Chapter Text
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A Consequence of Consumption
Chapter One
A One Mr. Will Graham.
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Will took his time saying goodbye to the mutts. Kissed one last muzzle, patted one last head, tugged one last ear. They wanted to follow him through the door, of course, to go out to play in the yard even though he’d brought them inside only twenty minutes before. But they couldn’t.
“I’ll be back in a few hours, guys,” he promised, less a reminder for them and more for himself. The dogs would be fine without him, but he knew better now than to take his return for granted.
He locked the front door and then the storm door, too. A new habit for him. His home in Wolf Trap, always like a boat at sea, distant and isolated, had felt like a refuge for as long as he’d lived there. Locking the doors felt wrong, antithetical to that, but it had become necessary.
That went for the lock on his front gate, too.
Frost-covered grass and gravel crunched under the wheels of his ancient Volvo as he backed out of the driveway. The GPS announced in a robotic deadpan that he could expect a 75-minute commute to his appointment, but he had every intention of making it last at least 90.
Still, time had been slipping through his fingers recently; despite his plans to delay his arrival, the drive passed in the blink of an eye.
He’d never been in this part of Baltimore before. A nice neighborhood; too nice a neighborhood, he thought, with its quiet streets and low-burning street lamps, its wide, brick-paved sidewalks. Too nice for him. And then there was the office itself, a beautiful Baltimore brownstone, its manicured hedges all red and gold, its well-maintained facade giving the impression of wealth, of value placed on presentation.
Whatever he’d expected when he booked his appointment—an office in a strip mall, maybe, or in a medical park—it wasn’t this. Even his car looked out of place, parked between two luxury sedans that must each cost more than double what his annual salary was, back when he was a cop.
He bought himself a few more minutes by fiddling with the papers kept in his glove box. Alphabetizing them, then sorting by date, then by length. When he couldn’t justify the busywork any longer, he ambled up the stairs to the entrance, then loitered there, watching his breath condense in the cooling fall evening air, float up and fog up his glasses, instead.
If he delayed any longer, he’d be asked to reschedule, and that would mean repeating this pointed procrastination. His appointment time had already passed by nearly fifteen minutes. That should be enough, right? He should just—just go in.
With a deep breath, he smoothed the front of his jacket, rubbed his hands down the rough denim of his jeans, and then reached for the door. It yielded readily to his touch, heavy but on well-oiled hinges, swinging open like an arm opening for a hug.
That set his teeth on edge.
The small waiting room, richly decorated, with ornately framed paintings and a bouquet of fresh flowers on the little half-table against the wall, didn’t suit his image of an FBI-appointed psychiatrist’s office any more than the building or the neighborhood it lived in. He wanted to explore it, examine the knickknacks, study the art, pet the petals on the flowers just for an excuse to steal another few moments of calm, but he didn’t have the chance. Someone had heard him, and the door to the office opened.
Then, there stood the doctor, extending an elegant hand in greeting.
Beautiful.
The thought surprised him. Will never put much stock into outward appearances; in fact, he avoided looking at people at all, for fear of what looking would reveal. So for him to find someone beautiful… that didn’t happen. At least, not usually, and not at first meeting. Usually, it took him months to notice that he found someone attractive, and by then he’d ruined their impression of him enough to make his interest moot.
Probably better that way. For everyone.
“Mr. Graham?”
The smooth voice knocked him out of his stupor.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, still halfway poised to bolt for the exit. The doctor still held out a hand in greeting, but Will couldn’t bring himself to take it. He shoved balled up fists into his coat pockets and let his gaze drift to the crease of a maroon lapel where it lay against the crisp white shirt collar beneath. A safe place to look.
“It can be a little difficult to find,” said the doctor, apparently not bothered by Will’s refusal of social niceties. “Come in.”
Beyond the door, the office lived up to the expectations set by the facade, by the waiting room. Warm, rich colors, dark wood, ceiling-height windows, a mezzanine lined with packed bookshelves. More art—and more unsettling art—than he would expect a shrink to pick out for a room that should probably be intended to feel relaxing.
In fact, the office exuded power and intimidation, rather than inviting relaxation and welcoming.
“This is… quite the office.” The inanity of the words lay heavy on his tongue.
