Love, Hugs, and sorry about the delay. Final snippit to round it off...

Shaz.

Whilst everybody else turns away, I turn to face you. Why? Where did I learn that from?

The dimly lit trattoria is almost silent this afternoon, as I step carefully and purposefully down into its murky depths. No music. I guess Luigi's sensed the mood. Sure enough the room is empty, save for one solitary figure looming over the bar. There's a bottle of whiskey by his side that he reaches for periodically, his shoulders drooping more with every gulp. I wonder why he doesn't turn around when he hears my shoes clopping down the stairs, if he's savouring that moment where he can convince himself that I'm her, perhaps.

I take a pew next to him, unsurprised that the movement still doesn't cause him to acknowledge my presence. I wonder if that's the first bottle? I don't ask. I reach into the pocket of my denim jacket, Chris' jacket, and pull out the crumpled scrap of paper that's compelled me to find him. His eyes flick across the distance between us as he sees what I'm now flattening out in front of me, but he's resigned to a lack of any further surprise that I found it.

"Thass' not for you." He gestures grimly, too drunk to poke his finger in my direction.

"You're lucky I'm the one who found it."

"Na. Not lucky. Rest of those dimwits couldn't find their own ass crack."

"None of them shot DI Drake." I'm not sure why I said that. Callous, stupid, foot-in-mouth whisper. The pain behind his eyes is as obvious as my guilt is instantaneous, and I stare intently at the paper in front of me to avoid his glare. A scrawl, opportunistic yet carefully considered, left scrumpled and pressed into Alex's right hand.

I'm sorry. Good luck.

"No. Thass' right Granger. Bloody bastard, thass' my legacy. Cop killer bastard." He punctuates each beat with a clunk of his glass against the surface of the bar, letting it slide from his grip and skid a few inches out of reach upon the last 'bastard'. He glares at the thing then, only looking away to make a grasp for the bottle, accidently knocking that away as well. I sigh inadvertently as I watch it roll over and over itself noisily, eventually coming to a begrudged standstill a few feet down the bar from us.

"So you just run away? Before you even know if she'll be okay? Coward." I don't mean to be so blunt, actually I don't know where this is coming from at all. I guess it's hard to be afraid of a broken man. He turns towards me, and stares levelly into my eyes then, holding my gaze for long enough to make my cheeks flush. "Was she bent?" It just comes out, my mouth has a habit of running faster than my brain in any circumstance but I really can't help wanting to know the answer to this one. At first, along with the rest of CID, I'd dismissed the Guv's outrageous claim. Except that, these things have a habit of playing on the mind, and I couldn't help but wonder. All the times she'd enlist my help to run off on her own line of enquires, then all this Boris Johnson stuff. It had all started to make sense and the more I'd thought about it, the more used I'd felt.

The Guv breaks my gaze then, and bangs his fist down so hard upon the bar that I jump. "Bloody Hell, what's happened to my team?" What has happened? After all we've learnt and after everything that's changed since last year, now we're in tatters. Suspicious of each other, hiding, treading on eggshells, torn apart. What would you do, Ma'am, if you could see us now? I reach for the whisky bottle, still lying dormant upon the bar just within my grasp, and I pour the Guv another large measure before taking a generous swig myself.

Rule number one: Trust. It has to be in this job. It has to be.

Another tricky situation, A get to drownin' in the blues.

And I find myself thinking, Well - what would you do?