Archive of Our Own ^beta

In Carol's meagre defence, DCI Taylor had always been an awkward man in every sense, and these last few months had not been good months. She'd had to sacrifice Matt Neville to keep him in his job, she knew damn well he hadn't dropped the Sinclair business like she'd asked, and he'd started looking increasingly like he was getting around that edict by treating sleep as optional. There were, in short, any number of reasonable explanations for why he might have started acting twitchy around her that sprang to mind ahead of 'replaced by the identical twin he'd never told anyone he had'.

All the same, this was definitely not going to be one for the career highlights file.

Unlike her missing DCI, however, Carol saw little value in blowing up multiple good people's careers by making an ill-timed stand for professional ethics. As far as they could reasonably ascertain with their IT expert both dead and apparently a master sodding criminal, all John Taylor had done with his illicit access was retrace his brother's already dubious footsteps and dutifully keep on top of his caseload, a fact which put him one up on many of her actual employees. Better for everyone involved if 'DCI Taylor' just quietly stepped down and completed his planned vanishing act.

Of course, hiring John straight back on as an external consultant was either going to be a masterstroke or the straw that broke the camel's back, but at least it helped to further blur the lines around his presence in the department.

Although, ironically, bringing him back in under his own identity felt more like trying to get away with a staged performance than it had to pass him off as his brother.

"John Taylor? DCS Shaw." Carol stepped out of her office to meet him, conscious of the gawking audience. It seemed she hadn't been the only one out of the loop on the twin thing. "We appreciate your coming in. Your brother speaks very highly of your problem-solving abilities."

He had in fact said no such thing, the secretive bugger, but considering the number of headaches he'd caused her, she didn't feel much guilt in making him a mouthpiece for this deception. If he had a problem, he could come and register his objections in person.

"Well, I'll, er, see what I can do... ma'am," John said, making more of an awkward hash of accepting her handshake than she considered entirely reasonable even accounting for nerves. It was distinctly embarrassing to realise that her best people had been fooled by a man with all the naturalistic acting ability of a six-year-old in a school play - though, in fairness, DCI Taylor had never exactly been the smoothest of conversationalists himself. It wasn't that she hadn't noticed him doing his best impression of a stunned trout when cornered, she'd just hoped it was a sign that he'd finally realised the precarious nature of his situation and was showing some actual sense of self-preservation.

Given the circumstances of his departure, she'd clearly either over- or wildly underestimated James Taylor's sense of self-preservation, and definitely missed his penchant for melodramatics. As for John, the jury was still out.

"If you'd like to step into my office, Mr Taylor, we can discuss the terms of your consulting contract," she said. Holding the door for him, she fixed the gathered onlookers with a gimlet stare. "All right, back to work, everyone, please. I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept of twins."

All the same, she couldn't help but study John herself as she closed the office blinds to shut them in. It was both somewhat vindicating yet also deeply aggravating to find that even now she knew the truth there was still no reliable way to distinguish him from his brother. DCI Taylor might have been a bit thinner, perhaps had less grey about the beard, but she couldn't swear to it without having them both here side by side. There was nothing else to go on except surface styling: the glasses, something different in the way John combed his hair, the fact he seemed inclined to dress as if he'd just walked out of an old-fashioned boarding school story.

She should have made more of those bloody pens. The detail had pinged her as off for DCI Taylor, who tried so hard to look casual it gave away the underlying fussiness, but her main suspicion at the time had been that he was making a passive-aggressive production of demonstrating he was now on his best behaviour. Almost twenty years of working with the man, and she'd still underestimated him.

Well, she'd be damned if she made the same mistake with the brother.

"So, you've decided to accept our offer," Carol said, gesturing for him to take a seat. "I think we can all safely assume you have ulterior motives, but, then, so do we."

His eyes widened as if he thought she was about to launch into some sort of Bond villain monologue detailing her part in the grand conspiracy.

