Oh, just leave your car right here,” he said, forestalling the question that hadn’t quite made it out of Crowley’s mouth. “There’s not likely to be anyone else who shows up during lunch. I mean, we don’t exactly get very many door-to-door salesmen around here, and I suppose after all you’d practically be doing me a service to discourage them.”

Crowley nodded, and Raphael beamed at him again and led them into the house. Despite what Aziraphale had said, it was furnished in an elegant yet understated style  (to Crowley’s rather judgemental view), although with surprisingly little evidence of character. If Aziraphale had been the Duke, Crowley thought, the place would have looked—well, not better, but at least as though an actual human being with tastes and opinions lived there.

“I really am glad Aziraphale managed to talk you into coming along,” Raphael was saying as they came into the dining room. “It’s not as though we exactly got to chat much at the party, and I did want to tell you how splendid I thought your mystery game was.”

“Oh—thank you,” Crowley said, sitting down in a chair that Raphael indicated. “It did get rather overshadowed, didn’t it.”

“Aziraphale will tell you I’m not much of a reader,” Raphael continued, “although next to him, who could be, but I do enjoy a good mystery now and again, and I told my staff to run out and pick up some of your books directly after the party broke up. Really good stuff, I’m on the second one now.”

“That’s very kind of you to say.”

“So—how do you do it, then?” Raphael asked.

“Sorry?”

“Write, I mean. Come up with your plots. I’m terribly curious—”

“I’m sure Crowley doesn’t want to talk shop,” Aziraphale cut in hurriedly. “Really, Raphael, the man deserves a break from writing. Don’t make him feel as though you’ve only asked him over to pick his brain.”

“It’s all right,” Crowley said, even though he absolutely hated being asked to explain how he came up with his plots. He hated even more, however, the notion that Aziraphale felt obliged to step in and defend him, as though he hadn’t dealt perfectly well on his own with just such questions hundreds of times before.

“I sort of—I suppose I tend to get an idea for some part of the story—could be a scene, or a character, or something else; in the one I’m working on at present it’s a haunted house. And then I build around that. So, for instance, today I was working out a motive for my murderer. Trying to determine why they’d have done it. But other times I’ve had the motive right off the bat. It’s different every time.”

“Oh, motive,” Raphael said knowingly. “I imagine that must be one of the most interesting things to invent, mustn’t it? All sorts of dark secrets and unspoken grudges and whatnot? Nothing like real life, I suppose, where from what Aziraphale tells me it seems as though most murders take place for disappointingly commonplace purposes.”

“Or for seemingly trivial ones,” Aziraphale added. “I believe that in reality, murder has more to do with the murderer than the motive.”

“Oh?”

“Well, if we take the most common motives to be Love and Money—which anecdotally I’d say they are—the fact is that hundreds, thousands more people experience disappointments in love and difficulties with money every day than end up murdering someone because of it, because they simply haven’t got the temperament.”

“Or they’re afraid of gaol,” Crowley said darkly.

“Or that,” Aziraphale acknowledged. “But my point is that there’s no actual good reason to murder someone—I mean cold-bloodedly murder, not self-defence—because whatever someone might say their reason is, I can point to a hundred other people with the exact same provocation who managed to not stab anyone about it, thank you very much. So if there’s no good reason, but people do it anyway, it makes perfect sense to me that they’d do it for what seem to us to be poor reasons as well.”

“Do you think that’s what happened here?” Raphael asked eagerly. “With the Johnson boy? I mean, that it wasn’t for any real motive? I confess I can’t see why anyone should want to have killed him. But perhaps you’ve investigated your way into answering that by now.”

Crowley glanced warily at Aziraphale. He was the one who kept insisting they keep his own brother on the suspect list. Let it be his affair whether or not to share what they’d learnt so far with Raphael.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, with no evident hesitation, “we had the idea—actually, I should say, Crowley had the idea—that it’s possible our murderer might not have killed the correct victim.”

Raphael leaned towards him. “You mean—no one actually did want to kill him?”

“It’s only a theory,” Aziraphale said. “If anything, it rather complicates matters, as we’re having to consider every possible reason someone might have wanted to kill Greasy Johnson or W—or someone else.”

Evidently, then, not everything was worth sharing with Raphael. 

“Thanks for the tip on old Mr. Dowling’s name being Gerald, by the way,” Aziraphale said. “That’s what got me on to thinking that Gerald Johnson might be related. And we’re now fairly certain he was Gerald Dowling Junior’s natural son, which could perhaps lead us to some other motive for getting him out of the way.”

“Gerald Junior, you say?” Raphael asked. “H’m, that’s—well, I admit I didn’t know the chap particularly well, but I can’t say he seemed like the type to leave a girl in trouble rather than doing the honourable thing.”

“He didn’t know about the child—I doubt whether Clara Johnson would have been aware of it before Dowling got called up to the Front—and, of course, he never made it back to make it right, if indeed that’s what you think he would have done.”

“You don’t sound as if you believe it,” Raphael said, smiling. 

“We found some letters between Dowling and the girl,” Aziraphale said. “He seemed very intent upon keeping their affair from his family. But, as you say, the child might well have changed things, if he’d made it back.”

“He’d at least have made certain the boy was looked after,” Raphael insisted. “Or—well, anyway, if you ask me, any man who’d let a child of his, even a natural child, go hungry when he’d the means to feed him is—is a rat. That’s all.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I doubt the Johnsons ever did go hungry. They mayn’t have been as wealthy as the Dowlings, but the interior of that cottage didn’t precisely indicate indigence to me. Don’t you agree, Crowley?” 

“Oh—” Crowley floundered for a moment. “Yeah, actually, I mean, that fish tank the boy had? Impressive piece of work, in its way. Can’t have been cheap.”

“Precisely,” Aziraphale said, favouring him with a brief yet devastating smile. “Not to mention the jewellery we found lying about the place. I’d imagine they’d have sold it off if they were truly hard-up.”

“H’m,” said Raphael. “I suppose that is reassuring.” He smiled, and although Crowley had thought it similar to Aziraphale’s smile earlier, he now wondered how he could possibly have imagined they were anything alike—Raphael’s was a poor copy when placed next to its unmatchable original. Ugh —what a maudlin notion, soppy and ridiculous, and Crowley let out an involuntary snort out of disgust with himself. Raphael evidently mistook this for impatience with the line of conversation, because he said, clearing his throat, “Well. Enough about that, then, I think I’ve quite had my fill of murder for the present. Particularly over lunch, what? Puts one off one’s feed a bit, doesn’t it, all this talk of killing? I really don’t know how you stand it, Aziraphale. In any case—Crowley, Aziraphale tells me you were at Oxford together?”

“Not together,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Concurrently, that’s all.”

“Yes, yes, that’s what I meant,” Raphael said. “But what I mean to ask is—have you been back to this part of the world since?”

“Not really,” Crowley said.

“Ah. Well. What do you think, then?”

They managed to make it through the remainder of lunch with no more references to Greasy Johnson or his death—or to Virgil Vane, for that matter, for which Crowley was heartily grateful. 

But as they were walking back out to the car, Aziraphale said, as though he’d been turning it over in his head for the rest of the meal, “You know, we haven’t come up with a good motive, have we?”

“For killing Greasy?”

“Or Warlock. Whichever they were aiming for.”

“Well, we talked about blackmail, right, for Greasy,” Crowley said, slowly. “And we said, I mean, there’s plenty of reasons someone might have wanted to kill Warlock Dowling. His family’s wealthy, he was turning twenty-one, that seems…suggestive.”

“It does,” Aziraphale said, “but what I should really like to know is whether Gabriel Kerux, in particular, might have had a motive. Given that his razor’s the only really solid lead we’ve got.”

“Right. Well—money, definitely, right? Like you said, Love or Money, and it doesn’t seem likely to have been Love. Although I suppose we should ask and find out if Greasy Johnson was seeing anyone, but—”

“If it turns out that the chores Mrs. Dowling’s been hiring him to do are of a rather different sort than we’d imagined,” Aziraphale said, “then I ought to retire from detecting altogether, because I do not see that at all. But—yes, money, for Gabriel Kerux, certainly. I suppose it could have to do with this business venture that he’s over here working on with Thaddeus Dowling…Greasy could’ve been blackmailing him, to return to that theory, and threatening to tell Thaddeus whatever he knew about Gabriel that might make him cry off of the deal. Or, Warlock’s twenty-first birthday might be a trigger for some sort of financial audit, if some share of the business is owed to him, or something, and if Gabriel’d been pulling anything funny with the accounts he might’ve been about to have been found out.”

“So…how do we find out if Gabriel’s been pulling anything funny with the accounts?”

Aziraphale pursed his lips in thought. “I wonder whether Newt’s ever wanted to see America?”

Newt had, in fact, always wanted to visit America. Thus far, however, New York had proved a disappointment—far grimier than he’d expected and full of people talking very quickly in unintelligible accents.

Still, though, he had a duty to carry out, and after getting himself settled in an cheap but seemingly clean boardinghouse (Lord Aziraphale was of course bankrolling the venture, and Newt could have easily afforded something a great deal grander, but in the event that anyone attempted to look into his antecedents it would be much less suspicious to live somewhere unremarkable), he made his way downtown with surprisingly little difficulty. Having the streets numbered certainly did help a fellow get his bearings, if nothing else.

Thaddeus Dowling and Gabriel Kerux’s business venture was headquartered in an office building that also held a number of other tenants. Newt spent that first afternoon in New York going from office to office and inquiring whether any work was available. Unfortunately, it appeared that America was still in the throes of its economic depression, and Newt was told at every turn that companies weren’t hiring. “And if we were,” said one particularly blunt office manager, “we’d have every man in town beating our door down, so we wouldn’t need to look twice at a foreigner in any case.”

Mostly undaunted, Newt returned to his boardinghouse for the evening to make a plan for the next day. If he couldn’t get into the building legitimately to look around, he was either going to have to break out the lockpicking skills Lord Aziraphale had insisted he learn, or finesse his way in through social connections.

He decided to save the lockpicking as a last resort and instead concentrate on attempting to ingratiate himself with an employee. Lord Aziraphale paid him well, certainly, but not well enough to make him want to risk getting thrown into American prison for breaking and entering. 

The next morning, accordingly, he commenced loitering outside of the building, looking for hints as to what might be the most fruitful potential point of entry to pursue. There were, of course, multiple methods of convincing someone to assist you—from feigning a romantic interest, to exaggerating the precise degree to which the investigation was official , to spinning a story about foreign governments and documents which might help prevent a war.

Newt had been strongly discouraged by Lord Aziraphale from using any of these in favour of what he liked to refer to as the “lost lamb” line of attack. 

“I do hope you don’t take offence to this,” he’d explained, “but, Newt, you’ve got a very sort of…hapless air about you. It’s very advantageous, actually, in this line of work. You know how I, ah, occasionally act the upper-class twit in order to get suspects to let down their guard? This is something very similar. You’ve just got to lean into the affect of being confused and anxious and a bit sorry for yourself, and no one will think you could possibly have any ill intent. Which, I mean, you don’t, or you won’t, have, because it’s not as though we have ill intent in general, but—you gather my meaning. So, you do that, and then you want to find someone—most likely a woman, probably a bit older, a mothering type, and come to her with your request for help. That’ll be your move.”

So he did his best to stay out of sight for the first few days of his observation, cataloguing the people who went in and out of the building and attempting to determine who was merely a visitor and who was likely to have the sort of access he needed. The ideal person would be a charwoman, or something of that nature—someone able to get into the building after hours without being remarked upon. 

He managed to identify a young woman whose clothes suggested she was likely some kind of servant, and who arrived every morning at seven, over an hour before the first businessman showed up. Newt’s selection was solidified when he witnessed the girl handing over a few coins to a beggar on the street as she left the building one afternoon. Surely someone with such a demonstrated charitable bent could be persuaded into assisting a young clerk who’d lost his keys.

Newt debated for a few moments whether he ought to attempt to sneak his photographic apparatus into the building in order to capture evidence of any financial misappropriations on camera. He regretfully decided against it—partly because he feared its size might be suspicious, partly because he’d never yet managed to get a photograph to come out right. Besides, he’d no need to prove anything he found. This was a fishing expedition, nothing more—a chance to gather information for Lord Aziraphale that might suggest why Gabriel Kerux might have wanted to murder either Greasy Johnson or Warlock Dowling.

So, armed with only a pencil and paper for taking notes, he settled into place at six-thirty in the morning on a cloudy Wednesday—slumped just outside the entrance to the building, head in hands, the picture of despair. (He had considered feigning a few sobs, but concluded the risk of being too obviously shamming was higher than any benefit he might gain from the added pathos.)

“Sir!” He pretended not to hear at first. “Sir! Excuse me, sir?”

Newt looked up. His target was standing there, concern writ on her face. “Oh—I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his face with a sleeve as though to brush away any stray tears. “I’m in the way, aren’t I, I’ll just…”

“Are you all right?” the girl asked, placing a hand on his arm to stay him. “You can’t be from around here, can you? Not with that accent.”

“No,” Newt said. “I’m English. And—well, I suppose I’m all right, or at least I will be, unless my employer finds out—”

“Finds out what?”

“That I’ve gone and left his passport in there,” Newt said, indicating the building. “I’m a secretary. My employer and I, we came over for a business meeting, which was yesterday, just inside there. Dowling and someone’s offices, I think. And he kept handing me these pieces of paper, and I kept setting them down, and I must’ve misplaced his passport somewhere in there because when I went to check for it this morning, it wasn’t with his things. Our ship leaves in an hour, and if I haven’t got it I’m sure to be sacked. So I came running directly here, but there’s no-one here to let me into the office to get it—unless… you…” He broke off and gave the girl his best hangdog look.