Still, they earned him a pleasant chuckle. “I think so too. Maybe I can find somewhere else for us to meet next time?”
That perturbed him on two fronts: one, the expectation of another meeting; and two, the thought of another office like this one existing somewhere in the world.
“You got more than one office?”
“I don’t have an office at all. This one is on loan. I don’t see private patients.”
Oh.
Well, now it made sense why the room and the psychiatrist didn’t seem to jive. Dr. Bloom had a softness about her that felt out of place here. Which meant this exercise in vanity belonged to a male psychiatrist, then. Someone older. Wealthy, with a wealthy clientele. Someone who valued the impression he left on others more than their comfort around him. A selfish person, though he would take care not to seem so; this office had been arranged to suit him, rather than his patients—
He shook his head. Useless thoughts. “Doctor Bloom—”
She motioned to a seat across from her. A black leather chair, set a comfortable distance opposite one just like it. Will obeyed the request implicit in the gesture, the cushion below accepting his weight as his eyes riveted themselves on the curves of her legs as she crossed them. She wore nice shoes. Black heels, the backs of them cupping shapely ankles.
“Doctor Bloom, I don’t know why I’m here. You don’t see private patients? I don’t know why either of us is here.”
Dr. Bloom blinked, dark lashes fanning over her cheeks, brow furrowing over her blue eyes—nope, look away—when they opened once more. “You’ve been through a traumatic experience, Mr. Graham—”
He held up a hand, shaking his head again. “Uh, just Will. And let me rephrase. I know why I’m here. I’m here to soothe Jack Crawford’s guilty conscience so he can get his beauty sleep. So he’ll stop calling and nagging at me. I don’t understand what he thinks I’ll get out of this.”
She pursed her lips in thought, head tilting marginally to the side, the cascade of her dark hair like silk draping over her shoulder. “I expect he thinks that therapy will help you cope with the trauma of what you lived through.”
“I think he doesn’t care about that as much as he cares that he can say he set the wheels in motion, in case I take to therapy after all.” He paused. “Which I won’t, by the way. Therapy doesn’t work on me. I know all the tricks.”
“Maybe it doesn’t work because you don’t let it,” she offered, a little smile curving her lips up toward a fetching dimple in her cheek.
“Tomatoes, tomahtoes.” He pushed up his glasses. “Still doesn’t work.”
There. Let her try to pry anything out of him now. He slouched in his seat, eyes skittering around the room until they landed on the desk in the center of it. Something glimmered in the light and caught his attention. Long, slender, metallic, with a nauseatingly sharp point. Was that a scalpel?
“How long have you known Jack Crawford?” she asked, instead of coming to his defense.
“Long enough.”
She remained silent, waiting for clarification. But Will didn’t pay much attention to social mores. His abrasiveness served a purpose: it kept people from bothering him. He could sit in an uncomfortable silence as long as he needed to.
“It can’t have been that long,” she tried, when his silence lingered. “I was under the impression you met when—”
“At the raid, yeah.” Again, he cut her off, but then offered no more. He had no intention of making this easy for her. She’d have to ask if she wanted to talk about it, because he sure as hell didn’t.
“So, you met two weeks ago. And you already know everything you need to know about him?”
He grunted. “You don’t have a private practice. Are you seeing me as a favor to him?”
Dr. Bloom’s lips twitched downward, one of her hands curled into a loose fist in her lap. Not anger—he’d made her uncomfortable. Pressed her on something she didn’t want to admit to. “We often work together. I teach at Georgetown, consult with him at the FBI as a criminal profiler when the occasion calls for it.”
Will nodded, suspicions confirmed. “You worked the case.”
“I did,” she agreed. Silence fell once more between them. “We weren’t expecting to find anyone living.”
He let out a slow breath. She wasn’t going to give up on getting him to open up; he had no plans at all to do so.
Still, she wasn’t giving up. “Would you be willing to talk about the case if we leave you out of it?”
Smart. Smart enough to catch on. Smart enough to refer to it the same way he did—’the case’ rather than ‘your traumatic experience’. To find an angle that would encourage him to talk under the guise of removing himself from the discussion, even though his perspective of events would give her insight into how he felt about what happened, anyway.
Not that his feelings mattered at all, in the end.
