Ashes to Ashes

Of Which Two Worlds?


Disclaimer

'Ashes to Ashes' was created by Kudos Film & Television for BBC Worldwide. All characters and situations from the series are the copyright property of the above. No breach of copyright or trademark is intended. This is a not-for-profit fan work for free distribution through the World-wide Web.

Author's Notes

This is a story that suddenly came to me in a flash of inspiration today. The first chapter is more-or-less a summary of what I think may take place in Season 3 of 'Ashes to Ashes'. The second chapter… is the beginning of the first episode of Season 4.

Censor: T – A little Gene and Alex potty mouth but that is all

Chapter 1 – Many Happy Returns?

Detective Inspector Alexandra 'Alex' Drake decided that she hated fate, destiny and all their ilk. If she ever met one of the so-called 'Powers That Be' she would stick Gene Hunt's beloved 44-Magnum revolver up their metaphorical arse and give them a lead and cordite enema.

It had all seemed so very, very simple. Gene Hunt, Ray, Chris, Shaz, Luigi… They were all hallucinations, right? Her subconscious had latched onto poor Sam Tyler's own hallucinations in a similar situation and had created an elaborate mindscape (based on her childhood in the early 1980s) as a refuge from the horror of being shot in the head. All she had to do was find a way out of that illusory world and she would be back in her home time of 2007 and her daughter, Molly, who was truly the only thing that gave her life meaning on some days.

Only… it wasn't that simple. The 'hallucinations' stayed firmly outside all the supposed limits of the Jungian archetypes that they were supposed to be. They seemed so complete, so human, so very, very real.

Ray Carling, for all his bumbling attempts at being a 'macho man' and a copper firmly on the grey line between honest and bent was really a bumbling, honest and somewhat naive teddy-bear who, frankly, needed his friends to keep him functional. You could not hope to have a more loyal and more good-natured friend.

Chris Skelton was a great kid. Oh, he wasn't the brightest light in the house, no doubt about that. However, Alex also didn't doubt that the kid was a believer in the job and in the idea of law enforcement. He had a big, soft heart, as anyone who had watched his interactions with Shazza would tell you.

Ah, Shaz! WPC (hopefully, given her talent, WDC soon enough) Sharon Granger. The mousy and somewhat introverted young woman had filled a surprising gap in Alex's emotional life, one that she had not realised that she even had. The young woman was her baby sister in all but blood. Alex had tried to build up her self-esteem and help her break out of her culturally-imposed submissiveness (Feminism having only really just started to take hold in early-1980s Britain).

Then there was Gene. The Gene-Genie. The Mancurian Lion.

Yes, then there was Gene.

Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt was everything that Sam Tyler had described him to be. An arrogant, overbearing, egotistical, misogynistic Neanderthal with Philistine and bigoted tendencies. Or, at least, that is what she told herself. What she hadn't been ready to see was the immense pain in that angry blue-grey gaze. The deep chivalry and personal nobility of a man who had wanted to believe in the primacy of good over evil but had seen too much shit bubbling out of the sewers day after day to be sure of that any longer. A man who saved her life time and time again. A man who, when he held her, made her feel so very, very safe, something that she had not felt for so very long.

What the hell did it say about her subconscious mind that she would invent an anti-hero to be her knight in battered-but-serviceable-armour?

What the hell did it say about her emotional health that he became closer than a friend? That she found herself flirting with him during that surreal sojourn in the period 1981-82. That, if he had made the offer, she would have willingly taken him as her lover?

The last crumbling wall of her resistance against this strange televisual fantasy version of the beginning of the 1980s collapsed in that horrible, surreal, utterly compelling moment when she learnt that her father had been responsible for the bomb blast that had left her an orphan. And, as she saw her weeping, hysterical 10-year-old self in Gene Hunt's arms in the aftermath of the explosion… then she understood why it was that his arms made her feel so very, very safe.

Yet there was still Molly and there were still the persistent, impossible visions that confirmed that, yes, she was indeed a woman out of her own time. That, some twenty-five years into the future, she had another life and a daughter whom she loved so dearly and wanted to hold again so very, very much.

