PART I

LONDON

Chapter One

'I hope that the world stops raining,

Stops turning its back on the young,

See, nobody here is blameless,

I hope that we can fix all that we have done.'

Hope

She shivered a little as she stepped out of the warmth of her car and into the brisk chill of a cold September night, hail stones and heavy rain pounding on her back as she ran, almost sprinted so desperate was she to avoid getting soaked to the skin, around the back of her vehicle to open up the boot and pull out a SOCO suit from her on-call bag. Shuddering, she smoothed the suit over her clothes and picked up her case, pausing for a moment to remove her ID card and car keys from her handbag before setting out into the night.

It was just gone four am on an autumnal Saturday morning, and in all honesty she had been hoping and praying for a lie-in, especially given the fact that this was her first week at work in more than three months and it had left her shattered. But no such luck. She had been dragged from her bed just under an hour ago now; this had left her incredibly irritated for someone who had never actually been asleep in the first place. She had barely slept at all in the past three months, not since the accident. Trying and failing to force her brain to switch off and allow her body to rest had become so much of a chore ever since then that if truth be told, she had more or less given up trying.

Except it wasn't just since the accident that sleeping had become a battle; she knew that in her heart of hearts. The issue dated back a little further than that, to what she now referred to as 'the incident'- only to herself, of course. That night.

But she wasn't thinking about that, she reminded herself firmly. She had promised herself at the start of the week, upon going back to work at long last, that she wasn't going to allow herself to think about that night. It was over, all over, over and done with, no going back. Replaying it over and over again in her mind was never going to change anything. No matter how desperately she craved the ability, she couldn't turn the clock back. Even if she could, what good would it do? She wanted to be able to mend her mistake, put things back, undo her terrible, terrible action which had proved to have the most awful of consequences, led to the situation in which she found herself today.

But what was the point in being able to turn back the clock if she still did not know what her terrible mistake had been?

She had thought about it. God only knew how much thought she had given it, mulling it over and over in her mind until the whole thing threatened to send her mad if she didn't stop sooner or later. Still she was no closer to an answer than she had been before, let alone to a solution.

And that, she reminded herself now, following the street-lamp-lit pathway out of the car park, was precisely why she was no longer allowing herself to think about it. Not at work, at least. It was a distraction, that was the problem, a distraction waiting to happen because as soon as she allowed it to enter her thoughts it would stubbornly refuse to leave again. It would sap up her energy, her concentration, leaving her completely incapable of thinking of anything else at all.

And that was why, at least at work, she had to push all thoughts of that night firmly out of her mind.

She wasn't entirely sure where she was going. All she had been told by the disgruntled police officer she had received a telephone call from almost an hour previously had been an address, a post code; one she had frantically scribbled down in the notebook she kept on a table beside her mobile phone for occasions such as this. She hadn't yet the faintest idea what she was dealing with, either. All she had was the postcode and her ID card; the rest would undoubtedly become clear once she had been admitted to the scene.

She followed the police crime scene tape in search of where she was needed, fighting the temptation to rub wearily at her eyes. It was still so dark, being only the early hours of the morning, and so getting her bearings proved itself to be a rather difficult task.

But it was easy enough to pick out a few basic features. She was on some kind of housing estate; North London, if she recalled the address and postcode she had been given earlier over the phone correctly. Although they were blocks of flats rather than houses, apartments perhaps, judging by the height of the buildings towering over her, casting long, intimidating shadows in the darkness.

Was it just the rain and the dark which was causing the whole place to feel so undesirable to her, so grim? She hoped so. She was tired; so tired, and she was praying for an easy scene tonight of all nights. She wanted something simple, a straight-forward suicide, maybe. Anything which involved minimum effort on her part at the actual crime scene itself was fine by her. If it had to be complicated, she desperately wanted the complicated part to be the post mortem rather than the scene.

That way, she could go home and attempt to get some much-needed rest before she had to drag herself back into work to tackle it.

It wasn't that she didn't enjoy her job. She loved it, always had, right from her very first day. It was all she really had, her work, the only thing in her life she had to fill her time nowadays. Over the last three months she hadn't even had that as something to occupy herself with, not since the accident which had seen her signed off for the foreseeable future.

