Detective Inspector Bertram Ashcombe

Bertram Ashcombe holds the rank of Detective Inspector aboard Threshold Station, a posting he treats with the gravity most people reserve for a good tailor. His uniform is pressed to a standard the quartermaster has stopped commenting on. His case-closure rate is, by any reasonable audit, excellent. He is, by his own account, rather good at this.

The audit does not mention Reeves.

Ashcombe's method — insofar as it can be called one — begins with a stated hypothesis, usually wrong, delivered with total conviction over the station's better coffee. It proceeds through several confident wrong turns. It concludes, almost without his noticing the transition, at the correct answer, which he then presents as though he had been heading there all along.

He is not a fool. He reads people well, remembers names and grudges with equal precision, and has a genuine talent for making frightened witnesses feel safe enough to talk. What he lacks is any instinct for physical evidence, timeline reconstruction, or systems logs — precisely the areas in which Reeves has no equal.

Character Notes

Ashcombe dresses for the job he believes he is doing, not the one Reeves is actually doing beside him. He regards this as a point of professional pride rather than an oversight, and would be genuinely startled to hear it described as the latter.

He is fond of Reeves in the specific, undeclared way of someone who would rather eat a bad ration bar than say so directly. He signs off every closed case with both their names. He has never once been asked to.

Partnership

Ashcombe asks Reeves questions constantly, and rarely the right one first. He has learned, slowly, that the right one is usually the second or third he asks — a discovery that has improved his closure rate considerably, though he attributes the improvement to "instinct."

Neither of them has corrected him on this point.