Chapter Text
“Grab us both a coffee, will you, Troy?”
DCI Tom Barnaby dropped a fiver on Troy’s desk, making some sort of significant face that Gavin wasn’t in the mood to translate. He’d been in a grump all morning; slept poorly the night before, got a mountain of paperwork to get through, and his Nan was still in hospital, her broken hip healing slower than it should be.
But Barnaby was right, of course. Once outside, with Causton’s damp Autumn air nipping on his skin and leaves scuttling along the footpath beside him, Troy’s ill humour stripped back some and he felt he could, perhaps, breathe a little better.
The bell on the shop door jangled as he shouldered his way in, trying in vain to comb the tangles from his hair.
“Mornin’, mate. Large flat white and a regular long black with sugar?”
His eyebrows soared to his hairline at this, delivered cheerily and in a deeply Irish accent.
The bloke behind the counter laughed. “I’m not a mind reader, don’t worry. Gracie said to expect you—Detective Sergeant Troy, right? She says you and DCI Barnaby are regular customers.”
“That’s right. Probably got more coffee than blood in me at this point.”
The man grinned again and set about measuring out grounds.
Part of the reason he was good at his job—and Sergeant Troy had just enough confidence to know that he was actually pretty good—was the attention he paid to people. Not just to get to the root of things, but because he was interested and people responded to that, even if he reckoned he spent half of his employed hours with a foot in his mouth.
The man in front of him wasn’t hard to get an initial read on. Good cheer radiated off him and, though he didn’t fumble, there was enough hesitancy in his movements that Troy would bet good money he hadn’t been in the job more than a week. Plus, of course, he hadn’t seen him before: the proprietor, Gracie, normally took his and Barnaby’s orders when they were too desperate for proper coffee to hit up the horrid lunchroom urns. What really struck him, though, was the faint but definite wariness in the man’s blue, blue eyes. His smile was broad, and seemed genuine, but there was something… something almost like fear behind the twinkling smile and Irish drawl. That, Gavin Troy knew, was the face of a man with something to hide.
Well, fair enough. He had things to hide, too, and it was really none of his business unless the bloke made it so.
Realising he’d been watching the man wordlessly for a few minutes, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and raised his voice over the milk steamer’s whine.
“Been at Gracie’s long, then?”
“Nah, I—I was working at a bar, before, but I managed to get myself fired for cussing out a customer. Gracie knows my Mam, so she said she could make a space for me if I minded my manners, ‘til I finish my degree.”
“Lot there to unpack.”
He took the coffees that were slid toward him, but leant against the counter, unwilling to leave yet and oddly charmed by the open, chatty… God, they were probably calling themselves ‘baristas’ these days, weren’t they?
He got another darting grin for his trouble, and squashed down the part of him that noticed the man’s hands (he could play piano with hands like those, his mind helpfully supplied. Very nice hands, they were).
“Ahh, where to start? I’m studying paramed—nearly done, too. And the bloke kinda deserved it, he was being a right casserole. But management takes a dim view of these things.” He stopped his sunny stream and grinned up at Gavin. “Oh, but I’m babblin’ awfully. I’m Martin, by the way. Martin Thielemann. Not very Irish, I know; Da was German Catholic.”
Something about being around this man made it hard not to smile. He was just… Just nice, and open, and a little bit awkward in a way that made Sergeant Troy want to draw him deeper, follow all the threads of his chatter.
But, because he was a coward and scared, scared, scared all the bloody time, Gavin did not. Instead, he straightened, smiled tightly and pushed the note toward Thielemann.
He said, “Well, thanks for these; I expect I’ll see you around?”
And Martin, picking up on his change in manner, just said “Of course. Nice to meet ya, Sergeant Troy.”
And then Troy left.
Gavin had given up telling himself he wasn’t gay in his last year of school, when Matthew Kitts had kissed him for a dare and he’d felt it down to his toes. But he wasn’t ever going to do anything about it (because he was a coward, and scared all the bloody time, and he wasn’t like those other fags, he was… he was a copper, for God’s sake, and he was good at his job!)
He stomped back toward the station clutching the paper cups like they’d personally wronged him. Tried to imagine Cully’s face instead of, of—well, of any man’s, and only saw her laughing at him.
