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"Alex. Hello, Alex."
Why were they being so rough? She blinked. That was all she could do. She felt herself trying to move and just blinking. Blinking wildly as a man crouched down over her, blocking out the light above. The man was half-smiling as if he was fascinated.
"Alex. That's good. Open your eyes, eh."
The man switched his gaze constantly between her and a man hovering somewhere away from him. "Okay, she's going again. Yeah, the BP. C'mon Alex, stay with it." His voice changed when he talked to the other man.
Beams, rotten beams up above the man's head. He was still smiling at her and then serious every time he looked away. The reflective stripes on his jacket, the things he was telling her... it was dazzling.
He moved and she saw the light scattered down between the beams. Dazzling.
The shrieks of the children from the daycare centre four houses away roused her. Alex heard them before she woke up completely and she tried to get up too quickly. She'd just sat down for a moment on the patio steps and now found herself slumped against a post. How had she gone to sleep so accidentally? There was a cold cup of coffee beside her.
She had no idea of the time but felt the weak, wintry sun on her face and knew it was still early afternoon. Over the garden wall the neighbours' teenage kids were playing their wake-up music. She could see them in their conservatory, standing around in their boxers and jeans, lighting up cigarettes as soon as they woke, cranking the music volume. Dis is for da wreckers and da haterzzz...
Without looking back into her own house she could tell Molly was in the kitchen behind her, thumping across the tiles in her socks. The phone rang and Alex looked around to see her daughter in the window, holding up the receiver. She was mouthing the name of the caller but Alex couldn't tell. Didn't care and waved her off, turned her face back to the sun. Clouds across the sky, which meant rain. She knew she should probably come inside and lie down in her warm bedroom but she felt happy to stay out here, looking down at her bare feet and the chipped toenail polish that Molly had painted on rather inexpertly.
Her doctors had told her that she might always feel like this – always on the verge of irritation, sometimes confused, always dull like the bullet had bleached the strong colours from her vision.
And in the first few weeks she'd only come to terms slowly with these changes. Perhaps it was because there so many gentle, cheerful people arriving at her beside to help her. Always wanting her to tell them again about what had happened at the pier. Physiotherapists, counsellors, nurses, even the Police who interviewed her about Arthur Layton. He hadn't been found yet, but she needn't worry. They'd catch up with him.
These people – none of them spelled it out plainly and she was so unused to the ameliorating words they used.
The bullet had taken her strength – she could never have it all back. And it had left her in floods of tears as she moved from the hospital bed for the first time. Her life had twisted inwards even as she woke again and again to the sound of Molly's voice and the muttering voices of nurses.
The phone ringing again from inside – hadn't Molly put them off? Hair fell across her face and Alex caressed it back behind her ear. Looking back into the glass patio doors she saw her own reflection before she looked beyond it to Molly. Sometimes she gasped when she saw herself – straight hair, white face, dark circles under her eyes.
"It's Evan again on the phone. Mum!" Molly was shouting, sick of being rooted to the spot with the phone in her hand.
Evan wanting to know again why she had instructed hospital staff to keep him away. Wondering why her first words had been about getting Peter Drake's mother to come and look after Molly. Evan wanting to come over although she'd told him once – curt, with his lies and betrayals still in her head – that she would never let him come around to the house again. He would never see her or Molly again.
He called once every ten days or so. It must seem cruel. But she didn't want to repeat the scene on the pier and only one time had she given in to the wearying anger against him, when he'd slipped into her room with a ludicrously huge bunch of flowers and sat by her bed while she slept. All she'd said was, "I found out about you."
Please, Mum. That's what Molly's look now said – she was holding out the phone and bouncing on her toes, obviously desperate to go the bathroom. Alex opened the glass doors and took the phone. She turned from her daughter and pressed the 'talk' button to end the call.
The mysterious case of Detective Inspector Alexandra Drake.
Released from hospital after five days and gone, just gone.
Had he actually swept the metal name plate on her desk into the bin or did he just imagine doing it? Fag hanging from his lip, shirt sleeves rolled up. Moving on twonks. Skelton, find out where Granger got up to with that berk who smashed the shop window.
Two months later. The Commissioner announced that as a result of the report by Lord Scarman and the subsequent inquiry into the London Metropolitan Police, several members of the Force had been dismissed for conduct unbecoming.
It had been like thunder rolling in far after the lightning struck. The Met had needed time to investigate Hunt's claims over collusion between its own people and "certain rogue elements" (as they always called them) in MI5. It could have gone badly for Hunt, but for the tapes he gave Scarman and the Artemis and Actaeon files. That couldn't be covered up, explained away. Those tapes had saved him.
