Title: Missing, Presumed Dead
Author: Zath Chauvert
Summary: What really happened to Sam Tyler?
Rating: PG-13/T/Blue Cortina
Feedback: Yes, please! Any and all feedback, positive or negative, would be greatly appreciated. Just hit the Review button at the bottom of the page. You can also read my author profile for other contact information.
Disclaimer: I do not own Life on Mars or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this. I am simply having a bit of fun and do not mean to infringe on anyone's copyright.
Author's Note: This was written for spastic_visions for the 2009 LoM Ficathon. The prompt was "the test card girl, Gene, dreams."

Missing, Presumed Dead
By Zath Chauvert

Gene Hunt did not hate his wife. Honestly, he didn't. He didn't exactly love her, and maybe he had never really loved her, but the mild indifference that he felt for her was not even remotely similar to hate. As far as he could tell, she felt the same way about him, and so, by unspoken agreement, they spent years living by the motto that an apathetic marriage was better than no marriage at all. Looking back on it, Gene wondered if things might have been easier if they really had been trying to hurt each other.

Sooner or later, everyone reaches their breaking point, it's always just a question of how long it takes to get there. The mutual charade of their marriage had been wearing thin for years, so when the end arrived in 1980, only the collateral damage was a genuine surprise. Gene knew that his Missus had started having an affair recently, but he ignored it. Even when she came right out and admitted to it one morning after handing him his usual plate of bacon and eggs, he saw no reason to get lose his equanimity. She didn't seem to have given him the clap or anything like that, so why should he care? Obviously frustrated, she announced that the man she had been cuckolding him with in increasingly brazen ways for the past two months was the one and only Sam Tyler, but Gene just laughed long and hard. Of course he knew it was Tyler. Did she really think that he didn't know what the members of his team got up to in their off hours?

"So," she said, once her husband got his mirth under control, "what are you going to do about it?"

"Do about it? Who says I have to do anything?"

Now, it was her turn to laugh. If Gene noticed that the tears which eventually started rolling down her cheeks weren't entirely from merriment, he gave no sign of it.

Instead, he simply asked, "What's so funny?"

"You've changed, Eugene. Twenty years ago, you'd have been out for his blood."

"Twenty years ago, I didn't have a department to run. Do you have any idea how long it took to find a DI with a brain in his head and then to get him to stop acting like said brain wasn't completely cracked? If letting you do the horizontal tango with him from time to time is what it takes to keep my team together and putting villains behind bars, you have my blessing." Gene took a bite of his eggs and shoved a fat slice of bacon in on top of it just to make sure that his mouth was too full for him to be able to respond to anything more that his wife had to say on the subject. She took the hint and stalked out of the kitchen, most likely to go and make an early start of the shopping or the laundry or whatever it was that she did these days to pass the time when she wasn't doing his DI.

That night, after chucking-out time at the pub, Gene arrived home to discover that the house was silent and dark. His Missus had disappeared off to god knows where, leaving behind a note on the kitchen table saying that she would get in touch with him once she had a lawyer draw up some divorce papers for her, an empty space where her clothes had once hung and, strangely enough, an equally empty place in his heart. His first thought was she must have gone to Tyler's flat. However, when Gene took a spin over there and barged in without knocking, he found his colleague drunk and alone with only empty bottles and a test card's frozen image on the telly for company. Gene knew that his wife had probably told Tyler what she was planning and where to find her, but asking Tyler (or the more appealing option of punching him in a kidney and demanding that he cough up the information) would require him to actually admit to someone that his wife had gone walkabout. Gene wasn't ready to do that quite yet, so he covered the true reason for his late night visit with his usual aplomb.

"Oi, Tyler, when are you going to finish the report on the Patterson murder?"

Sam just sat on his bed and stared at Gene for several seconds, either trying to hold back a comment that would earn him a beating or trying to hold back the urge to sick up right then and there, maybe both. Finally, he said, "What?"

"The Patterson murder: couple stabbed to death with a pair of garden shears, blood on the ceiling in patterns you claimed were important, and turned out it was their punk yob of a son what did it, just like I said it would be. Where's the report?"

"You mean the report I finished and gave to you last Wednesday?"

"Did you?"

"Yeah, so it'll be in the pile on your desk, under the three reports I've given you since then."

"Oh. Alright then."

Sam started to ask, "Anything else?" but Gene was already out the door. Tyler sighed. On the other side of the room, the television gave a hiss of static and turned itself off.

Meanwhile, outside, Gene climbed into his car and headed back home. Having no clue as to the whereabouts of his wife and lacking anything better to do, he went to bed. Eventually, he fell asleep, expecting to dream about his wife back in younger, happier days or maybe about Jenny Agutter.