But she didn’t know him well enough. He could keep this conversation to the specifics of the case, and the rest of this appointment would go smoothly enough for him to bow out at the end and put this in his rear view mirror.
Of course, his involvement would make it easier for her to ask the kind of probing questions that would turn the focus back to him, but what was the alternative? He could sit and stew in silence for the remainder of the hour. Normally, he would; he’d planned to, even.
But Jack Crawford, for all his faults, had figured out one crucial thing about Will Graham: he was a sucker for puppy eyes. And Alana Bloom, whose face expressed such kind concern, such genuine interest in his well-being, drew out the part of him that made him more inclined to behave. More inclined to make this train wreck even just a little less painful for her than it must already be.
“I mean…” He sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. “Fine.”
She hummed, a pleased little sound. Her foot jiggled up and down once as she studied him. Could probably tell he would wait to be prompted before speaking again, but didn’t let that rush her to formulate her next question.
Will returned his gaze to the desk, and the silver object gleaming on top of it. Definitely a scalpel. A surgeon, or an artist? Probably both.
“How long were you with him?”
Of all the places to choose to start. “Uh—not long. A week. Week and a half, maybe.”
“The forensics team determined it was a little longer than that. Fourteen days.”
“Time,” he said, wobbling a hand back and forth in front of him. It really had been slipping away from him.
She nodded, considering him carefully. “He didn’t keep any of his victims that long?”
Will heard the implied ‘other’ before ‘victims’, knew she saw him as one of their number, but silently thanked her for not counting him among them aloud. “He didn’t keep them at all.”
“That’s consistent with our profile.” She seemed pleased by that, hands relaxed on her lap. “When we were working through it, we kept cycling back to his detachment to his victims. They weren’t even human in his eyes, were they?”
Will blinked. This was a trap. He knew it was a trap. But he couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop himself. “What?”
Her lips pursed again. The ankle jiggled too. It might be her job, but he didn’t like the way she was trying to puzzle him out. “He kept them alive, but encouraged decomposition. He prolonged their suffering.” Her head righted, then tilted the other way. “Someone who doesn’t value people, doesn’t see them as people. We were shocked that he—we didn’t expect to find anyone but him in that house.”
Someone who—?
“Is he—” Will swallowed, throat working against the rising lump within it. “Did he say those things…?”
Dr. Bloom shook her head, and the relief must have shown on his face for the way she pressed her lips together. “No. He hasn’t said a word since we took him into custody.”
Tension drained from him so quickly he felt almost lightheaded. “How did you end up finding him?”
She hesitated. “I shouldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation, but for the sake of continuing this conversation, I’ll remind you that doctor-patient confidentiality goes both ways,” the last, delivered with another little smile. At his nodded agreement, she uncrossed her legs, settling her elbows onto her knees and leaning forward, conspiratorial.
This kind of bad behavior wouldn’t be usual for her, then. A straight arrow, maybe rigidly so.
“One of the victims hadn’t decomposed as much as the others yet; much easier to identify. When we found out she’d gone missing from a pharmacy, that she was a diabetic, one of the techs hypothesized that he’d been using the sugar water as a chemical restraint. Inducing diabetic comas. It didn’t take much work from there.”
Will held back his scoff, opted for a grunt instead. An easy trail to follow once the bodies were found. Finding the bodies would be the hard part, hidden as they were in the wood. Which meant he owed his rescue to lucky chance and intrepid hikers.
Well. Even if it took two weeks, he should be grateful they found the garden when they did. No telling how long he would have stayed safe in that house.
“Stammets—” he started, then shifted in his seat. He didn’t need to say anything. He could brush this off, pretend the BAU’s best minds had come up with a theory of Eldon Stammets’s mind that reflected his reality, and move their conversation right along.
But.
To write Eldon Stammets off as hateful of his fellow man, as motivated by the perpetuation of their suffering, felt misguided to the point of rudeness. He couldn’t help his anger over it. Despite all his plans to give Dr. Bloom as little as possible, he couldn’t go on without making himself, and therefore Stammets, perfectly clear. “That’s not his pathology. He doesn’t hate people, he—”
He broke off, crossing and uncrossing his arms, averting his eyes. His hands found his jeans again, rubbing over their coarse texture, wiping off his clammy sweat. Dr. Bloom said nothing, and her silence allowed him to pick up the thread a minute later.