Overnight Vanderzee was suspended from his position as Assistant Commissioner, and Hunt still wasn't sure whether the grim bastard was going to actually face prosecution. He'd certainly been arrested later though, escorted from his home during Sunday lunch with his Dutch dad shouting himself hoarse into the escorting police officers' faces.
And what had Hunt got from the Met for his troubles? Several warnings of course about his lack of judgment in uncovering the alleged conspiracy, particularly for going to Scarman instead of the Commissioner. They'd even dragged out the sorry old accusations about what he and Drake had got up to. Making me feel lucky I've still got a job and the old team here at Fenchurch East.
He wasn't bitter though. Somehow he didn't care that the Commissioner hadn't pinned a medal on his jacket or even bothered to publicly acknowledge his team's role. Instead he'd been allowed to take Ray and Chris down to the club of Sir Leonard Roseberry-Sykes and arrest him as he held his fork over a wobbling salmon mousse.
And of course they'd spent whole days down at Woolwich getting rough with those Russians. Nobody cared what happened to them.
The wheels of British justice turn so slowly I may be back in nappies again before it's over. Maybe the whole conspiracy would just dissolve into accusation and counter-accusations before the Met came to terms with its role in extrajudicial murders.
It was funny. They'd handed him the Roseberry-Sykes collar like a fighting dog thrown a meaty bone for following its instincts. It seemed the Commissioner still saw him as the kind of copper who would soon be obsolete, and needed to become so.
Funny though.
"I made a speech in Brighton about the kind of people needed to take the London Metropolitan Police into the future," Lord Scarman had said a few days back when he'd stopped by CID in that formal, scramble-to-your-feet, way he had. "You're not exactly what I had in mind, Detective Chief Inspector Hunt."
"I was in Brighton to hear you say it, sir." Hunt offered him a drink and Scarman refused. It was eleven in the morning after all. "It was a lovely speech. I took away from it that I should start planning me own farewell bash."
"Well that will have to wait until later." A quick look up and down and then he'd left – as good as a kiss on the lips with tongue when you considered it was Lord Scarman.
The old team leant over at the corner tables arguing, pointing fingers and spilling pints. Chris and Ray at it again while Granger sat between them with her arms crossed and chipped in occasionally about which of them had accidentally mentioned that Tootsie was a nice-looking lady if you overlooked the stubble.
He dangled his glass over the other side of the bar so Luigi couldn't fucking well ignore the refill this time.
"Signore Hunt." Luigi shook his head and refused to take the glass. He'd had gone troppo since, since… he'd changed the entire menu and had printed it only in Italian. He buzzed angrily when Biro or Jimmy complained about having to get used to a whole new array of dago muck. Why had he been affected? What was she to Luigi anyway? Nothing.
Was it troppo?
"Izzit troppo or loco?" Hunt asked and Luigi turned away from him without filling his glass. Don't pretend you don't understand me, Giacomo. Oh well. He focused on the television – two Italian teams playing. "What are the crowd chanting, Luigi?"
"It means, 'You're shit and we hate you.'"
Oh. "Sounds beautiful when you don't understand what they're saying."
"Signore." There Luigi was now, wiping away the spilled alchohol on the bar. Hunt knew what Luigi wanted to say and he studied the game for a moment as a Lazio player skidded gracefully into the boots of his opponent. Luigi had been pestering him about it this past month.
"Fine!" He slapped his hand on the table. "Fine, stop your bloody fussing and just give me the bloody keys."
When he was inside the short dark hall of her flat he almost wanted to back out, but there the fuck Luigi was behind him, hovering in the front doorway as if he suspected Hunt would start sniffing her shirts and spray her perfume around the bedroom. Nothing seemed to be gone. She had taken nothing just as she had brought nothing. Gene walked through the rooms, not knowing where to stop.
Why did he feel like if he sat down he might be here for days, looking through her drawers, taking his time with the things she used to touch? He'd never paid much attention before. It was just a flat, just the typical stuff birds had in their flats and it wasn't as if she'd actually collected most of it herself anyway. But maybe it would tell him something.
"Signore, what do I do? I'm sorry, but the flat…"
Hunt had just picked up her robe, the spotted brown coloured one that always disappointed him because it was so manly, and in his fantasies she'd worn lace and showed her tits. He turned around quickly as if Luigi had caught him out. He was thinking about how he'd held her in his lap right there on the sofa, his hand inside her robe, tracing a circle across her thigh, sneaking his hand down under the belt and between her legs. Comparing the tan of his hand to the paleness of her leg. She had a way of whispering…
"Signore."
