I

London, 1982

There shouldn't be any sound. It's 5am and it should be quiet. But the noise rages in his head, too many thoughts being kept awake by too little adrenaline, his muscles aching for rest even though he's perched on the bright red bonnet of his car, the only splash of colour in this pre-dawn wasteland.

A swallow brings the taste of bile; should eat something and maybe stop chain-smoking. The gum doesn't get rid of the sour taste anymore and the lamps around the scene make his eyes hurt. He'd kill for sleep.

'Guv?'

Ray's voice from the darkness and he turns his head, still buried in the collar he's turned up against the cold, chin almost on his chest. It's fucking freezing. Minus three.

'SOCO'll be here in ten minutes.'

A nod and a silence. They've done this too many times over the last month. No one has any jokes left.

'Drake?'

'Dunno, Guv.'

He watches her looking down at the dead girl, hands in his pockets. Gone are the days where he'd demand some of her psychiatry bollocks. It seems a lifetime since the first one of these. Sometimes he has to double check the calendar to make himself believe it's only been twenty seven days.

'Same as the others,' he states quietly, though this is the first time he's laid eyes on the victim. They're past that question too.

It's always the same.

'Twelve,' she replies and he knows the lack of inflection in her tone is all about desperation. 'They're always twelve.'

Desperation and something else he doesn't understand. Can't think about it, there's no room. No room for anything but dead girls screams and, by now, the unmasked grip of panic.

'You alright?'

Stupid question. Stupid, pointless question. He can't think of anything else to say and she doesn't grace it with a response. The way she doesn't look at him makes him feel even more useless than he clearly already is and he doesn't have the energy to call himself a jessie for thinking it.

'I have to solve this,' he hears her say to the girl. Directly to the girl, the corpse, the once-beautiful child that is now nothing but a discarded heap of mottled and violated flesh. His mind accepts, processes and rebels about the way that she's not talking to him before he even has the chance to open his mouth, though the protest is on its way.

'We, Bolly.'

She's shaking her head and he watches her shoulders hunch, telling him to go away, forcing the air around her outwards until he has to take a step back.

'...parents,' he mutters, turning from her. There's nothing he can say to her and he doesn't know why but he can't, he can't, take her on. Sometimes she's a universe away and his arms just don't stretch that far.

He didn't do it the first time. The DCI can't break every bit of bad news and it was one girl, just one.

Didn't do the second either. She did. She told him there'd be more and he didn't believe her because he didn't want to.

He's done the five since though. Every time. And it's not fair, the way the words are the same and the sobbing, desperate wails are the same and the why, why, why? is the same but the hurt isn't. It should be but it isn't. It stabs worse every time, opens a well in him that fills fast with anger, and tiredness, and sorry, I'm sorry, and regret and helplessness. So much helplessness. He should be able to offer more, he knows. After he'd done it twice, he stopped promising they'd catch him soon even though he knows it's what they want to hear. He could help them, by promising he'd make someone pay. He could help himself if he could force his helplessness to believe it. He'd kill to be able to believe it. But it's been twenty seven days and there are no clues, no fibres, no prints, no motive. Nothing but ghosts, haunting him in the night, freezing him to the bed when he tries to sleep. Little girls, bloody and broken and screaming silently into the dark, at him, lit by the white noise shining from the television in the corner.

He tries to tell them he's sorry but it's like they just don't want to hear.

'Guv.'

He nods, a corner of his mouth raising, Scotch in his hand. Somewhere there's a drum beating, like music, like a heartbeat.

'Where've you been?'

'Guv.'

Closer, the cigarette burning down between his fingers. Closer, closer.

'I asked you a bloody question.'

'Guv.'

Frowning now, louder, louder, louder. It's in his head, this drum, and it's splitting him apart.

'...Guv!'

'Sam!'

He sits bolt upright, his cheek hot and sweaty from lying on his desk, head stuffed full of cotton wool and whiskey. A blink and the room comes back, quiet and warm.

'Uh, no Guv. It's me.' A beat. 'Chris.'

He stares at his DC like he's never seen him before. The man is white, thinner than he was thirty days ago, hair straggling down over his collar.

'Christopher. What?'