Was it possible for someone to exist in two separate time frames? It sounded like bad sci-fi, but the appearance in her life of Detective Inspector Tom Summers was the final horrifying proof. Somehow, she found herself caught in the path of Summers' homicidal obsession to somehow redeem himself from his past involvement in the endemic police corruption of this era. This reached its climax in a collapse of Alex's relationship with Gene that shattered her heart and left her longing for home. Finally, Alex and Summers faced each other on the scene of the notorious Lord Douglas Lane bullion robbery and Alex was on the edge of begging the other time-lost policeman to pull the trigger. Whether her 'death' would send her to oblivion or send her to Molly, she didn't care, because in a world where Gene did not trust her…

Then Gene appeared out of nowhere, her knight errant once again. And Alex realised that she truly was in love with that man.

Alex hated irony as much as she hated fate and destiny. However, a cynical part of her had to admit that there was a certain sick humour to being gunned down by Gene Hunt by mistake after a hostage situation went very bad.

As Alex looked up at the faces of her horrified squad-mates, she realised that she would miss them all. She loved Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch and similar detective shows when she was little; running with Gene and the gang had been as good as being in a 1980s cop show!Finally, the world went white.

Alex awoke in a hospital room in 2007. Molly was there to welcome her home. Alex was able to bear witness as Tom Summers' body was wheeled past her room, as dead in this time as he was in 1982, although she doubted the COD here in 2007 was a gunshot wound to the chest.

And there, things ought to have ended.

Which is why Gene's appearance on the TV set in her room was so very, very unwelcome.


All Alex had wanted, upon returning to what she resolutely insisted to herself was her real life in the year 2007, was to slot back into her old existence and forget that the whole '1982' thing had ever happened.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out that way.

It wasn't just that Gene and the rest of the crew made regular appearances on her TV and her PC monitor at work, begging her to wake up from her coma, telling her that she was missed and that Gene was in trouble. There were also the reminders on her PDA that she was scheduled to act as Shaz's matron of honour at her wedding to Chris. Then there was Ray's gruff voice heard on her car radio, telling her about the hunt for Gene, who he could only refer to as 'that bastard'. No, leftovers from her experience were to be expected, no matter how much she devoutly hoped they were just flash-backs to a comatose hallucination.

What worried her was that… she no longer felt at home in 2007.

Evan… He had been a father to her in many ways after her parents' murder (murder-suicide, as she now knew for certain – he had confirmed it although she wasn't able to tell him how she knew). However, having had the oily little creep hit on her back in the 1980s necessarily changed her perception of him. No matter how much she tried, she couldn't escape the fact that this was the creepy and decidedly hypocritical man whose affair with her mother had driven her father to his desperate act. She couldn't forget the irritating lawyer who, more than once, had blocked investigations and worked tirelessly to get the worst of the worst toe-rags back on the streets, as if their rights somehow trumped the rights of all the poor sods they would hurt…

All in all, she knew that she would never be able to see Evan the same way again. There was an icy wall between them now. He knew it, even Molly knew it. Both adults were quite surprised when the 13-year-old girl coldly informed her 'Uncle Evan' that it would be best if he didn't visit for a while because 'Mum obviously doesn't like you anymore'.

Then there was the job.

Alex was a career cop. Her parents' death had left her with the firmest devotion to the cause of law and order – to make the streets safe and make sure that no child should ever suffer her fate. Perhaps that, more than anything else, had been the cause of her extreme guilt during her time in the 1980s (and she was more and more convinced that it was the real 1980s) – that she had doomed Molly to her fate.

The problem was that, having experience police work in the 1980s, it was difficult to get back into the flow of things in the early 21st Century. Oh, there was technology that Gene would have killed to have access to – helicopters and patrol cars fitted with sensors that could see through walls and automatically identify stolen cars, fingerprints and mug-shot databases, DNA profiling and other forensic tools that made the '80s look like the stone age.

However, it was a very different culture. Police in the 21st Century seemed to be continually walking on egg-shells when it came to interviews and custody. There was a perpetual fear of being accused of racism or some other form of bigotry. Lawyers could sit there smugly and get their clients released because someone hadn't filled in the right form before searching their car or because they had said something 'potentially prejudicial'. Worse, there were too many targets, too much form-filling and time-marking. Uniforms were spending their time patrolling for easy speeding or disorderly behaviour tickets because you were judged on your number of 'cases solved', not on whether you had actually prevented a crime or caught serious criminals. Oh, the occasional traffic nick might find a blagger on the way to a job, but that was rare indeed.

