Author's Notes:
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and acknowledge the legal rights of those who do. I will make no profit from this story. This is the prologue to "Loyalty and Betrayal", the next chapter in the ongoing Sienna / Bobby saga. It's set in London shortly after the events of "Bulletproof Armour".
You know how I've been saying that everyone will be getting drunk, angry and laid in this fic? Well... the angst starteth here. Don't say I didn't warn ya.
As ever, feedback / reviews most welcome.
Also as ever, gigantic thanks to brynna for beta-ing and moral support!
When he thought, or dreamed, about what had happened in London, he kept seeing the wall of pictures. Remembering the night when he had stood in front of it, seeking some clues as to the events of the past two years of his lover's life in a strange city.
Odd, that. In terms of what had happened, he would have expected to see the wreckage of the City of London stadium roof haunting his thoughts. Or perhaps that hideous second when he had seen the terrorist raise his gun to Sienna, and known, in that same second, that he could not possibly get there in time to save her (although she hadn't needed him to; she had saved herself). Perhaps even the gloomy, dank, MI5 interrogation room where he had come face-to-face with the man he had been hunting, the man who had murdered a young architect and his wife in New York, and thus brought himself and Alex Eames to London.
Random chance, he thought. But then, random chances happened all the time; supposing that another pair of Major Case detectives had been chosen to investigate the murders of Ranjit and Miya Elahi? Supposing that Andrew Davenport had not been assigned to work on the stadium security team?
Supposing, for example, that three years ago, it had been he and not Eames who had busted in the door behind which a panic-stricken gangster's bodyguard was hiding with a baseball bat? If not for that, it could have been she and not he who had been sent on the surveillance operation on the East Coast, in which case the past three years would have unfolded very differently. As it was, she had stayed in New York to recover from the broken arm she had sustained, and he had gone alone to work with Interpol and the CIA.
If someone had told him at the start of that operation that he would meet the woman with whom, he hoped, he would be spending the rest of his life, he would never have believed it in a million years.
Perhaps, he reflected with a grim smile, that same hypothetical person could have done him the favour of mentioning that he was also going to meet the man who would nearly split them apart for good.
That same thought was in large part why, two weeks after the foiled attack on the City of London stadium, he had found himself standing in front of a large wall, covered almost from top to bottom in photographs. They flowed across the expanse of yellow paint in chronological order; the oldest in the top left hand corner, the newest in the bottom right. The images were grouped together by subject; here a small cluster representing a martial arts tournament in Paris, there a larger group for a week's vacation in Spain. Dotted throughout were various random images of the two people who owned the photographs and had created the wall as a sort of photo gallery, depicting the history of the past years of their lives.
The wall belonged to two of Sienna's friends, Tanya and Jack Simmons-McAllister. It was the inner wall of the living room to their house. Since the living room occupied nearly the entire ground floor, and it was a large house, the wall was still nowhere near full, although Goren estimated that the timespan it covered had to represent at least fifteen years. He was tall enough to see the beginning of the photographs at the very top of the wall if he tipped his head back slightly. Private Tanya Simmons, as she had been then, glowered out at him, the scowl and army uniform not hiding the fact that she had been only seventeen, maybe eighteen at most, when the photograph had been taken. Beside her, a image of her husband in cap and gown, university degree in hand, peered at the viewer through his glasses. Though at least four years older, he appeared the more shy of the two, pleasant smile not hiding the uncertainty in his expression.
"Fun to look at, isn't it?"
He turned quickly, although the speaker's Scottish accent had already identified him. Jack McAllister crossed the room to stand beside him, considering the wall himself with a thoughtful expression. (Goren was still somewhat confused as to what surname to use for him, as Tanya and Jack seemed to sometimes go by their joint surname and sometimes by their original names. Tanya's explanation hadn't exactly cleared things up: "Well, basically when we're working we use our original surnames, when we want a good table in a restaurant we use our joint name and Jack's title, and the kids can just have whatever name they like best".)
Now nearly fifteen years older than the picture of him Goren had just been contemplating, Jack looked at present as though every one of those years had caught up with him, hard. He isn't sleeping, Goren thought, but did not comment. He had seen cops look much the same way after a particularly traumatic case, and the only cure for it was time. Time, and the company of friends.
Except, he reflected, that McAllister had just lost one of his friends and would lose another in the very near future.
"It's an interesting idea. Map out your lives over the past few years… I suppose it makes it easier to see where you came from, where you're going to."
McAllister grinned tiredly. "Actually, I've always taken the view that it just saves you having to put them into an album, but yeah, there's that too." He stared at the wall for a few seconds, then added apropos of nothing, "Drew does that. You can always tell when he's trying to work something out, because he throws the papers all over the floor. Says it's easier when you can see things and move them around…"
He suddenly fell silent, and an awkward silence descended and lingered. Goren returned his attention to the images. Previously, he had looked only at part of the wall, knowing that the pictures he was particularly interested in did not appear until towards the end of the wall of photographs, the area covering the past two years, when Sienna Tovitz had come to London and met — or rather been introduced to — Jack and Tanya. Now, though, he deliberately returned his gaze to the top of the wall.
