“A bit,” James agreed, “I only had two naps today. But my head still hurts and if I get up too quickly I get dizzy,” he added gravely, his hazel eyes wide and blinking.

“Relax,” Robbie insisted with a grin as he reached out to stroke James’ hair, his hand coming to rest lightly against his neck, the contact comforting for both men. “No one’s suggesting you’re well, there’s no need to end the dying swan routine quite yet. If you can keep if going for a few more days I suspect Laura will feel the need to bring something in an ovenproof dish and the Chief Super might even stretch to a get-well card. Two sick days in a row; people are starting to think I’ve murdered you. And if you don’t come back to work we’ll never find out how I did it.”

This just can’t be happening. And especially not now. Things have just been going so well. He can’t. It’s undignified. It’s ridiculous. He can’t have caught mumps from a toddler. It’s not fair.

Robbie had been a little afraid that the lad might wake up in a panic, finding himself in bed with his boss. In a compromising position, and the morning after the night before.

What he hadn’t expected was this endearing, drowsy, grumpy, first-thing-in-the-morning James.

“Anything to suggest it’s murder?” Robbie demanded unrepentantly. Alright he was in a bit of a temper these days but it was hardly his sodding fault. The universe had decided to throw an attractive, leggy blonde into his path, make it a bloke and make it his sergeant. So the universe could bloody well deal with his bad mood.

Hathaway loses control in the interrogation room and has to face the consequences.

James is distracted when he finally returns, early in the afternoon. He’s casting a suspicious glance back in the direction that Robbie now knows the nurses’ desk is in. But his face clears when his eyes lock on Robbie’s. And he makes his way over, carefully manoeuvring around Laura’s chair with a ceremonious nod at her, before dropping down with a sigh into his own seat, that’s set at an angle between Robbie and that monitor.

“I know you can hear me. I’ve still got you. And I’m still not going anywhere.”

Clev

Lewis

She heard the words echo eerily from years before. It wouldn’t be the first mental comparison she’d made between the late DCI Morse and James Hathaway but nothing had ever been this spot on.

So she was stuck in an empty office, twiddling her thumbs and switching between feeling guilty for doing nothing and feeling bored. What sort of a name was Hathaway anyway? She knew there was an Anne Hathaway, wife of Shakespeare. Then there was the other Anne Hathaway, who was a real looker and famous for no knickers at some red carpet event. Lammy presumed that DI Hathaway wore knickers, and probably didn’t know Shakespeare personally. After four hours of logging onto her computer and messing around with all the new employee orientation files that made her brain want to die she decided she had earned a coffee and headed off to the canteen.

They’ve somehow managed to get cut adrift from one another in the early days of Robbie’s retirement.

But James has a tendency to make speeches when he’s drunk.

Luckily for Robbie.

There’s that feeling of losing James, somehow, building even before he left, and now all of a sudden sharpening into something undeniable, like it’s been a premonition after all.

For the hundredth time since they had arrived, James Hathaway wished his houseguests gone.

More to the point, he wished his blasted Uncle Randolph had never died and left him this great hulking estate in Oxfordshire, for he had been perfectly content until then to live as an outcast, the youngest son of a youngest son who had spent his inheritance on supporting the cause of abolition.

Set after "Dead of Winter". Hathaway talks and Lewis draws some conclusions. Smooching ensues.