“He doesn’t understand them. He sees people the way a layman sees a Michaelangelo, or a Cellini. He sees what the statues represent at their most basic level—a human form in a dramatic pose expressing an emotion—but can’t read them the way an art critic would. Can’t know the history, the allegory, the references and context that give them meaning and substance, what they represent. He sees them, and they take up space around him, but that’s all there is.”
A strange smile twisted on Dr. Bloom’s lips; his snapped shut in response.
Too much. He’d said too much, been too much.
“I’m sorry.” Humor colored her voice, a gentle apology for making him uncomfortable. “It’s the metaphor. I only know one other person who uses metaphors like that in conversation. Especially about classical art.”
Will didn’t care; what mattered was her perception of Stammets’s pathology, which she had completely—
“It’s just, that’s how he sees them,” he tried again. “He doesn’t get them. But he—he understands connection. He craves connection. The mushrooms, by planting those victims in his garden, he connects them to one another the best way he knows. The mushrooms.”
And that’s about where his eloquence ended. He couldn’t explain it in a way she would understand, so why bother trying?
“Did he say those things?” she asked, an echo of his own question not minutes before.
“No, not—”
He ran a shaky hand through his hair. Stammets had little on that subject to say—at least, that satisfied—during the time Will had stayed with him. He had explained about the mushrooms, though. His words still reverberated in the cavern of Will’s skull. 'If you walk through a field of mycelium, they know you are there. They know you are there. The spores reach for you as you walk by.'
“No. He didn’t.”
“He must have said something for you to reach that conclusion. To be so sure.”
She didn’t believe him. “He didn’t need to. I’d already figured him out.”
Her eyebrows rose, a sharp jump made without conscious control. She opened her mouth to say something else, ask something else, but the clock chimed the hour before she could get out a word.
“That’s time.” She stood, expression kind, if a little regretful. “Not too horrible, I hope?”
“Not too horrible,” he agreed. Granted, he’d shown up about fifteen minutes late and, through luck more than anything, evaded the hard questions. He got out of the chair and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain back just enough to peek out into the street.
All clear.
He turned around and there she stood, laughter written in the lines around her eyes—look away—watching him.
“It’s a uh—a precaution. Ever since the press conference.”
“Ah.”
The press conference. Another disastrous idea of Jack’s. “Had to learn to lock my doors at home, too.” He let a chuckle out past his lips, then immediately regretted it. That was stupid. Lock the doors from a bad experience at a press conference. Not from being kidnapped by a serial killer.
Judging by her frown, she’d put those dots together. Thankfully, she let it pass without comment.
“Can I ask just—” she took a tentative step closer, hand extended as though about to touch her fingers to his arm, but thought better of it just in time. “Well. The hour’s over.”
He sighed. “Go ahead. Just one. And I might not answer.”
“Why did he choose you? You don’t fit his victim profile.”
A question whose answer would remain secret as long as he lived, if he had anything to say about it. “I don’t know. I only knew him in passing. Barely said anything to him before he knocked me out.”
“Barely?”
“I think all I got out was, ‘wait, my dogs.’ Then he beaned me.” He laughed, and this time, Dr. Bloom joined in.
“Would you talk to him again for us? He might open up to you.”
“That’s more than one question, Doctor Bloom.”
She laughed again, relenting. “Okay. But I’m going to ask one more, anyway. Not about the case.” She waited, and when he didn’t protest, asked, “Will we be meeting again next week?”
“Uh.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, gaze flitting around the room until it landed on a chaise, set off to the side. Fulfilling an expectation, but discouraging its use. “Thanks, but I think I’m good.”
Her voice was no less warm when she extended her hand to shake his and said, “Well, if you ever change your mind, you have my card.”
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When Alana Bloom asked him if she could borrow his office, it took Hannibal all of three seconds to weigh the possible risks and benefits before he decided on agreement. Still, caution had always served him well, and it would be remiss of him not to ask, “If I may ask why…?”
“I’m not taking on patients, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she laughed, bringing the bottle of his home-brewed beer up to her lips and taking a sip, eyes sparkling coyly at him. “It’s for a case I’m working.”
This told him everything he needed to know.
