Note: This was not easy to write because there are so many good Lewis scenes in this episode that Hathaway is not privy to…I tried to work in references to as many of my favorites as I could without letting this thing get any longer than it already was. I meant for this to be roughly the same size and overview as the previous one, but…let's just say it got away from me.

Credit to Guy Andrews for all the good parts of dialogue and a great episode!

What the Sergeant Saw: The Sad Case of Allison Bright

A Moment with Rachel

Sergeant James Hathaway started out the first day of the Allison Bright case not seeing much at all. Contacts…a lot of expense and a lot of bother for little pieces of plastic that were quite often more trouble than they were worth. The day was not off to a good start.

It improved considerably with the arrival of Inspector Lewis.

"I have to make a speech," Lewis announced.

Instead of earning his keep putting the finishing touches on the case they'd closed the previous afternoon, Hathaway was busy trying to find an optometrist who might be able to squeeze him in on short notice. So, he wasn't particularly listening. "Who does?" he asked.

He turned in his chair to see Lewis looking shell-shocked and a bit grey around the gills. "You?" he said in surprise. Lewis nodded his head glumly in confirmation. He couldn't have looked any more rattled if he'd just been told he had only three months to live. Hathaway couldn't help laughing. "Priceless," he said as he turned back to his computer. The thought of Lewis addressing a crowded room of anybody cheered him up considerably. And not just because that meant he wouldn't have to be the one giving a speech. He wondered what DCS Innocent was thinking.

They'd been working together for several months by then. More than long enough for the sergeant to know that the inspector would not relish the prospect of standing in front of a group of strangers and making nice while the entire room stared at him. Not that Lewis wouldn't do fine at it. He handled press conferences decently and with a lot less fuss than some Hathaway could name. In fact, the sergeant thought Lewis was quite good with the press. He told them what he could and didn't waffle about what he couldn't, and the journalists seemed to appreciate knowing they might not get much, but at least it would be the truth.

Press conferences were quick affairs. Say what needed said, get through the Q & A's as gracefully as possible, and walk away. Speeches though. They were a whole other ball game. A ball game it was obvious his boss was not at all looking forward to playing.

DCS Innocent dropping by to try to encourage him in the speechwriting did not help. Lewis, now looking almost physically ill, had been scribbling, crossing out, rolling his eyes, and sighing over his speech for ages by that point. He was in no mood to listen to Innocent's less than original joke and too discouraged to work up a smile or even a grunt to make her believe he at least appreciated her support.

Hathaway, who had finally found an eye doctor willing to fit him in and who was still finding the whole Lewis-giving-a-speech idea a laugh, snickered politely at the chief superintendent's humour, but it wasn't enough to placate her. She took the inspector's less than enthusiastic response as an unspoken reproof. Quite probably because she could see the toll the speech was exacting on Lewis and was feeling a bit guilty for assigning it to him.

Her smile turned to a frown, and she said, "Speaking in public, Lewis, is a duty a senior officer is expected to discharge…without fuss!"

As she rather huffily marched off, Lewis said, "Hathaway, find me some dead people!"

The sergeant, heading off to his appointment, turned back and asked, "Sir?"

"Crime now! Or I shall discharge and it won't be a pretty sight!" the inspector yelled. He ripped his latest attempt from the notepad, balled it up, and threw it towards the rubbish bin.

"Sir," Hathaway said and made his escape. Though he couldn't know it at the time, he'd gone off to meet a killer and catch a glimpse of the man's next victim. It was a very unsettling thing to look back on later when he knew the truth. The entire time he'd sat through that exam Dr. Hugh Mallory's wife had been hanging from the banister of their home. Hathaway had sat centimetres away from the man who had put her there and seen only an ordinary eye doctor. The man had joked and even mentioned his wife, and there'd been nothing in his manner or his voice or his eyes to indicate he'd killed her only that morning.

Actually, even before that truth came out, being called to the scene and discovering it was the home of the man he'd only just met was a bit disconcerting.