She frowned. “I do have a key,” she admitted. “But I’m not sure I ought to let you in, not without someone’s permission…I know!” she said brightly. “Why don’t I just go in and get it for you? Just a regular passport, right? What’s your boss’ name, then?”

“Would you really do that?” Newt asked, and then, inventing wildly, “Oh, but I don’t suppose—you can’t read French, can you?”

The girl shook her head. “No. Is that a problem?”

“Well, the passport’s in French, is the thing,” Newt explained. “My employer’s half-French, half-English. Very cosmopolitan fellow.”

“Oh.” The girl thought for a moment. “Oh, but I can certainly tell when something is in French, and if you tell me your employer’s name I’ll know to look for a document in French that has that name on it.”

Newt shook his head. “It won’t be the only document in there in French, I’m afraid. Nor the only one with his name on. My employer likes all of his contracts drawn up in multiple languages. Look, if you could just let me in for a moment, I’d be so awfully grateful. Are you worried I’m a thief? Couldn’t you come and watch while I looked? You’d be able to see that I didn’t take anything else away. Oh, please, I’m terribly worried about what’ll happen if we miss that boat.”

The girl frowned. “I suppose I could let you in under strict supervision,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Dick Turpin…tine. Dick Turpentine,” Newt said, blurting out the first name he thought of and hastily modifying it to sound less suspicious.

The girl, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. “I’m Bridget,” she said. “All right, Dick, but don’t you even think about taking anything.”

“Cross my heart,” Newt said, and did so.

Bridget unlocked the doors and led him through the corridors and upstairs to the Dowling-Kerux offices. “Here you are,” she said, “although if they’ve locked it away I guess you’re out of luck, aren’t you?”

“I’ll just hope they haven’t,” Newt said grimly, and began pulling open drawers.

With Bridget’s steady gaze on him, he couldn’t risk pulling out the pencil to jot down any findings, so he instead did his best to memorise any tidbits that he could while flipping through files in his pretended search—dates and amounts of deposits and withdrawals, account balances, letters from Dowling instructing certain trades. It certainly seemed, from his hasty perusals, that the venture was far from solvent—but he saw no clear evidence of embezzlement from either Kerux or Dowling. Well, that was hardly surprising. He hadn’t really expected it to be so obvious. Still, however, Lord Aziraphale would doubtless be interested to hear of the dire financial straits the business had found itself in. After all, both men had been representing themselves in England as successful American financiers. If they were less than they appeared…that opened up some very interesting lines of inquiry, as Newt saw it.

He stretched out the search as long as he realistically could, until he’d finished the last desk drawer and righted himself with visible disappointment.

“Can’t you find it?” Bridget asked.

Newt shook his head sadly. “Perhaps I didn’t leave it here, after all. Perhaps it’s at our hotel—oh, goodness, is that the time?” He glanced at his wrist, hoping Bridget wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t wearing a watch. “I’d better go. At once. Thank you so much for your help, it’s most awfully appreciated.” He left the office, Bridget stepping aside to let him through the door.

“I’m very sorry!” she said, calling after him as he walked briskly down the stairs.

“It’s quite all right!” Newt shouted back. “It’ll all work out. It always does. Good-bye! And thank you!”

He forced himself to slow down to a more sedate, less noticeable pace as he left the building, wandering around for a while in a random pattern before returning to his lodgings. (He didn’t really think Bridget would possibly be following him, but it paid to be circumspect.) At last, alone in his room, he pulled out the pen and notebook and began jotting down all the things he’d noticed back at the office. He had, at least, the beginnings of a decent report for Lord Aziraphale.

Newt’s absence posed no more than a mild inconvenience for Aziraphale—it wasn’t as though he’d ever been a particularly good valet in the traditional sense, and Aziraphale was more than capable of looking after himself. A fair number of things, however, took ever-so-slightly longer without Newt’s assistance, and the cumulative effect of this was to take up just enough of Aziraphale’s time that things began to fall by the wayside. (He made a note to inform Newt of this fact upon his return, in order to convey his genuine and wholehearted appreciation for his services.) 

As a result of this general lag, it was nearly five o’clock on the Tuesday after Newt had left that Aziraphale realised he hadn’t yet fed Greasy Johnson’s fish. He’d been switching off with Crowley, and today was his turn. 

He passed Lesley on the way downstairs—the man was just coming out of the drawing-room, where the Dowlings and Gabriel were presumably finishing up their tea.

“Afternoon, Lesley.”

“Good afternoon, m’lord.”

“Oh—if you happen across Mr. Crowley and he asks after me, would you mind telling him I’ve gone to feed the fish? Thanks awfully.”

The walk down to Greasy Johnson’s cottage took the better part of an hour (Newt’s absence meant that Aziraphale would have had to drive himself, and while he certainly could do so, he was just rusty enough to make walking a more agreeable prospect. Doubtless Crowley would have been more than willing to drive him over, if he’d asked, but such unnecessary proximity seemed…best avoided, for obvious reasons), and by the time Aziraphale arrived, it was growing dark outside.

He’d brought an electric torch along, though, in anticipation of this eventuality, and rested it on a chair, pointed towards the fish tank. He paused a moment and assessed—the light from the torch reflected off the tank’s glass, drawing his eye to the patches of algae that clouded its surface. 

Aziraphale came closer to the tank, peering in at the gravel. There were bits of dead plants stuck in there, and he realised that he certainly hadn’t cleaned the tank since Greasy Johnson’s death, and apparently neither had Crowley. Well—no time like the present, was there?

He rummaged around in the cottage’s cabinets until he found a bowl large enough to hold the fish, filled it with water, and carefully began transferring the fish one by one into the temporary container.

The tank was large, and he wondered for a moment whether he might not be able to lift it up to pour out the water, and briefly considered going back up to Tadfield Manor to fetch Lesley to lend a hand, but faltered at the prospect of spending another hour tromping around Oxfordshire.

So he took an old mug out of another cabinet and began removing the water and dumping it out in batches until the whole thing was more-or-less empty. He found a rag in the kitchen and set about scrubbing the glass walls, humming to himself a bit as he did so.

Aziraphale had just about finished with the sides of the tank and was about to start in on picking through the gravel when he heard footsteps.

He didn’t bother turning to look, still facing the tank as he asked, “Crowley?”

The thing about writing, Crowley had once told a curious friend, was that approximately eighty percent of the time it was absolute Hell, like pulling particularly sticky burrs out of one’s clothes, but the remaining twenty percent was a sort of fuzzy trance that one came out of hours later with a bursting bundle of manuscript pages and absolutely no idea whether they were any good.

Crowley hadn’t had a day of the latter type since arriving at Tadfield Manor, but he emerged from his room on Tuesday feeling vaguely seasick, flexing his ink-stained fingers to get out the cramps that had seemed to set in all at once when he’d stood up. He glanced at the clock—it was now past seven, which meant he was very likely going to be late to dinner if he dallied any longer.

He cracked his neck once to relieve the tension and set off down the hall to find Aziraphale, only to receive no answer once he knocked at the door.

“Mr. Crowley?” Lesley poked his head out from around a corner. “I thought I heard you. If you’re looking for Lord Aziraphale, he said to let you know that he’d gone to feed the fish.”

“Really?”

Lesley nodded. “It was some time ago, in fact. I’d just begun to wonder where he’d got to. I certainly expected he’d be back in time for dinner.”

“Did he walk there?” Crowley asked, feeling a—surely irrational? —spike of worry. 

“I believe so, yes.”

“He can take care of himself, obviously,” Crowley said, more to himself than to Lesley. “It’s not as though he could have got lost or anything. Although—it is rather dark now—don’t you think?”

“I really couldn’t say, sir,” Lesley said carefully.

“Yes, all right,” said Crowley, nodding. “I’ll just—I’ll drive down and get him. I’m sure it’s fine. But—I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Do you need help bringing the car around, or…?”

“No,” Crowley said, “no, I’ll just—”

He managed to burn off some of his nervous energy by walking to the car with unaccustomed alacrity, so that by the time he’d settled into the driver’s seat, he was almost positive that he was overreacting. He was probably going to run into Aziraphale on his way back, he’d stick his head out the window and say “Need a lift?” and they’d drive back together in time for dinner.

But he didn’t run into Aziraphale on the way, and Crowley could feel the anxiety returning as he approached his destination. 

The cottage, when he reached it, appeared dark. Misgivings growing, Crowley grabbed a torch from the car and practically sprinted inside. He stumbled through the door and froze, blinking rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Aziraphale was lying face down, body crumpled on the floor, a rivulet of red running down from the side of his face and staining his white overcoat. All around him lay the remnants of Greasy Johnson’s fish tank. The light of the torch reflected off the shattered glass, creating twinkling stars in a firmament that surrounded a pale yet bloody moon.

Chapter Text

The first thing Aziraphale noticed upon waking was that his head ached horribly. The second was that he seemed to be in his bed at Tadfield Manor, with only a fuzzy recollection of how he’d got there. And the third was that someone was holding his hand.

He blinked. As the world came into focus, he saw Crowley sitting at the side of the bed, half-dozing in an armchair, his hands nowhere near Aziraphale’s.

The things one imagined after a head wound, really.

“Crowley,” he said, voice thick with disuse.

Crowley sat straight up (for Crowley). “You’re awake!” he said, unnecessarily, Aziraphale thought. “I was just starting to wonder if I should ring the doctor again to ask him when I’d better wake you. How are you feeling?”

“Eighth circle of Hell, I think, if that was the one with the demon fellow chopping at one’s limbs with a jolly great sword. Only he seems to have taken a particular liking to my head.”

“Can’t blame him,” Crowley said, clearly heartened by Aziraphale’s tone. “You’ve got such a nice head. Absolutely invites hacking.”

“Someone seems to have agreed with you, at any rate,” Aziraphale said, forcing himself upright into a sitting position so that he could talk to Crowley properly. “Ah—you’ll forgive me, I can’t quite recall—”

Crowley nodded. “Doctor said it might be a bit of a jumble. Someone seems to have come along while you were cleaning the fish tank and given you a big whack on the head.” He mimed this. “Either they weren’t sufficiently clever to stick around long enough to check their handiwork and make sure you were properly out of commission, or they heard me driving up and got spooked. Hard to say which.”

“Or they only meant it as a warning blow to begin with.”

“One Hell of a warning if they did.”

“Indeed,” said Aziraphale with feeling.

“Well, in any event, you came to fairly quickly, although you were still a bit out of it, and we made it back up here. Lesley rang the doctor and he came by to have a look at you. Stitched up the rather nasty cut on the back of your head there—must’ve been from the glass of the fish tank, he said—and made certain your eyes still moved like they ought and all that. Apparently you don’t have a concussion. Still, he said you should take it easy for a few days, no alcohol, and to call him if you started acting funny, which I didn’t bother to explain wasn’t really a reliable method of assessment in your case.”

Aziraphale, feeling as though he ought to, smiled at this.

“Might have some nausea, too, along with the headache and the blurry memories,” Crowley added. “I think that’s about the size of it.”

“Don’t laugh,” Aziraphale said, “but…do you happen to know if the fish are all right?”

Crowley looked very much as though he wanted to laugh, but seemingly managed to conquer the impulse as he said, “That’s also what you asked last night, you know. And, yes, your blessed fish are just fine, although their living quarters are somewhat cramped just now. The bowl you’d put them in was far enough away that it didn’t break.”

“Oh, good,” Aziraphale said, “I’d feel so dreadful if it turned out I’d accidentally killed those poor fish—”

“Your own death, of course, being merely an afterthought.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Aziraphale said. “I didn’t die.”

“You damn well could have! What kind of an idiotic decision—”

“For an adult man to feed some fish unaccompanied?”

“You’re obviously a target—”

“Crowley, I’m not exactly a china doll. I was in the War, for Heaven’s sake! I’ve put away more murderers than I really like to think about. I’m perfectly capable of performing my own risk assessment!”

“Doesn’t seem to me like you did such a good job of proving it last night, is all.”

“Don’t act as though you’re not absolutely delighted with this,” Aziraphale snapped. “Your turn to play the hero.”

Crowley recoiled, the look on his face so plainly indicating the falsity of that statement that Aziraphale instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry,” he said, quickly. “That’s—that’s not fair.”

“If you think,” Crowley said, voice low, “that I could possibly wring one single spark of enjoyment from finding you like that—”

“I know. Yes. Of course—”

“I thought for a second you might be dead, Aziraphale! I thought…” He shook his head. “Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. “Actually.”

“Oh.”

“Not so fun after all, is it,” Aziraphale said after a moment. “Being the guardian angel.”

This was enough to drag a grin from Crowley. “Is that what I called you? I’m sorry. Well, if it makes you feel any better, though I don’t see why it should, I’m fairly convinced that my being there didn’t make much of a difference at all. Granted you weren’t your usual sparkling self, but I’d bet you’d have made it back here on your own power anyway.”

“That won’t stop me from being properly grateful to you.”

“I’m not really interested in gratitude.”

Aziraphale’s head throbbed. “Then I don’t suppose you’d have any interest in helping fetch me a glass of water?” he asked. “I’m absolutely parched.”

Crowley was up in a flash. “Course. Right away. Sorry, you’re ill, and I start right on in with the antagonising you—”

“I’d expect no less from a self-proclaimed nuisance,” Aziraphale said, and when that only made Crowley look guiltier, added, “and in any case I’m fairly certain the antagonising was mutual.”