She hadn't expected to miss it quite as much as she had. Most people would welcome a break of a quarter of a year from work, especially given the unreasonable hours she found herself having to work in her profession, not to mention the insufferable police detectives she often ended up being forced to tolerate. But she had, she had missed it.

She had missed having a purpose.

It was starting to become rather obvious as to where the crime scene was, judging by the large white tent just visible now in the distance, the crowd she could just about make out milling around it. The tent was positioned just left of the entrance to the block of flats directly ahead of her, a little in front of the block. A fall, a suicide? That was the first thought which sprang to mind; the closer she got, the more apparent it became that the crime scene tent was in the perfect position to be concealing the body of someone who had thrown themselves from the roof of the building, landed on the pavement outside. It was far too soon to tell of course, especially having not even laid eyes on the body yet, been given any details whatsoever, but right now, suicide seemed the most likely explanation.

This was to be her first proper case since the accident. She had been in work all week, yes, but she had been kept away from any cases of her own to deal with, deliberately, she suspected, to ease her back into it slowly. Instead, she had been left with nothing to do other than completing paperwork relating to cases which had begun and ended whilst she had been away on sick leave after the accident, a task which had threatened to bore her to death as she struggled to work her way through. She had resigned herself to the fact that she might well be kept away from anything vaguely resembling an actual case of her own for quite a while yet.

And so it had been something of a surprise when she had received the phone call from the police calling her out to this scene roughly an hour ago now.

She didn't feel quite prepared for this. Stupid, she knew; she was good at her job, she had to keep reminding herself of that. It was only natural to feel somewhat nervous about being thrown in the deep end after three months of sick leave, but she was back in action now and she was ready, despite the butterflies in her stomach, the increasing sense of dread the closer she became to the crime scene tent.

It was going to be fine. Yes, she might be a little shaky to start with, but she would get back into the swing of it in no time. It was like learning to ride a bike, learning to swim; no matter how long one left it for when they returned to the activity it still felt instinctive, natural as anything. The first few minutes might feel a little strange, but another ten after that and she would feel her old self again, fully prepared to take on the world. It would be absolutely fine.

"ID?" The voice of a rather bored-sounding police officer pulled her back from her thoughts. It had been a while since she had last done this but she had been right; already the memories were flooding back. She reached into her pocket on autopilot, pulling out her ID card and holding it out to the officer.

"Dr Nikki Alexander," she said, voice clear as a bell, suddenly feeling more at home than she had in months. "Home Office Pathologist."


The police officer paused for a moment to glance at her ID card, eyes straining a little in the darkness before nodding, then stepping to one side and gesturing to Nikki to pass through into the crime scene tent, out of the cold and rain and safely undercover. She smiled at him gratefully, shivering a little in as the cold icy winds of the early hours of the morning intensified once more.

Nikki found herself taking an abnormally deep breath, attempting to compose herself before stepping through into the crime scene tent, confronting whatever it was waiting for her inside. Suddenly, with hardly any warning at all, a peculiar mixture of excitement and worry and nervousness and just a hint of dread came flooding into her heart all at once.

It had all be different before, somehow; before she had found herself stood right in the entrance to the crime scene tent. It had been so long since Nikki had last been out on call that up until now, excitement had been the only real emotion she had experienced: excitement at the thought of having a purpose again, excitement in anticipation of feeling alive again in a way that she hadn't since the accident three months previously. Not that simply returning to work could ever possibly fix the aching within her heart of late, her desperate need, her greatest desire which could now never be fulfilled.

Nikki knew that really, deep down at least. But still, she had allowed herself to hope the maybe, just maybe, coming back to work properly, coming out on call might do something to help make her feel at least a little back to normal.

The trouble was that she had clung to that hope. That hope had been one of very few things which had assisted her in pulling through this far in the aftermath of the accident, which made this crime scene, this case, all the more critical in terms of her mental state, her recovery. Nikki was only too aware of that, and in all honesty this realisation was causing her to feel rather afraid as she stood there in the entrance of the crime scene tent, mustering the strength and the courage to step inside.