He didn't know what to do with all this stuff that belonged to her. He felt reckless suddenly, angry. She hadn't even wanted to come back for five minutes to get her clothes.
He opened his mouth to tell Luigi to keep it or bin it all, whatever.
No one had told him where DI Drake had gone after she left the hospital. It was generally taken as fact around the office floors that she'd gone to recuperate from the bullet wound with family. And he hadn't asked anyone, and hadn't let anyone speak about it. Yeah, he'd supposed in the couple of times when he'd been drunk enough to let himself think ... just think ... that she'd done exactly what she'd always told Hunt she wanted to do; gone back to her daughter. Forgotten CID, the team, the job she'd often seemed to hate. She had warned him that she'd go one day.
What a fool I am, Hunt thought, thinking that she'd come around again cos I told her some sentimental rubbish about being her man. This is the ending. This is your ending.
But he said nothing to Luigi and he let the spotted brown robe fall onto the floor. I'll decide when to get rid of every last trace of her.
Hunt smoked as he sat in his office and watched Biro stick a pen in his ear. Another minute and he'd storm out there and give the night shift a bollocking for letting Robbie effing bloody Hendry go even though the little arsehole had been caught stair-dancing yet again.
He took up his notepad and realised he'd forgotten what he needed to write in it. Flicking through the pages there were his many sketches of him and Drake, all drawn before he'd ever got more than a kiss from her. Stupid that he hadn't binned them yet, but somehow he'd managed to overlook it.
Ripping one away from the pad and balling it tightly in his fist as he tapped the ash of his fag out, Hunt dropped it into the bin and then the next. What a panting little dickhead I was, he thought, knowing he'd light a match in the bin to make sure that the likes of Granger and Chris would never get to laugh over them again.
He stopped at the one page – was that the one? Was it the one she'd held out to him on the stairwell downstairs? "That's my favourite" she'd said and he'd quickly snatched the notepad back and shut it.
She'd been a bit snappish about it of course, finding all those crude little ideas of his. But now Gene looked at the page and there next to his sketch he saw a fat love heart, the kind teenage girls drew on their exercise books and school bathroom walls. She must have drawn it in the research room after he'd bolted from the cleaner.
'Alex loves Gene' she'd written inside the big flippant love heart.
"There you go, little lady."
The courier had a Mancunian accent – Alex looked up as he handed a package to Molly at the door. Then she came quickly down the hall, smiling. She just wanted to hear his voice and she asked him a few questions about the electronic tablet he held out for her sign.
Little lady.
That had first started it – her going out to the end of the garden to stand behind the ash tree where Molly wouldn't see her. It was the only time she let herself drift into thinking about Gene. She'd go over and over their last conversation, frowned at how inarticulate she'd been, reinvented the scene in her mind so that it ended differently. It's not that she would have blurted out something daft – I love you, I do – but she would have explained that she had no choice. Why couldn't he see then that it wasn't fair to make her feel guilty about trying so hard to get back to Molly, to leave 1982?
How ironic though. I'll be a better Alex, she'd thought, away from the visitations, headaches, away from the people who looked uncomfortable or rolled their eyes when she started rambling about the future. Now she had a permanent head injury and although she could still look after Molly, and sooner or later would return to part-time hours at work, she had to cut out so much else just to keep from collapsing.
Perhaps Molly thought that she came down here into the garden to cry.
No, she didn't come out there to cry. After a few days of letting herself remember 1982, Gene, the exact layout of her flat, her desk, Shaz, Chris, Ray, Viv... she'd discovered that if the sun was shining, even feebly, and if she concentrated on that warmth the ash tree and the garden and the noises from the daycare centre would retreat and fade…
The first time had been only for seconds in her hospital bed months ago, falling into sleep as the sun streamed in through the large windows. Blink. Alex'd found herself lying at the edge of a children's playground at dusk. Her hand had felt along the ground and came across a piece of broken glass, and the glass pricked her finger and she lifted her hand to see blood.
A nurse tapped her arm, feeling for a vein. It brought her back into the hospital room, into the midday sun, into the present. But it hadn't been a dream and she gazed down at her finger and the lingering sensation of the glass cutting.
The second time, she'd hidden away from Molly behind the ash tree. Still not sure if she was just being stupid or letting the damage to her brain confuse her. She'd felt suffused with the sun's warmth again, full of it, struck through with it, and suddenly she'd been jolted awake to find herself standing in a square full of people threading through and around each other in a late afternoon rush. Punks, hysterical teen boys in their quaint outfits, civil servants still trapped in the late '70s, gripping suitcases and Harrods bags. People leaving offices, doors slamming. The tiredness of the end of the working day, a man valiantly folding his newspaper beside her.
