London was cold on that dark November morning, as Sandra Pullman tugged her navy coat around her slender body on the way from the door of her house to her car. It was six o'clock in the morning - usually she wouldn't even be awake at this ungodly hour, even on a Monday, but this Monday was the day when she had a meeting with Strickland and a few other Detective Superintendents about some useless new initiative being implemented across the Met. She hated Monday mornings at the best of times, never mind when she had to spend her first few waking hours in a stuffy room drinking some awful instant coffee out of a polystyrene cup.

She sighed as she descended down the greyish white stone steps from the front door of her house, blindly prodding at the buttons on her key fob to unlock the doors of her car. It was the ninth day of November, she realised. Nobody knew the significance of that date to her; not her mother, not her colleagues, not even her boys. Jesus, even Jack hadn't known. She looked down the street, sighing and pressing her dry, chapped lips together and closing her eyes for a second, before opening the heavy car door.

Throwing her massive, expensive black leather handbag onto the passenger seat, she got into her car - it was only a few days old; a brand new, dark blue Audi that had set her back a small fortune. Not that she had anything better to spend her money on, though, and so she bought herself a flashy new car every year without fail. It wasn't as if she had anybody else to treat with her money, was it?

She started the car, and cold air began to blast from the fans, startling her slightly until she gained enough sense and composure to turn them off, and sat in the car in silence for a moment, staring at the clock blankly. 6.01 now, the digital display in the dashboard told her - she ought to get going, or she'd be late for the meeting, meaning that she'd undoubtedly end up stood next to some smelly individual who hadn't bothered to have a shower before turning up, and straining to hear the DAC prattle on about the new system that was being forced upon the force. At least if she was sat down, she'd be able to employ her well-honed skill at sleeping with her eyes open, which had taken many such meetings to perfect.

She glanced quickly in the driver's mirror to ascertain that she wouldn't have her brand new car smashed to smithereens if she pulled out, and caught a glimpse of her face in the reflection. God, she looked knackered - ice blue eyes, cold and bitter, her skin pale and dull, her hair unkempt and sticking up at all angles. She didn't care enough to correct any of these things, as she pulled out into the road and began her moonlight commute to work, the radio playing quietly as she drove.

The street she lived on was posh, by all accounts - townhouses owned by middle class people, leading their mundane, boring lives, having one-point-eight children who they sent to overpriced schools, and generally doing very little from day to day. She'd hate to live like that, being average and uninteresting, doing the same thing over and over again. Having said that, Sandra did realise that these people did have one advantage over her - they were all still in bed at 6am.

She reached the end of her road and came to a halt, watching cars go whizzing past along the main road, driven by commuters equally as tired as she was. She spotted some homeless people curled up against a wall, protected from the bitter weather by thin blankets and old coats with rips in. Seeing those people reminded her just how lucky she really was, sometimes, although she rarely felt it, living alone in her big, empty house. At least she had a roof over her head.

The fans were finally managing to blast out an impressive quantity of hot air (even more than Strickland would be able to, she thought to herself with a smile), but she was still cold. Not on the outside - in fact, she considered stopping to take her coat off - but inside. She was freezing; her heart of stone pumping ice cold blood around her body as she went along, with nothing and nobody to truly love. She couldn't remember being in love, really. It wasn't something she'd felt often - perhaps there'd been one or two men, but she'd never fallen in love, merely tripped, before getting up, dusting herself off, and continuing as if nothing had ever happened.

She turned onto the main road, accelerating past the few pedestrians mad enough to be out at this time in the morning and speeding off down the road towards the station. God, seventeen years ago today. How had that gone so quickly? What the bloody hell had she been doing for seventeen years?

The radio was playing quietly - she didn't remember switching it on, but then again, with the vast array of mainly useless buttons in this car, it could have been anything that triggered it. She'd never understood how morning radio presenters could be so sodding cheerful at 6am - it was a skill she had never mastered. She really wasn't a morning person, though; it took several large doses of caffeine to get her to fully open her eyes, never mind pretend to be cheerful about anything. Some ridiculously cheesy, poppy song was playing - it wasn't the station she usually tuned into, and so she prodded what she assumed was probably the "off" button, which instead retuned the radio to a station playing a song which, if nothing else, matched her mood well.

"Late night sex smoking cigarettes,
I try so hard but I can't forget,
And in a heartbeat
I would do it all again."

She bit down on her chapped bottom lip, breathing slowly as she slowed down for the traffic lights. Shit, today was going to be difficult - pretending that everything was fine was just normal life for her; she was a master of disguise when it came to her feelings, and she doubted that anyone really knew what she felt like now. Then again, she didn't quite know what she felt, either. It was like a black hole of total emptiness inside her, taking in her emotions and leaving her with nothing but the feeling that she was so very alone. But pretending that she was fine on the anniversary of the events on this day seventeen years ago? That would take some doing.

She ignored the single tear that fell from her cornflower blue eye as she turned into another road from the junction. It wasn't worth thinking about her feelings - she knew that from bitter experience.

Another song had started playing on the radio - another bloody depressing one, of course. This show may as well have been the Sandra Pullman show; every song that had been played so far this morning had been sad, mournful and depressed, just like her.

"Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again".

The songs used in this are "Nothing Left To Lose" by The Pretty Reckless, and "So Long, Marianne" by Leonard Cohen. Please review - the next part should hopefully be up within a week. This will be a minimum 20-chapter story, so sit tight!

Sinéad x