What on earth she was going to do if her plan failed to work and she felt just as lifeless and unneeded after tonight's crime scene as she had been ever since the incident and the accident which followed, Nikki wasn't entirely sure. It was a rather frightening prospect, she quickly came to realise, and not one it was going to do her any good to dwell upon. And so Nikki Alexander took a deep, slightly shaky breath, pushed all thoughts of the hellish nightmare of the last three months as far to the back of her mind as she physically could (which, these days, was not very far at all) and stepped right into the shelter of the crime scene tent.

Almost immediately, she was confronted by a tall, well-built man with a greying moustache, dressed in a SOCO suit, police-issue notebook clutched tightly in one hand.

"Are you the pathologist?" Was the first question he posed to her.

Nikki nodded, holding out her hand for the man before her to shake. "Dr Nikki Alexander, I'm attached to the Home Office. And you must be the DI…?"

"That's right. DI Robert Thorn, I don't believe we've met?"

Nikki shook her head. "No, I don't think so…"

"…I believe I've worked with a colleague of yours before though," DI Thorn continued. "Dr Harry Cunningham, he's at the Lyell Centre too, isn't he?"

He threw her completely with that statement. Purely and simply because she hadn't been expecting it, that was what Nikki told herself. Although that in itself was incredibly naïve of her, she realised now with a sigh, cursing herself as she struggled to pull herself together after the shock of hearing that name just when her guard had been down, leaving her completely unprepared…

Could she really have been as stupid to have convinced herself she wasn't going to be hearing his name at work from now on? Of course she would be, just because the person in question was no longer employed at the Lyell Centre, that by no means meant he was erased from history as far as the world of pathology and police was concerned. He might be gone, long gone in fact, but traces of him lingered everywhere, Nikki was going to have to get used to that. Somehow, she was going to have to learn to live with it. Although god only knew how.

"No, n-n-, I mean…" Nikki stammered, having seemingly lost the ability to string a coherent sentence together. "Yes, he… he did… up until recently. He was… he accepted a contract from New York University three months ago, left almost immediately- he took up a professorship there, you see, he needed to be there for the start of the semester. So… so he's gone," she finished, her voice still just as shaky as it had been when she first begun to explain. How had she managed to fall apart quite so quickly? That had to be a new record for her, even on top of all the other rather impressive ones she had managed to set herself after the accident.

"Oh… oh, I see," DI Thorn managed, clearly rather taken aback at Nikki's near-falling to pieces at the mere mention of Dr Harry Cunningham's name. He frowned for a moment, silent, before seemingly deciding that the best course of action would be to pretend their somewhat shaky discussion of New York University and new appointments stateside had never happened and move onto the case in hand.

"Jane Doe- so far, anyway," the DI changed the subject quickly, stepping to one side to finally allow Nikki a first glimpse of the body in question, her first proper case of her own in three long months. "Looks as though she fell from the roof of the apartment block; I'm thinking suicide based on the evidence so far. What do you make of it?"

Nikki crouched down slowly, carefully beside the corpse, dropping her case down beside her and pulling on a pair of latex gloves. The body in front of her appeared to be that of a young woman, sprawled on her side in an awkward, rather twisted position, looking rather as though she had indeed fallen from the rooftop just a couple of metres to the right as the detective had already speculated. Nikki frowned slightly, leaning over the body for a better look.

"She looks young, early to mid-twenties is my guess," she began, getting right back into her stride with surprising ease. "Judging by the facial features I would guess she could be Eastern European in origin, though that's just a possibility. How far have you got in terms of trying to get an ID?"

"Not very far, not yet," DI Thorn admitted, almost a little sheepishly, Nikki realised with amusement. Did he find her a little too composed and professional, a little too intimidating, perhaps? It wasn't the portrayal of herself she had been aiming for exactly, though Nikki was more than willing to run with it. She found herself in the mess she was in now because she had once come across too open, too naïve, she had concluded, and she would do anything to ensure she never found herself in that position again. Yes… intimidating, that must be it. Intimidating could work.

But then she remembered her near-falling apart at the mere mention of Dr Harry Cunningham's name, and all of a sudden she wasn't so sure that she had managed to come across as composed and intimidating after all.

"We'll be going door-to-door tomorrow, seeing if we can find someone who knew her," the DI continued. "Assuming it is a suicide, it seems logical that she lived in the apartment building; someone here must have known her. So you think she's Eastern European?"