'Uh, well, there's nothing...'

He trails off because his DCI is already waving a hand, ushering him backwards with the flick of his wrist.

'See you tomorrow but stay near a phone. Let the desk know where you'll be.'

He doesn't have to say why and Chris doesn't need to ask. He hesitates by the door though, turning around after a brief struggle with himself.

'We're uh...goin' to Luigi's if you...no.'

He's shaking his head. He hasn't been out drinking with them for a week and can't face it tonight either. As an afterthought, he asks,

'Where's Drake?'

'Left an hour ago, Guv. Didn't say where.'

The door closes and he's alone, staring down at the flat of his desk, uncluttered by paperwork because there isn't any for this case. Their killer is a phantom, seemingly without touch or blood, or sweat or semen, without prints or hair, no clothes, no prior, no life.

He doesn't know how to catch a ghost. But there has to be a way. There always is. Isn't there?

She's always left on waste ground, near a dilapidated building. Usually a condemned one and God knows there are enough of those around down here. The river smells when you're this close to it; it sucks at the concrete banks caging it, the foam on top catching in his headlights. He sits in the car, looking out at her last resting place, seeing that body like she's in his lights only in his head she's standing, pointing, naked and yelling.

Not for the first time this month, he's starting to really believe he's losing it. But then, he can't remember the last time he slept more than two hours at a stretch and Drake's told him enough times that the mind does funny things when it wants to.

There's music coming from somewhere, a steady rhythm that matches his footsteps as he walks. The building's been combed for evidence, no sign that their killer squatted there. He doesn't know why he knows she's in there but she's not anywhere else and she was looking at it this morning with an expression he couldn't decipher. Copper's hunch. He usually follows his instinct, except when he lets her persuade him not to.

'What do you know?' he asks her shape. He's not scared. He knows her breathing. And she doesn't seem surprised that he's here.

'I know we're not going to find him until he wants us to.'

She steps into the light of his torch, glass and grit crunching under her boots. The shadows make her cheeks hollow, blackness at the base of her throat, a living skeleton in three-inch heels and white leather jacket.

'We have to. This has to stop.'

'It's not going to.'

'That's not bloody helping.'

The back of his neck is killing him, tension from his shoulder blades to the top of his head. It's what he thinks about as her hands lay flat on his chest, that pain; he doesn't move. He's so tired that the world outside the torch beam is disappearing to black, his ears buzz with voices he can't make out, mouth dry and legs aching, her hands burning through his coat.

'Do you trust me, Gene?'

'Yes.'

'Then trust me when I tell you – you won't catch him.'

Her breath feels cold on his cheek as she breathes upwards, air ghosting over his mouth in a faint waft of peppermint and wine. In this moment, he can believe her. He doesn't want to but that doesn't mean she's not right.

'We can't just give up.'

'We won't. And he'll give himself to us.'

Her voice is muffled and he can't see her face; she's resting her cheek on his breastbone like she's listening to his heart.

'...are you alright, Bolly?'

'No.

...they're always twelve, Gene.'

'I know.'

His arm is around her shoulders but he doesn't remember moving. The torch beam lights the floor and he stares at the wall, looking at peeling paint and rotting timbers, piles of rubble in the corner half lit by the glare.

'I think there'll be five more.'

His eyes close, ears whispering to him. It takes a physical effort to pry his eyelids apart again and the world is distant when he does, like everything is a long way away and happening to someone else.

'No.'

Not that many. Please, anyone listening, not that many.

She's looking up at him and he thinks it's gone too far now, he needs sleep; when his eyes meet hers they pull at him like a vacuum, a gaping expanse of cold, glittering stars, chilling him for a split second before his hand jerks, the light moves and his imagination stops playing tricks.

'Go to bed, Gene.'

A month ago, he'd be jokingly asking her to come with him even though they both knew he was never joking at all.

'What are you doing down here, Alex?'

She never said yes.

'I'm waiting.'

Later, he thinks he should really have pressed her on that. But she'd said it as she was stepping away and he missed the warmth of her hand; he'd looked down to his chest to see if it had left a mark, imagining a hole right through to his skin. And when he'd looked back up, she was gone.