Rematch by I_did_not_mean_to

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Bear-en & Sleuth-ien

This is the second chapter. The prompts used are "Against the Odds" and "Killing me strangely".

Be advised, there will be (more specific) reference to death and some unresolved tension in this chapter.

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They should not have come right away, Aredhel realised as they drew up in front of the stately manor and were greeted by shuttered windows and a closed door.

“Damn, Rissë,” Celegorm laughed wryly as he came down the steps, “when I invited you, I didn’t expect you to show up half an hour later. I am sorry, but the family has gone to bed already.”

He still looked so terribly good, she thought instinctively before her professionalism could kick in—he was evidently lying. Despite the heavy shutters and the drawn curtains, she could make out blades and flashes of light, filtering through the bastions of dissimulation stubbornly.

“Give us a moment to mourn and get our thoughts in order,” he went on when he saw her unconvinced mien.

“To dispose of the evidence, you mean?” she shot back sharply.

A hand, broad and strong as a paw, was pressed against the rippling muscles of a broad chest. “You wound me,” Celegorm said in a tone that sounded much too honest and vulnerable, filtered through the persistent mist that carpeted the scene.

He looked like a golden bear, sharp-toothed and lethal, standing there on the steps leading up to a house they were denied access to.

Beside her, Haleth growled impatiently—she was not known for her bedside manner and Aredhel extended a soothing hand behind her back. She had been doing this job for too long not to know that some people had to be handled with the utmost care lest they clam up and become a monumental hindrance in the case.

This family undoubtedly was of that sort.

“That was not my intention,” Aredhel said in her gentlest voice, “but you must understand how important it is that we speak to everyone who was on the premises as soon as possible.” Before you have a chance to get your stories straight and coordinate your lies, she thought bitterly.

“That would be all of us,” he replied sheepishly, but the hard, cold gleam in his eyes belied his inoffensive posturing. Moreover, Aredhel knew him too intimately to be fooled by this exaggerated persona of a well-meaning simpleton he loved to play to get away with his trespasses.

“All the more reason to get your depositions. You have nothing to hide, do you?”

The affable smile vanished instantly and his eyes followed Haleth as she started to prowl around the house in search of clues and treacherous indications of wrongdoing.

“We have plenty to hide,” he then answered the rhetorical question with disarming candour, “but none of these things is pertinent here. You don’t really think that we’d kill our own brother, do you?”

Aredhel hesitated just for a moment too long—his eyes glazed over as if he had thrown up a silver shield and his mouth curled into a disdainful scowl.

“Come back in the morning and we’ll answer your questions as best we can,” he snarled and turned on his heels.

“Boss?” Haleth called from the side of the building. “Here is a window that is boarded-up with planks. Looks recent!”

“Oh,” Celegorm chuckled humourlessly as he turned at the door to gauge Aredhel’s reaction, “that must be father’s study. Sometimes, an experiment goes awry, or a party gets too out of hand. What can you do with seven sons?”

“There was a party? When?” Aredhel jumped on that titbit of new information that they had managed to wrest from him.

“Yesterday,” he admitted, “had I known that you were still interested, I would have invited you.”

It was harder than expected not to fall prey to his easy charm and his sharp smile, but she dug her nails into her palm and conjured up her sweetest smile. “Well,” she purred, “you can invite us in now, can’t you Tyelko?”

“No can do,” he laughed, honest regret lacing his voice, “come back tomorrow, dear, and I’ll tell you all I can.”

“You have always been a terrible liar,” Aredhel groaned, holding his gaze stubbornly and pinning him in place by sheer willpower while Haleth continued to slink around the house noiselessly. “When did you last see your brother?”

His face darkened and then he shrugged slowly and jerkily. “I am not entirely sure, to be honest.”

There was guilt there, flickering bright through the fire of Celegorm’s anger—regret washed through Aredhel as she realised that she would have to push his buttons mercilessly in hopes that he’d let something slip if she only fanned the flames of his puerile defence mechanism competently enough.

They had sworn not to hurt it each other when they had parted—so many years ago—and she hated that she would have to break her word.

