She picked her way through the wreckage of the vehicles that littered the road. Leo had beaten her there and was already working on a body in the vehicle nearest the cordon, a black Bentley that was wedged at an angle into the central reservation. She lifted her hand and greeted him with a wave that he returned, ducking out of the car to talk to her and tell her where he wanted her to go.

'What have we got?' she asked, glancing out over the sea of contorted metal and equally mangled bodies that it was her job to sort through and investigate in the hope of bringing some answers and perhaps some solace to those left behind.

'A bloody political nightmare is what we've got' was the reply, not from Leo but from the police officer standing at his side. He was a gruff man, probably in his mid to late fifties with a puce complexion and a vein that pulsed in the side of his head when he got agitated. A heart attack waiting to happen, she thought to herself as Leo gestured her to one side so that they could talk uninterrupted.

'Multi vehicle pile-up; three cars, two motorcycles. The problem is that one of the cars belonged to a high profile Nigerian diplomat, the two motorcycles were his police outriders and there are reports that witnesses heard shots being fired. Mr Kumasi has been taken to hospital to be treated for serious head injuries but his driver and bodyguard weren't so lucky. Neither were the mother and child in the Volvo' he gestured towards a crumpled wreckage further down the carriageway. In the dim light cast by two hastily erected floodlights she could see a woman's body slumped over the steering wheel and a small body lying on the road beside the car, covered up with a blanket after an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt.

'And the third car?' she asked, glancing over at a Ford Fiesta that was on its roof and appeared to be empty.

'There's a lot of blood in both the driver and the passenger seats but no sign of the driver. He was bleeding heavily and he won't have got far. The police are searching the vicinity'

'What do you want me to do?' she asked, but she already knew. She was going to get the mother and the child, and once again she was going to have to cope with the senseless loss of another life that had barely started. She could handle it this time because it was only an accident and that seemed somehow less noxious than the idea of somebody larger and stronger than the child, somebody pure evil, taking the life for reasons of his own that she prayed she would never understand. She needed to handle the mother and child because her colleagues couldn't do it. Even five years down the line she knew that Leo's wounds were still too raw, and that he would never see a mother and child without seeing Cassie and Teresa. After Hungary she didn't think that Harry would take it either. He tried to brush it off, to make out that he was over it, but she knew that he was more damaged than he would ever let on, and he'd spent enough nights in her spare room for her to know that when he did sleep he sometimes woke up crying.

'The Volvo' he replied, intentionally not referring to the horrors that waited for her inside the mangled wreckage of the car. 'Is that alright?'

'It's fine' she nodded, peering past him into the car 'The driver?'

'Yes. His bodyguard died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital and he's being transferred straight to the mortuary'

'Have you paged Harry?' she asked. She knew that Leo sometimes didn't page Harry unless they were really desperate for a third pair of hands, and she also knew that it infuriated Harry to know that he was treated with kid gloves. Special treatment was the last thing that he wanted, even though they all knew that he needed it.

'Yep but I haven't heard anything' he replied with a shrug 'Probably best if he doesn't come. One of us should enjoy our Saturday night and there'll be plenty for him to do on Monday morning' he added, trailing off as almost on cue the blue Golf pulled up at the cordon and Harry climbed out. One look at him told Nikki two things; that he couldn't perform any autopsies because nothing that he said, concluded or did would stand up in court, and that there was no way that he should have been driving. Not unless they wanted the next autopsy they conducted to be on their friend and colleague.

'Harry' she painted an awkward smile on her face, aware that in one fluid movement that Harry barely seemed to register Leo had taken the car keys from his hand and stowed them safely in his own pocket. She wasn't the only one who'd noticed the slight unsteadiness in his gait and the stench of alcohol as he approached them only confirmed her fears.

'Sorry Harry' Leo greeted him with an equally awkward smile and steered him away before a police officer could notice his inebriation and put that together with the fact that he'd arrived at the crime scene in a car 'We've wasted your time. The two of us are more than capable of taking care of what's here. You should head home and get some sleep'

'How?' Harry asked sounding genuinely intrigued 'You've just taken my car keys'

'I'll be finished here in twenty minutes. Wait in my car, I'll run you home and have a PC drop yours back to your house'

'You plan to tell a police officer that they need to take my car back to my house because I've driven drunk?' he asked, looking suitably incredulous. 'Come on Leo, that's madness and you know it. Anyway, I've only had one whiskey'

'What, in a pint glass?' Leo pulled a face that left no doubt that he didn't believe a word that Harry said. 'You're right about the PC though. I'll get Janet to come down in a cab and take my car home, I'll run you home in yours'

'There's no need'

'There's no alternative' Leo replied, spared from arguing any further by some commotion on the far side of the cordon.

'Here come the bloody spooks' a police officer muttered derisively as two large black Range Rovers with tinted windows pulled up on the other side of the cordon and several men all dressed in black jeans and tight t-shirts climbed out.

'Step away from the body, Professor Dalton' the last person to emerge from the Range Rovers bellowed authoritatively. He was the only one dressed in a suit and Nikki would swear that there was a bulge beneath his jacket that was consistent with his carrying a weapon. He looked marginally less threatening than his identikit colleagues but he still wasn't somebody that she would have wanted to mess with, but Leo stood firm.

'And you are?'

'Foreign Office. The attack on Mr Kumasi is a matter of international security. It needs handling delicately, not trampling through with size ten boots' the man gave DI Hardwick a withering glare and the ruddy faced officer spluttered but managed no intelligible reply 'You can continue to work on the other vehicles but Mr Kumasi's car and the police vehicles are now a matter for us. We've appointed our own pathologist'

'And who would that be?' Leo asked. He knew the game well enough to know that even though they'd appointed their own pathologist they would be expecting to use his facilities and his auxiliary staff to conduct the autopsy and he wanted to know who he was dealing with. He got his answer not in the form of words but in the form of somebody stepping out of a third Range Rover that had just pulled up at the cordon. Nikki only knew her by reputation and recognised her only from a photograph that Harry had on his desk of the three of them at some kind of work function or other, but she knew who she was dealing with. If there was any doubt in her mind then Harry's slack jawed gawp and the faint smile on Leo's face put paid to it. The woman walking towards her as if she owned the place was Professor Sam Ryan.