Unlike the more recent images, the pictures there did not flow in neat chronological order, but there were large gaps, representing times when neither Jack nor Tanya had been taking photographs of events in their lives, such as Tanya's operations abroad with the British Army, and whatever Jack had done with his life before he decided to turn to journalism. Part of Goren's mind couldn't help thinking that that was odd; most journalists he'd met had been writing since they were teenagers working on their high school newsletters, and anyone trying to break into the profession in their mid-twenties would surely face massive competition… but, further down the wall, there was Jack in a suit, collecting some kind of journalists' award, with a beaming Tanya beside him.
And here and there, popping up like the grinning joker in the pack, there was Drew, or Andrew Davenport, to give him his full name, or that bastard, as Goren privately thought of him. Throughout most of the wall, he appeared only intermittantly, although Goren noted that in one picture showing him and Tanya drinking together, he looked to be barely out of his teens. Halfway down, there was one picture of him and Jack together, and though it was not dated, he would guess that Jack was not much older there than in the graduation photograph at the start of the wall. Oddly, they were both dressed in formal suits, black tuxedos that, if anything, highlighted how young they looked, or at least, Goren thought, how young they looked in comparison to the men they were now.
Then suddenly, around three years ago by Goren's reckoning, he began to appear more frequently. Pictures of the three of them together also became more frequent, and the background was often either Tanya and Jack's house, or the training hall Tanya ran for her martial arts classes. And then, two years later…
A short, red-haired woman began to appear then, her face faintly unhappy despite the smiles she had worn to be photographed. He knew now that Andrew Davenport had introduced her to Jack and Tanya immediately after she moved to London, and that the four of them seemed to have almost instantly bonded into a close-knit group of friends.
Although Jack, Tanya and Davenport had known each other for years, it appeared that the arrival of Sienna had been the catalyst for a closer friendship developing between them, and photographs of the four of them as a group became more common. Here a Christmas party, there someone's birthday celebrations. Here a holiday somewhere Mediterranean, and there, towards the end, a large cluster of photographs taken in a muddy field, representing their trip to last year's Glastonbury Festival. Yet again, he found his eye drawn to the one in the centre. There was something about it that bothered him.
It showed the four of them — Jack, Tanya, Davenport and Sienna — together. Tanya and Davenport were stood next to each other, with Jack in front of Tanya, her free arm draped over his left shoulder. Her other arm was supporting Sienna, who was sitting across Tanya and Davenport's shoulders; half her weight on Tanya's right shoulder, half on Davenport's left. All of them were holding beer bottles, and they were clad in T-shirts and shorts, laughing in the sunshine.
The staging of the photo, though slightly odd, was not what bothered him. There was a nearly-identical picture far at the top of the wall with Tanya and several of her fellow soldiers from her time in the Army arranged in a similar way, although on that occasion Tanya herself was being supported on the shoulders of two hefty male soldiers.
He still could not put his finger on what irritated him about that photograph, and his train of thought was interrupted by the sudden realisation that he'd been silent for the past few minutes, and McAllister obviously thought that he was offended.
"Sorry. I know he's not your favourite person right now. Truth be told, not mine either." McAllister's voice was deeply unhappy. Goren sympathised, but could offer no comfort, and simply shrugged, trying to convey with a single movement that on the one hand, he disliked Andrew Davenport with a strength of feeling that bordered on hate, and that on the other, he was aware that the man had been one of Jack McAllister's closest friends, and that he, Goren, was about to deprive him of another.
"Well, anyway, I'll see you tomorrow." McAllister shrugged, and trudged away, his shoulders slumped. Goren watched him go, and rubbed his forehead.
He should be on top of the world right now, he thought. Not only had he caught the killer he and Eames had been pursuing, he had been instrumental in foiling a terrorist attack on a major sports stadium in London, saving thousands of lives. In the process, he and Sienna had been reunited two years after they had both thought that they had broken up for good and would never see each other again. An image of Sienna, beautiful in the warm night air on the night of their reconciliation, floated into his mind, but it was spoiled slightly by another image. Sienna, trying not to cry as she embraced Jack and Tanya, all of them murmuring reassuringly that her proposed move back to New York didn't have to mean the end for their friendship, not at all, there was always email, and Skype, and they could visit now and then…
He sighed. As if to underline how conflicted his feelings were, his eye was caught by a photograph towards the bottom of the wall; Davenport, grinning sardonically. Unusually for the wall, it was a picture of him on his own, taken in the past few years. He was seated at the kitchen table in Jack and Tanya's house, and whoever had taken the photograph (Jack? Sienna?) had obviously just shouted at him to look up at the camera, so that he looked up at the photographer with a grin of amusement, a grin that now seemed to be mocking Goren, wordlessly asking Are you worth her giving up her friends for? Her job? Her life? Didn't work out too well the last time around, hmm?