"There's no such thing as retroactive permission to be on a crime scene, but I think we're all agreed that the fewer lies we have to tell here the better," she went on. "If you're on the books as an official consultant, that covers a multitude of slips. Your fingerprints are in this office; you're familiar with people and past cases that you shouldn't be. Let's have pretexts in place to explain those things before all the tricky questions come up, shall we?"

"What if Holly told her business partner what she suspected?" he said, still looking anxious.

"I don't think Ms Pinder was very keen on sharing in any sense," she said. He'd be considerably more worried if he'd seen her annotated wall of stalker photographs, but somehow Carol had a feeling the evidence seized from that flat had already gone wherever the Sinclair files went. Besides, without whatever additional observations Holly had been keeping in her head, it was circumstantial at best. Pictures of John staying in his brother's house proved bugger all, and any deviation from Taylor's usual methods could still be explained away.

"If necessary, we go to the backup story that DCI Taylor shared details of his cases with you to get your perspective on the murders," she said. "It has the advantage of being considerably more believable than the actual truth, even if it does drop your brother in it for telling tales outside police channels."

"Well, I don't care about that," John said, wrinkling his face dismissively. "James clearly wasn't thinking about anybody else when he ran off, so I don't see why we ought to worry about him when it comes to the consequences."

Not a stance that Carol would necessarily disagree with, and yet something about it still nagged at her instincts. She'd worked a few missing persons cases in her time, and while the anger wasn't uncommon, she would have expected to see a bit more overt worry mixed with it. After all, per what little detail the family had been willing to share, DCI Taylor had vanished several weeks ago, leaving behind only a paranoid letter that presumably implied either genuine fear for his life or some form of mental health breakdown. Either there had been more in that parting letter than they were telling, or...

"And you still haven't had any contact from your brother since he left?" she checked.

John jolted a little in response to the question, though it was hard to conclusively read guilt on a man who seemed to live his life in a perpetual state of flustered alarm. Albeit not without some cause at the moment. "Er... no," he said, a beat too late. "Nothing... worth reporting. And, indeed, nothing unworthy of reporting. Just, erm, nothing generally, in fact!"

He might be a bad liar, but on the other hand, he might just be this clumsy at answering questions he hadn't had a chance to rehearse for. Carol eyeballed him a few moments longer, but though he shrank back in his seat, he didn't break.

Did she find that performance convincing? Hard to say. Timid though he might appear, it would be a long time before she accepted anything she heard from a Taylor at face value. Or even took either of their faces at face value.

Still, happily, the question of her ex-DCI's whereabouts no longer had to be Carol's problem. And while his brother had surely accepted this job with a view to conducting his own off-books investigations, they ought at least to be able to keep him on a tighter leash.

"I do hope you realise you'll no longer just be free to make things up as you go along," she said sternly. "We have rules and procedures for all our consultants, and we'll be expecting you to follow them to the letter."

"Oh, good," he said.

Carol narrowed her eyes, but decided that might not actually have been sarcasm. In fact, she was slightly reevaluating just how often she'd assumed DCI Taylor was giving her lip or being deliberately obtuse, even before he'd been swapped out for his twin. Traits that had been subtle in James were writ large in John.

For now, she was cautiously willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Well, I can't say I'm thrilled about how all this came about, but I don't deny you've proven yourself capable of being an asset to this station," she said. That record case resolution rate was going to come in very handy when it came to justifying everyone keeping their jobs in the wake of the Holly Pinder fiasco. "Considering we're currently down both our lead DCI and our main IT support, we need all the help that we can get. And given we seem to be getting more than our share of unnecessarily complicated murders lately, I don't doubt we'll be calling on your services sooner rather than later."

He nodded obediently, but seemed to have missed the fact that this was his cue to exit the conversation.

"That's all," Carol said, rather pointedly. "Unless there's anything else you'd like to get off your chest?" She doubted very much that he or his sister-in-law were telling her everything, but they could at least credit her with the intelligence to be fully aware of that fact.

