By morning, the downpour had dwindled into a frantic drizzle that drove itself into the window in sharp, staccato beats, like insects on a motorway. Miles lay waiting for the day to brighten enough to indicate that it was time to get up, but it remained a muggy grey. Eventually, he thought he heard Buchan moving in the next room, and took that as his own personal alarm.

He had expected Thornton to come along knocking on their doors to wake them, but he heard no movement on the stairs, though he listened from the moment that he woke up. There was still nothing when he staggered blearily into a shower that spat water down at him like chips of warm hail, and couldn't hear anything but the whining of the pipes.

Chandler was already sitting at the dining table by the time Miles got there, neat as ever and reading through the previous day's paper, though the acrid scent of Tiger Balm betrayed the façade.

"Morning," Miles offered, taking the seat next to his boss and eyeing the lack of plates on the table. Their absence sat wrong with him, considering how well everything had been prepared the previous day. "You know what time breakfast is?"

"I've not seen Thornton this morning," Chandler replied, without looking up, though it was difficult to see what was so riveting about yesterday's news. They had heard some of it in the car, until the signal had cut out into a helpless gurgle of static. "And it doesn't sound like there's anyone in the kitchen."

"Late risers, then," Miles commented, checking his watch to make sure that it was still nine o'clock. "For a team building retreat, anyway. Would have thought they'd be waking us up at five thirty in the morning."

Chandler said nothing in reply, and Buchan was there before Miles could try to prompt anything. The historian filled the room with noise even though he hadn't said anything, peering around as if searching for something.

"Where did you get the paper?" Buchan asked eventually, as if he couldn't function before he had had his daily dose of intellectual stimulation, and Chandler glanced up.

"It was on the table when I got here," he said. "Someone's already done most of the crossword. Incorrectly, I'm afraid."

"Sudoku?" Buchan inquired, hopefully, and Chandler shook his head. The historian deflated, crestfallen, and Miles almost felt sorry for him as he took a forlorn seat at the table, staring at the surface as if it had one of his precious files on it.

The minutes ticked past, and the only movement on the stairs was Kent, Riley and Mansell heading down, their faces as dour as the day outside the windows. Thornton remained as absent as if they had all somehow managed to imagine him.

"No one's found a note, or anything, have they?" Miles checked, glancing around to include all of them in the question.

Chandler shook his head, turning to the last page of the paper with a faint drifting of newsprint. Buchan shrugged, his attention fixed on the document as if he were a vulture waiting for an animal to die.

"What about you lot?" Miles prompted his DCs. "Any of you heard anything from Thornton?"

"He's not up yet?" Riley blinked in surprise, checking her watch. Confusion deepened the frown which fatigue had left on her features.

"I'll go and knock on his door," Mansell announced, and Miles watched him turn around, wondering what it was he wanted to complain about so much that he had created extra work for himself. Probably just wanted his phone back.

"Do you think we're meant to make ourselves breakfast?" Buchan pondered, only to snatch away the paper almost before Chandler had finished setting it down. He produced a pen, seemingly from nowhere, and buried himself in the half-finished crossword, ignoring the silence that followed his question.

Mansell was back before anyone answered, as if he had run the distance, irritated hands curling into fists at his sides.

"There's no one there," he reported, voice sallow. "No one answered the doors, and they were locked when I tried them."

For a moment, Miles considered fetching the car keys from his room and just driving back to Whitechapel. Back to Judy and the kids, and the ghosts lurking in the recesses of the station.

Perhaps Thornton had had a similar idea, he thought, standing and moving to the window. He leant as close to the pane as he could without his breath fogging the image, and peered out into the damp.

"Anyone remember if they had a car parked out there?"

Riley moved to join him, her reflection as hollow-eyed as if sleep had been burrowing there in a failed attempt to make it into her head.

"I don't know about them," she said, fingers moving to pick over the edge of her plaster. "But we certainly did."

