DISCLAIMER: I still don't own anything.
A/N: I'm not going to plead for reviews anymore, although the reviews are the writers' food. If you don't review my plead bunny will starve and die and I'll abandon this story. Another thank you to my beta Elfinium, for sacrifacing her time.
The interrogation room was actually the 'Lost property' room; 'A' Division used it because it had the thickest walls. It held an air of foreboding with its dusty shelves and foul smell of old, damp paper and burnt tobacco.
In the middle of the room, between the shelves filled with long lost and forgotten items, stood a lone table and three chairs, currently occupied by three men.
DCI Gene Hunt placed his pack of cigarettes on the table in front of him and lit the one in his mouth. He took a long draw from the fag and exhaled loudly before leaning further back in his chair and folding his arms.
"So… My DI here is really keen on the introductions and tape-recording but I prefer to skip the formalities and get straight to the point." Hunt grunted, throwing a meaningful glance at DI Tyler. Sam opened his mouth to comment but changed his mind, instead pressing the play and record buttons on the tape-recorder. Gene ignored him and continued his questioning. "Tell me who killed Thomas Morris?"
The boy looked blankly at him and then turned to Sam. "Tom is dead?" He asked in surprise.
"Yeah, dead as a door nail." Gene said taking another drag from his fag and exhaling loudly again. "Do you have a short memory, or brain damage?"
"I don't understand." The boy replied nervously.
"Well obviously you or one of your buddies killed him, then you lot dumped him in the scrap yard."
"Guv!" Sam hissed under his breath.
"I don't know anything Mr Hunt, I swear."
"Do you know that swearing is bad?" Gene asked in a patronising tone.
The boy shook his head and opened his mouth to say something, but his face met the back of Gene Hunt's hand.
"Stop playing Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumb with me and start spilling the truth now." Pressing the almost finished fag into the ashtray, Hunt took the boy by the lapels of his shirt, drawing him up to eye level. The stench of stale whiskey hit the boy in the face. "You better tell me what you know now, because otherwise I'll find the darkest, filthiest and coldest cell for you and lock you in there to rot. I know you are as guilty as a Sodom's sinner, so you might as well save us some time and pain." With this said he dropped the boy back in the chair.
Until then Sam had remained silent. He got up from his chair and barked at his DCI.
"Guv…a word!"
Gene's face clouded even further with fury, his bad temper flaring to dangerous levels. He lifted himself from his seat and grabbing Sam roughly by his neck, dragged him behind one of the numerous shelves.
"What do you want now Dorothy?"
"Let me talk to him Guv. He's scared." Sam tried to reason with Gene, although he knew it was pretty much a lost cause.
"'Course he is bloody scared, he knows something." Gene barked back.
"But it doesn't mean he's a killer." Sam argued, his voice was becoming sharper. He usually wasn't an ill tempered man, but his DCI was bringing out the worst in him. He could also feel a strange and alien anger; it did not help the situation.
"He is hiding something and that's enough for me to lock him up for months." Hunt scoffed, his own patience with his DI wearing thin.
"But, we have no evidence and no reason to keep him Guv. You can't just keep him in custody, because you don't like the aftershave he's wearing."
Gene took hold of Sam's shoulders and shoved him face first into the metal frame of one of the shelves.
"Do I have to remind you, that the last time you let someone out because we didn't have enough evidence one of our birds almost died, Sammy-boy?" He hissed into Sam's ear. Sams' temper flared, he shoved his elbow into Gene's gut.
"It wasn't my fault." Sam shouted at the panting Guvnor.
They stood glaring at each other, neither prepared to give way. Eventually Sam returned to the interrogation table and resumed the recording of the interview.
"I'm DI Sam Tyler, and I'm going to do this interview from now on. What is your name?"
"Billy Clarke"
"Ok, Billy, can you tell me, when did you last see Thomas Morris?" Sam asked calmly.
"Last night in the bar."
"What, he didn't pay his round, so you killed him?" Gene asked angrily.
"Guv! Shut it will you?" Sam sniped at Gene before turning his attention back to Billy.
"I didn't kill him!" Billy answered nervously.
"No one said you killed him, Billy." Sam tried to calm him while simultaneously throwing murderous looks at Gene. "Can you tell me, if he had some other meeting later? Maybe he mentioned a name? Or going to the scrap yard?"
"No!" Billy answered a bit too quickly. He was on the edge.
"Are you sure?" Sam pressed.
"No, y-yes, I'm sure… He didn't mention any name… We left the bar after a few drinks to celebrate… job well done and then everyone went home." Billy explained.
"Job well done?" Gene asked. "What, like robbing the gold smith? Was that why Thomas died? He didn't want to share?" By the end of his questions Gene was leaning over the boy threateningly with both hands on the table.
"No, I told you, I know nothing about the killing." The boy was trembling now. "We didn't really rob the shop, we only had to take one ring, nothing else, and then just collect the money for the job."
"I knew you were guilty." Gene barked.
"I only watched outside for coppers." Billy pleaded, genuinely frightened.