Crowley only nodded before striding out of the room, returning only a minute or so later with a glass of water.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, taking a sip. 

“Want anything to eat? I don’t know if you remember, but we missed dinner.”

“Well, the doctor wasn’t wrong about the nausea,” Aziraphale admitted, “so I don’t know that I can precisely stomach a full English at this juncture, but if perhaps a piece of toast, or something similar, could be arranged…?”

“At your service, my lord,” Crowley said ironically, and was out of the room again before Aziraphale could chide him.

The epithet did, however, remind Aziraphale that his actual valet was across the Atlantic engaged in some adventuring of his own. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Newt?” he asked, when Crowley came back bearing not only toast but a pot of marmalade and a cup of tea.

Crowley shook his head. “It’s not exactly as though you’ve been out for days.”

“No…I do hope he’s all right. I should’ve thought he’d have checked in by now.”

“No use telephoning long distance if you don’t have anything worthwhile to report,” Crowley said. “And now I think—well, it was always a long shot anyway, right? Although I suppose if he’s operating off of your expense account, the cost is hardly an issue.”

Aziraphale smiled. “Newt’s always very conservative with the coffers, though, you’re right. I’m not really worried.”

“Not about Newt, maybe,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale eyed him suspiciously over the toast. “What is it?”

“Someone attacked you. And I don’t want to argue about it any more than you do, but don’t you think…I mean, it’s got to mean something, right? That you’re—we’re—getting somewhere?”

“I would imagine that whoever attacked me did so to impede our investigation, yes, which does seem to possibly suggest that we may have hit upon something. The trouble is that I don’t know what.”

“I was wondering if it had to do with the fish tank itself,” Crowley said. “I don’t know, maybe that’s another of my overly fanciful detective-story ideas, but maybe they weren’t really after you, they were after…I don’t know, something buried in the gravel?”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily overly-fanciful,” Aziraphale said, “unless you’re going to tell me that the thing buried in the gravel was a small golden key that unlocks a hidden chest and reveals a trove of documents explaining everything. But I can’t quite see how it adds up. You and I have been feeding the fish for weeks now. If someone was worried that we’d find something in the tank, surely they’d have popped down and got it long since.”

“But we hadn’t cleaned the tank yet. Maybe that was the thing that made them act.”

“So you think whoever it was followed me down to the cottage on the off chance I’d decide to start cleaning the tank? I might remind you that although you might know better, to the outside observer I don’t believe Lord Aziraphale Eastgate seems the type to roll up his sleeves and tidy up the habitat. No, I think it’s as you suggested before. Someone knew I would be alone and off my guard and took the opportunity to attack.”

“Who did know that, by the way?” Crowley asked. “Lesley must’ve, because he’s the one who told me where you’d gone, but did you mention it to anyone else?”

“I should think anyone in the house might have known,” Aziraphale admitted. “I wasn’t precisely cloak-and-dagger about my destination. Any of the Dowlings, Maud, Gabriel…they might very conceivably have overheard. It does strongly suggest someone in the household, but we’d more or less decided to focus on that group anyway given what we learned from your student friends and the servant interviews that Newt conducted. And I suppose anybody could have done it from a logistical perspective, yes?”

Crowley grimaced.

“What?”

“Well,” he said, drawing out the vowel, “so, the thing is, everyone seems to have been getting dressed for dinner at the time you were attacked. Or, at least, they claim to have been. I think we can safely say Maud’s out of it given that she was cooking the entire time. I suppose it’s barely possible Lesley—cycled, or something, down to Greasy Johnson’s cottage, attacked you, didn’t bother to stick around to see if he’d finished the job, and then came back up and told me where you’d gone… although it doesn’t seem likely. And as for everyone else, we can’t even rely on trying to find someone who looked dishevelled, because as soon as I brought you back everything went into a proper whirlwind anyway.”

“So we’re back at the Dowlings—any of them—or Gabriel Kerux,” Aziraphale said. “I do hope Newt’s found something.”

Crowley still looked uneasy.

“What?” Aziraphale demanded again.

“There’s one exception,” Crowley said. “Maybe I’m missing something—but if I’m not, according to what everyone’s said, I don’t believe there’s any way Gabriel Kerux could’ve attacked you. Which seems to cut our best suspect right out.”

“He’s got an alibi?”

Crowley nodded. “For most of the crucial time period, he was on the telephone with his damn tailor. Telling them all about the measurements he needs for some custom suit. And unless they’ve somehow managed to invent a telephone you can carry wherever you go, I don’t think he can have both done that and been at the cottage conking you on the head.”

“I assume someone’s already checked up with the tailor?” Aziraphale asked. “The police?”

“Yeah. Tailor confirms. Could be lying, I suppose, but the Exchange also confirmsthat a call went through.”

“It may have been faked somehow,” Aziraphale said, aware that he was grasping at straws now. “Or—it mayn’t have been Gabriel himself who attacked me, but an accomplice. He and Dowling could be in it together, if there’s some financial funny business going on—although that theory rather depends on the original target having been Warlock Dowling, and I can’t quite bring myself to imagine Thaddeus killing his own son—but there could be someone on the outside.”

Crowley’s eyes lit up. “Maybe the call to the tailor was code, it was a message telling someone at the shop that you were going to be vulnerable and they’d better hurry—or, well, if the tailor’s in London it doesn’t seem likely they’d have made it up here in time to attack you, but maybe the tailor took the message and then called someone else—”

“Now you are edging into the realm of fiction, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale said, laughing. “But it seems that we’ve agreed not to dismiss Gabriel Kerux as a suspect just yet.”

“If this were a book, having an alibi would make him by far the most likely murderer, you know,” Crowley said. “Nothing’s so suspicious as an alibi.”

“Fortunately, reality tends to be rather more straightforward in that regard. If we were going to dismiss alibis entirely we’d have to rule back in practically the entire suspect pool that we started off with.”

“Eugh.” Crowley made a face.

“Precisely.”

“So, what’re our next steps, then?” Crowley asked. “I mean—once you’re clear to go back on the hunt, obviously.”

“I’m not entirely certain where to start,” Aziraphale admitted. “That’s why I’ve been hoping to hear from Newt.”

The next day, however, when Newt did call, it was with news that seemed to complicate rather than clarify matters. 

“There’s definitely something funny going on with the financials,” he said, voice tinny over the long-distance line, “but it’s not clear from what I saw whether it’s Kerux or Dowling or both that’s the cause of it. Either of them could be defrauding the other, or they could be in it together, trying to convince investors things’re going better than they really are.”

“Do you have any notion of whether you’ll be able to find out more?”

“I’m afraid not, my lord. The story I ended up using to get in isn’t precisely repeatable. Actually, it won’t look good if that girl sees me around at all after this…”

“Hm,” Aziraphale said, dissatisfied.

“I’m sorry,” Newt said, sounding miserable even over the long-distance line. “I thought it was best to take the opportunity when I found it…”

“No, no, you did quite right,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve no complaints whatever. I only wish there’d been more for you to find.”

“I did notice something else,” Newt said. “The business has been steadily losing money since its inception—although investors continue to pop up quite regularly in the records—but there was one particularly large deposit made about two years ago. I don’t know whether that’s significant, but I thought I’d mention it.”

“Two years ago,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully. “Thank you, Newt.”

“Shall I stay on and try to figure out more?”

“No, thank you, I think you’d better come back now. You’ve enough funds for the journey?”

“Plenty, thank you, my lord.”

“Very well, then. Wire me what ship you’ll be on when you’ve sorted it all out.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said. “Good-bye.” He rang off.

“Well?” asked Crowley, who’d been hovering eagerly a few steps away. “Didn’t sound like much, but…?”

“No, you’re right,” Aziraphale said. “As we suspected, there’s certainly something funny going on with the Dowling-Kerux accounts, but Newt wasn’t able to determine what. The only other thing of note is that their business seems to have had a sudden infusion of cash about two years ago. I imagine that’s related to Dowling’s having inherited this estate—that would be about the right timing, wouldn’t it?”

“Think so,” Crowley said, “but the estate’s not worth much, remember? Lesley said there’s not much income from the property.”

“Oh yes,” Aziraphale said, “when we were wondering whether Greasy’s being Gerald Dowling Jr’s son might have been the reason he was killed. But then where did Dowling and Kerux get the money?”

Crowley shrugged. “Maybe they took out a loan? Or Gabriel could’ve come into some money somehow, it’s not as though we’ve any idea of his financial background.”

“That’s true, I suppose. It just—well, I’m about to sound like you, but it seems awfully coincidental that the Dowling-Kerux business should have become solvent just as Dowling inherited this place.”

Crowley grinned. “You mean, in a book, it’d need to connect up?”

“Yes. But, it’s as you say, in reality there’s no reason it mightn’t be coincidence.”

“Well—I mean, it’s not like we have scads of other leads just now, is it? It’s entirely possible that Lesley wasn’t completely aware of the financial status of the estate—I mean, you’d think he would be, but—”

“What if it’s not the estate?” Aziraphale broke in. “Or, I mean, the estate but not the estate, if you gather my meaning.”

“I do not.”

“This—” he waved an arm — “Tadfield Manor, the grounds, all of it, I can’t imagine that brings in much money. I’m certain it’s worth a fair bit, but it does one absolutely no good to have a house that’s worth a lot unless one intends to sell it. But it’s entirely possible Gerald Dowling Senior had more assets than we know about—more than Lesley might have known about. Well-considered investments, wealth from another branch of the family…just because the old man lived in a modest style doesn’t mean he was only of modest means. And so, then, if Thaddeus Dowling inherited all that as well as the property—”

“—Then it’s entirely possible he would have been in a position to inject it into his failing business,” Crowley finished. “Gosh. Yeah.”

“And,” Aziraphale added, “while the land itself is entailed, the rest of Dowling’s property may well have been willed in such a way that a bastard could inherit. Which would mean—”

“That Greasy Johnson was the rightful heir to that fortune?”

“Very possibly.”

“And when Dowling discovered it,” Crowley said, eyes bright, “he decided to kill him before he could claim his due—”

“All right, all right,” Aziraphale said, holding up a hand. “It does seem we may have got onto something here, but I must say we’re making rather a lot of assumptions. We need to check the wording of the Dowling will, first off—I’ll call Inspector Tyler, I assume he’s got it. And then we’d still need to figure out why now, two years after inheriting, he’d suddenly decide to kill off the real heir.”

“Right. But it’s something to go on, anyway.”

“And,” added Aziraphale dryly, “it’s not as though we’ve many better leads at present.”

A week on, Aziraphale seemed not to have suffered any lasting ill effects from his injuries, and Crowley began to feel the vise around his heart loosening. 

They’d not made much progress on any of their theories, besides confirming the accuracy of a few of the alibis for the attack on Aziraphale. Crowley was beginning to wonder whether they ever would figure out who’d killed Greasy Johnson, or whether the whole thing would simply peter out, the trail gone cold.

“It does happen sometimes,” Aziraphale said when Crowley mentioned this to him. “But I shouldn’t think we’re quite there yet with this affair. We are still acquiring new information, and as you said, my being attacked means there’s likely something that we’ve hit upon.”

“I suppose,” said Crowley.

“Beginning to tire of the Dowlings’ hospitality?”

“I wouldn’t mind sleeping in my own bed again, anyway.”

“You’re at perfect liberty to go back to London whenever you choose, I should think,” Aziraphale said, “it’s not as though you’re a suspect—”

“Tell that to Inspector Tyler.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s been after me for an alibi for the attack on you,” Crowley admitted. “And I haven’t got one, obviously, because I’m the only evidence that you were attacked before I got there.”

“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” Aziraphale said, standing up from his chair in evident outrage. “I shall speak with the Inspector at once. It’s completely absurd to imagine that you should have had anything to do with that— Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” he demanded, rounding on Crowley.

“You’ve been a bit occupied!” Crowley snapped. “And you will absolutely not speak with the Inspector. I don’t need you swooping in and smoothing everything over for me, thanks very much. I can handle myself.”

Aziraphale looked chastened. “Oh very well,” he said, sitting down. “But you ought to have told me. It’s important that I know what the police are thinking. And if they’ve still got you on the suspect list, it seems reasonably clear that they’re nowhere near an answer.”

“Yeah, all right,” Crowley said.

There was a knock on the door.

“Yes, come in!” Aziraphale called.

“Lord Aziraphale?” Lesley nodded at both of them. “There’s a delivery for you? At the front gates.”

“Oh, excellent, thank you so much,” Aziraphale said, clapping his hands together. “I’ll be right down.”

“What’re you getting delivered?” Crowley asked.

“A new fish tank for the Johnson cottage,” Aziraphale said, stepping into the hallway ahead of Crowley. “The poor fish have been trapped in that little bowl ever since the old tank was smashed, and I can’t imagine that’s a good environment for them.”

“And you’re going to, what, carry it on over there yourself?”

“No,” said Aziraphale, turning as they reached the foot of the staircase to roll his eyes at him, “I thought perhaps that I might find someone with a car to help me out.”

“Right you are,” said Crowley, grinning. “I’ll go bring it round.”

The new tank was slightly smaller (and certainly less ornate) than the old one, and Aziraphale and Crowley were easily able to load it into the car.

“Drive slowly, please,” Aziraphale said, “if not for my sake then for the sake of the tank.”

“And for the sake of both of us not ending up covered in shards of glass,” Crowley said, easing off the accelerator. 

“Yes, I’ve had quite enough of that lately.”