With a growl of annoyance, Goren dragged his eyes away from the picture, rejecting it with the thought That was your fault. Your fault. It was all your fault.
Of course, rationally he knew it hadn't been, that he and Sienna had had problems long before Sienna decided to make the serious mistake of confiding her doubts over their relationship in Davenport, whom she considered a friend, having met him on the same surveillance operation where she and Goren had met. Davenport had repaid her trust and affection by persuading her that she should leave New York, and Goren, to take up a post with Interpol in London, and then getting her shot on a sting operation he had set up to catch a Metropolitan police inspector he suspected (correctly) of leaking information to an Eastern European human trafficking gang.
That in itself might have been forgiveable, Goren thought, were it not for the fact that Sienna (and the thought was painful) had been in love with the suspect in question, DI John Durham. Rationally, he knew she had met him on the rebound from their break-up. Certainly, he himself had numbed the pain of losing her in the arms of several of his old girlfriends plus a few casual pick-ups in bars, but it still hurt to think that Sienna had replaced him so quickly.
And again, that would not in itself have been reason to hate Andrew Davenport. His reason for hating Davenport was simple. Davenport had never told Sienna that DI John Durham was under investigation for corruption, not because he hadn't known, but because he had. Indeed, he had persuaded her to come to London for precisely that reason. He needed bait to entrap Durham, and Sienna had been perfect; a young, attractive, intelligent female who Durham had no reason to suspect, as she had only just arrived in the city.
And then, for nearly two years after that, he had kept silent. He had never told Sienna that the pain, both physical and mental, she had suffered was not the result of bad luck, but because he had decided that she should be used to achieve his goals. Goren was still struck by the intimate nature of that betrayal; there were enough pictures of Sienna and Davenport hanging out together on the wall to show that they had become very close friends indeed.
And then Jack McAllister had worked out what had happened, and confronted Davenport with it in hearing range of everyone involved; Sienna, Goren, Eames and Tanya. And Davenport hadn't denied it. In fact…
Goren heard again Davenport's words on the rooftop that night. He had actually had the nerve, the arrogance, to accuse Goren of being the one who had hurt Sienna. "Did you know that when Sienna… thinks about other men, she compares them to you?"
And again, in that sardonic English accent: "Did you know that when Sienna… thinks about other men, she compares them to you?"
And there it was, the thought he was trying to avoid. What had Davenport been going to say, before he paused? Before he changed whatever he had originally been going to say?
No. It was unthinkable.
Bad enough that one of the latest, most recent pictures on the wall showed Davenport with his arms around another man, a young black man by the name of Michael Jones. They were obviously smitten with each other. Davenport's expression was oddly tender, almost protective, the only picture on the wall where he wasn't either smirking or grinning, and the younger man was relaxed against him, smiling widely, secure in the embrace of someone he loved. British law gave gays and lesbians the right to form civil partnerships, and when Goren had met Davenport for the first time in nearly three years, just three weeks ago, one of the first things he had noticed was that he was wearing a thin platinum ring as a sign of his engagement; bitter irony when he had nearly deprived Goren of the love of his life.
No. If nothing else, it was an absurd thought. Davenport was gay, after all, as he, Goren, knew quite well (another memory of Davenport's voice from three years ago, speaking to Sienna: "Sweetheart, it's not YOU I'm interested in").
And yet… His attention returned to the photograph of the four of them at Glastonbury. The sunshine indicated that it had been taken late in the festival, as the earlier photographs showed the whole site being covered in mud, and he suddenly realised what the discrepancy was.
In the photograph, Sienna was wearing a T-shirt depicting a white hand holding a hand-grenade in the shape of a heart and the words: "Green Day: American Idiot" across the top. Pretty standard festival garb, except that in an earlier photograph, Davenport had been wearing it. And, looking more closely, it was the same T-shirt, the letters showing identical signs of heavy wear and tear in both photographs. And looking at the back of the photographs, they had been taken on consecutive days.
He was being stupid. Ridiculous. After all, even if he was right, it made no difference. The past was past.
The past never is past, he thought, and then realised that he should go to bed and sleep. The day after tomorrow, a Sunday, he and Eames would be flying out to New York, and after that he would not see Sienna for at least a month, probably longer. The thought of being separated again after they had just found each other was unbearable, but they would both have to bear it. He did not intend to ruin what would be their last day together by yawning all the way through it, and resolved to put all these thoughts out of his mind.
Except that in the months since, he had been drawn back to the memory of the wall of pictures, and the thoughts he had had in front of it.
It didn't matter. Not at all.