Love Me In The Dark

Episode 3:The East Bank

The warehouse sat on the east bank of the river like a man who had decided, at some point in the distant past, to stop explaining himself.

I don't know why that was the first thought I had when I saw it.

As a journalist, I'm supposed to deal in facts, in specifics, in the verifiable and the concrete. But there are buildings that have something beyond their materials, and this was one of them. Exposed brick, dark with age and river damp, the kind of dark that takes decades to accumulate and can't be faked with paint. Low industrial lights mounted at intervals that threw amber circles on the cobblestones without fully committing to illumination. The whole place looked like it had been there longer than the city and simply decided to outlast everyone's opinions about it.

I arrived at five minutes to ten.

I always arrive early at a first meeting. I arrive early because the first few minutes of a space, tells you things they would prefer you not to know. Whether the person inside is the kind who prepares for other's arrival or the kind who expects others to deal with whatever they find there.

I stood in the small courtyard outside the warehouse door for approximately ninety seconds, in the cold air, and noted everything I could. One entrance. The door stood right before me. One window, first floor, lit from inside. The sound of nothing moving nearby.

I knocked.

The door opened before my hand fully dropped.

Damian Vael was dressed today in dark shirt, dark trousers, no jacket. He looked …I searched for the right word…more himself. The gala suit was a uniform, perfectly worn, but a uniform nonetheless. This was not. His look at my face was quick and professional. Then, he swept the courtyard, in one practiced arc, before stepping aside.

I walked into his office area.

Long table, documents already spread across it like a cheeseboard. Two lamps, one at each end, creating overlapping pools of warm light. The kitchenette along the far wall was basic, functional, with a coffee maker boosting the picture. Bookshelves on the left side, titles I couldn't make out from the door. One window overlooking the river. The only exit was the same door I just came through.

I catalogued all of this without appearing to. You learn how to do that, over the years. Always look like you're simply arriving in a room, while actually reading every corner of it.

He found the recorder in thirty seconds.

He didn’t touch me or pat-down, or even requested. What he did was watch the way my jacket hung as I walked through the door. The weight of the device in the left pocket caused a fractional difference in the drape of the fabric on that side. He noticed it. This was a man who was trained to notice things just quietly, as a matter of course.

"Turn it off or this ends now," he said. Flat. No drama, just information.

"I'm a journalist. I record." Also flat. We were, apparently, going to be very formal at each other across this table.

"You're a journalist working against people who have already killed at least one man this month." His direct gaze spoke of someone who thought this through and was not, at this stage, interested in counterarguments. "Turn it off, or walk back out. I won't stop you."

I pulled the recorder from my pocket and dropped it on the table between us, face up, still running.

"It doesn't turn off," I said. "But it stays here. In plain sight, where we can both see it. If one of us ends up at the bottom of a car park like Dell, the other one has something to work with."

He looked at the recorder for a long moment. Then at me. Back at the recorder. His left eye twitched again … a fractional recalibration, the look of a man updating an assessment.

"That's reasonable, I guess" he said. The driest, smallest suggestion of a shrug I’d ever witnessed on a human being.

Then he turned, poured two coffees from the machine at the wall without asking how I took mine, and brought them to the table. We sat down and got to work.

That was the first night.

I came back the next night. And the next. And the one after that. After the first week, I stopped thinking of it as a decision I was making and started taking it simply as the new shape of my evenings. Finish at The Median, eat something at my desk that I wouldn't be able to tell you an hour later what it was, drive to the east bank.

Every night, he made my coffee without asking how I took it. And each time, he got it exactly right. The consistent evidence that he had paid attention to something I had not invited him to pay attention to, filed it away with the same methodical accuracy he applied to everything, and was now deploying it as casually as breathing.

It felt like a small invasion. Which was, I recognised, an unreasonable thing to feel about a cup of coffee. I felt it anyway.

On the fourth night, I brought food.

Somehow, it caught my attention that he forgot to eat when he was working deeply. It wasn’t the way busy people sometimes do to signal how important their work is. He was the type that, when fully engaged with a problem, simply drops everything that isn't the problem. Once he picked up a document, the rest of the world, including the concept of dinner, ceased to register.

I noticed this on the second night and told myself it was not my problem. I noticed it again on the third night. As I set the food flask on the table, he looked up from whatever he was reading. I said nothing, because a comment would have made it into something it was not.

