Chapter 27: The Dinner
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — November 22, 2008, 5:00 PM]
James changed shirts three times, which was two times more than any operation had ever required.
The first shirt was too formal—white, crisp, the kind of thing Alex Richter wore to charity galas and aristocratic dinners. The second was too casual—a black henley that said criminal lieutenant more than IT technician. The third was a blue button-down, slightly rumpled, the kind of shirt that a man called Jim who fixed computers might wear to dinner with a woman he was beginning to like.
Beginning to like. The phrase was a diplomatic understatement and he knew it.
He'd made a reservation at a small Italian place in Clerkenwell—not the kind of restaurant where Alex Richter entertained lords and junior ministers, but the kind where the tables had candles in wine bottles and the owner called everyone "darling." Deliberate calibration. Jim from IT earned thirty-five thousand a year and lived in a flatshare in Hackney. Jim from IT could afford good pasta and house red but not a sommelier.
The operational script was prepared. Over the main course, Jim would mention trouble with his home computer. Molly would offer help—or he'd offer to fix something at her office. The conversation would turn to work, to the morgue, to access. Casual. Organic. The request would come wrapped in enough personal connection to feel like trust rather than transaction.
He rehearsed the pivot three times in the bathroom mirror. It was good. Natural. Indistinguishable from genuine interest.
He picked up the Richter phone, then put it down. Picked up the Jim phone—a separate burner, dedicated solely to this identity, never used for anything else. The screen showed Molly's last message: See you at 7! I'm wearing the blue dress. Is that too much? It might be too much. It's just pasta. Ignore me. See you at 7!
He typed: Blue sounds perfect. See you there.
Sent. Pocketed the phone. Checked the mirror one final time. Blue shirt. Dark jeans. No watch—Jim from IT didn't own a TAG Heuer. No Westwood suit hanging on the door. No gun in the drawer. Tonight, he was nobody dangerous. Tonight, he was just a man going to dinner.
---
[Trattoria Lucia, Clerkenwell — November 22, 2008, 7:10 PM]
She was already there. Blue dress, as advertised—simple, fitted, the kind of dress a woman bought specifically for occasions she wanted to go well. Her hair was down, which James hadn't seen before. It changed her face—softer, less institutional, more like someone who existed outside the fluorescent corridors of St. Bart's.
"You look—" James started.
"Too much? I knew it was too much. It's just pasta. I should have worn the—"
"You look lovely."
The word landed. Molly's hands, which had been adjusting a napkin with anxious precision, went still.
"Oh. Thank you."
They ordered. Wine—a Montepulciano, the owner's recommendation, delivered with a wink that suggested he'd identified the evening's emotional stakes with the accuracy of a seasoned professional. Antipasti. The bread was warm and the olive oil was peppery and the restaurant was half-full, which provided enough ambient noise for privacy without the loneliness of empty tables.
"So," Molly said, dipping bread. "Jim from IT. Tell me something I don't know about you."
The question was a trap in ways she couldn't appreciate. Everything she knew about him was a lie—his name, his job, his history, his life. The truth was a Glock 19 in a Southwark flat and a man named Fletcher at the bottom of the Solent and a blackmail archive growing name by name in a notebook she'd never see.
"I like museums," James said. True—or true enough, translated from a previous life where Saturday mornings at the MFA in Boston had been the closest thing to peace he'd found. "The quiet ones. Not the blockbuster exhibitions with queues round the block. The small rooms where they keep the things nobody comes to see."
"Which things?"
"Medieval manuscripts. Maps. Instruments nobody knows how to play anymore. The objects that tell you what ordinary people cared about, not what kings commissioned."
Molly tilted her head. "That's... unexpectedly poetic for an IT person."
"We contain multitudes."
"Whitman. You read Whitman."
"Among others."
"I read mostly forensic journals. And Terry Pratchett. Is that a terrible admission?"
"Pratchett understood death better than most forensic journals."
The laugh came—the one he'd heard at Speedy's, surprised and genuine and slightly too loud for the room. The couple at the next table glanced over. Molly covered her mouth. "Sorry. I do that. Laugh at things that aren't meant to be that funny."
"It was meant to be exactly that funny."
The food arrived. Pasta—tagliatelle for her, rigatoni for him, both in sauces that smelled of garlic and patience. They ate. They talked. And somewhere between the antipasti and the secondo, the operational script in James's head—the pivot to work, the casual mention of computers, the bridge to morgue access—went silent.
Not quiet. Silent. As if someone had reached into the machinery of his calculating mind and pulled the plug on the specific circuit responsible for treating this woman as a means to an end.
She told him about her father. A GP in Sussex who'd died of pancreatic cancer when Molly was twelve. "He was the kind of doctor who made house calls. Actual house calls. His patients loved him, and he loved them, and when he got sick they queued outside the house to bring food. I decided to go into medicine because of him, and I decided on pathology because—" She stopped. Took a breath. "Because I couldn't bear to lose living patients the way he couldn't bear to lose them. The dead ones are already gone. You can't fail them."