Even if you caught one of the toe rags and were able to make the charges stick, they would be let off with a warning or less. What was the point of trying to keep the streets clean when the penal system's only apparent function was to give them room and board for a few weeks and then recycle the little shits onto the streets again?

A really nasty case could still get the detectives in her CID section motivated to work hard in solving a case but, mostly, their attitude was: 'why bother'? Even if they could get someone to talk without their statements being ruled out because of 'undue pressure', the beak would just release the little bastards. The endemic of youth-on-youth crime and murder was allowed to continue unchecked. So long as it didn't spill over into the 'nicer' neighbourhoods or create too much of a stink in the media, the estates were allowed to fester and consume themselves in an orgy of drugs and violence unhindered by the forces of law and order.

Alex had already been bumped back onto desk duty due to 'psychological instability' after shouting at her superiors about 'pussy footing' with the local street gangs. She figured that only her recent near escape from death and her superb skill as a forensic detective prevented her from getting suspended when she caught a little teenage monster of a pusher, who was selling his filth to babies at a local school. She practically smashed the little bastard's face through the interview room table when he gave her lip. Hearing Gene Hunt's warm and dangerous words of approval didn't help her state of mind at all.

No, all in all, Alex's return to the 21st Century had been nothing like what she had hoped. In some ways, she had begun to understand why Sam had killed himself. That other world, that past world, had been so very much simpler and easier to live in. The shades of grey and the creeping sense of hopelessness were so much darker and less easy to endure now.

Of course, she had one thing that Sam lacked. She had a rock to cling to. She had Molly.


Alex's temper had been steadily decaying ever since she had been returned to duty. People thought it was the after-effects of her close brush with death. They were almost right. It was actually Gene's increasingly desperate state, barely able to keep one step ahead of the hounds chasing him down for the attempted murder of his DI, Alex Drake. That Gene and Alex had been so publicly and violently at odds the last time they had been together in the office only served to confirm the suspicion that the notoriously quick-tempered Mancurian detective had taken the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

The combined strain of returning to the 21st Century, her estrangement with Evan, the sudden existential crisis of faith she was having with her vocation and the clear strain that her ill-temper was inflicting on poor, blameless Molly was telling. It wasn't surprising that Alex wasn't taking care of herself; she was surviving on sausage, veggie pancake roll and chips, alcohol and coffee most days. No one was particularly surprised when Alex, in the middle of coldly dressing down two under-performing detective constables, had a fit and lost consciousness in the middle of the CID office.

Alex wasn't surprised when she woke up in her hospital bed in 1982.

It was surprisingly easy to convince Ray and the Chief Super that Gene had shot her by mistake. Within hours the net had been cast for that Irish skank, Jeanette. However, given that weeks had passed, Alex was confident that the blonde woman had fled the country.

After release from hospital, the team escorted her back to her rooms over Luigi's restaurant and bar, all smiles. The last one to leave her doorstep was Gene. "Thanks for comin' back for me, Bolly," the gruff Mancurian said.

"You would have done the same for me, Guv," she replied.

The big man grunted, snorted and huffed in that adorable way of his when he had been caught being noble or affectionate. "Course I would! Looks bad for a DCI to lose too many of the bodies on his watch," he grumbled before looking back at her, remembered fear and horror tugging at his features. "Duck the next time!"

Gene turned to leave but Alex grabbed his arm. "Gene," she said seriously. This caught Hunt up short. Alex rarely used his given name as he rarely used hers; it was an intimacy that made them both nervous. "Gene, I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" Gene was genuinely surprised at being offered an apology by his self-assured and independent-minded DI.

"For ever thinking that you were my enemy," she explained. "You are the reason I'm stuck here, Gene Hunt, but not in a bad way. Never think it is in a bad way." Alex cupped Gene's cheek in her hand. On a whim, the black-haired woman leaned forward and laid a gentle kiss on the corner of the man's mouth. He tasted of booze, tobacco, cologne and of Gene.

Gene blushed in a way that Alex swore ought to be impossible and she smiled mischievously as his face hardened into the granite expression that terrified innumerable villains throughout his patch. "Well, that's good to know, Bolly," he said roughly. "Can't have the team pulling in different directions, can we?" The man stepped back and Alex did not try to close the distance again, realising that he felt vulnerable and needed the distance to maintain his balance. She knew that Gene had not had any kind of serious relationship since his wife divorced him in the disastrous emotional aftermath of Sam Tyler's death in the line of duty years previously. She imagined that his emotions were troubling him now.