Instead, he found himself dreaming that the little blond girl from the test card had walked into his office, asking for help finding her lost friend. There was something off about her, a deadness in her eyes that shouldn't be present in one so young. Dream logic demanded that Gene to help her even though she put him on edge, but there was no rule against him helping by delegating the task, so he called his DI in to put him on the case. Gene must not have been alone in his assessment of the child's oddness, because Tyler took one look at her, started blubbering like the big sissy that he was, and then bolted out of the room with the girl in hot pursuit even though she never seemed to move her legs. Gene watched her chase Tyler all over the station. She almost caught him, but he managed to escape through a train tunnel that somehow connected the canteen with the roof, where he went sailing over the edge to freedom. Robbed of her prey, the test card girl rounded on Gene. She looked like she was about to order him to do something, but Gene had had enough.

"Sod this," he said before she could open her mouth again. Then he snatched her clown doll out of her hands, stuffed it into a convenient box, and mailed it to London. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Finally, his ringing phone dragged him back to wakefulness and saved him from having to put up with any more imaginary nonsense. It was still the middle of the night, but years of habit allowed Gene to grab the handset in the dark and answer before the end of the second ring. "DCI Hunt here," he said. "What do you want?"

There was no reply, only a single exhalation that sounded suspiciously like a quieter version of the sighs that Sam Tyler liked to make on a regular basis. A second later, the line went dead.

"Arsehole," Gene muttered to the world in general, then rolled over and went back to sleep. By the time his alarm clock awakened him a few hours later, both the dream and the phone call were already forgotten. However, he was given reason to recall both events only a few days later when, in the middle of a pursuit, DI Tyler ignored a direct order to wait for backup, ostensibly lost control of his vehicle, drove his car into a river and, for all intents and purposes, vanished. As soon as Chris radioed to tell him the news, Gene knew exactly what had happened and how things would play out from there. It was his job to know these things, even if he didn't feel the need to share that knowledge with anyone else.

All available manpower was devoted to search. For days, they combed the area in ever widening circles around the site of the crash and dredged the river for miles downstream, but they never found any sign of Sam's body. Officially, Sam Tyler was a missing person. Most people assumed that he had been killed in the line of duty, drowned and swept away in a rain-swollen river. However, unless his body turned up, it would be years before he could legally be declared dead. DCI Hunt cooperated with the inquiry into Tyler's disappearance and presumed death, answering the questions that were asked of him, but that was all. He didn't demand that he be allowed to lead the investigation like everyone expected he would. He didn't even seem particularly interested any of the findings. At first, some members of the force took Gene's behavior as a sign of guilt. However, no incriminating evidence was ever found, and Gene was cleared of all suspicion. The crash was filed away as an unfortunate accident, but Gene knew better. He hadn't directly lied to the investigators, but he also hadn't told them that they were asking the wrong questions.

In the days and weeks that followed, on an almost nightly basis, Gene dreamed that he was standing on the river's edge as Tyler's car went crashing into the water. Every single time, he watched his DI, who for once had listened to Gene's admonishments not to bother with a seatbelt, go through the windscreen, just like the evidence implied that he must have done. After that, the dream had several different variations. Sometimes, Tyler was already unconscious and sank like a stone. Sometimes, he was cut up and bloody but fought against the current for as long as he could. Sometimes, Gene actually dove in to try to save him. Sometimes, he didn't need saving at all but would rather stay in the water and drown than confront either Gene or the blond girl in the red dress who had appeared on the opposite bank. Every version of the dream ended the same way, with the river claiming Sam Tyler for its own, dragging him under, never to be seen again living or dead, and every version was a total load of bollocks.

Gene knew that countless man-hours of searching had failed to locate the missing corpse of his former DI because there wasn't a corpse to find. However, he kept this information to himself, because Gene Hunt did not hate his wife and, try as he might, couldn't bring himself to hate Sam Tyler either. Tyler's decision to turn his back on it all and thereby destroy the best damn team of detectives that Manchester had ever seen hurt Gene far more than he would ever admit, but on some level that fluctuated between subconscious and conscious depending on how drunk he was, Gene felt that he deserved it, so for once he swallowed his pride and pretended to be just as clueless as Chris and Ray and most of the others. He suspected that Cartwright might know more of the truth than she let on, but he kept quiet even around her, just in case he was only imagining the knowing looks she always seemed to wear whenever someone mentioned Tyler.

The closest Gene ever came to telling the truth was in the pub the night he announced that he had put in for a transfer down to London. Nelson had asked him what his wife thought of the impending move south, and Gene, aware that he had an sizeable audience, 'accidentally let slip' that his wife would not be accompanying him because she had dumped him and run off with another woman. It almost wasn't a lie at all. He just hoped that Dorothy could make her happier than he had ever been able to.

The End