Alana was working exactly one case at present; the case of Eldon Stammets, the Mushroom Man. Hannibal inwardly frowned at the moniker—the media loved their alliterative and sensationalist killer names, no matter how ridiculous. But Eldon Stammets was safely behind bars; Alana would not need to borrow Hannibal’s office to meet him.
Which left only one other person of interest involved in the case: Eldon Stammets’s lone survivor, found in a stupor at his dinner table when the FBI raided his home. A one Mr. Will Graham.
On the night before her appointment, he tidied his office, removing anything remotely incriminating. He knew Alana well enough not to suspect her capable of rifling through his belongings, snooping in his absence, but again, caution had always served him well.
As he put the final polish on the room, walking it through to check for anything he may have missed, he toyed absently with the idea of placing a recorder under the patient’s seat. Hannibal had followed the Mushroom Man case throughout its progression, and could admit to a mild interest in its players and particulars.
Curiosity, even mild, had always been a compelling motivator for him.
And, while he respected Alana well enough not to tread on her toes when it came to patient care, she had denied taking on new patients, making this meeting with Mr. Graham a mere conversation and therefore not subject to doctor-patient confidentiality.
It is unlikely, he thought, even as he decided in favor of recording Mr. Graham after all, that this man will have anything of value to say. But even that likelihood did not prevent him from turning the chair on its side and taping the recorder beneath it.
When Hannibal returned to his office, it was long after her appointment had concluded, and well into the night. He hung up his jacket, closed the office door behind him, and took sweeping stock of the state of the room. Much as he had left it before, to give Alana her credit, though with a few notable differences.
His chairs, for one, had been moved closer together. A cozy distance, he assumed, for a man who would need softening up before speaking. Far too close together for Hannibal’s preferences, considering certain people among his clientele. His sketches had been moved, too. Stowed and then replaced, he supposed, because they lay on his art table in a tidy stack, corners squared up together, where before they’d been in artful disarray.
With slow steps, he approached the chairs, running his fingers over the buttery leather, and then pulled them back into their original positions.
Next, he considered his liquor cabinet, contemplating a truly fantastic Malbec as his beverage for the evening. Anyone else, he supposed, might sit down to listen to the recording right away. Find the answers to their questions and be done with it.
But Hannibal had always taken something of a perverse pleasure in waiting. Patience, like caution, was a tool he had mastered. He relished in the anticipation of satisfaction as much as he did in the satisfaction itself. Even should Will Graham’s testimony to Alana Bloom prove unenlightening, he could draw out and enjoy this moment in the knowledge that soon, his curiosity about Eldon Stammets would be sated.
So he settled down with a glass of the Malbec, its dark bouquet piquant and woody, and set the recorder atop his desk with the fanfare such a resolution deserved.
His low expectations, it turned out, were completely upended. Indeed—this whim of his, to record Mr. Graham, had been a prescient stroke of genius.
It did cross his mind to regret that Alana treated the meeting as a therapy session, despite her insistence that Mr. Graham was not a patient, because that meant he had made a liar of her, albeit inadvertently. But he didn’t linger over the thought, any sense of guilt overshadowed by the excitement brewing in his gut. Because, though what Mr. Graham revealed about Eldon Stammets rendered the killer irredeemably boring, what Mr. Graham revealed about himself made him unutterably interesting.
His defensiveness, almost to the level of taking personal affront at Alana’s misreading of Stammets’s motivations, stopped Hannibal’s semi-distracted listen-through of the tape and made him rewind to hear it again from the start.
Mr. Graham may have intended to say nothing of meaning about himself, but the few words he spoke exposed him just the same. What struck Hannibal on second listen, were the hints he dropped about knowing people. Jack Crawford, Eldon Stammets. Even Alana, to an extent. His fluency in managing her increased as the session progressed. The delicious little joke about locking his doors—as though he had more to fear from Freddie Lounds than Eldon Stammets—raised so many questions that Hannibal could not repress his delight. He would like to speak to Mr. Graham himself. Probe him, deconstruct him, solve the riddles that bubbled up anew with each word that passed his lips.
Eldon Stammets had not conjured nearly this level of interest, for all that his modus operandi had some similar themes to Hannibal’s own.
But a direct approach would scare Mr. Graham off, so for now, Hannibal contented himself with the video of the aforementioned press conference that Freddie Lounds had uploaded to TattleCrime. The very one that made Mr. Graham redefine his perception of his personal safety, when an abduction by a serial killer had not.