"What do you mean?" Chandler demanded, head lifting, showing more interest in this than he had in anything since they had lost their last murderers. Mansell jostled at Riley, trying to see out of the window, and she swatted his arm.

"Our car's gone," Miles confirmed, struggling to see deeper into the grey beyond the pane, as if that would show him that he was wrong, that it was parked just out of sight and that nothing was awry.

"Stealing patrons' cars can't be a part of standard operating procedure here, can it?" Buchan's voice had a nervous twist to it, and Miles' head crackled with resentment in response. "Joe?"

"Thornton did say that they weren't conventional," Kent offered, reported speech with no self or opinion behind it.

"Maybe they just moved it somewhere more out of the rain," Mansell suggested. "No one's actually going to steal a car from a house full of police detectives."

They would have to have taken the keys from my room, Miles realised, but Chandler was talking before he could air the thought, sounding irritatingly and unflappably calm. As if all of his negative emotions had been shredded out of him, a torrent of red, in the past few days.

"We should wait for them to come back," their DI informed them. "If they don't, we can find the landline and use it to call someone. In the meantime, I'm sure we could all do with breakfast."

He said nothing about who was going to make this breakfast that no one was going to feel like eating. Eventually, they all ended up picking at the tasteless cereal that Mansell found in one of the kitchen cupboards, like a roomful of sparrows. Miles did his best not to let the others see his eyes keep straying back to his watch, and he tried not to be aware of them doing the same.

"How long do you reckon they'll be?" Mansell asked finally, trepidation stalking around the edges of his features.

"Thornton said it was a long way to the nearest town," Kent pointed out, but his voice was uneasy, and he seemed to be drowning his spoon in milk rather than actually eating with it.

"He's trapped us here," Buchan declared, wild eyes staring at the table in front of him as if it were made of knives. "The landline probably doesn't even exist."

"Shut up," Mansell snapped indelicately, but there was something wrong in his face; he had already had the same idea as the historian. Miles supposed that they all had. Worst case scenarios weren't exactly difficult to think of any longer.

"If we need to, we can break open that box to get at our phones," Riley said. She sounded reasonable, but the edges of the plaster on her hand were ragged, the legacy of her anxious fussing at it.

Miles glanced down before he could pick out any more signs of how frayed the people in his team had become. For a moment, he wanted to go and check, go and make sure that the box was still there, but he didn't. If he didn't, it would be impossible to find it gone.

The silence came back, and trapped them in the room just as the locks trapped them in the house. None of them could leave while their ears strained to hear the sound of tyres slogging through the wet, lest the cacophony their feet on the floorboards drown it out.

Waiting became unbearable before the hour was out. Thornton and Pauline weren't coming back. Miles knew that the way that people knew the doorbell would ring the instant before it did, knew who was on the other end of the phone before they answered.

"I promised my husband I'd call," Riley said finally, hushed, as if it hadn't been something she had wanted to share with the room, just a memory that had risen slowly to the surface and bubbled from her mouth. "He'll worry."

"I'll help you look for the landline," Buchan offered immediately, speech spiked and intimidated.

"Try not to break anything," Miles ordered, more at the historian than at Riley, though she was the one who smiled her acknowledgement at him.

They left without saying anything further, and for a moment, with the grey crowding at the windows and the shadows huddling in the hall, Miles believed that there was no other place in existence. Just this room, with its six small occupants, four now that Riley and Buchan had stepped out into a harsh, hungry nothingness and let it swallow them whole.

Then he heard their feet on the stair, and the instant was gone.


A/N - So, good news! Or bad news, depending upon whether or not you actually like this fic. But, since this is the fourth chapter, I reckon I'm relatively safe to say it's good news. While I was procrastinating the other day, I worked out how long it would take for this fic to be up in its entirety if I continued uploading only once a week (and it's quite a long time). So despite the fact that I am currently six thousand words behind on my NaNo, writing the sequel to this fic and plotting the sequel to that, I'm going to attempt to update three times per week. So, the next chapter should be up at some stage on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone for reading! ^.^