They made it to the cottage without incident. Once they’d brought the tank in, Crowley set to filling it up while Aziraphale checked on the fish in their bowl.

“Sort of stupid of us, to bring it all the way over here,” Crowley said. “When we could’ve just brought the fish over to Tadfield Manor. Saved us having to come back here to feed them.”

“Well, yes, only I doubt whether Thaddeus Dowling would have been particularly eager to host them.”

“Mm. Good point.”

“We shall have to work out a permanent home for them eventually, though, you’re right,” Aziraphale said. “I suppose there’s always advertising in the local papers.”

“Not attached enough to bring ‘em back to London with you?”

“Don’t mistake my sense of duty for affection.”

Crowley felt as though he’d been slapped across the face. He’s talking about the fish, idiot. 

“You’re the one who said we ought to feed them in the first place, anyway,” Aziraphale was saying, evidently unaware of how his words had hit Crowley. “Beginning to regret it?”

Crowley was silent. If my insistence that we feed the fish had been the thing that killed you—if I’d repaid my life-debt by ending yours—

“Tank’s full,” he said.

Aziraphale gave him an odd look, but refrained from interrogating him in favour of carrying over the fish bowl and gently placing its residents in their proper habitat.

“There,” he said, standing back. “Much better, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure they’re very grateful,” Crowley said.

“Well, aren’t you dour today,” Aziraphale said, going over to wash his hands. 

“Sorry. I think it’s just…I mean, I know you don’t remember the last time we were here, but I do. It’s hard to get out of my mind, that’s all.”

“You are developing quite a penchant for discovering—well, not corpses exclusively, but—”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t continue.”

“Indeed,” Aziraphale said with feeling.

They got back in the car. Having named the cause of his dissatisfaction did not seem to have lessened it to any appreciable extent, and Crowley drove quickly and in silence, ignoring Aziraphale’s pointed coughs that were probably intended to communicate disapproval of his speed.

He saw the turn for Tadfield Manor and, not really thinking about what he was doing, blazed past it.

“Crowley? You’ve missed the turn.”

“We’re making a detour,” he said grimly, scanning the side of the road as they went, trying to find what he was looking for.

“For what?”

“For this,” Crowley said, spying a suitable-looking spot and pulling over.

“That’s a barn,” Aziraphale said, getting out of the car and looking at the nearby building. “An empty barn, I’m fairly sure. And this is a field,” he said, gesturing around them. “Is there something in the field? Please tell me you don’t expect us to go digging for clues, because I do draw the line somewhere—”

“No.” Crowley shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking straight at Aziraphale. “I, er. I want to fight you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just for practice. I—listen, Aziraphale, I’m being driven half-mad with worry, all right, I can’t stop thinking about someone attacking you again, and I just—I want to know you’ll be all right.”

“And I’ve told you, I can take care of myself,” Aziraphale said coldly. “Or don’t you remember seeing me fence?”

“Oh, are you expecting your assailant to toss you a foil? Look, I know you’re able to hold your own in a fair fight, more than that, but I mean real stuff. No Marquess of Queensberry rules. Playing dirty.”

“And what do you know about playing dirty?”

Crowley flushed. “Maybe you forgot, but I was in gaol.”

“You were getting in prison brawls?” Aziraphale demanded. “You?”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. And no, I didn’t get in any brawls, but I did pick up a thing or two in case I ever needed to defend myself.”

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, almost laughing, “so you’re going to show me what you’ve learnt, is that it? I can’t imagine that you —I mean, really, Crowley, do you think no-one’s ever tried to kill me before?”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know you then.”

“The fact remains that I can indeed fight in the real world, thank you very much, and I certainly don’t need whatever tips you picked up behind bars!”

“Right. Well. Then you shouldn’t have any trouble defeating me, yeah?”

“What?”

“If you’re so damn good. You can just go ahead and prove it to me.”

“I don’t have to prove—” 

Crowley grabbed him by the lapels and pushed him into the side of the barn. “Maybe not. Maybe you don’t have to prove it, all right. But don’t you want to? Show me how wrong I am?”

Aziraphale seemed surprisingly unfazed by this manhandling. “If you insist,” he said, and before Crowley quite knew what had happened they had switched positions, and he was pressed against the barn with Aziraphale’s hands close around his neck, pressing just lightly enough to allow Crowley to breathe unencumbered. 

“See?” Aziraphale said. “Perfectly capable.”

Crowley kneed him in the stomach.

Aziraphale’s grip reflexively loosened, and Crowley seized his advantage, flipping them around again, holding onto Aziraphale more firmly this time, wrapping a hand around each wrist and pinning them to the wall.

Aziraphale made a strange sound, and Crowley nearly let go out of worry that he’d actually hurt him before he realised that Aziraphale was laughing.

“Oh, that was playing dirty, indeed,” he said, catching his breath. “Very well, I shan’t scruple to hit below the belt, as it were, if I’m attacked again. Are you satisfied?”

“Not quite,” said Crowley.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Adrenaline still rushing through him, Crowley realised just how close he’d come to Aziraphale—closer perhaps than he’d ever been. Their bodies brushed in a dozen places, heat radiating between them. Their noses were practically touching, and Crowley could not only hear but feel the hitched rhythm of Aziraphale’s breathing. His neck was branded with the memory of Aziraphale’s hands around it just seconds ago, soft hands, improbably well-manicured for how long they’d been out here in Tadfield. 

Standing there, Crowley thought for a single wild instant that he might be about to finally throw good sense to the wind and kiss Aziraphale.

And then Aziraphale kissed him.

Crowley immediately dropped Aziraphale’s wrists, hands flying up to cradle Aziraphale’s face. Freed, Aziraphale wrapped his arms around Crowley’s waist, dragging him in somehow even closer. His breath was warm in Crowley’s mouth, and Crowley could feel a heart pounding, not entirely certain whether it was Aziraphale’s or his own.

Aziraphale pushed him gently away from the side of the barn, and Crowley stumbled backwards, clinging on to him. Aziraphale broke the kiss, panting, and lifted one hand from Crowley’s waist to rest at the back of his neck, his thumb stroking gently the same spots he’d been throttling earlier. He made a soft, wordless noise, and Crowley swayed in, intending to kiss him again.

Aziraphale came forward to meet him—and pushed him all the way back into the side of the barn, his hand now firm on Crowley’s throat, his other arm pinning his body to the wall. He rested his forehead against Crowley’s. They stood like that for a moment, Crowley neither able nor wishing to move. 

“Aziraphale…”

Something in Crowley’s tone must have brought Aziraphale to his senses, because he let go as though he’d been scalded and stepped back, straightening his clothing and pulling at his hair. “Well,” he said, haltingly, “it would appear that I can—play dirty too.”

Crowley sagged back against the side of the barn, grateful for its support. “You’re not really pretending that was part of the fight? ”

Aziraphale didn’t meet his eyes. “It certainly wasn’t—anything else.”

“No,” said Crowley, striding towards him, “I don’t believe that. And do you know why I don’t believe that? Because you know perfectly well how I feel and you know perfectly well how much power you have to hurt me, and it would be impossibly cruel of you to take advantage of it in that way. And I know you, Aziraphale, and I know you’re nowhere near capable of that level of cruelty.”

Aziraphale’s face had crumbled at impossibly cruel, and he sounded dangerously close to crying as he said, “You’ve no idea what I’m capable of.”

Crowley wanted very much to reach out and shake him by the shoulders, but stopped himself just in time, on the grounds that grabbing Aziraphale was what had led to this whole mess in the first place.

“I’m sorry for doubting you, all right? Is that what you want me to say? It was impertinent, and ridiculous, and stupid of me, and I know I’ve no right to demand anything of the sort from you.”

“I accept your apology.”

“Okay. All right. So I’ve admitted I was wrong to put you in that situation, now can you please admit that you kissed me because—”

“—No. It was an ill-advised calculation, that’s all—”

“There was nothing calculated about it!”

“I don’t wish to discuss it any further,” Aziraphale said stiffly.

Crowley gaped at him. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

“Come on, we’ve got—at least to talk about it. Please. So, fine, your position on…things…hasn’t changed, that’s—well, I don’t want to say it’s fine, but it’s what it is—but just then, you weren’t thinking about what was wisest, or what was best for me, or for you, or for either of our reputations—you were thinking about what you wanted, or maybe you weren’t thinking at all, but either way you’ve got to see that the consequences were…absolutely terrific, honestly. Weren’t they?”

Aziraphale raised his eyes Heavenward as though praying for divine patience, turned on his heel, and began walking briskly towards the road.

“What are you doing? Are you actually running away?”

“I’m going back to Tadfield Manor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Get in the car.”

Aziraphale turned to look at him. “I think I’ve had enough of letting you drive for the present.”

It had been three days—three interminable days since the incident by the barn, which Aziraphale refused to think of in any more specific terms, and, resultantly, three days since he’d spoken more than a few words to Crowley.

They’d seen each other at meals, of course, and Crowley had come to tell him that the telegram from Newt had come in, and Aziraphale had thanked him with all appropriate civility, but there had been nothing that might be called a substantive conversation.

Crowley had seemed to realise, after the first day or so, that pestering Aziraphale to explain his actions was unlikely to result in a favourable outcome, and had retreated, apparently content to let Aziraphale withdraw. 

Before too long, of course, there was likely to be some sort of development in the investigation, and then they would have to speak to each other again. He only hoped that by that time things would have simmered down somewhat—enough so that he could actually look at Crowley for more than two seconds together before remembering what had passed between them. What he, Aziraphale, had done.

It would have been so much better, he reflected miserably, if Crowley had done it, if Crowley had been the one to kiss him. If that had happened—not that Aziraphale had given the scenario an unreasonable amount of thought—then Aziraphale would very likely have enjoyed himself heartily for about ten seconds before breaking away in indignation, possibly slapping Crowley across the face for his trouble (this last depending upon certain other variable circumstances of the encounter). Crowley would have apologised and Aziraphale would have very graciously forgiven him and they could have moved on—or, rather, Aziraphale would probably still be thinking about it every single time their eyes met, but at least he’d have the moral high ground. And he wouldn’t have the terrible ball of guilt that sat heavy in his stomach, reminding him that this was all his fault.

He had been lying, of course, when he’d told Crowley that he’d only kissed him to gain the upper hand in their tussle. The most painful part of that lie (and Aziraphale remained selfishly grateful Crowley hadn’t believed it; he did not, indeed, want Crowley to think him capable of that level of cruelty) was that for a moment it had been so easy to imagine a world in which that would have been a clever tactic rather than a post facto justification. A world where they had, perhaps, been together for years, where deploying kisses as a method of ending arguments was well-established as fair game because there was no need to worry about what else they might mean, because there had been hundreds of kisses before, instead of this being the first.

First, and last.

Aziraphale was adamant in that. No matter how much more difficult it might be to withstand temptation now that he knew just how appealing its repercussions were, he remained convinced that the thing was as impossible as it had ever been.

Now, sitting alone in his rooms, he was attempting to divert his mind from the issue by applying it to the far less disquieting topic of murder. After all, the sooner he solved the case, the sooner this whole affair would be over and he’d be back home in London. He had briefly considered telephoning Raphael and asking to move back to his estate for the duration, but that would have been running away, a tacit acknowledgement that he no longer trusted himself to stay in the same house as Crowley. 

So Aziraphale remained at Tadfield Manor, rifling once again through the stack of papers they’d found in Greasy Johnson’s cottage in search of anything that might be useful.

Their previous lead, the idea that perhaps Greasy could have inherited some monetary portion of the estate as an illegitimate child, had been soundly quashed by the lawyer he’d asked to review old Gerald Dowling Senior’s will. Between that and established inheritance law, it was clear that as a bastard not mentioned by name, the boy had been entitled to absolutely nothing.

It seemed, therefore, vanishingly unlikely that there would be anything of note in these documents—not to mention that they’d already reviewed them, albeit superficially—but looking through them kept his mind busy and didn’t require leaving his rooms, so Aziraphale pressed on.

Paging through old Frank Johnson’s grocery lists, laundry bills, and various memoranda, he happened—again—upon the bundle of letters from Gerald Dowling to Greasy’s mother Clara that Crowley had found earlier.

My dear Clara:

I have been ill these last days—as I hope you have heard, lest you think me a scoundrel for abandoning our scheduled meeting. In truth, I can think of no medicine that could serve me so well as your presence, but I am persuaded it would be not only unwise for me to attempt deception in my current state of infirmity, but also for me to potentially expose you to my illness, should it prove contagious. Know, however, that my love for you fills my heart with a fever far stronger than the one that at present affects my body—and far less curable, I fear.

I have had little enough to amuse myself, confined as I am to my bed—you know I have never been a great reader, and illness has somewhat muddled my brain, making it still more difficult to battle through pages of Tolstoi or Dickens. This, of course, is also the reason that it has taken me so long to compose this letter to you—only now have I mustered enough clarity of thought to set down these words. I fear it may be longer still before it reaches you, as I do not know who I shall find to bear it.

But you have never been far from my thoughts—feeble as they presently are. I was dozing yesterday afternoon and found myself in a scene which I am unable to identify for certain as either dream or memory—it is likely some combination of the two. Perhaps your recollection is better than mine, and you can puzzle it out.

You and I were sitting together, in public, in a restaurant in London. It had taken me the better part of a month to persuade you to drive up with me, and then the better part of the drive to convince you that it was perfectly proper for us to be seen eating together—particularly as my entire family was safely dining at a friend’s, back in Oxfordshire. But my persuasions had at last proved successful (perhaps evidence as to this incident being merely a figment of my imagination), and although I had chosen the restaurant specifically for its quality, I had not tasted a single bite of the food, so caught up was I by watching you and speaking with you. You were rather nervous, upon our entrance, but as the meal went on you grew more confident—with time, and with wine—and before long you were laughing with me, talking in your usual animated way. Your words were meat enough for me, your smiles sufficient drink—I had not eaten a bite and yet I was completely sated.