Gene turned to leave and Alex began to close the door of her flat. "Alex?"

Alex froze for a second before opening the door again. "Yes Guv?"

"I wish I could believe you, all that stuff about the future," the big man said. "After Sam was right about so much… I ought to believe you… but it's hard." Gene sighed, looked down at his shoes and shifted for a few seconds before switching to a safer topic. "Look, Bolls, we'll talk tomorrow, yeah?" Alex nodded. Gene's face softened and there was that grim half-smile that she found so fascinating. "Okay, you'll be on light duty for a while, but there's too much going on around the patch to spare you right now, so you'll be in the office in time for your shift. Got that?"

Alex nodded again and smiled. "Goodnight, Guv," she said.

Gene Hunt grunted, nodded and was on his way. There was a bottle of scotch with his name on it tonight. He had a lot of hard thinking to do, both about his current DI and one he had years previously. It was the sort of thinking that a man didn't want to do sober.

Inside her flat, Alex was staring at her TV screen in a mixture of horror and fascination. She was looking at her squad of alleged detectives in 2007 hovering around as the camera, clearly substituting for her own POV was loaded onto an ambulance. She saw Molly run over and clamber up onto the ambulance – someone had clearly driven her over from her school, God bless whoever that was. No matter what Alex did, she knew she would not be able to cut off Molly's tearful pleas for her to wake up. After all, the TV was already turned off and unplugged from the wall.

On autopilot, Alex changed into her fine scarlet silk pyjamas and crawled into bed. Her emotions were at war. There was pleasure at seeing Gene's name cleared. There was that incredible sense of family and community that she realised that she always felt around the team, something that she now realised she had not felt since her parents' deaths. There was a degree of relief at touching Gene again that she didn't want to analyse. However, there was also the guilt – the guilt that she was again separated from Molly and not knowing if she would ever be able to get back to her daughter ever again.

Her body racked with sobs, Alex Drake slipped off into a restless sleep.

She was quite surprised to awaken in the Accident & Emergency unit of the local hospital back in 2007.


There followed the most disorienting period of Alex Drake's life. Given who she was and her past experiences, that was saying a lot.

It all began after returning to her house with Molly after being released from hospital (and being scolded by a doctor for allowing herself to become mildly malnourished). Evan had been helpful but, frankly, Alex had been glad when he had agreed to leave. Alex was surprised when Molly, who had previously shown no domestic inclinations, had cooked a meal and hovered anxiously at her mother's side until it was all eaten.

Alex felt immensely guilty at seeing Molly's very obvious guilt and stress. It wasn't her daughter's fault that her mother was caught between two times, between her only blood kin and a man she had come to love. She firmly clamped down on her urge to reprove the girl for treating her like an invalid (but wasn't she?). Instead, she poured all her love into her actions and did everything she could to reassure the girl. Alex restrained a giggle when her hyper-serious daughter extracted a solemn vow from her to take better care of her health in future. It was a strange moment when Alex realised that she recognised the look on Molly's face. It had been the same stony, devastated expression that… that Alex's own past self had been wearing when she and Gene had to tell the 10-year-old girl that her parents were dead.

"I… I don't want to lose you, Mummy," the girl nearly whispered.

"You won't Molly," Alex assured her.

"But… I nearly have! Twice!" Molly was about to flee but Alex easily captured her and enfolded her in her arms, letting her cry herself out and feeling the suspicious sting of tears in her own eyes.

Alex, having learnt to be a disciplinarian (And no little girl of yours will have to scrape by on a copper's pay, right Bolls? – Shut up, Gene) ensured that Molly had not been falling behind on her homework and then personally tucked her daughter into bed. The girl looked up at her mother worriedly. "You'll be there when I wake up?" she almost demanded.

"Forever and ever, or until you grow up, whichever comes first," Alex confirmed with a smile, earning a tired giggle from her little girl, before kissing Molly good night.

Alex finished cleaning up downstairs before retiring. This week promised to be difficult. At least with police work, she had a mental distraction from her own mixed feelings. A week on sick leave meant that she would have a little bit too much time to think.