Three minutes long, with hundreds of thousands of views.
He recognized Jack Crawford immediately. Though Hannibal had never had the pleasure of working with him, he had seen his picture often enough on TattleCrime, usually accompanying an article denouncing the FBI as a bunch of incompetents. Behind Crawford stood a few others from the Bureau, but nobody of note, as well as Alana Bloom, and a few more unknowns. Among the faces he didn’t recognize, Hannibal’s eyes kept coming back to the sullen-looking, disheveled yet handsome man standing off to the side behind Alana.
A Botticelli angel brought to life, he mused, gorging himself on the riot of brown curls, the blue eyes, so startling in their clarity. He thought of the velvet charm of the voice on the recording, the soft lilt of his well-suppressed accent, suited impeccably to the symmetry of his face.
Perfection in features, constructed by an artist’s hands, one moment, and then contorted almost to ruin by the expression of derision and disgust as the conference wore on. A face which matched the recording’s abrasive, bordering on rude personality.
This would be Mr. Graham then.
He didn’t seem happy to be there, and given Mr. Graham’s comments to Alana and his demeanor at the press conference, his presence was likely not voluntary. The man at the helm must be to blame—Jack Crawford probably thought it would make good optics for the BAU to show off the man they rescued from the clutches of evil, even if he stood silently in the back. An infantile grasp for approval from the masses.
The whole video would have been a waste of time, unexpected pleasure at an attractive face aside, were it not for the last five seconds. These five seconds netted the website an additional thirty views at the very least, and all from the tablet in Hannibal’s lap.
Jack Crawford pointed at the person behind the camera, utter contempt writ on his face for all to see. The camera rose, red curls bobbing into view as the reporter stood up and centered her viewfinder on the agitated Mr. Graham.
“Freddie Lounds, TattleCrime,” she announced.
Jack Crawford, halfway off the screen due to her close zoom on the man in the back, made an impatient gesture, barely sparing her a glance.
And then she said: “I’d like to address this to Will Graham—”
Which made the room burst into chaos.
“There will be no further questions,” Jack Crawford boomed, not even allowing her to continue to speak, instead ushering the now conspicuous Mr. Graham away from the podium. The rest of the press corps clamored for a word, shouting their inquiries at Jack Crawford’s back.
Until this video aired, Will Graham had only been referred to in the press as Stammets’s unnamed survivor. A John Doe, for his privacy and safety. Miss Lounds’s little stunt laid his identity bare, made it general knowledge. Trust her reporting to unearth the truly interesting part of the story; thanks to her efforts, Will Graham became a common enough name that Hannibal had heard it well before Alana requested the use of his office.
Despite the yelling, the flashing lights and clicks of shutter buttons, despite the ever-mounting noise, Lounds’s voice cut through like the ring of a bell, sharp and high. “Mr. Graham,” Lounds shouted, “didn’t they find you at Stammets’s table?”
Jack Crawford held an arm out as though blocking out the room, repeating, “No further questions!” at the top of his lungs like a mantra. The way a child would, in combination with ears covered and eyes screwed shut, to block out an unpleasant sound.
“Did you eat them!” Lounds yelled over the din. “Did you eat the mushrooms!”
The camera zoomed in further, capturing in grainy detail the way Will Graham’s eyebrows jumped into his hairline, the way his mouth popped open to speak.
Jack Crawford’s hand moved from Mr. Graham’s back to his arm, and at his sharp look and a muttered word, the blue-eyed man fell silent.
And then, the pièce de résistance.
Mr. Graham’s shoulders shrugged, and his mouth moved, speech inaudible to the camera filming them across the distance and through the noise.
Hannibal watched that particular segment a surplus of times, focused precisely on Mr. Graham’s lips. He felt reasonably certain, by the end, in his understanding of the words Mr. Graham spoke just before turning his head and cutting off the view of his mouth.
‘Well, I—’. Two words, meaningless on their own, but giving rise to yet another question that demanded an answer. What logical endings could there possibly be to that brief utterance?
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘Well, I did.’
Hannibal’s own lips curled upwards as he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, the glass of Malbec effectively forgotten on the desk before him.
He could wager a guess as to which of the two it was.
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