Chapter Text
“Charles?” Catherine called as she kneed the front door closed. She folded a dry cleaning bag over one arm. “Charles?” There was no response. She paused at the foot of the staircase, laying a hand on the elegantly carved newel. Distantly, a rich soprano voice soared, drifting down to reach her. A soft smile of recognition touched her mouth. Strauss. Beim Schlafengehen, from his Four Last Songs. One of Charles’s favorites.
“It’s an evening song, Catherine, about closing your eyes at the end of a long day, and freeing the soul from waking life into a world of dreams and endless possibility,” he had explained once, groping the air with his hands, as was his habit when he spoke. His warm, paternal gaze had fallen fondly on her, and it was safety. He was her safety. “Or so that’s the literal translation of the poem. Strauss composed the music near the very end of his life. It signifies his acceptance of his own mortality, and his looking forward to the final chapter, to an eternity of peaceful slumber.” She loved when he would talk to her about things like music, or books, or even politics. It was how he showed her that she had earned his respect, and nothing meant more to her in this world.
She ascended the stairs and scanned the long, wood-paneled hallway. “Charles?” She stopped to straighten a flower arrangement, then, noticing her reflection in the mirror just behind the vase, raised a hand and fluffed her hair as well. She frowned slightly at the grey peeking through at her roots, a reminder that she was overdue for a visit to the salon. Sighing out the frustrations of age, she resettled the dry cleaning bag on her arm, and walked on.
With a glance into the empty study, she found its CD player the source of the nearly-finished aria. “Charles,” she sang out again, transforming the music from solo to duet.
“I picked up your blue suit.” The door to the master bedroom was cracked. “You could wear that today, if you fancy,” she said, pushing it open wide. She halted abruptly, angling her head toward one shoulder. Not in here either, then. She hung the suit in his wardrobe and exited back into the hall. She called his name once more. Could he have stepped out?
She rapped her knuckles on the bathroom door. “Charles? Are you in there?” Another knock. “Charles?” He must have stepped out. Her hand grasped the knob.
For half a second, she simply stood there, her brain refusing to accept the scene before her. Charles was in the bath. No--most of Charles was in the bath. The back of his head was splattered in bits against the tiled wall behind him. His bathwater was dyed crimson, and a pistol lay across his chest, its mouth resting just by his collarbone, his lax fingers curved along its handle.
It’s possible that Catherine called out his name one last time. Perhaps she screamed. Any reaction her body made would have been instinctive, occurring with neither her knowledge nor her consent. Catherine’s thinking mind had chosen flight, and when she first returned to awareness, she was stumbling backwards out the door, into the hall, rushing clumsily in the direction of the stairs. She suddenly found herself immobile on the landing, staring down the steps to the front door, panting, gasping, whimpering, her whole body shaking violently. She forced herself to take a few breaths, and wondered how she could have missed the off-copper stench of blood permeating the air until just now. She turned her head back toward the bathroom. An irrational hope struck her, that maybe she had misunderstood, overreacted, that Charles would stroll out of there any moment now, tying his robe and smiling, asking what all the fuss was about. Or that she'd look down to find the front door opening, and he’d step inside, scraping his damp shoes off on the mat, surprised to see her, having only gone for a walk and lost track of time.
But of course Charles didn’t walk out into the hall. Charles didn’t come through the front door, or up the stairs. He didn’t smile in bewilderment at Catherine's silliness. He didn’t laugh; he never would again. Charles was undoubtedly, irretrievably dead.
Her hands were on the telephone without her realizing it. She had no idea whose number she’d dialed until he picked up.
She’d first met Jackson Lamb a couple years earlier. His reputation preceded him. He was Charles’s favorite. The best agent MI5 had in its ranks. “The future of the Service,” he’d called him on more than one occasion. The way he spoke of him, the effusive praise he laid upon him, the mixture of awe and admiration that lit his eyes when Lamb's name came up in conversation; to be held in such high esteem by a man like Charles…
He must be quite a man, Catherine had often thought to herself, which had made it all the more shocking once she actually met him.
The best way to describe him was also the simplest: Jackson Lamb was an arsehole. He was rude, he was crass, he was condescending. Eyes like the Mona Lisa, he was somehow always watching, always one ear in any nearby conversation. She supposed this was what made him such a fantastic spy, but it also made his presence incredibly unnerving. You could feel him studying you, reading you. You always had the sense that you were not a person to him, but rather that he surveyed you as an architect would a building; he was taking stock of your weak points, collating them into a detailed report that he’d use to his own ends, no matter what the result meant for you.
Catherine didn’t trust Lamb, but Charles did. For Charles, it had gone beyond trust; he had absolute faith in the man. And if Catherine could trust anyone, it was Charles. In a normal emergency, that’s who she would be calling, but for obvious reasons, this was not a normal emergency. Who would Charles himself have called? Lamb. And it was this unconscious realization that led her to dial him.
“Lamb,” was, too, how he’d answered, his voice a degree gruffer than usual. For a moment, she was silent, her mouth moving, but words failing her. “Yeah?” he asked, louder, annoyed, and it made her jump.
“I’m sorry, did I wake you?” she breathed.
There was a pause on the other end. “Catherine?”
She nodded, then shook her head at herself, remembering that he couldn’t see her. “Yes, it’s me.”
“No, you didn’t wake me. You all right? You sound strange.”
Was she all right? What an absurd question. She let out a frantic giggle, then clapped a hand over her mouth, ashamed to be laughing at a time like this.
“Catherine?” Lamb repeated.
“I’m sorry to call like this, only I’m at Charles’s and he’s–-he’s–-”
Lamb stifled a sigh, rubbing his creasing forehead tiredly. “He’s what?” Of course, he didn’t need to ask. Of course he already knew.
“Well, he’s...dead.” On the last word, her voice caught, and broke. He heard her exhale a dry sob.
Lamb un-stifled his sigh. Leaning back against the sofa, he asked, “How?”
“I–-I don’t know. He was in the bath. There was a lot of blood. I think I saw...a gun? I’m not sure–-I don’t know if–-I–-”
He could sense her starting to slip towards hysteria. “You think he shot himself?” he interrupted her rambling. She ought to think that. He’d done a pristine job of things, after all.
“I don’t–-”
No, she hadn’t thought that, hadn’t even considered it. Charles would never do that.
Charles...Charles in that blood-soaked tub, dead, his head caved in, brain matter on the wall behind him, and a gun, a gun in his hand. Had she seen anyone but Charles in that state, she would have taken things as read. Her fingers curled against her lips. Her vision blurred. It was like she’d been staring at an optical illusion, struggling to make sense of its alien shapes. It wasn’t until she considered the image from a different angle that everything came together, and she could finally see it with clear eyes.
“Do you really think he would do that?” Catherine asked Lamb in a small, pathetic voice, having already found her answer. She smacked at her face, wiping a hand through the steady stream of tears that had begun to fall.
Lamb sucked his teeth. No, but you and me and everybody else would have been much better off if he had done.