"Could be," Nikki replied, refusing to give too much away for the moment. She was still a little nervous that she might have lost her touch in those long three months away from work and didn't want to commit herself to any particular opinion too soon if at all avoidable. "That's merely an inference; the only way of being sure is by formally identifying her."

"Of course," DI Thorn agreed. "What do you think though, of the scene? Suicide?"

"Possible…" Nikki began; she was still in the process of carrying out a thorough initial examination of the Jane Doe's external appearance. She had forgotten just how awkward this whole affair was, trying to conduct a careful examination of a body in the dark, crime scene illuminated only by a dim, artificial light, half blocked by a swarm of police officers flooding the crime scene tent. She knew what she was looking for; at least, she knew roughly what. There were a number of possibilities, a mental list inside her head, and all Nikki had to do now was to work her way through it, ascertain which of her list of possibilities applied in this instance…

And then she found it.

Nikki leant further across the body on the floor of the tent, checking one last time just to be certain.

"Can you step to your left for a moment, please?" she asked, turning to look over her shoulder at DI Thorn and the forensic photographer now stood beside him. "You're blocking the light; I want to get a closer look."

"Of course. Why?" asked DI Thorn, an almost child-like curiosity in his tone. "Have you found something?"

"Quite possibly," Nikki replied, frowning momentarily as she continued to examine the body, taking one last check, just to be sure. "There," she finished at last, gesturing almost triumphantly to the forensic photographer to move in and capture the injury she had discovered on the Jane Doe's body. "Minor abrasions to the shoulders."

"And?"

"And they're significant because…?"

"Because the positioning of the abrasions is consistent with the Jane Doe being grabbed by the shoulders, possibly shaken," Nikki explained, shivering violently as the opening flap of the crime scene tent was pulled open and a gust of cold wind hit her hard, chilling her to the bone.

"So you think there was someone else involved?"

"Could well have been. Have you checked the roof for any signs of a struggle? Assuming it's the roof you think she descended from, that is?"

"The roof's being checked as we speak, no obvious signs of a struggle so far, although it's not the best of conditions for a thorough search," DI Thorn admitted. "Progress is bound to be slower than normal, though we should hear something soon."

Nikki simply nodded, her eyes never leaving the body in front of her. She was finding it increasingly difficult to focus on the case, to keep her mind clear, empty of thoughts of him. She had to concentrate, to force herself to by any means possible.

"There's not really anything more I can do here, the next step will be to complete the post mortem," she explained. "I'll arrange to have the body taken back to the Lyell Centre. Will you be attending the PM?"

"If that's alright with you."

"Does nine am tomorrow work for you?"

"Perfect, the sooner the better. I'll see you there, Dr Alexander. Goodnight."

"Goodnight," Nikki replied, and with that she bent to pick up her case and headed towards the tent entrance, pausing to brace herself for a moment before mustering the courage to make a run for it, right into the storm. She kept running, going through the motions of movement, almost automatic in her actions, until she reached her car, unlocking it as she ran and hauling herself into the drivers' seat, slamming the door and shutting out the rain. She turned around to throw her case onto the back seat, pulling down the hood of her SOCO suit and turning on the headlights.

It was only as her key turned in the ignition that it all finally became too much for her, and before she had even made it out of the car park and onto the main road in the direction of the Thomas Lyell Centre, Nikki Alexander had burst into hopeless, uncontrollable tears of mourning for all she had lost.

Dr Harry Cunningham.


First proper chapter, hope it was OK. Thank you so, so much to my wonderful first reviewers: Dinabar, KiwiSWfan, greylostwho and Megannnn123, your encouragement was hugely appreciated and I'm so glad you're enjoying this so far. As you may have gathered, there is going to be a proper ongoing case as an element of the plot, though I'm using the case as a plot device here in order to achieve something else... that's all I'm saying for now :P The details of both the accident and the incident wil be revealed in time, promise. I'm going to keep you hanging for a bit longer on that one yet ;)

As ever, reviews would be hugely appreciated, however long or short, the more I get the sooner I'll upload the next chapter :) I'd love to know what you're thinking so far.

Emxx

PS. as with the prologue, the lyrics at the beginning of the chapter are from Emeli Sande's Our Version of Events album, can you detect a theme here? :P It only seems right given her album was the inspiration for this storyline.