Alex changed into her pyjamas (noting with an ironic smile their similarity to those she owned in the '80s) and slipped into bed.

Alex was awoken by her alarm clock… which was odd because she hadn't set it last night… and the last time she heard the alarm, it didn't sound anything like the ringing of a 1980s-era BT Trimfone like the one on her bedside table in her 1982 flat. Half-asleep, Alex fumbled the slim angular receiver off of its cradle and automatically dragged it to her ear. "Drake," she mumbled.

"Good morning, Bolly, this is your six-thirty alarm call," the voice of Gene Hunt spat in her ear. "I expect to see you in the office no later than eight. Be there."


For the next four months, Alex Drake was a woman adrift between two worlds. The moment she closed her eyes to sleep in one, she would be awakening to a new day in the other. The experience tested even the hyper-organised Alex to the limits. At least the week of sick leave she was enjoying in the 21st Century stopped her from having to mentally organise the separate case loads in two different time zones, at least at first.

As it was, she was glad that she only lived with Molly in the 21st Century. An adult would have been more suspicious of Alex's liberal use of 21st Century information technology to aid her in her 1982 cases, let alone her habit of leaving flow-charts and brainstorming notes around the house. To Molly, this simply fitted in with 'Mum being Mum'.

When Alex was allowed back on duty in 2007, the stress levels suddenly doubled. Trying to keep her two case loads mentally and organisationally separate was nearly impossible. In more than one occasion, she found herself trying to get a dumbfounded Shaz or Viv to get information on cases that wouldn't even occur for a quarter of a century. Worse was trying to get her 2007 detectives to give her updates on cases that surely had been closed for longer than some of them had been alive.

Then, one day, Alex had an unpleasant surprise.

She came home to find Molly, her face streaked with tears, sitting besides a pocket tape recorder. The same tape recorder on which Alex had been habitually recording her thoughts in a desperate attempt to sort out what was happening to her before she had a nervous breakdown. Given the pile of tapes sitting beside the girl, she had pretty much gone through the entire record of Alex's adventures in the 1980s and her more recent time hopping.

Alex initially thought that Molly's reaction was fear that her mother was going insane, an entirely understandable fear. However, she could not be more wrong. Molly believed her mother's stories to be true. She somehow knew that Alex was living two lives in two different time-zones. She was terrified that Alex was going to stay in 1982 one day and never come back.

"Molly," Alex protested, "I'd never leave you! I love you!"

"But you love HIM!" Molly protested.

"W… What…?"

"Mummy, you love that man, that Gene! I can hear it in your voice when you talk about him!" Molly managed a hollow laugh through her tears. "I can even hear about it when he annoys you and you're complaining about him! It's just like how Mercy talks about Colin when he's being a bloody prat!"

Alex was shocked at her daughter's perspicuity, so shocked that she didn't remember to tell her off for bad language or wonder at the likely teen melodrama in which she was clearly peripherally involved. Alex stepped forward and sat down next to Molly, took the girl's limp hand in her own and looked her daughter right in the eyes. "Molly, you know that I love you. I am so very, very happy and proud that you believe that this is really happening to me. That you trust me is very important, you know that, right?" Molly nodded. "Molly, when I was first in the 1980s, nothing was more important to me that I get back to you. Yes, it's true that I feel very close to Gene Hunt… Maybe I do like him in the way you think. But there is nothing, not in this world or in that one, that would make me give you up. Do you understand?"

Molly nodded. "I love you, Mummy," she said.

"Oh, I love you too baby." She folded the girl in a hug.

"Mum?" Molly said a while later, after the two had sat opposite each other in a strained silence during supper.

"Yes, Molly?"

"Um… this sounds silly…" Alex raised an eyebrow to her daughter. "Um… Do you think that this Gene bloke would like me? He sounds really cool, in a kind of rough-tough outlaw way. Better than all the Emo wimps at school, at least!"


Molly seemed to absorb Alex's stories of the 1980s in a way that Alex didn't know whether to find amusing or alarming. Molly clearly had a talent for research and, maybe, for acting. Alex was surprised at the number of 1980s idioms that Molly had integrated into her speech. The girl even looked up what passed for teen fashions in the era to which her mother was time-hopping and began to integrate aspects of it into her personal 'look' (Alex drew the line at the New Romantics-style make-up, jewellery and hairdos). Alex didn't know if it was an expression of teenage alienation with a time-jumping twist or whether Molly really did find the 21st Century as 'boring' as she claimed.