But the clearest part of this possible-dream is what had happened after our waiter had cleared all our dishes away, and you and I were alone at the table, neither of us ready to leave and put the evening behind us. We were scarcely talking at all any longer, simply sitting there in one another’s company.

And I reached out across the table and took your hand in mine.

God knows I have felt that hand often enough before, Clara, that I have been fortunate enough to know the touch of your skin on my own. But a thousand more intimate touches, confined to secrecy and darkness, were as nothing compared to the pride and ecstasy I felt then, holding your hand out there in the world where anyone might see. 

Perhaps you will tell me I am remembering all wrong, that you would never have been so foolish as to reveal ourselves such in public, that I attempted and you repelled my touch. At present my foggy mind is unable to distinguish the truth.

I hope soon to be well enough to find you at our usual meeting place. Should I manage to get this letter to you before coming myself, though, I will permit myself to place in writing here—though I am certain you will say it is foolish—that I thank God every day for the felicity of having met you, and curse Him just as often for the circumstances which force our love into hiding.

I remain most faithfully yours,

G.

Something was scratching at the back door of Aziraphale’s mind, a not-quite-fully-formed thought lurking just at the periphery of his consciousness. There was something about this letter, something that maybe suggested—

Aziraphale sat bolt upright, nearly knocking over the mug of now-cold cocoa that he’d brought up from the kitchens earlier. These letters—Gerald Dowling’s letters—they were proper love letters, filled with genuine emotion and longing. They’d— he’d— assumed that Gerald and Clara’s affair had been a fling, a temporary attachment between two people of wildly differing social classes, the lord of the manor amusing himself with one of the local girls. Certainly, the tone of Gerald’s letters seemed to indicate that he’d believed the gulf in their stations to be an insurmountable obstacle. 

But what if Aziraphale had been wrong? What if he’d failed to consider that the attachment might have been strong enough to outweigh all else? What if Gerald Dowling Junior had actually fallen in love with Clara Johnson and married her? They’d both have been well over twenty-one; there wasn’t any legal obstacle to their marriage, certainly. The only things stopping them were…well, the usual. What people would say. What his family would think. What damage it might do to their respective reputations. 

If, however, Gerald and Clara had decided that they didn’t care, that they were in love and to Hell with all the rest of it, they were getting married—

Then Greasy Johnson wouldn’t have been Greasy Johnson at all, but Gerald Dowling III: the legitimate heir to Tadfield Manor and the entire Dowling estate—including the very large sum of money that Thaddeus Dowling had used to prop up his failing business.

Which was an extremely compelling motive for murder.

Chapter Text

His first thought was to tell Crowley. He’d even got up out of his chair and made it halfway to the door before remembering that he wasn’t presently speaking to Crowley.

But that was ridiculous—this new theory was certainly more important than any…personal issues they might be having. He needed to see him, to talk it over, hear what he thought—and when had that happened? When had Crowley’s opinion become as indispensable to him as his own? When had he grown so accustomed to having someone to talk things over with, someone whose mind worked in just the right way to catch on totally different ideas and yet to understand his own perfectly? When had he, Lord Aziraphale Eastgate, ever needed anyone else to confirm he was correct?

And yet it had happened, evidently, some time over the course of these last weeks. Well, Aziraphale told himself firmly, it would just have to…un-happen. He was going to solve this case and go back to London and resume detecting all on his own, just the way he’d done for years before Crowley came along.

Still, though, it would be rather unaccountably mean of him to cut Crowley out entirely from this discovery when he’d been so helpful with everything. It was only fair that he go over and share his thoughts. Assuming, of course, that Crowley was capable of keeping the conversation strictly business. Any mention of other recent…events, and Aziraphale would leave.

When he knocked on Crowley’s door, however, there was no answer. 

“He’s gone out, my lord,” Lesley said, approaching him. “About half an hour ago.”

“You don’t happen to know where?”

Lesley shook his head. “Just for a walk, he said. I imagine on the grounds, but I’m afraid he didn’t specify.”

“I see,” Aziraphale said, frowning. It was unexpectedly disheartening to find Crowley gone—and something in Aziraphale recoiled from the idea of wandering the grounds of Tadfield Manor searching for him. Perhaps it was misplaced pride—why should he be the one to search for Crowley— or perhaps Aziraphale simply no longer trusted himself alone in remote locations with Crowley. (Not that the barn had been particularly remote. Really, how completely idiotic of him, doing— that —in broad daylight, in full view of any passerby, a flagrant disregard for propriety—)

It appeared, then, that he would have to do without Crowley after all. Aziraphale returned to his own rooms and sank into an easy chair, reflecting. He had a theory, that was all—an idea without any evidence. Logically, then, the next step ought to be to find such evidence, to either prove or disprove the theory. 

There must have been a marriage licence, of course, if he were correct. But there hadn’t been anything of the sort in with the papers from the Johnson cottage, and if papers verifying Greasy’s legitimacy had been left at Tadfield Manor, it was more than likely that someone would have found and destroyed them—indeed, happening upon such documentation might well have been the catalyst for all his actions. And he could hardly go rooting through the private areas of the house without permission.

Of course, Aziraphale didn’t actually need to prove that Greasy Johnson had been legitimate. They weren’t precisely suing for his inheritance in a court of law. No, all he needed was something to go on, to show that he’d been killed for that reason. 

Perhaps Clara’s letters to Gerald? Those hadn’t been in the bundle from the Johnson house, and while none of Gerald’s letters alluded to marriage, perhaps hers had. But, given that the letters would have been sent either to Tadfield Manor (where they would have been destroyed if discovered) or to the French front, that wasn’t such a promising prospect.

No, he needed something outside of the house. If the marriage had been secret, they’d clearly applied for a special licence to avoid having to publish the banns (and if it had been carried out in a hurry before Gerald was called up, all the more reason to avoid delay). But it would have had to be recorded somewhere…

“The parish register,” Aziraphale said aloud. Yes—surely there must be a record of the marriage there. 

He stood up, ready to call for Newt, only to remember that he had yet to return from America. Very well, he’d just…drive himself, then. 

He was sorely tempted to wait for Crowley to return, so that they could go together, but he steeled himself, fixing in his mind the prospect of being able to greet Crowley with a complete and evidence-backed murder solution when they next met, rather than having to depend upon his aid to obtain it.

Aziraphale found his way to where the cars were garaged and stood for a moment, staring at his own (and Crowley’s, next to it, which proved at any rate that he couldn’t have gone far). 

“Are you leaving?”

He turned to see Warlock Dowling lurking just outside.

“Oh! Ah…well, I suppose that depends upon what one means by ‘leaving,’” Aziraphale said. “I have an errand to run, but I shall be returning later.”

Warlock nodded.

“I do hope it’s not been too much of an imposition,” Aziraphale said, “having us—me and Mr. Crowley, I mean—in your home. Of course this can’t have been easy for you—”

“It was a pretty rotten party,” Warlock agreed. “But it’s not much of a bother to me, having houseguests. I mean—I don’t know many people here, yet, so it’s actually sort of nice to have someone at the dinner table besides my parents. And Mr. Kerux. And I did like Mr. Crowley’s murder hunt, you know. Until the end.”

“Yes, it was clever, wasn’t it?” Aziraphale agreed. “I’m glad that we can at least provide conversation somewhat more stimulating than Mr. Kerux’s, though I can’t imagine there’s much competition there.”

Warlock grinned. “Yeah. Uh—sorry for interrupting, anyway, I just heard someone going out here and I wondered who it was. You probably want to get on with your errand now.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, turning back to his car and sighing heavily. “I believe I remember how this thing turns on—”

“Don’t you know how to drive?” Warlock asked.

“Yes!” Aziraphale said. “Theoretically. I mean, I have driven before. But—well, I live in London, and I’ve got a valet who likes to drive more than I do, so…it has been a while. I can do it, though. Of course.”

Warlock looked sceptical. “You sure?”

“No,” Aziraphale admitted, “but I really do need to go somewhere, so I don’t know that I’ve got much choice.”

Warlock’s eyes lit up. “Hang on. How far’re you going?”

“A few miles, that’s all,” Aziraphale said warily. “What…”

“I’ve got just the thing,” he said, and, disappearing behind one of the other cars, dragged something out from in back. “Look!” he said, proudly displaying the contraption. 

“What exactly am I looking at?”

“My old scooter!” Warlock said. “It’s dead easy to use, look, you don’t need to know anything. And it’s got an engine, goes faster than you’d think.”

“May I?” Aziraphale asked, reaching out to take hold of the scooter from Warlock. “It’s still in working order, I take it?”

“Oh yes,” Warlock assured him. “I haven’t used it much here, it’s true, but that’s mostly just because I haven’t got much of anywhere to go.”

Aziraphale examined the scooter. He was still slightly dubious of its functionality, but if he could make the thing work, it did seem significantly preferable to tackling the car.

“I’ll just…give it a go, then, shall I?” he asked, and, at Warlock’s enthusiastic nod, got on and travelled a few experimental feet. It wasn’t a terribly comfortable ride, but it was much easier to control than a car, and Aziraphale was able to work up a fairly decent head of speed before stopping.

“Seems like you’ve got it,” Warlock said.

“Yes, I rather think I have,” Aziraphale agreed. “Thank you very much. I’ll have it back to you in a few hours.”

Warlock waved a hand. “Keep it as long as you like.”

“In a few hours,” Aziraphale repeated firmly, and, waving awkwardly at the boy, started up the scooter again.

Warlock Dowling hadn’t precisely been following Lord Aziraphale around. He’d simply…noticed what he was doing. 

In truth, Warlock had been slightly disappointed by his lack of involvement in the investigation. After the initial shock of seeing the body, he’d found it rather thrilling to have a murder right in his own backyard. And to have it investigated by not only the famous amateur detective Lord Aziraphale, but also Anthony Crowley, whose books were heaps better than most of the other trash he’d read lately. But the detection had gone on, it turned out, largely without Warlock’s involvement, and he’d begun to feel slightly resentful of the fact that he wasn’t even involved in his very own murder mystery. 

So he’d been pleasantly surprised when, as things shook out, he’d been able to help Lord Aziraphale by loaning him his old scooter. Back in the house, Warlock amused himself by wondering where, exactly, he could have gone—he’d said it was only a few miles, so he wouldn’t be heading back to London. Perhaps that cottage the Johnson fellow had lived in? He’d overheard Lord Aziraphale and Mr. Crowley discussing some papers they’d found there.

Perhaps Mr. Crowley would know. Actually, it was odd, now that he thought of it, that Mr. Crowley hadn’t been along with Lord Aziraphale in the first place. He scarcely ever saw them apart, lately. 

Warlock left his rooms and ventured out into the hallway in search of either Mr. Crowley or, failing that, Lesley, who could be depended upon to know most of what went on inside Tadfield Manor.

He was arrested in his progress by the hall phone ringing. 

Warlock picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Lesley?” It was Lord Aziraphale’s voice.

“No, it’s, uh, it’s Warlock. Dowling,” he added, unnecessarily, because what other Warlock was Lord Aziraphale going to think it could possibly be?

“Oh! Thank you again for the scooter,” Aziraphale said. “I wonder if I could prevail upon you to do me another favour?”

“Sure,” Warlock said, feeling a spark of excitement kindle in his breast. “What is it?”

“I’m calling from the rectory at Tadfield parish,” Aziraphale said. “I wonder—is Mr. Crowley back yet?”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, could you please have a look for him, and let him know where I am and that he should come join me as soon as possible? I’ve something I want to show him.”

“Of course. I’ll look straightaway,” Warlock said. It wasn’t exactly detecting, but it was something to do. “Anything else?”

“No, that’s all, thank you. I do appreciate it,” Aziraphale said.

“No trouble at all,” Warlock said, and rang off.

“Who was that?”

Warlock turned to see his father standing at the other end of the hall, an unfamiliar and slightly unnerving expression on his face.

“Just Lord Aziraphale,” he said. 

“What did he want?”

“Just to let Mr. Crowley know he’s at Tadfield parish. Dad, I think he might’ve found some sort of clue, or something, I think they might actually be about to solve the mystery, isn’t that neat?”

“He’s at the church?” his father said, more to himself than to Warlock. “He’s at the church…” He strode down the hall and clapped Warlock on the shoulder. “Thanks,” he said, briefly, and walked away.

Aziraphale stood alone in the vestry, staring down at the open book in front of him. There it was, in plain English, clear as day, just where he had hoped he’d find it: Gerald Dowling, Jr, and Clara Johnson’s marriage, in the parish register for December 1913.

He was conscious of a vague sense of anti-climax. The heady excitement of his initial brainwave had subsided over the course of his trip to the church, and looking down at the confirmation of his suspicions, he couldn’t help but feel as though something were missing.

As though some one were missing. Oh, very well, he wanted to tell Crowley, what was the use of denying it even in his own mind? He’d given in immediately upon arriving at the parish, had asked the parish clerk for the use of his telephone before he’d even inquired about the register of marriages, all so that he could try to reach Crowley as quickly as possible.

Well, perhaps Warlock had managed to find him by now, and, with the way he drove, surely it wouldn’t be long…?

