Chapter One

Out of absolute, sheer boredom and the fact that I am stuck on my butt right now at home not able to do much, I ended up writing a bloody fanfic. About Ashes. Which I can't find the disk for and it's really pissing me off. Since it is a good show though, and I'm really feeling quite sadistic at the moment, well...there you go. Published. And if you're looking for a story about how Alex and Gene kiss and fall in love and have babies, please click the back button. This may get a little disturbing.

I have been on here before...but new account with a superweird username, considering I opened the old one when I was 12. And wrote Twilight crap. So yer.

This might well be a load of rubbish...

It was dark when the body was found.

The call came in at three, a man with a cockney accent nervously relaying the information. He'd found a body, down by the river, an asian woman, he said. No, he didn't know her. No, he wasn't going to give his name.

And so, that was how they found themselves, in the early hours of the morning, standing in the cold, British weather, down by the Thames, staring at the body. It wasn't the first time, and it probably wouldn't be the last. They'd seen many bodies, twisted bodies, burnt bodies, bodies you could barely recognize as being human.

Alex had never seen anything like this.

"Jesus." She muttered, staring down at the woman, suddenly feeling sick. The woman's torso had been sliced open, several times, it seemed. Blood covered her chest, her arms, what remained of her clothes. Her insides seemed twisted, mutilated. Her brown stared up at the sky like glass balls.

She glanced at the man beside her-Gene- who was staring down at the woman, eyes slightly narrowed. He'd never seen anything like it either. He didn't know what to make of it.

"Well." He said after a while, looking at Alex. "You're the bloody psychiatrist, you tell us what this."

"Psychology." Alex rolled her eyes slightly. "And I don't know. It's horrible, though."

He sighed, and glanced at the others in the team. "Forensics here yet...bloody hell, get rid of him!"

A man with a perm and one with blonde highlights moved away from the group, towards the man that the other had seen. It was a man in his thirties with brown hair, holding a camera up, taking pictures. A reporter, they presumed. Violent murder on the streets of London and a reporter wanted the story.

"How does he know about this?" Alex glanced at Gene, confused. "It's the early hours of the morning, he can't just be a random person walker. Reporters don't do that-"

"I don't know, maybe the informant told 'im!" Gene replied. "Who the hell is he, anyway?!

"We don't know." Alex answered. "He said he didn't want to be found out. Didn't want to be seen as a snitch." She glanced at the body then back at Gene. "He knows who did it. Or he thinks he does."

"Or he did it."

"Possible." Alex shrugged. "The person who took the call said he was nervous though-"

"Well maybe he was faking it!" Gene glanced at Alex in exasperation, before frowning slightly. "You feel sick, Bolls? Never seen a dead body before?"

"It's nothing." She answered quietly, looking away from the body. "I've just never seen anything like that before."

The body was soon identified as Suha Ahmad. She had no family in the country. She'd come here to attend university and had, it seemed, overstayed her visa, for whatever reason. She'd booked a flight to Islamabad airport on the days before her visa expired, one which she had not boarded. It seemed her family were rich, or at least, well off.

Racism? She didn't know. She shuddered, remembering the way the womans intestines had spilled out onto the concrete, the way the womans insides were exposed. Something was nagging away at the edge of mind, something didn't make sense.

It got to her when forensics called them, and informed them that both the woman's kidneys, liver and heart had been removed.

"At the very least we can say they were removed by an expert. Someone who's trained to do such a thing. Somebody who has done this before." They were told. "One of the kidneys was removed before everything else. Weeks ago. The others...were removed more recently."

"Jesus." Gene muttered, glancing at Alex. Alex suddenly remembered the stories she'd heard...stories of travellers being offered drinks in bars and waking up in a hotel room in a bath of ice, minus a kidney.

She'd never paid much attention to them.

Except Suha would never wake up. Suha was dead.

"Somebody murdered her, and took her organs out?" Gene said quietly.

"No." The technician shook his head slightly. "Somebody took her organs out whilst she was still alive, most likely. There's no stab wounds, gunshot wounds...anything to suggest that she was killed in a way other than from blood loss and the removal of vital organs. In short, somebody removed this womans organs, and then she died."

"Removing them by force, most likely." Alex was feeling slightly sick again at the thought of it. She'd heard stories of people in Asia and Africa selling there kidneys...she'd heard a lot of stories. She'd just never truly believed them.

But there it was. A case of organ theft, lying dead on a mortuary slab right in front of her.

Proof that Organ theft happened.

And proof that it was happening right here, in London.