There was a questionable expression on his face in that moment and I immediately decided not to think about it. Surprise, yes. But what was underneath the surprise was not simple. Something quieter. Which had no business being in a working meeting in a warehouse at eleven o'clock at night between a journalist and her source. I made a deliberate, conscious choice not to examine it.

That look went straight through my professional armour as if it were made of paper.

I found this intensely inconvenient and moved on.

We argued every night. It was the most stimulating professional arguing I had ever done. He argued with the patience of a man who had mapped three moves ahead and was waiting, without obvious frustration, for you to catch up to where he already was. I argued the way I've always argued, which is fast and lateral and not particularly interested in the established route if there's a shorter one.

"You push the first source too hard, you burn all of them." He would push a document across the table when making a point. Not aggressively, but with a definite placement, the corner of the page landing exactly where he wanted my eyes to go. "You wait and build. Come from the side."

"Dell waited," I said. "He is dead!"

"Dell was alone. You're not."

"Rushing gets us inadmissible evidence and a lawsuit that buries the story permanently."

"Moving on two fronts simultaneously…"

"Is controlled panic with a better vocabulary." He said it like he had apparently heard that argument before and already had its dismantling prepared.

I opened my mouth.

"Stop." His voice dropped. He sounded sharp, flat, with the authority of someone who did not need to be loud. "Stop talking. One second."

I stopped.

I don’t normally stop when told to. It’s a documented feature of my professional personality that when someone tells me to stop talking, I take it as a structural suggestion rather than an instruction. I generally talk more. I’ve been told about this issue on multiple occasions by people whose judgment I respect. Yet, I continue not to stop. It's simply how I'm built.

But, I stopped.

He looked at me across the table. The lamplight was amber and low, the documents spread between us like a map of a country we were still learning, and the recorder sat at the edge of its small circle of light, running, the way it always did.

He was quiet for long enough that I almost said what. Almost.

"You are the most alive person," he said. Quietly. So quietly I immediately wondered if the recorder had caught it. "I’ve ever been in a room with."

And then.

Nothing. He didn't follow it with anything. He didn't look away or look down or soften it into something more manageable with additional words, which is what most people do when they say something true by accident. He just…said it. Sat with it. And looked at me.

The silence that came after was not like any of the working silences we'd built up over the previous four nights. Those had texture. The texture of thought, of two minds running parallel, productive and focused. This silence had a different feel entirely. It was warm where the others had been neutral. It sat on the table between the recorder and my notepad and the half-eaten takeaway and neither of us moved toward it or away from it.

"What?" I said. Because I needed to say something and what was the only word I trusted not to reveal anything.

He shook his head. Very slowly. The gesture of a man setting aside something he’d not intended to put on the table.

I picked up my notes. And, I admit this precisely because it is true and because pretending would be dishonest: my hands weren’t entirely steady. A small tremor, barely visible, but there. I said goodnight, and left.

I felt his eyes on me as I walked the full length to the door.

They stayed with me in the cab ride home at two in the morning, the city passing in amber and black outside the window, the bridge lights and the dark river and the silence of a city in the small hours. Meanwhile, my heart started doing something I’d warned it very clearly, on multiple occasions, not to do.

I told myself it was the work. The intensity of it all, the sustained pressure, the particular false intimacy of two people sharing dangerous information in a small room every night. I tried to convince my head that the nervous system, under that kind of pressure, produces responses that mimic warmer feelings. That it's a documented phenomenon. That I was a professional, or wasn’t I?

None of those was particularly convincing by the time the cab stopped outside my building.

I let myself in. Locked the door. Stood in the dark hallway with my back against it for a moment, for no particular reason I was willing to name. Then, I pulled out the recorder and pressed play.

His voice, low in the lamplight: You are the most alive person I have ever been in a room with.

My voice, flat: What?

Silence.

Paper.

I turned it off. Went to bed. Starring at the ceiling, I told myself I was thinking about the case, which was true. I was also thinking about other things, which I argued with myself that I wasn't.

Outside, somewhere in the street below, a car engine idled. I noticed. Because I notice everything, it's genuinely not a choice. I lay there listening to it not move. Thirty seconds. A minute. Longer.

I filed it in the part of my mind marked uncertain and closed my eyes.

The engine eventually stopped. I didn't hear it go.

By morning, the car was gone.

The unease it left behind was considerably more persistent.