Aziraphale carefully closed the register. His first instinct was to ask the clerk whether he might take it with him back to Tadfield Manor, to be shown to the police as evidence, but he hesitated. After all, it had been safe here for twenty-two years. Bringing it back might attract precisely the wrong sort of attention. 

He heard the door of the church open, and turned expectantly, hoping it might be Crowley, wondering what he’d say if it turned out to be the clerk. 

It was neither. 

Thaddeus Dowling stood in the doorway, eyes fixed on the register in Aziraphale’s hands.

“Hello,” Aziraphale said, out of instinctive courteousness.

Dowling didn’t return the greeting. “What’s that?” he demanded, indicating the register. “Some kind of record book?” 

Aziraphale held it tightly against his chest. “Yes.”

“God damn it,” Dowling said, sounding more annoyed than angry. “Of all the stupid things…! Not my fault I don’t know every single bureaucratic detail about this damn country.”

“Perhaps not,” Aziraphale allowed, “but it is your fault that you murdered Greasy Johnson—or should I say Gerald Dowling III—to avoid his inheritance coming to light. Isn’t it?”

“It’s not like anyone actually wanted him to have the estate,” Dowling said. “My uncle never even knew he existed. He wasn’t raised a Dowling. His name wasn’t even Dowling. He’d have been an absolutely worthless heir. Not like me. I’m a businessman, I know the value of hard work, I deserve Tadfield Manor.”

“Yes, I’m certain that an orphan who supported himself through manual labour didn’t know the value of hard work,” Aziraphale said.

Dowling made a face. “Don’t get smart with me. The idea of you standing there and preaching to me about hard work, you silly little aristocrat with your bowties and your soft hands, it’s sickening—”

“Oh, now, I don’t think there’s any need to get personal—”

“You and your writer boyfriend, damn shirker that he is, couldn’t be bothered to fight in the War but didn’t have any trouble offing his ex—”

“Don’t you dare insult him,” Aziraphale snapped, taking an involuntary step towards Dowling. “That’s a lie and you know it.”

Dowling shrugged. “I think we’ve done enough talking, in any case,” he said, advancing towards Aziraphale. “Give me that book. Now.”

“Absolutely not,” Aziraphale said, taking a few steps back. He reached a hand out behind him and felt for the wall. “Why bother trying to destroy it? Now that the truth is known…”

“Known by you.”

Aziraphale continued feeling his way along the wall behind him. “Not only me,” he said, lying. He hesitated on the verge of naming Crowley—after all, if Dowling did have some ridiculous plan to silence anyone who knew his secret, the last thing Aziraphale wanted was to drag Crowley into danger along with him.

“I think I’ll take my chances with that,” Dowling said, and lunged towards him.

Aziraphale’s hand landed at last upon the door to the nave, and he turned quickly towards it, heaving it open and dashing through.

He slammed the door behind him, but Dowling caught it, and they struggled back and forth for a moment before Aziraphale realised that even if he did manage to shut the door, there wasn’t any sort of proper lock that might have kept him contained to the vestry.

He let go of the door and, still holding the register tucked under his arm, dashed into the nave, furious with himself for how he was already breathing hard. 

The nave was decorated in a fine High Church style that Aziraphale might have appreciated under other circumstances. Light flowed in through the coloured-glass windows, illuminating the empty pews. Aziraphale glanced around wildly. The door to the outside was visible at the far end of the room, but what good would that do him? Dowling had no doubt taken his car there, and Aziraphale stood no chance of evading him on the scooter. If only Crowley were there, Crowley and his hell-for-leather driving…

But Crowley wasn’t there, and neither was the parish clerk, for that matter, who might have been able to lend some assistance. (Or perhaps he’d only have been an additional difficulty. The man hadn’t exactly given off the impression that he’d be pugilistically gifted.)

Dowling had made it into the nave, now, and was advancing towards him. Aziraphale grabbed a hymnal from one of the pews, and, holding it flush against the register, managed to create a sort of shield. 

Dowling, thankfully, had evidently never learned not to telegraph his punches, because once he’d reached striking distance Aziraphale had ample warning to rear back himself and slam the two books into his oncoming fist, throwing Dowling off balance and causing him to stumble backwards. 

Aziraphale wasted no time in seizing this advantage, using his makeshift weapon to whack Dowling again, this time directly on the head. Dowling fell on his rear, and Aziraphale wound up to hit him again, but stopped short at the last second. It wasn’t as though he were about to beat Dowling unconscious using a couple of books, was it? The pen might have been mightier than the sword, but its products left something to be desired as a blunt instrument.

He did need to knock Dowling out, though, and he couldn’t very well put down the register, or Dowling might simply pick it up and flee with it. But then how…

Aziraphale was borne back to three days ago, to the barn, to Crowley, kneeing him in the stomach—

Playing dirty.

Of course. He didn’t have to leave on the scooter simply because he’d come that way. No, if he could incapacitate Dowling, not even knock him out, just knock him down, Aziraphale could escape in his car. 

Dowling got to his feet. “Give me the book,” he said, and grabbed at the register.

Aziraphale, without letting go, lifted a leg and administered a strategically placed kick.

Dowling’s grip on the register loosened instantly, and he stumbled back again. 

Aziraphale looked towards the door to the vestry, finding that all his paths to it were blocked either by pews or by Dowling himself. So he turned and ran full-throttle in the other direction, seeing an opening just to the left of the altar and hoping to God that it would be another door to the outside.

It wasn’t. Aziraphale skidded to a stop, confronted with racks of lit votive candles and a statue of the Virgin.

High Church, indeed.

He turned, back on the hunt for the exit, and found the entrance blocked by Dowling, who had apparently recovered more quickly from Aziraphale’s kick than he’d anticipated. 

Dowling lunged, Aziraphale darted reflexively out of the way—

And Dowling crashed into the candles.

Crowley walked up the drive to Tadfield Manor, strides lengthening as he went. He’d been vacillating between emotions over the last few days and had finally, it seemed, settled down, albeit in what felt like a precarious state.

On the one hand, Aziraphale had kissed him, which was, after all, the outcome Crowley had been striving towards ever since he’d learnt that Aziraphale had kept his letter. This was only slightly marred by Aziraphale’s ridiculous insistence that he had done it as part of some sort of ploy, as well as the way he’d stormed off afterwards. It would have been rather too much to ask for Aziraphale to have been instantly converted to Crowley’s point of view on the matter. No, Crowley had been more inclined to consider that kiss as a sign that, perhaps, passion was beginning to gain the upper hand over prudence when it came to Aziraphale’s inner struggle. 

More troubling, though, was the way in which Aziraphale had all but avoided him ever since the incident by the barn. Crowley had been tempted to push, to insist they talk about it—he had, after all, promised to be a nuisance—but something had seemed to tell him that it might not, at this point, be wise. It was possible that Aziraphale was so shaken by what had occurred that he might respond to any further overtures with the absolute cessation of all communication. So he’d gone against every instinct he had and given Aziraphale space. 

It was, however, rather difficult to give someone space when you were staying in the same house—hence, the just-concluded walk. Crowley opened the door and stepped into the foyer of Tadfield Manor, pausing for a moment while he decided what to do next.

He was just about deciding that it might be worth it to go say a very non-pushy hello to Aziraphale—maybe ask about the case—when Warlock Dowling ran up to him, shoes squeaking on the polished floors.

“Mr. Crowley!”

“Yes?”

“Lord Aziraphale called asking for you. He said to tell you he’s at Tadfield parish and that you should go there because he wants to show you something. Er—as soon as possible.”

“Right,” Crowley said, fighting the impulse to tip Warlock. “Uh—thanks. He didn’t say what, by any chance?”

Warlock shook his head. “He sounded awfully excited, though. I think it’s probably a clue.” He pronounced the last word with reverence.

“I think you’re probably right,” Crowley said. He wondered, for a moment, whether he ought to ask Warlock if he wanted to come along. The boy—Crowley couldn’t help thinking of him as such even though he was twenty-one; he seemed younger—certainly didn’t have enough to do. A bit of employment might have done him a world of good.

But this was murder, and, more to the point, it was also Aziraphale, and Crowley was hardly in a frame of mind to be concerned with Warlock Dowling’s well-being above those other considerations. 

He therefore took his leave of Warlock with only a brief word of thanks, and went directly back out of the house the way he’d come, this time crossing the drive to head to where the cars were garaged.

He was somewhat surprised to find Aziraphale’s car still there, until he remembered that Newt wasn’t yet returned from America and therefore wasn’t around to chauffeur Aziraphale. 

But then how had he got to the parish? It wasn’t terribly far, and Aziraphale had certainly made it clear that he didn’t mind walking, but…

Crowley glanced around at the other cars. Perhaps he’d asked someone else to drive him?

This notion engendered a wholly irrational burst of jealousy, which Crowley instantly fought down. Of course he wouldn’t ask you to drive, he hates your driving and anyway he’s been avoiding you for days, it’s not as though he was jumping at the chance to be alone in close proximity to you. Although, if Aziraphale was asking for him now…that must have meant that whatever he’d discovered was important enough to outweigh his reluctance to keep his distance from Crowley.

All the more reason to hurry there.

Crowley got in the car, still idly wondering how Aziraphale had travelled to the parish.

As he pulled away from the other cars, something struck him, and he braked for a minute, scanning the area again, just to check…

Thaddeus Dowling’s car was missing.

It seemed the height of unlikeliness that Aziraphale had asked Dowling, of all people, to give him a lift. Why, then…?

Crowley sped away from Tadfield Manor, trying with all his might not to jump to conclusions. Dowling might have taken his car out for any number of reasons, after all. There was no reason to think…

Still, though, he drove even faster than he was accustomed to (in a way that Aziraphale, no doubt, would have heartily disapproved of), feeling a pit of dread growing in his stomach—a feeling altogether too familiar from the time he’d gone down to Greasy Johnson’s cottage and found Aziraphale unconscious and bloodied on the floor.

When he reached Tadfield parish, then, he was barely even shocked to discover that the church was on fire.

Aziraphale coughed. The fact that the building was on fire all round them was bad enough, but the smoke was making it damn near impossible to see what he was doing.

Fortunately, Dowling appeared to be just as handicapped as Aziraphale, and had proven wholly unable to either successfully attack him or get his hands on the register.

Aziraphale had squirmed underneath one of the pews, hoping that the combination of smoke and confusion would be enough to prevent Dowling from spotting him. 

But he couldn’t very well remain there forever, not with smoke filling his lungs and the air inside the church growing hotter and hotter. If he couldn’t manage to knock Dowling down long enough to find the exit, neither of them would be making it out.

He poked his head out just slightly from under the pew, scanning the nave for any sign of Dowling. He saw a fuzzy figure near the altar that might have been him, or might simply have been another statue. 

The figure moved—Dowling, then—and Aziraphale reacted, rolling out from underneath the pew. He didn’t know why Dowling was up near the altar—perhaps he couldn’t see which was he was going in the smoke—but that was about as far from the door back to the vestry as he could possibly be, which meant that now was Aziraphale’s best chance to get there and get out without running into him.

He crouched low to the ground, scuttling forward in what must have seemed a very undignified manner, in an attempt to both evade Dowling’s vision and stay below the smoke. But Aziraphale’s knees weren’t what they had been twenty years ago, and he hadn’t got far before the ache in his thighs became nearly unbearable. Gritting his teeth, he straightened, joints cracking as he stiffly moved to his feet. 

He covered his face with his free hand, making an extremely ineffective sort of gas mask that nevertheless seemed better than nothing. The other hand still gripped the register, which thankfully seemed only slightly the worse for wear.

He was nearly to the door to the vestry when a clumsy blow slammed into his back, nearly knocking him down.

Aziraphale turned to see Dowling, who looked possibly even worse than Aziraphale felt, stumbling towards him. 

“You hit me in the back,” Aziraphale said, momentarily outraged, before his common sense asserted itself and pointed out that someone who’d slit his own nephew’s throat to gain a fortune wasn’t precisely likely to scruple at unsavoury tactics. Not to mention that it must have been Dowling who’d attacked him while he’d been feeding the fish, who’d knocked him out with his own torch and left him laying there for Crowley to find…

Oh, Crowley was going to be absolutely furious with him, sneaking off to the church by himself when he knew perfectly well what had happened the last time he’d gone off on his own. He couldn’t let Dowling win here, he just couldn’t, not when he remembered the look on Crowley’s face as he’d described seeing Aziraphale in the ruins of the fish tank. Aziraphale couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him like that again, frightened and worried and frustrated by his own powerlessness. 

Dowling came for him again, and Aziraphale, cursing softly under his breath and then sending up a mental prayer of apology for daring to do so in a church, let the register fall to the ground. He blocked Dowling’s punch with one hand, grabbing his collar with the other and using his leg to sweep Dowling’s leg out from under him.

Dowling went down hard, and Aziraphale, with the last bits of strength left in him, sprinted all-out for the door.

He heaved it open, stumbling through the vestry and towards the door to the outside. He caught his breath for a moment, but the air in the vestry was growing too warm for him to feel easy lingering there. 

Just as he was about to lunge for the door, it swung open on its own, and Crowley darted through, hair mussed and anxiety writ on his face.

“Aziraphale!”

“Crowley! Crowley, they—they were married—Gerald Dowling and Clara Johnson—it’s in the parish register, I had it, but—Dowling—” He couldn’t get any more words out, the combination of all the smoke he’d inhaled and the demands of the last few minutes proving too much for his lungs. 

Aziraphale hacked out another cough, lurched forward, and collapsed directly into Crowley’s outstretched arms.