"Did you know the person, the one you had to give the ring to?" Sam asked.
"I'm sorry, I can't help you. Please!"
"Ok, forget about the name of this person. Can you tell me what kind of ring it was?" Sam tried again.
Now Billy started to really shake and tears threatened to spill from his eyes. He backed away from Sam, unconsciously trying to find protection behind Gene Hunt.
"The ring on your hand." Billy pointed to Sam's right hand. "That ring is the same as the one we had to get from the gold smith."
Sam dragged his shocked eyes from Billy's fearful face to his ring finger and then to Gene.
"I didn't realise you were such a fairy that you wear rings Tyler?" Gene mocked.
"I don't." Sam's voice came as a whisper in his shock. "I don't even remember having it until now." He cast another look at the ring and lifted his hand to see it better in the lamp light. The ring was massive, made out of silver with a large, round head and some strange circular engravings.
"Great, my DI has entered the land of Oz again and in the middle of an interrogation none the less." Gene took the boy by the scruff of his neck and handed him to the PC's outside the 'Lost property' room. "We are finished here, get him back to the cell and don't let him out until I say so!"
A couple of hours later nothing had really happened in the CID. There were no new bodies but there was no new information either.
Sam had send Annie down to the archive. She was searching for the profile of someone who might have form for trying to fence rare or old jewels. Chris was down in the mortuary collecting blood test results and Ray was sitting at his desk, feet up, chewing loudly on his gum whilst completely ignoring the paper work he had to do. DCI Hunt sat in his smoke fogged office, fuming silently.
Sam was at his desk, going through Thomas' statement and the files Annie had found on the gang and dodgy antique traders. The drums were echoing loudly, bouncing off the walls of the room. He wondered how no-one but him could hear them.
"Would you stop that bloody noise?" DS Carling snapped, not able to take any more of the DIs' tapping.
Sam looked up from the folder in surprise.
"You can hear it too?" He asked hopeful.
Gene chose that moment to leave his office. "Of course he can hear it, I can hear it. Come to think of it, I'm sure Cartwright can hear it in the bloody archives."
"What?" Sam asked shocked.
"Yer tapping, you twat." Gene snapped at him. "Stop it, or I swear…"
"Oh…" He sighed in disappointment. Looking down at his hand he noticed it resting on the desk with his middle and forefingers held on the edge and the other three fingers folded. He hadn't even registered that he was tapping the rhythm of the drums. "Sorry, I didn't realise I was doing it. It must be some song I've heard somewhere that got stuck in my head."
"You better get it out of your head, or I'll dig it out for you, it's bloody annoying." With that Gene returned to his office, slamming the door.
Chris approached Sam's desk nervously after the DCIs' outburst. He handed the folder with the blood results to DI Tyler and crept back to his own desk, instantly pretending to busy himself with some paper work that probably should have been done days ago. Sam took one look at the results and jumped up from his chair. He threw the door to Hunt's office open with a bit more force than was necessary causing the glass to rattle.
"What do you want now? A hug, because you feel lonely?" Gene asked, his tone bored.
"DC Skelton just gave me the blood results for Thomas Morris. There are traces of heroin in his blood." Sam said hoping that the Guv would listen to him for once and that they would finally have something to work on.
"A junkie then. Should've known not to waste my time."
"You don't get it, do you?" Sam asked.
"No, I don't. Please enlighten me Sherlock!" Gene said feigning interest.
"Heroin, is not popular until the middle of the '80s. Right now the popular drugs are LSD, hashish, cocaine and marijuana. Heroin is an '80s drug." Sam tried to make his DCI see reason, forgetting for a moment that this was DCI Gene Hunt. Gene ignored the strange references. They were normal for his DI.
"A new drug then? I'll have to make sure that whoever is selling new drugs in my city goes behind bars. However, a dead junkie is just a waste of time." He replied stubbornly. "It's not my problem if some scum has decided to check out early, as long as it's not affecting humble citizens."
"Being addicted is not a crime Guv, it's an illness. But that's a discussion for another time. The thing is, he wasn't an addict, and there are no marks on him, besides the pathologist didn't find any damaged organs or health problems apart from these few traces of heroin in his blood." Sam argued.
"So, he wanted to have a first taste but had the bad luck for it to be his last too. Poor sod."
"The traces are of heroin are not enough to kill even a first timer it must have been cut with something else. Guv, let alone someone who uses frequently. There is no way the heroin killed him. that poisoned the blood, the problem is this something is some new or rare chemical and this archaic machinery here can't find it.".
"Then we go and bring in all the new and suspicious blokes in the city." Gene got up from behind his desk. "Let's clean the streets of a few scum-bags and junkies."
"Guv, we have nothing! Only a few traces of something unknown in the heroin, which alone, could not have killed him." Sam stood at the door barring his way. "We can't just go on a hunch and start breaking down doors and arresting random people. We need to go by the book here, with proper procedures."
Gene pushed him out of the way and shouted for Chris and Ray to fire up the Cortina.
"You didn't hear a world, I just said, did you?" Sam asked in frustration as he jogged after Gene.