Prologue.
Harry.
'There's a woman who also knows where the uranium is hidden,' Mani had told him. Bittersweet in its connotation.
'She's dead,' he'd replied, clearly not able to disguise how he'd felt and still did. Ruth, out there somewhere was lost to him forever. Safe and happily married, if Malcolm's searches were to be believed.
Lost maybe, but from the moment that she'd walked almost hesitantly into that dreadful room, small and frightened and completely unaware as to the game that Mani was playing, the stakes had risen one hundredfold. His death should it come was well overdue, whereas hers - never. At no matter what the cost to him personally, he'd known that he was going to protect her.
Mani who he'd once trusted, in what had been a theatre of war like non other, had known exactly which of his buttons to press and, by insinuating what in fact was the truth about their relationship, had inadvertently handed him a purpose. Time tended to play tricks on the love struck and he'd certainly been that. But now he knew that his longings for Ruth had been real, not something that he'd clung onto and embellished over the years, never to be voiced or proven. As clearly as he knew that Lucas and Ros were running out of time in which to find them.
That he'd been forced to watch Ruth being hurt in the process. Her screams and tears, heart wrenching as he played Mani at his own game, he would always regret, but never the chance that he'd been given to prove to her that he still loved her. One single word, hidden behind her hands. His name. 'Harry,' she'd said plaintively, her eyes still full of tears, as Mani had fallen to the ground, had given him just a sliver of hope. The last that he'd seen of her, as Ros had taken her to the waiting ambulance.
He could and maybe should have followed her, but to what purpose? Exhausted and dehydrated, 'no he was fine, he'd told a concerned Lucas, stubbornly refusing any help. Instead he'd gone home to shower and change, before he headed back to the grid.
Ros, who herself had lost so much, had recognised how he was feeling. 'We need to give Harry what he wants,' she'd told Lucas and Jo. But by sending Jo to talk to Ruth, the catalyst that had brought her back to him, had changed from what had been a small hill that he'd been preparing to climb, into a huge chasm. The moment that Ros had been forced into pulling the trigger.
Ruth.
The bag had always been packed. Hidden as it was, on the top shelf of Nico's wardrobe where no one other than her would notice it, she'd come to believe that maybe it wasn't necessary. Until. Moving faster than she had in years, with her mind racing, Nico was her only concern. Bright and beautiful with his whole life in front of him, she'd been living the impossible dream. Well part of it anyway, if she'd been able to forget the man that she'd left standing on the dockside. As she'd lain buried in George's arms and he'd told her that he loved her, it was Harry that had flooded her mind. This was what Harry had wanted to tell her. That and that she'd stopped him, was the cross that she'd nailed herself too, every time during the past two years, when George had made love to her.
Stepping off the plane into the dark grey skies of London, a green and pleasant land it wasn't. It was into an evolving nightmare that would see her losing George's trust, long before he was killed. The horror that was about to unfold, entirely of her own making.
That her first question to Malcolm had been 'how is he?' proved that she still cared about Harry didn't it? When she'd been forced into that ghastly room and seen him tied to a chair, clearly having been beaten to exhaustion, she'd known without a doubt that she still loved him.
Mani's insinuation that their relationship had been akin to Brief Encounter was true. That Harry had risen in her defence as she knew he would, whilst she'd shrunk in her chair, fearful of what else lay in store, was an inevitability.
'Do you love him?' Harry had asked her when they were finally on their own.
'I feel guilty,' she'd said, going on the defensive. The time she'd been away, having taught her to stand up for herself. But this was Harry who had always loved her and, still did if the look in his eyes were to be believed. The intimacy that they'd once shared, still burning brightly. Why when he clearly knew that she'd fallen into bed with George?Wondering if she'd ever be given the chance and, if she did, how she'd explain, had been blown away with the one single bullet to the back of George's head, as the guilt and the grief had engulfed her.