Aziraphale stirred. Crowley, who had nearly fallen asleep himself while waiting, almost pulled his hand away from Aziraphale’s, but, upon a moment’s reflection, decided to keep hold of it. He’d been afraid, the last time, to let Aziraphale know how horribly sentimental he’d been, holding his hand while he slept, but it wasn’t as though Aziraphale wasn’t fully aware by now of just how sentimental Crowley could get.

Aziraphale’s eyes opened, and he peered dreamily at Crowley. “Oh dear,” he said, after a few slow blinks. “Here again.”

“It’s almost like you didn’t learn a damn thing after last time,” Crowley said.

“Must I demonstrate my self-defence abilities for you again?”

“You seemed to enjoy it the last time.”

Aziraphale flushed slightly at this and pulled his hand away from Crowley, who let it go with no little regret. “Did Dowling make it out?” he asked.

“Regrettably, yes. The parish clerk called the fire brigade as soon as he noticed the smoke, and they got there just after I did. They managed to save Dowling and a fair portion of the church itself.”

“Oh good,” Aziraphale said. “And he—I mean, he has been arrested, yes?”

“Oh yeah. After tangling with you he wasn’t in any condition to run for it, and Inspector Tyler was there before he’d managed to recover. Being held just for assault now, but I imagine they’ll add murder once all the evidence sorts itself out. I think everyone but you’s still a bit fuzzy on what exactly happened.”

“I’m still a bit fuzzy,” Aziraphale admitted, putting a hand to his head. “I did manage to tell you they were married, yes? Gerald Dowling and Clara Johnson?”

“You did manage that. And I’m as capable of putting two and two together as the next person, so I told Tyler that made Greasy Johnson the legitimate heir to Tadfield Manor and the whole estate.”

“Yes. Exactly.” Aziraphale sighed. “I do wish I had managed to keep hold of that register. I don’t regret letting it go, not precisely, but the entire reason I went to the church was to get it to have as evidence, and now I’m certain it’s been burnt to cinders, and although I’ve no reason to believe Tyler will doubt my word—” He broke off and eyed Crowley suspiciously. “What’re you grinning at?”

“Oh,” Crowley said, feeling—and no doubt sounding—extremely pleased with himself, “only because I got it.”

“You—”

“I got it. The register. Right after you told me about it. I went back in and found it. Wanted to present it to you in a properly dramatic fashion, but you weren’t really in much of a condition to appreciate it at the moment. It’s with the police now, so. Uh. Anyway. I got it.”

“You—oh, Crowley, thank you!” 

“I’d say any time,” Crowley said, “but I’m worried it might be misconstrued as encouragement for you to keep on rushing into burning buildings all willy-nilly—”

“Oh, no. It hadn’t caught on fire yet when I went in. No, my dear, I do believe you were the one who defied all common sense and went running, as you say, willy-nilly into a burning building.”

“Oh, God,” Crowley said, horrified. “I really did do that, didn’t I?”

“Do you feel suitably heroic?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley looked at him and saw the sparkle in his eyes, heard again the way his voice had cracked on oh, Crowley, thank you, and grinned.

“Yeah, actually. I think maybe I do.”

Chapter Text

Among the disadvantages to accusing one’s host of murder was the distinct atmosphere of awkwardness that descended over Tadfield Manor after Thaddeus Dowling’s arrest. Harriet had, evidently, been entirely ignorant of her husband’s actions, and professed not to condone them whatsoever, but the plain truth of the matter was that it was thanks to Aziraphale that her family had been completely destroyed, and she remained accordingly frosty.

It thus became quickly clear that Aziraphale would do well to leave Tadfield Manor as soon as possible. Thankfully, the residence of the Duke of Arcadia remained as open to him as ever. A call to Raphael explaining the situation had resulted in a speedy invitation, and once Aziraphale was pronounced well enough to be moved, he’d had the (finally-returned) Newt drive him and his belongings over.

He’d wrestled for some time with the question of whether or not he ought to invite Crowley along, too. After all, he’d spent the past several weeks in a state of near-continuous agitation brought on by the circumstance of their staying in the same house—of the knowledge of Crowley’s proximity, and proclivity, and just how little Aziraphale would have to do to take advantage of both… It seemed the height of folly not to jump at the chance to escape. Furthermore, after his own recent behaviour, Aziraphale feared that asking Crowley to stay with him might seem unfortunately suggestive. The last thing he wanted was to give Crowley the wrong idea—even if Aziraphale himself was no longer quite so certain about whether it was, exactly, the wrong idea. 

Yet, what proved a more compelling argument than either of these considerations was the simple fact that Crowley was very nearly as implicated in Thaddeus Dowling’s capture as Aziraphale was. He had, after all, been the one to secure the parish register, which might very well prove to be a key piece of evidence in the trial. Tadfield Manor, then, had become almost as inhospitable for him as it was for Aziraphale, and Aziraphale couldn’t bring himself to abandon Crowley there while he fled to safety himself. 

So they’d gone over together—well, not together, not even in the literal sense, as Crowley had driven his own car, but they’d departed and arrived contemporaneously—to stay with Raphael until matters were settled enough that they were no longer needed in Oxfordshire. 

“I’m terribly grateful, you know,” Aziraphale told his brother once they’d settled in and were safely ensconced on one of Raphael’s many sofas, enjoying a much-needed drink. “I thought if I had to purposefully not-stare at Harriet Dowling one more time I might go mad.”

“Not to mention Warlock,” Crowley put in. “That boy’s been in a hell of a state since his father was taken—and of course he was the one who’d told him where you’d gone, and then me… I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s somehow managed to twist it into all being his fault.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed, “I don’t quite like leaving him, to be completely honest with you, but it is dreadfully awkward being around him at present. But we shall have to come up with some way to help him.”

He hadn’t meant the we, it had just sort of slipped out, but the only indication Crowley gave that he’d processed it at all was a longer-than-usual blink.

“All right, then,” said Raphael, seemingly oblivious to any unintentional implications in Aziraphale’s wording, “let’s have it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Come on. I can tell you’re absolutely dyin’ to have your little moment where you explain everything that happened, soup-to-nuts, and I want to hear it. Go on, then.”

Aziraphale coughed. “Oh, well—” He glanced at Crowley.

Crowley grinned. “He’s right, isn’t he? You’re absolutely bursting with how clever you’ve been.”

“Actually,” Aziraphale admitted, “I don’t feel as though I’ve been particularly clever at all over this case. But I can explain it as far as I understand, if you like.”

Raphael got up and went over to the end table. “Can I get you another one, Crowley? I warn you that ‘as far as I understand’ will have us sitting here for quite some time.”

“Oh, I’ll be able to stand up to it, I expect. After all, the first several times I met your brother, I literally couldn’t escape.”

Aziraphale braced himself for the wave of guilt that usually washed over him whenever he was reminded of the circumstances under which he had met Crowley, and was surprised to find that it never came. 

“If the two of you join forces in mocking me I shan’t stand a chance,” he said, instead. “Very well, then.” He took a sip of his drink. 

‘Thaddeus Dowling, as we know, was born in America and began his career as a businessman there. As Newt uncovered in his research, he and Gabriel Kerux made some unfortunate investment decisions and found themselves in arrears. That was about two years ago, and that’s also when he received word that old Mr. Dowling—Gerald Dowling Senior, his uncle—had died, and Thaddeus, as the nearest heir, was to inherit Tadfield Manor and the rest of the estate.

“It seems that although Tadfield Manor itself was rather more of a liability than an asset, Gerald Senior’s wife had inherited a tidy fortune of her own, and as she had predeceased him the money went to her husband upon her death, absolutely, and to his heir after him. So actually the inheritance was a critical boon for Thaddeus, given the situation he’d got himself into with his business. But he must have been attached to the idea of himself as a self-made businessman—or perhaps he didn’t want to scare off investors—or it could even be that he didn’t want to acknowledge he’d needed English money, given the general resentment he seems to have had towards the country. Whatever his reasons, he kept up the appearance that it was his own money, his own profits being used to finance his lifestyle here, when actually he’d have been in quite a jam without the Dowling family money.”

Raphael snorted. “I could’ve told you that. The amount of fellows I went to school with who insisted that they’d worked for everything they’d got when all the while their parents were sending monthly cheques to supplement their income as an advertising clerk, or what-have-you…”

“You’re one to talk, Duke of Arcadia,” Aziraphale said.

Raphael, good humour seemingly undisturbed by this, only smiled. “Oh yes. But I’ve no trouble admitting I’m a bit of an idiot, what? Thank God for you, anyway. Shows the old inbreeding’s not gone too far just yet.”

“In any event,” Aziraphale said, after a moment, “Dowling didn’t go putting it about that he’d inherited anything beyond the house itself. But at some point in the last two years—I’m not certain when exactly—he discovered, probably in the midst of sorting through the financial documents related to the estate, the marriage certificate belonging to Gerald Dowling Junior and Clara Johnson, and realised that none of it was supposed to belong to him after all.

“This next bit’s mostly speculation, based upon some things that Dowling said to me at the church and then later to Inspector Tyler. He doesn’t seem to have destroyed the certificate right away. I’m not certain why. Perhaps he thought he needed time to decide upon the best course of action. It seemed clear that Greasy Johnson himself was ignorant of his own parentage, and there was no immediate danger from that quarter.

“What seems to have changed things is Harriet Dowling hiring the boy to do some odd jobs around the house. He was killing spiders in the study where Dowling had hid the documents, and Dowling, not knowing he’d been sent in there, saw him leaving the room and jumped to the conclusion that Greasy now either knew or might know the truth about himself. I am personally inclined to believe that he did not, given that he seems to have changed his behaviour not at all after the incident, but of course we can’t be certain.”

“Not exactly a high point for Dowling in terms of logic, was it?” Crowley said. “I mean—it’s not as though Greasy threatened him or anything, right? He just…thought he knew because he’d been in the room alone for a bit?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed, “Dowling’s conduct does seem to have been somewhat irrational. That’s part of what made it so difficult to determine it was him, ironically. We kept trying to make it make sense, even though God knows I’ve seen enough of humanity to know that it frequently does no such thing.” He smiled slightly, and was rewarded by an answering smile from Crowley. Raphael’s glance darted back and forth between them. Aziraphale felt a pang of anxiety—were his feelings that obvious? —but it passed quickly, and he was surprised to discover that he didn’t actually care. It was only Raphael, after all. He wasn’t likely to get the wrong idea about why Aziraphale had looked into the Ferno case. 

“Well,” Aziraphale said hurriedly, “Dowling immediately destroyed the certificate, but that evidently wasn’t enough for him. He couldn’t be certain that another piece of evidence showing Greasy’s identity might not pop up somewhere else—which he was quite correct about, as it happens, given the letters that we found at the cottage. No, the only way to be safe was to eliminate the boy himself.

“He chose his own son’s birthday party as the day for it.”

Raphael grimaced. “Rather—well, it seems a bit silly to say in bad taste about a murder, but—rather heartless, wasn’t it?”

“He knew he wanted to kill Greasy at Tadfield Manor, and the birthday party was the best opportunity simply because of how many other people had the opportunity. Far more people coming and going meant that Greasy’s arrival would be less noticed, and it also opened up the possibility that it might have been one of the other guests who’d killed him.

“He undid this bit of cleverness by stealing Gabriel Kerux’s razor, which couldn’t very well have been taken by anyone who wasn’t actually staying at the house. Or perhaps he simply changed his mind from introducing the uncertainty of the many party guests to actively framing Gabriel. 

“On the day of the party, Crowley’s murder game was to start at 2. Dowling asked Greasy to come by at 2:30 under the pretext of a gardening job—a good excuse to meet him out-of-doors, and also a reason for Dowling to show up in a gardener’s apron and gloves. They arranged to meet by the bench where Cr—where he was found, and between 2:30 and 2:45 Dowling slit his throat. It was risky—he might have been seen—and indeed he actually was seen, by Crowley, heading into the greenhouse. 

“As Crowley and I managed to deduce some time ago, Dowling entered the greenhouse by way of the gardening shed, where he took off the apron and gloves that he’d used to protect his own clothing from getting bloodstained. They’re still there, in fact—or were, I expect Inspector Tyler has removed them for evidence by now. 

“Dowling waited till the coast was clear and then came out of the greenhouse to rejoin the party. I’m not certain when he realised he’d forgot to leave the razor there—but I believe it was after Crowley and I initially looked at the gazebo, as I don’t think we’d have missed it if it had been there then. He could quite easily have snuck back out at any point and left the razor for the police to find—certainly safer than keeping it with him, and I imagine he was eager to push suspicion onto Gabriel.

“What with the police’s investigations—not to mention ours—Dowling hadn’t had a chance to properly examine the Johnson cottage, and with how much time Crowley and I were spending there, he became worried that perhaps there was a copy of the marriage certificate, or the birth record—something that we’d find and use to put it together. And, in fact, he wasn’t so far wrong, as that’s where we found the letters from Gerald to Clara that eventually tipped me off that they might have been married.

“But he didn’t want us poking round, and so when I was alone feeding the fish he took advantage of the opportunity to attack me.”

“Rather silly of him, wasn’t it?” Raphael said. “I mean, seems to me a jolly great whack on the head’s more likely to make you think you’re on the right track.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I don’t believe he was thinking with anywhere near that much clarity at the time. His nerves must have been shot all to Hell with us living in his actual house—he couldn’t let his guard down for a moment. And so while, really, none of this was what I’d call a well-planned murder, Dowling just grew more erratic as time went on, culminating in him assaulting me at the church. That certainly wasn’t wise—after all, the revelation of Greasy Johnson’s identity only proved Dowling had a damn good motive for the murder, not that he’d actually done it—but I imagine he was feeling desperate to do something, anything.”