“Thielemann. Thielemann. No, I don’t know the name. What’s he like?”
Troy shrugged, watching as Barnaby took a sip of his coffee and smacked his lips, satisfied. He’d been working with the man more than a year now and he still couldn’t believe Barnaby actually liked his coffee black and sugared.
“Short-ish. Irish. Friendly, but not too friendly, if you know what I mean. Might be blonde, or brunette; depends on the light, I ‘spose.”
For some reason, the chief was smiling into his coffee cup. “Enlightening as always, Sergeant Troy.”
“He had nice eyes. Very blue,” he added, a touch defensive, to prove he had actually been paying attention. Of course he had! And not, he told himself firmly, because of anything to do with clever, competent hands or a sharp, interesting face, or twinkling smiles and wary eyes and a way of darting around the corners of what seemed a most interesting life. No. He paid attention because that was his job, and he was good at it. For some reason, he felt a little rumble of nausea, and he chased it away with more coffee.
Barnaby’s smile deepened and even the open window and the smell of Autumn couldn’t chase off the return of Troy’s bad mood.
The next time Barnaby chucked him a fiver and shooed him toward Gracie’s, Troy learned that Martin had grown up in Midsomer Deverell, a pretty village on the other side of the Marsh Woods from Causton, but spent most of his youth at boarding school in Dublin on the wish of his “properly Irish Mam.” He had worked the family trade for a little before aiming for paramedicine and now was three months out from earning his qualifications, he had a sweet tooth something wicked and he privately agreed that coffee was better with milk, but made Troy promise he wouldn’t pass that on to Barnaby.
The time after that, Martin somehow inveigled a very abridged life story out of Troy: educated at the local school (hated it), Dad wanted him to go to university (hated it), Mum encouraged him to drop out of uni and give the police force a go (loved it, stayed, became a detective, got assigned as the DCI’s sergeant after a year, which was pretty bloody good if he said so himself, and now he helped solve murders and kicked the occasional door down and… yeah, things were pretty alright).
And the time after that, when he came rushing in all of his own accord looking flushed and happy and the least uptight Martin had ever seen him, it was to tell him that Nan was finally out of hospital and back on her feet. Martin’s smile could have kept a hot air balloon aloft, he reckoned—it was that buoyant. He’d rummaged around at the back of the cake cabinet and emerged with a box full of various treats: a spare quiche he was sure wouldn’t sell, a couple of brownies, a slightly-too-small-to-be-picture-perfect slice of carrot cake, a jam-topped scone and a handful of cookies. When Gavin had reached for his wallet, the other man had fixed him with such a glare that he was almost (almost) frightened.
“They’re not for you, they’re for your Nan. Restorative, and such. You’re not to pay for restorative scones.”
Of course, they ran into each other outside the shop all the time, because Causton was a small town and everybody knew everybody.
Partly out of the nature of his job but mostly because he kept to his own space, Gavin wouldn’t say he had many friends per se: plenty of old ladies he got on with, and people his age who nodded to him, but nobody outside the force he’d go to the pub with. Somehow, though, Martin had managed to charm the whole bloody village—to date, Sergeant Troy had spotted him swapping cake recipes with Sue Clapper, walking with Cully and Nico through the Sunday markets, sitting drinking coffee with Gracie and Lil, the other baker at Gracie’s, and several times browsing or drinking wine with Tim and Avery at the bookshop. By pure luck, he and Barnaby hadn’t yet bumped into each other, but Gavin bet it was only a matter of time. He’d started to dread running into Martin, not because he’d done anything except be cheerful and generous, but because Gavin had realised something awful—something with repercussions, something he one hundred per cent did not want to deal with on top of the fact that it seemed like someone was being pushed down the stairs or accidentally shot or otherwise mutilated and murdered every other week.
The fact of the matter was, he felt better after seeing him. Even if they didn’t talk, even if he only caught a glimpse of blue eyes and big grin and a flop of hair that could, given the right light, be blonde, the world seemed brighter and better around Martin Thielemann.
So it was that a month after he’d first met him, Gavin Troy was forced to admit he was infatuated with the bloody barista.