It had been a good day. They'd done their run early, and Doyle had then puttered about for the rest of it, alternating between the garden and a hopeful pile of junk that aspired to be a motorbike when it grew up. Bodie dozed in convenient spots, and when pushed, served as errand boy.

It had been shaping up to be a good evening. Supper had been more than satisfactory, and they'd settled down on the Chesterfield afterward, frankly cuddling as they watched a dvd. Bodie was happy. Head in Doyle's lap, only nominally paying attention to whatever was playing to itself on the box...some actor fellow Doyle was fond of, Martin Something or other, in "Death in Holy Orders." All was right with his world.

And then it wasn't. Bodie suddenly found himself, along with Doyle's sketchbook, rudely tumbled to the carpet. He got his head up over the back of the sofa just in time to see Doyle slam out of the cottage. Bugger.

Bodie wondered what'd got up the stroppy old sod's nose this time. Something on telly? He turned back to the film in time to catch Martin Whosits addressing a bird who looked as unreliable as any Doyle'd ever taken up with.

"'You seduced him and he thought that you loved him. He gave you a consecrated wafer because you asked him to. He knew that he'd betrayed his vocation, and when he came to you, he realized that there'd never been love, and that he'd been used. Do you feel you have no responsibility for his death?'" The detective on telly looked at the bird accusingly through his spectacles.

Bloody hell, that's telling 'er. Bodie grinned to himself, then bent over and gathered up the sketchbook. Time to go find out where the murder was.

Doyle was freezing his arse off in his shirtsleeves, sitting on the garden wall. Bodie strode up, and stuck the sketchbook out as a flag of truce. Doyle grunted, took it, and made room on his wall for Bodie. That worthy sat down, slung a companionable arm about Doyle's shoulders, and let him brood awhile in silence under the faint wash of starlight. But being Bodie, of course, meant never letting well enough alone for long.

"Ray?" Bodie bumped the sketchbook with one knee. "Why'd you stop painting?"

Doyle's curly, graying head came up at the apparent non sequitur. He shrugged.

"I won an award."

Bodie's quirked eyebrow invited him to continue.

"I belonged to this artists' group, y'see. And one of 'em got very angry. Said I didn't deserve it." Ray shrugged again. "I didn't paint the way they did. I didn't paint the subjects I should paint. I was...oh yeah,..'naïve and dreadfully repressed.'"

"What, you?!" Bodie was astonished anyone could consider Ray repressed. Irrepressible, maybe, but repressed? Doyle?

"Thanks. I think. Anyway, my paintings were too 'chocolate box.' Not real art, because, as far as I could tell, I liked to keep my subjects' clothes on. And yes, I painted the apple. You moron." The grin, like the elbow applied to Bodie's side, was affectionate and habitual. "Others had been painting longer, with more appropriate subjects, and in more appropriate styles. The group as a whole should have been credited, since individual artists are nothing without the group; they gave my work visibility, access. I was an ungrateful, untalented berk who had no right to succeed at anything. So I quit."

"What, just like that?!" Bodie'd never known Doyle to give up on anything. Including moronic ex-mercs. Half-kill himself pulling off the impossible, yes. Give up, never. Indomitable belonged right up there along with irrepressible in Bodie's personal lexicon of Words to Describe Doyle.

"Yeah, just like that. I was very, very young, Bodie." Ray leaned back into Bodie's warmth as he tried to describe something that had puzzled his young self at the time. Bodie was a familiar and trusted bulwark against the vagaries of the world; he was a human breathing space that let Doyle sort through himself until he could find the right words. Not that there were any for what had happened, Doyle thought. "I mean, these were people I respected. They were the experts; they must be right."

Both of Bodie's eyebrows expressed his opinion of that.

"Yeah, well, like I said...I was very young. I thought they must be right. Not because of the criticism. I like to think I could stand up to a bit of criticism--and believe me, for this one bloke, it was Piss On Doyle Week--but because of the echoing silence from the others. It was like...the whole thing was nothing they should soil their lily-whites with...as if a "poison pen" could do absolutely no damage to anyone as long as they pretended nothing had happened! It's all very well to claim to be above the hue and cry, to say that 'you've got to be thick-skinned in this business', but there's always that ninth fellow out of ten who goes out and slits their wrists because a lot of 'good folk' let that sort of thing go on...or even privately approve!"

"Harding Poison Pen case getting to you?"

"Yeah. They knew, Bodie! Every last lily-white fingered board member knew that it was going on. And none of 'em lifted a little finger to stop it. One of 'em said, he said to me he 'didn't want to get involved.' Didn't want to take sides. Sides! As if that were all there was to it. So they let it go on. The ragging, the bullying, the mudslinging. 'Cause it was nothing to do with them! And every last one of 'em was so surprised when old Johnny Harding topped himself. Just like her in there."

"What, the bird on the box?"

"Yeah. And not one of 'em felt any responsibility at all for letting it go on. Bastards."

Bodie thought about this in silence for a moment, while Doyle glared morosely into the dark. Bodie didn't have the heart to tell him that he looked just like Martin Whosits right then.

"So, I suppose it's no surprise that you ended up working for an organization that believes in keeping its own doorstep clean." Bodie couldn't see the grin, but he could feel it, right through the bits of Doyle that were parked warmly against him.

"Nah. It's just that...sometimes you can't let it go on. Sometime you have to stand up. It's like what that writer feller of yours, Pratchett, said the other day. Someone's gotta be for the underdog. Not because they're good and right and true, 'cause most of the time they ain't, sunshine." Again that grin, communicated through warm bits of Doyle. "But because they're not the overdog. Gotta balance it out. For the Johnny Hardings of this world. Besides, pissing on someone who can't even fight back 's never been my style, mate!"

"'Course not. Mind you, you aren't above beating the shit out of a few of the deserving..."

"Yeah." This time the grin was shared.

They cuddled close for warmth on the chilly stone of the wall and shared a comfortable silence. Then, apropos of nothing, Doyle said

"Murphy came to see me in the office yesterday."

"What about?"

"Said you should stop calling me sweetheart. Apparently it 'dents departmental dignity.' Very earnest, he was."

"I'll call my lover anything I damn well please!" Bodie expostulated indignantly. "And it's not like I did it over an open channel or anything, right? Doyle? Shit!"

Bodie levitated off the wall and pelted for the dubious safety of the cottage with Doyle hot on his heels. The door slammed shut behind them, and the department was unfortunately not privy to whatever whispered endearments were exchanged during the rest of the evening.

"The Poison-Pen, this time, had found a victim ready made to her hand. There were the letters, thirty or more of them ('and I don't suppose that's the lot, either,' was the Dean's comment)--menacing, abusive, insinuating--all hammering remorselessly upon the same theme. 'You needn't think you will get away with it'-'What will you do when you fail in Schools?'-'You deserve to fail and I shall see that you do'--then more horrible suggestions."
  --D.L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, p.249.

-- THE END --

October 2007