“So he tried to attack you again,” Raphael said. He looked at Crowley. “It’s a good job you went after him, then, what? Otherwise we might have got a flambéed Aziraphale.”

Crowley shook his head. “He’d just about made it out on his own by the time that I got there. Roast Lord not showing up on the menu anytime soon, I’m afraid.”

“ Must you talk about eating me right before dinner?” Aziraphale asked, without rancour. “And Crowley’s not giving himself enough credit, he may not have actually saved me but he did save the marriage register, which I certainly wasn’t in any condition to do.”

Raphael laughed. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take on a commission for me, then, Mr. Crowley? Have a bit of a break from writing your books and follow my brother around, helping get him out of trouble whenever he’s poking his nose into things he’s convinced won’t turn dangerous? I can pay very well, you know.”

Aziraphale flushed, irritated. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, thank you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of implyin’ otherwise. But you’ve got to admit you have a tendency to leave just a smidge of destruction in the wake of your heavenly vengeance.”

“I’m afraid that I, too, am much better at making messes than at cleaning up after them,” Crowley said lightly. “Much as it pains me to deny your generous offer…”

While Raphael laughed again, Crowley turned to look at Aziraphale. “Besides,” he said, in an undertone, “I’d follow you anywhere for free.”

He got up to refill his drink, leaving Aziraphale to absorb what he’d just said.

The frightening thing was that he was fairly certain Crowley meant it.

Warlock Dowling was, if not the absolute last person Crowley would have expected to call him at the Duke of Arcadia’s house, certainly extremely low on the list. 

He acknowledged this almost immediately: “I’m sorry if this is awkward,” he said, “but I don’t—I didn’t know who else to call.”

“How can I help you?” Crowley asked. He felt slightly guilty towards Warlock, even though he knew perfectly well that whatever troubles he might be undergoing had very little to do with any of Crowley’s actions. But he, and, more to the point, Aziraphale, had in fact been immediately responsible for the breakup of Warlock’s family, and that sort of thing did create a sense of obligation, however irrational.

“Mother’s selling the house,” Warlock said, “because, well—I mean, you wouldn’t like to live in a place your husband had murdered someone in, I expect—and she’s thinking of moving to London and getting a flat. She’d go back to the States except that we don’t know—just yet—what’ll happen with Father. I mean—you know.”

Hanging, very likely, Crowley thought, and wondered momentarily just how many men had swung as a result of Aziraphale’s interference. And now, his. “Yes?” he said, prompting the boy onward.

“And, well, I decided that I want a change. A fresh start. I started college over in America, but I never finished—Father didn’t think it was necessary for a businessman—and I thought, well, Father’s not—Father, I mean to say, doesn’t have much say in the matter anymore—and so I wrote to Oxford and asked them if I could transfer and they’ve written back to say yes.”

“Oh,” Crowley said. “Er—congratulations?”

“Thanks,” Warlock said. “I’m hoping to start soon, but, well, the thing is, I don’t have a driver’s licence in this country, and neither does my mother, and I…don’t really know very many other people just yet…”

Crowley remembered the scant few attendees at the birthday party, and made a quiet, hopefully vaguely-sympathetic noise.

“So I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind bringing me,” Warlock finished. “I’d take a bus, but, well, I’ll need my things, and…”

“Of course I’ll do it,” Crowley said, glad of the opportunity to assuage some of that nebulous guilt. He paused, thinking, for a moment. “But— I actually have a favour to ask you, then.”

“Yes?”

“How do you feel about tropical fish?”

Crowley hadn’t been at all certain of whether Aziraphale would agree to come with him to pick up Warlock and bring him to Oxford, but he’d agreed with surprising eagerness.

“I’m glad to see him taking his life into his own hands,” he’d told Crowley. “And—I do wonder whether we might not be able to help him even more?”

“What do you mean?”

“That group of students who were there the day of the party. The one I fenced with—Adam, I think—well, it might make things a bit easier for young Warlock if he already knew some other people at Oxford, don’t you think?”

“You’re suggesting we facilitate an introduction? A little Platonic matchmaking?”

“It’s not as though I’m expecting them to become bosom companions, you see,” Aziraphale explained, “but just to be going on with…”

“It’s not a bad thought,” Crowley had agreed, and they’d managed to get in touch with Adam Young a few days before heading back to Tadfield Manor to collect Warlock.

Adam and…the other ones, Cheese and Sticky Hands and The Girl, as Crowley privately thought of them, were waiting in the appointed place when they arrived. Two of them had promptly taken up the fish tank from Crowley’s car—Crowley protested this as wholly unnecessary while being secretly glad he and Aziraphale wouldn’t have to risk throwing their backs out. 

Adam and Warlock had eyed each other somewhat warily at first— “Only to be expected,” Aziraphale had said, sotto voce, “it’s not as though they’ve much in common just yet” — but by the time everything had been unpacked and Aziraphale started making vague noises about wanting to get back before it grew too dark, all five of the young people were chatting amiably, chiefly about the fish.

“That was a good thought you had,” Aziraphale said, as they walked back to the car. “About the fish. I confess I was a bit worried over what might happen to them. Somehow I don’t think they’d quite have fit in with the decor at my flat.”

“Would’ve looked a bit odd next to the stacks of old books and things I assume you’ve got there,” Crowley agreed.

Aziraphale glanced at him. “Oh,” he said, after a moment. “You know—it’s silly of me, really, but—somehow I can’t believe you haven’t been to my flat.”

Crowley shoved his hands into his pockets. “That an invitation?”

Aziraphale didn’t respond, and the flicker of hope that had sparked to life inside Crowley was promptly snuffed out.

They walked in silence for another minute before Aziraphale said, voice entirely different than it had been before, “It’s really not in any danger of getting dark soon. I confess I only mentioned that as a convenient excuse to get away. I do like that lot, but they’re so…”

“Young?”

“Exuberant,” Aziraphale amended. “At any rate. We can head back to Raphael’s now, of course, but if you like I thought we might stop in at the Botanic Garden. We’re not far away, I don’t think.”

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “Uh—sure.”

“Excellent,” Aziraphale said, and smiled without looking at him.

The garden was only about an hour away from closing for the day, and, consequently, they had the place nearly to themselves.

Crowley made a few desultory attempts at conversation, but was met with polite yet inconsequential responses at every turn. It was evident that Aziraphale was turning something over in his own mind, and Crowley forced himself to remember that the man had just finished a murder case that had involved multiple attempts on his life and that he was very probably preoccupied with that rather than anything having to do with Crowley.

Still, though, he fancied he caught Aziraphale glancing at him from time to time as they stopped by a fern or bent to look at a flower. 

At length, Aziraphale spoke. “I heard from Inspector Tyler yesterday. Apparently matters with the case are progressing such that neither of us shall be needed for very much longer. I’ve told Raphael that I’ll be leaving at the end of this week. Of course I’m certain he’d be delighted to have you stay longer if you like—”

Crowley shook his head. “Oh no. If nothing else, I’ve got to get back to my plants. That neighbour—probably doing her best, and all that, but I don’t entirely trust her.”

“Afraid she won’t take sufficient care of them?”

“Afraid she’ll let them get full of themselves,” Crowley corrected him. “No, I’ll leave with you. I mean—at the same time as you.”

Aziraphale let the phrasing pass without comment. “I’ll let Raphael know, then.”

They walked on in silence for a few more moments, but the space between them felt less easy than before, and Crowley said, desperately, “I—if we’re both going back to London, I mean, I wondered if—I wanted to know—I mean, is this it? Good-bye? Am I ever going to see you again?”

Aziraphale came to a sudden halt. 

“What?” Crowley asked. “I meant—I didn’t mean, you know, like that, I just meant—”

“Yes, I know what you meant,” Aziraphale said. “It’s only that I remember very clearly thinking something very similar the last time I saw you in London. That I couldn’t ever see you again.”

“And yet, here we are,” Crowley said, heart pounding.

“Here we are,” Aziraphale echoed. “But I hope for your own sake that you won’t find yourself in the immediate vicinity of any more murders.”

“You know, there’s an idea for a book. Fellow falls in love with a detective and starts committing the murders himself just to have a chance to see him again.”

Aziraphale’s expression wavered between scandalised and amused. “It would give me no pleasure to have to catch you,” he said at last.

“You’re assuming you could.”

“Well, I mean, yes, I do assume that. Murder shrieks out, and what-not. I’ve no doubt you’d plan a very clever crime, but evil does have a tendency to founder on the rocks of its own iniquity.” He looked so smug as he said this that Crowley was very briefly tempted to actually plan the perfect crime, solely to take Aziraphale down a peg.

“So—the answer’s no, then?” he asked, instead. “Barring another murder, God forbid, can’t we even be friends?”

“We are friends,” Aziraphale said. “Even if we never meet again. I hope you can believe that.”

“I can believe it without being satisfied with it,” Crowley said. “Don’t tell me that your ridiculous idea about ruining my reputation extends to ever even being seen having lunch with me—”

“It does,” said Aziraphale, and looked very much as though he wanted to add something else.

“But?” Crowley prompted.

“But,” Aziraphale said slowly. “I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

Crowley felt a sinking weight in his stomach. “You don’t want—but—” He remembered the way Aziraphale’s mouth had felt against his own, the desperate heat of his breath, and clung to that feeling as proof that whatever he might say, Aziraphale did want him, even if only physically.

“Not that,” Aziraphale said quietly. “No—it’s something else. I haven’t been entirely certain how to put it without offending you.”

“Nothing you say can offend me as much as the idea that you don’t trust me with your honest opinion,” Crowley said.

This hit home—Aziraphale paused briefly before nodding. “Very well. I am concerned with your reputation, truly, but there has been another consideration as well.”

Crowley waited.

“I worry that whatever feelings you have towards me have been irrevocably shaped by the circumstances under which we met,” Aziraphale said slowly. “I don’t mean to suggest that you don’t know your own mind. But this sense of obligation it may have created, the imbalance…”

“If you’re suggesting I’m only in love with you because you saved my life—”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I’m worried that you feel that way despite the fact that I saved your life.”

“Say love ,” Crowley said, more roughly than he intended. “If you’re going to deny me the courtesy of believing me about my own feelings, the least you can do is name them.”

Aziraphale’s mouth trembled, and Crowley immediately softened. “I do believe you about your own feelings. I’m only worried they won’t be enough. That someday you’ll wake up and decide that the burden of being reminded of—all this, everything that happened before—every time you look at me weighs more heavily with you than whatever you—whatever love you feel now.” 

“I don’t quite understand.”

“I saved your life,” Aziraphale said again. “When you couldn’t save your own. I had to be your guardian angel, however little I might have wished for the role. And I’ve been terrified you’ll come to resent me for it. That you’ll feel tethered to me against your will, like you owe me something.”

Crowley laughed abruptly. “I don’t exactly go in much for being made to do things against my will, you know.”

“Well, I realise that,” Aziraphale said, “but—you have chafed at the positions we’ve been put in. I’ve seen it. Is it so ridiculous of me to imagine that you might one day grow to find it unbearable?”

“Not ridiculous,” Crowley admitted, “but you’ve given me an unanswerable argument. I can swear to you till Doomsday that I want you in a way that has nothing whatever to do with how we met and everything to do with who we are, but what good does that do if you’ve convinced yourself I’m bound to change my mind?”

“I’ve come to that conclusion myself,” Aziraphale said carefully. “That there’s nothing you or I can say or do that can guarantee this won’t end up causing both of us a great deal of pain in the end—far worse pain than if we part now and resolve to never meet again.” He paused.

“But?” Crowley prompted, which was probably deeply presumptuous of him.

“But,” Aziraphale said, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth and making Crowley’s heart soar, “I’ve been thinking about what happened at the church, and about what happened at the barn, and, funnily enough, also about Gerald and Clara. And I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s time I stopped denying myself joy for fear of some future sorrow.”

Crowley wanted desperately to speak, but somehow couldn’t quite sustain control of his mouth, and the words caught in his throat.

“So my answer is yes,” Aziraphale continued. “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you, yes, I want you to come see my flat, yes, we’ll see each other again. Yes.”

“Huh,” Crowley said, when he’d found his voice again. “I was right.”

“About?” 

“The barn. If that got you to change your mind—I knew it was a really good kiss.”

“Not as good as this one,” Aziraphale said, and stepped forward.

They were interrupted, some minutes later, by a series of disapproving coughs emanating from the vicinity of a nearby tree.

Aziraphale broke away, and Crowley reluctantly let go of him to see that an extremely elderly gardener was leaning on his rake, glaring at them.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Aziraphale said cordially.

“Hmph,” said the old man. “Garden’s closing soon.”

“Oh—yes, of course, quite right,” Aziraphale said. “Thank you.”

The gardener, rather than leaving, continued to stare balefully at them.

“We’ll be leaving in just a moment,” Aziraphale said.

The gardener hmph ed again and trudged away.

“Romantic,” Crowley said, dryly.

Aziraphale exhaled a laugh. “I really must stop doing that in public.”

“No you mustn’t,” Crowley said, alarmed.

“I only mean that we’re a sight too old to be making fools of ourselves like this in front of everyone.”

“Oh. Well. In that case, uh, if we’re finished here, I suggest we go be foolish in private.”

“Yes, I don’t think there’s any cause to hang about. We do seem rather to have overstayed our welcome.”

“Ready, then?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale smiled radiantly. “Ready,” he said, and they left the garden together.