All-in-all, Alex was glad that she had not recorded anywhere her theories on how it was that the time-jumping began for her. She feared that Molly might foolishly try to replicate a violent near-death experience in an attempt to follow her into the past that Alex feared was becoming more real and attractive to Molly, despite its very real relative primitivism, than the present.

Oddly enough, Molly's strange behaviour actually helped Alex, at least in the 1980s. She found herself able to talk to Gene about Molly for the first time, explaining that the girl had become a bit rebellious and troublesome and that was the reason for her occasionally distracted performance. She was surprised about how easy her relationship was getting with her DCI. Oh, there was still concern about the remnants of the Lodge, who it was feared, were hovering around and seeking revenge for the failure of the Lord Douglas Lane job. However, despite all the close calls and cultural clashes, she felt that she and the rest of the team were just getting into their stride.

The new openness about Molly actually allowed Alex to occasionally get past Gene's protective wall of suspicious cynicism. She understood now why he had been so closed to her in the past. Gene was a man of fairly unsophisticated but always-profound emotions. To him, if you loved someone, then they had to be at the centre of your thoughts. Alex's ability to compartmentalise and suppress her concern for Molly (at least in public) after her arrival in the 1980s had convinced him that there was something off about her. If he had a little girl who was somewhere else, he wouldn't have been able to stop thinking about her and talking about her!

The thing that Alex feared most from this new openness very quickly came to pass. Chris and Shaz's wedding was close at hand. Shaz had suggested that Molly join her mother in London for the ceremony, maybe even act as bridesmaid or something. Sargent Viv James had suggested that the girl might want to spend some time with his twin daughters (although Ray later remarked that a 'posh girl' like Molly might not get on well with a pair of black girls from London). This triggered an incident at the post-shift booze-up at Luigi's that night.

"Ray Carling, I'll have you know that there isn't a prejudiced bone in Molly's body!"

"Look, all I'm saying is…!"

"Drop it, Raymundo," Gene snapped. "Bolly doesn't have a problem with Viv… or a prat like you. Why should her little girl?" Gene looked up at Alex with a grim smile, hope shining in his eyes. "How about it though, Bolls? Think the little Princess is ready to spend time with the Gene-Genie and the crew? Afraid that we might teach her what real life is like?"

Alex didn't know how she manoeuvred her way out of that trap. She still hadn't decided if Gene believed her story about being from the future. Some days he acted like he did and others he seemed not to, to the point where he would get angry at even the mention of the future.

Back in the future… or the present… what was it anyway? Anyway, the school holidays were upon them. Alex had already decided that she would spend two blissful weeks with Molly, away from the job, away from the city and as far away from the strains of her current time-split life as she could get. She didn't think that she would stop time-hopping just because she was on leave from the job in the 21st Century, but at least she would be able to minimise the stress. For that reason, she put in her holiday request in the 1980s for what she judged was the same time period.

Alex got the impression that her 21st Century colleagues were relieved that she would be off their backs. Oh, she wasn't as much of a harpy as she had been at first, but she still demanded results as Gene Hunt always did of his team. She hoped that she was showing them that there was no middle ground, no 'toleration' of criminality. She hoped that, maybe, the good part of policing in the 1980s might yet be rediscovered by her subordinates.

So, Alex loaded Molly into her BMW 5-series saloon and the two set off for Folkestone and the beginning of what, hopefully, would be two stress-free weeks in the south of France.

Alex was a careful driver, all the more so with Molly aboard. Furthermore, Gene's gruff example had taught her to use a car like a lethal weapon, to attack every curve, every traffic signal and every junction – to drive defensively was to invite disaster in a pursuit. However, no matter how good you are, you have to be lucky every time. The lorry driver from Eastern Europe probably never saw her car, she later reflected. Hell, she bet that the bastard probably only had the vaguest understanding of British traffic laws.

Alex's last coherent memory was Molly's scream as the 60-foot long giant side-swiped their car as it suddenly changed lane in front of them and sent the BMW careering through a crash barrier towards the hard concrete of the other motorway below… Then there was only blackness.