James set down his fork. The plate was half-finished, the sauce cooling, the meal irrelevant compared to the thing happening across the table.
"You're not failing anyone," he said.
"You don't know that."
"I know you care about getting it right. About finding the truth. About giving families answers they can live with. That's not failure. That's—" He searched for the word that Jim from IT would use, that wouldn't reveal the depth of understanding that belonged to someone else entirely. "That's grace."
Molly's eyes glistened. She blinked it away—quick, practised, the reflex of someone who'd learned not to cry in front of colleagues because crying was interpreted as weakness in hospitals the way it was interpreted as weakness everywhere else.
"You're very different from what I expected," she said.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone who talks about processors and asks me if I've tried turning it off and on again."
"And instead?"
"Instead you quote Whitman and understand decomposition rates and use the word 'grace' like it means something to you." She picked up her wine. Drank. Set it down with more force than intended—the glass hit the table with a sharp tink. "Jim, can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
"Why me? I mean—look at you. You're clever and funny and you actually listen when people talk. Women must—I mean, you could—" She was spiralling, the way she did when vulnerability exceeded her tolerance. "Why the mousy pathologist who eats lunch alone?"
The question deserved an honest answer. James Moriarty, criminal consultant, information broker, architect of an assassination network, sat in a Clerkenwell trattoria and gave the most honest answer he could manage while lying about everything else.
"Because you're the most real person I've met in months. Everyone else—" He gestured vaguely, encompassing a world she couldn't see. "Everyone else is performing. Playing a role. Saying what they think they should say. You just... say things. True things. Without checking first whether they're appropriate or strategic or calculated. You're genuine, and that's—" He stopped himself. The next word would have been terrifying, and Jim from IT wasn't supposed to be terrified of genuineness. "That's rare."
The silence that followed was the longest they'd shared. The restaurant moved around them—waiters, diners, the ambient clatter of plates and conversation—but the silence held, a pocket of stillness in the noise.
"Would you like dessert?" Molly asked, and the question was so mundane after what had preceded it that they both laughed, and the laughter broke the tension, and the evening returned to something manageable.
They split a tiramisu. Molly got mascarpone on her chin. James pointed at it. She wiped it with her napkin, blushing. He found himself wishing she hadn't.
---
He walked her home. Clerkenwell to her flat in Bloomsbury—thirty minutes through streets lit amber and edged with November cold. They walked close but not touching, the precise distance that separated intention from action, want from willingness.
At her door—a Victorian conversion, third floor, window boxes with dead geraniums that she apologised for—she turned.
"I had fun," Molly said. "Really fun. Not polite fun. Not social-obligation fun. Actual, genuine, wish-it-wasn't-over fun."
"Me too."
The moment arrived. The one where gravity and proximity and three hours of honesty-adjacent conversation converged into a single possible action. James could feel it—the pull, physical and simple, the desire to close the remaining distance and learn what her lips tasted like.
He didn't. Not because the operation prohibited it. Not because Jim from IT would move too slowly. Because he wanted to too much, and wanting something this much when you were composed of lies was a cruelty he wasn't ready to inflict.
"Next week?" he asked.
"Yes. Definitely yes." She smiled—wide, unguarded, the smile of a woman who'd spent the evening being seen and had decided it was safe to be visible. "Good night, Jim."
"Good night, Molly."
She went inside. The door closed. James stood on the pavement for fifteen seconds longer than necessary, then turned and walked south toward the Tube.
At home—the Southwark flat, the operational centre, the place where James Moriarty lived and Jim from IT did not—he sat at the kitchen table. The notebook was open. The new one, from WHSmith. He should write up the evening: contact developed, trust deepening, access timeline progressing.
Instead, he stared at the blank page. The pen stayed capped.
His phone buzzed. Molly: Tonight was wonderful. Thank you. 🐈
He typed Me too and deleted it. Typed I had a great time and deleted it. Typed You're the best thing in my life and every word I said tonight was a lie except the ones that mattered and deleted it.
Typed: Me too. And the cat emoji is very you.
Sent. Set the phone face-down on the table. Pressed his palms flat against the wood—the same table where he'd planned arsons and laundered money and mapped the corruption of police officers. The surface was warm from his hands.
The morning came with Moran's voice on the phone, clipped and professional. "The St. Bart's asset. Is she ready?"
James stared at the ceiling. The plaster had a crack he'd never noticed—hairline, running from the light fitting to the wall, the kind of fault that existed beneath the surface long before it became visible.
"Still developing the contact," he said.
The words were technically true. They were also, by a considerable margin, the biggest lie he'd told since waking up in a dead man's body.
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