I cooled my heels in the hallway, waiting for George and Colby to get back. Across the way, Bradley waited too, his highly trained investigative eyes trained on his shoes.
George had suggested — and it was, unfortunately, hard to argue with him — that after all the recent… drama, that it would probably be a good idea for him and Colby to let Jenny know that she was free to go, thank-you-very-much-for-your-cooperation-ma’am-we’ll-be-in-touch.
I would have loved to be there to see her face, and more importantly, Bradley’s. But now that we’d finally made some spurking progress, there was no reason other than the sheer joy of it to tick off our colleagues in what we prefer to call the “conventional” police.
So instead I just glanced at Bradley, and basked in the cozy afterglow of his humiliation.
#
I’ve mentioned before, I think, the tendency of some Iron Badges – and George is one of them – to sometimes model their behaviour on TV cop shows. So why, you’re probably wondering, did Bradley get my nose so out of joint by doing exactly the same thing?
And, uh, that’s a really good question, come to think of it.
It could be that I cut George and the other guys – it’s usually the guys – some slack, because I know that all too often, we have to operate far outside of the bounds of normal. We deal every day with things right out of mythology, and it helps to have your own mythology to draw on, to help you cope. And you could do a lot worse in finding a mythology to inspire you than the secular, pop-culture myth of the heroic cop… provided, of course, that you pick the right cop to emulate.
That’s another thing that bothered me about Bradley, I guess. He so obviously took so much delight in a particular kind of detective work: picking at people’s stories until they fell apart. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that just because something doesn’t make perfect logical sense doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I’ve seen that work on TV. You know, where catching a guy in a lie about what colour shirt he was wearing upsets the whole applecart and he confesses to sixteen counts of murder.
And maybe that even works in the ordinary world, with ordinary people who commit ordinary crimes. But there’s nothing ordinary about Fairyland, and the regular rules don’t apply there. Not at all. I learned that a long time ago. Now it was Bradley’s turn.