"No, my chest is now... bare," John said. "Although also, and importantly, in a more literal sense, not bare at all!"

Carol opted to put them both out of his misery before he could continue that line of conversation any further. She nodded him towards the door. "All right, well, we'll call you in when we have a case in need of your specialised skills." And otherwise try to minimise the amount of time he spent hanging around the station looking for trouble.

That had more than enough of a habit of showing up uninvited. As John opened the office door, Chief Constable Ziegler stood poised on the other side ready to knock. John pulled up short with a startled yelp.

Ziegler narrowed his eyes at the sight of him. "DCI Taylor?" he said.

Carol hastily cut in. "Actually, this is his brother, John," she said. The fact it was true didn't help to make it feel any less like a painfully transparent lie.

"Twins," John supplied helpfully, still staring up at the Chief Constable like a small furry creature mesmerised by a snake.

"Twins," Ziegler echoed, in the tone of a man who couldn't help but wonder if he was being very feebly pranked. One of the rare occasions Carol could empathise completely with her boss.

"John was instrumental in proving his sister-in-law's innocence and identifying Holly Pinder's true killer," she said.

"Since, of course, James would never have been allowed anywhere near that case," John added, too brightly.

Ziegler turned his faintly suspicious gaze on her. "I wasn't aware DCI Taylor had a twin," he said.

"You'd be surprised how little it comes up in background information," Carol said. Or casual conversation with people that you'd known for almost two decades, apparently. "Given DCI Taylor's resignation has left us rather short-handed, we were discussing offering John a provisional consulting contract."

Ziegler could certainly veto that if he so chose, but as a rule he was reliably in favour of anything that could potentially improve their crime statistics without inflating the personnel costs. He made a noncommittal noise that would doubtless turn out to have been endorsement if it was a success and no such thing in the event of a miserable flop.

"Where is your brother now?" he asked John. "There are still a number of outstanding matters from his last few cases that I'd like to see cleared up."

Carol just bet he would.

"He's doing some travelling," John said. "Apparently he jumped at the chance to be free of all his commitments. I doubt very much he's going to be willing to pick up the phone for the police."

The note of genuine frustration towards James sold that evasive answer better than she would have given him credit for. Still, all things considered, she suspected it was in everyone's best interest to keep John and her boss as far apart as possible going forward.

"Chief Constable Ziegler," she said, taking control of the conversation. "You wanted to see me?" She cocked her head in her expectant listening posture.

"I'll just, er, be going," John said, pointing through the doorway and awkwardly squeezing out past the Chief Constable.

Ziegler finally stepped the rest of the way inside, but his attention hadn't quite left John yet. "Tell DCI Taylor I want to speak to him as soon as he gets back," he said.

"Don't we all," Carol said wryly. And Ziegler was not going to be at the front of that queue.

John closed the door, finally making his escape. Ziegler frowned after him a few moments more, but to her relief, let the matter of both Taylors go, and instead launched into his latest spiel about media strategy. Another hurdle passed for one of her more ambitious acts of creatively interpreting the spirit of the law.

And yet she didn't doubt that she'd made the right move; the only move that covered the backs of all innocent or at least well-meaning parties involved. DCI Taylor included. That business with his resignation letter - unsigned, undated, and delivered through his wife? He'd certainly done his best to muddy the waters around the true timing of his departure. By tacitly endorsing his brother's deception, she'd managed to give him a far bigger head start than even he could ever have anticipated.

She just hoped to God he was doing something truly worthwhile with it. She'd stuck her neck out quite a way for both the Taylor twins, but it wasn't going to be the only one there on the chopping block if and when this all came crashing down. They were all committed to this nonsense now, for better or worse.

And she'd better see some absolute detective miracles out of John Taylor from here on in if he thought that he was even going to make a start on making up for all this mess.