Alex had looked down to see her feet in the white boots, the tight jeans clinging to her legs. Without a doubt she had begun to walk, knowing exactly where. She'd walked down lanes with tattered posters flapping in the breeze, past pub doors with the clientele turned out into the evening. She'd cut through lines of cars and buses wheedling their way through narrow streets, and out into a square where the setting sun had coloured the sky over London violet.
She'd stopped once to ask a pensioner if she could just have a look at their paper. The date was April 7th, 1982. A Wednesday. It grew dark as she'd kept on, began to jog even past the empty office blocks, and her eyes had been irritated by the smoggy night air. Finally she'd turned into the street and could see Luigi's lit sign in the distance.
"Mum!" Molly had shaken her until she'd opened her eyes. "Don't do that!"
Now Alex sank down against the trunk of the ash tree, her toes sinking into the soft earth between the roots. Molly had switched on the radio in her bedroom – so annoying that she was obsessed with this one song and played it over and over again up there.
I want to go there, Alex thought, letting the feeling of that warmth on her face take her away.
"Don't sit down. I told you you'd have to buy us all pints if you let in more than three goals." Ray shoved Lewis off his chair and offered it up.
Hunt'd spent another hour up at the bar, avoiding them again. Now he rejected Ray's chair and sat at the corner table instead, next to them but apart. Still he felt dutiful enough to make a crack about getting to meet Biro's wife for the first time. "Your tits are bigger than hers so maybe you should borrow her bra next time you want to bounce around on a football field."
Biro looked grateful.
Arms crossed, Hunt settled back against the wall to watch as the team worked themselves up over their five-one pasting at the hands of the Croydon mob. He knew he should probably forestall the inevitabe arguments by giving them all a good bollocking but he felt flat, unwilling to do what was expected. He knew much of the uproar was them somehow all doing their bit to get a bit of emotion out of him, jog him back into his old self. That made him feel even less inclined to give them what they wanted.
Instead Hunt ordered them a round of drinks and had a brief nothing chat with Luigi about his new menu and what was good in the kitchen tonight.
"Signore, what would you like?"
"You order for me. No offal. Giving it an I-tai name don't make it taste any better." He'd forgotten his fags, felt around his pockets. Ray was on his feet straight away, offering his packet.
In this world the face reflected back in the puddle wore too much make-up and her hair had that same ludicrous, energetic bouncy curl. In this world she'd come to her senses in a bus-shelter not far from Fenchurch East and found herself sitting there in her familiar blue blouse and jeans and her white boots. With an old lady watching her thoughtfully. But she didn't have her jacket and she knew there was a story behind that, in this world, and she would just have to forget about that jacket.
She stood in the middle of the street and turned in a circle. She felt electric. There was the window of her flat, dark. There was the smell of cooking and candles, the smell of the cold night air and 1982 pollution.
Alex put out her hand to the step railing for a second, enjoying the burn of the cold metal against her fingers; then she began to walk down the steps to Luigi's. Already she could hear Ray bellowing and Luigi's shoes scuttling and tapping around between tables.
It wasn't that she positively knew he would be inside at his favourite table. She didn't control this world, or him. But she hoped he was. Of course he'd be angry, but maybe as he always had, maybe he'd just write off the peculiarities that surrounded her to her being a little insane. He'd never been curious or questioning. He'd always kept his counsel.
He'd said - right here on this step - "I am the only man for you".
It really was freezing and she took the steps slowly, feeling the chill in her hands. It was an intense coldness that began to ache and it was wonderful because it signalled how real this world was. Just like the cooking smells drifting out of vents, like the faint buzzing sound the streetlights made, and the squeaking of her boot on the concrete.
There was no hurry to get down inside – she could spend months in this world and be woken by her daughter minutes later in the other. The annoying, frenetic song Molly had on repeat would still be playing when she returned.
But she couldn't wait a moment longer to find out if Gene was inside there through the doors. And "I feel nervous," Alex murmured as she reached the bottom of the steps. She still had no idea what she would say to him. But she was so confident that after the hard looks and cutting comments, after perhaps even ignoring her and pretending he had somewhere else to be, she'd get Gene alone and it wouldn't matter.
Alex pushed open the door and cold air rushed into the restaurant with her. Gene was there in the corner, pouring himself a glass of wine as he looked up.
end.