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The creaking noise of old hinges protesting alerted Haleth and made her hasten her steps towards a small back door, barely visible in the ambient darkness.

She would have recognised the silhouette standing in the doorway anywhere, no matter the lighting conditions, and the painful jolt the sight of Caranthir’s haughty expression gave her took the wind out of her sails.

Coming to a halt a few steps away, obscured by a largely untended bush, she observed the oldest son of the house almost folding himself in half to fit through the old, evidently disused door.

During her recon mission, she had clearly seen that there was a huge, beautiful door leading out from an elaborate outdoor patio to the garden, so she could only surmise that this tiny opening was one of the original portals of the historic building.

“The police are out front,” Caranthir hissed urgently. “Get a move on!”

Before he could vanish once more—an uncanny talent of his—Haleth stepped out of her hiding spot and called his name.

Caranthir froze on the threshold before discreetly widening his stance as if he expected her to rush him and force her way into the house.

“I had wondered if you’d come,” he commented in a lazy drawl that was so unlike the tight, strained tone he had used just a few moments prior that Haleth instinctively knew that he was dissembling. “There is nothing we can tell you that would be helpful.”

Tight-lipped, she thought with a mix of longing and despair, he had always been private to the degree of being hostile and unreachable—one could not have any dealings with him without getting the nagging feeling that he was holding back the best of what he had to offer, be that truth, love, or services, to win the imaginary negotiation that was his life.

“That is for us to decide,” she countered harshly. It was not clear to her why this one man could provoke such devastating, irrational, corrupting ire in her when she usually prided herself on her cool head so much.

“Where has he been?” she asked then, her brows knitting in distrust, as she nodded at the dimly illuminated corridor she could only barely make out over Caranthir’s shoulder. “Getting rid of critical evidence, huh?”

He flinched back as if struck. “No matter what disdain or hatred you—deservedly and fairly—hold for me,” he said coolly, “I will not allow you to speak thus about my brother. Nelyo is beyond fault and blame.”

Arching one brow, Haleth cocked her head. She had almost believed him, but the slight hesitation and the noticeable tremor in his voice gave his own lack of faith away at the last moment.

“That is also for us to determine,” she insisted and turned to leave when she heard Aredhel call for her. “We’ll be back.”

“You’ve said that before,” Caranthir jeered, “so forgive me if I am not exactly holding my breath.”

A thousand replies—angry, disappointed, heartbroken idiocies—bubbled to her prickling lips and were swallowed back down.

Caranthir, beautiful as he might be, was no longer an inaccessible, vain dream. He was now a potential foe; someone she might have to cuff and throw into jail.

Inadvertently, she asked him the same question as Aredhel had put to his brother and she got a similarly vague answer which left her with a queasy, unsettling feeling in the pit of her stomach. How could one not know when one had last seen one’s brother?

Both Aredhel and Haleth felt terrible as they drove back to the city centre; they had achieved nothing other than to warn their targets and flounder miserably in the face of old acquaintances who could have been so much more—it was embarrassing and a clear professional failure.

The worst part though was that they fervently hoped, against all reason and probability, that these men were only guilty of being thoroughly infuriating.

They knew that they should have recused themselves from the case and yet, neither one of them was ready nor willing to do so.

Just as they were about to part ways, the e-mail from the coroner kept them rooted to the uncomfortable car seats—it turned out that the debris found around and on the corpse was not, as initially thought, regular dirt and rubble linked to the gruesome demise of the victim.

“Gemstones and rare metals?” Haleth groaned. Every way they turned, supposedly safe leads turned into confusing and incriminating surprises that cemented the case against the immediate family. “Could it not simply have been the molten remains of the regular items found on a man of that age? No? Is that too much to ask?”

“We need a full, extensive, and detailed list of the components,” Aredhel mumbled, typing furiously on her phone, while Haleth looked on in apprehensive silence—she was deeply dismayed and worried by this change of events to the point where she was not sure she’d find any sleep that night.

“Tomorrow first light,” Aredhel announced and got a grim, determined grunt from the passenger side of the car as her only reply.

They didn’t dare look at each other and, as each got ready to go to bed in her own flat, they found that they could hardly bear to look at themselves in the mirror.