When she awoke the pain was gone.
She briefly wondered if she would get some residual feelings, in the same way her head had throbbed before, but she doubted it. She was definitely dead this time. There was no body being tended to in a hospital ward; no relatives waiting and worrying. She recalled the brief flash of pain as the bullet ripped apart her insides. Then nothing. Death.
The thought held no fear. She had no particular regrets. She had entered the Police force later than many, worked her way up the ranks to DI and had loved every second of it. She no longer blanched at corpses, or vomited on police cars. She had DCI Gene Hunt to thank for that.
She could no longer listen to 'Careless Whisper' either. She had DCI Jim Keats to thank for that.
She pushed him out of her mind as quickly as he had entered. She couldn't bear to think of him just yet and anyway, he would find her soon enough. He told her that he would be waiting and she had a feeling that Jim Keats was a man of his word. Man…Devil...whatever in hell he was. She only hoped that Gene Hunt was a man of his word too.
She opened her eyes. The bedroom was familiar, but different. She quickly realised it was the same room she had occupied twenty years before, only slightly more modern – early 2000s maybe? How did time work here, anyway? She had been gone twenty years, which should make this 2010. She decided to work on that assumption for the time being.
She rose from the bed and walked into the bathroom. At the sight of the shower she paused, her senses momentarily overwhelmed with the remembrance of her and James under the stream of water; flashes of his face before her, his lips on hers, his fingers dragging over her flesh. She shook her head to clear it. She needed a further few moments of peace before facing the insanity of Fenchurch East.
She showered quickly and dressed in black trousers and a white vest. She shrugged on a jacket, and was unsurprised when she placed her hand in her pocket to find a Fenchurch East warrant card. DI Sarah Jenkins. Of course.
She took a little extra time over her hair and her make-up, cursing herself even as she did so, since she knew she was doing it because she was going to see him again. Not that he had ever really left her.
She decided to walk. It was a beautiful day, no wrath of God storms this time, and she just wanted to take in this new old world. It was all so incredibly real; the breeze rustling the leaves, the chatter of passing schoolchildren, even the hum of the traffic, punctuated by the odd siren. It was like stepping into a time warp and going back twenty years to the London she knew when she was twenty five. Somehow it was familiar, comfortable.
She remembered everything she had read in Sam Tyler's file and how he had described this world. He was spot on. If she was honest, her main drive to get into CID in the first place was so she could gain access to the records of all those people she had heard about, the people in Gene's world. She had read all their files; Alex Drake, Ray Carling, Chris Skelton, Sharon Granger, Annie Cartwright, Sam Tyler and even Gene Hunt himself.
When there were no more files to find she had read the file of James Keats. But something didn't add up. Something didn't make sense. At that point she knew beyond all doubt that when she died she would end up back here. But not to sort herself out; she had long since resigned herself to her own fate. But before she could give herself over to him, she needed to find out how James Keats, the man, had become DCI Jim Keats, the monster.
And to do that she would have to go back to where it all began.