"Bit of a coincidence, this," he told Lewis. "I met him a couple of hours ago…sorted out my eyes for me." Hathaway had seen plenty of death by then. Rachel Mallory's bothered him more than most; he felt somehow involved simply by virtue of having met her husband the very day of her death. He'd needed a smoke waiting for the inspector to show, and he could have done without the conversation in the stairwell with her feet dangling lifelessly above them.

As they discussed how the investigation would be handled, the inspector spoke quietly and sympathetically to the dead woman, "You poor girl." Hathaway was not surprised to hear Lewis speak to the dead. He made a habit of it.

Lewis wasn't the first man Hathaway had heard do so. He'd heard men grumble at the dead for calling them away from their supper or being dumped in the rain…just the general griping of men called out to do a disagreeable task when they would have rather been almost anywhere else. And, of course, there'd been those who spoke rudely and quite often vulgarly to the dead in what Hathaway suspected was a very poor attempt to express their horror at death in particular. And then, there were the 'Turn over, you lazy sod' sort of comments from the few who most likely said the same sort of things in the same sort of tone to their car when it wouldn't turn over in the cold.

Consequently, Lewis speaking to the dead wasn't that spectacularly out of the ordinary. It was the manner in which he did it that was unusual in Hathaway's experience. Lewis spoke to them with compassion, with interest, with an awareness of the people they might have been. It was obvious Lewis didn't look at the dead as dead bodies but as dead people. Dead people who had lived and hoped and laughed in the same way he did. People who had a story to tell, people who deserved something better than the violent, unfortunate end their dead had all-too-frequently suffered.

So, when Lewis said, "You poor girl," it merely hammered in what his sergeant was already feeling. Here was a life cut short, a tragedy and a crime. Not, as far as Hathaway saw at that moment, a crime in the legal sense just in the sadness of a family torn apart by a meaningless death. Children ran up and down that staircase, chattering and giggling and telling secrets; the body strung up from the banister had no place there.

Standing there, trying not to see the flaccid arms and legs hanging between him and where the inspector sat staring pensively at the deceased, Hathaway felt almost ill. It was far from the most gruesome death he'd encountered as a CID officer, but he'd have been happier if they'd taken this conversation outside. Even so, although with any other inspector the little tableau on the stairs might have been horrific or farcical with Lewis it was almost companionable…just the two of them and the dead woman taking a moment before they got down to the hustle and bustle of the case.

On a previous investigation, one that hadn't felt so personal to Hathaway, he'd made the mistake of asking Lewis about his penchant for talking to the dead. "Do you always question the dead, Sir?" he'd joked over the still form of a corpse Lewis had just been addressing.

Lewis had frowned back at him and then gone back to looking over the body. Hathaway had thought the frown was going to be all the answer he was going to get, and he'd expected nothing more. But, after Dr. Hobson had come and gone, after SOCO had collected their little goodie bags full of potential clues, and after Lewis and Hathaway had spoken to the less-than-helpful witnesses at the scene, when they'd climbed into Lewis' car to go break the bad news to a wife who had not been terribly broken up by it, Lewis had said, "I used to ask Morse my questions, but…" he'd gestured vaguely with his hand and finished in a quiet voice, "now I'm left asking them of the dead themselves." Lewis had then turned his head to stare out at the passing streets, and his sergeant had regretted not keeping his mouth shut.

Hathaway had been struck then, and was again now, with the knowledge that Lewis was reduced to asking the dead for answers because he wasn't going to get them from his partner. In fact, not only could Hathaway not answer the inspector's questions, he hadn't even shared them. Rings and hoovers and him standing there wanting a cigarette and wondering why they weren't back at the office clearing up loose ends and filing the paperwork on what had until Lewis starting asking questions looked like a straight-forward suicide.

"She's a wrong 'un," Lewis pronounced with certainty and without question. "I want Hobson all over this—" he began and wasn't at all happy to hear she was off on holiday leaving them at the mercy of a locum. For good reason it transpired. Without even getting the body onto the slab, Dr. Cook quickly and, according to Lewis' inexpert opinion, incorrectly ruled Rachel Mallory's death a suicide.