** Trigger/content warning for graphic description of racially-motivated violence**

After a similar evening three weeks later, Hardy's eyes flew open in the middle of the night. He tried to adjust his vision in the darkness to get his bearings, but felt disoriented and nearly dizzy. He groped at the bedside table until he located the lamp and switched it on. He realized what had woken him at this ungodly hour – his mobile was ringing persistently and buzzing on his nightstand. He grasped at it and tried to make out the caller ID, but his vision was still slightly blurred from sleep.

"Hardy," he half-croaked into the mouthpiece. There was a lump in his throat and for a moment he had to struggle to get his breath.

"Hardy, hi, it's Bo. Petra. Bödigheimer?" When Hardy did not further greet her, she ventured, "From the HCMD?"

"Yep, of course. Sorry, was just getting some winks in." Hardy rubbed at his eyes and tried to make out the time on the digital clock beside his bed - why was she calling him at a quarter to three in the morning? They hadn't had any contact in the six weeks since they had left Derby, and now she was rousing him in the middle of the night?

"I'm terribly sorry to wake you, but I wanted to get moving right away. There's been a lynching in Cambridge. We don't know a lot yet, but I've got to get over there. Can you come? I know you're probably busy, but I don't have authorization to bring my team formally, and I'd really like to have another person with me on this."

"You think it's part of the series we looked at? Are there others?" Hardy paused as the sleepy haze cleared in his mind. "You said a lynching? A death?" He already had so many other questions in mind: why wasn't she bringing her team? Who from Cambridge had called her in the middle of the night? And why had she immediately thought of him?

"That's right. He's dead. All I know is that he's male, and that based on the crime and his race, Cambridge called me. You coming?"

"Erm, yeah. Can you send me the address? It'll take me a few hours to get there, I'm still in Bristol."

"I know - I'm in Bristol, too. I'll pick you up. Text me your address and I'll see you soon."

"Erm…alright. I'll see you in a bit then." Hardy was puzzled as to what Bo was doing in Bristol, but he could sense her impatience to end the call, so he let her go and began immediately packing a bag. There was no telling how long he'd be gone, so he packed enough for a week and hoped for the best. While he stood on the curb outside of his building waiting for Bo, he emailed Ramsay from his mobile to let her know that he would be going on a short vacation, but that she could call or email him if any issues should arise. In this particular instance – and perhaps only this particular instance – he was grateful that the constabulary did not overly rely upon him, such that he had the capacity to leave suddenly for a week at a time.

After a short while, Bo pulled up in front of Hardy's building and he climbed in.

"Sorry again to ring at such an odd hour. I didn't even really think, I just called you as soon as soon as I heard." She gestured toward the cup holders embedded in the central console. "I brought you a tea, if it helps. I know you don't do coffee. Cream and sugar are in the console. Wasn't sure how you take it."

"Oh. Thanks." They drove in silence for a while as he prepared his coffee and settled in. It was early May, and he expected that the sun would be coming up just as they arrived in Cambridge. Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him and he asked, "So how did you find yourself in Bristol? I thought your HQ was in London – there isn't a hate crime case in Bristol, is there?" He wondered vaguely if he would have even been made aware if there was such a case under his constabulary's jurisdiction.

"Oh, yeah, no, I was just visiting my parents. Did I not mention that I'm from Bristol originally?"

"No, I didn't realize. That's convenient, I guess."

"Yeah, I try to get back to visit them when we're not actively on a case. Between their schedules and mine – they're both doctors – it's tough to make time for visits. I've only even been in town a few days as is. I feel kinda bad."

Hardy could relate to the feeling; he had never been particularly adept at prioritizing his personal relationships and making time the time to fit them into his lifestyle. Even now, with his career placing fewer demands upon his time than ever, he managed only to maintain his relationship with Daisy; most of his friendships had either eroded over the years or been lost by him in the divorce.

"So you said that your team isn't meeting us there?"

Bo looked at him guiltily. "We're not really investigating this in an entirely official capacity, since we're not on the case."

"Does CT Command know to expect us? They're going to notice us there at some point."

Another guilty look. "They may not know about this yet. I mean, we can't even be sure that it's part of the case."

"But what about CT Command? They're just going to send us back."

"Well…we may be able to get in and out before they arrive."

"How do you figure?"

"Um…" From her facial expression, Hardy could tell that she was trying to think of the most advantageous way to phrase her thought. "So, Cambridge called me, told me about the case, I said I'd be there. I mean, it's a lynching, and I'm head of hate crimes, so, of course, right?"

"Right…"

"And I thought, it could be helpful to know if this might be part of the larger case, right?"

Hardy nodded slowly, unsure of where she was going with this. "Right…"

"So Mark and I made some calls to the constabularies around Cambridge – because if it is part of the case, and there are other identical crimes, they won't be too far away. And as it turned out, it's a good thing we did, because, unfortunately, there were two other lynchings last night, in Ipswich and Peterborough. We told them to go ahead with processing the scenes and all that, send us everything they have, and give CT Command a call once it's a more reasonable hour."

"And what did you tell Cambridge? And I thought your team wasn't on this case,"

"Mark was visiting my parents with me, so I made good use of him. And, well, after talking to Ipswich and Peterborough, I immediately started packing up, and forgot to call Cambridge back."

"You forgot."

She smirked. "I had a bad concussion once. I can be forgetful."

It was after 6:00 am by the time they arrived on the scene in Cambridge. The sun had begun creeping over the horizon in the first leg of its day-long journey across the sky. Hardy nodded awake from his fitful nap, leaning against the car window, just as Bo pulled off onto a grit road, surrounded by trees and broken-down vehicles.

"This isn't Cambridge," he muttered groggily.

"Sure it is. The River Great Ouse is just on the other side of those trees." Bo replied before quipping, "And g'morning to you, Sir."

They grabbed their bags from the car and walked on the damp grass, down a narrow pathway that led through the trees. An officer greeted them at the crime scene tape, checked their credentials, and allowed them passage.

They came into the clearing and immediately stopped short when they realized what they were looking at. Though they had both been aware that they were there to investigate a lynching, they hadn't braced themselves for what they would find. A boy's body, dressed in a football jersey and jeans, hung down from a tree near the river. Hardy and Bo exchange dark glances before proceeding forward.

"Christ, he's just a child," Hardy muttered.

"My God…I had no idea." Bo's face had lost its colour as she looked on, aghast, toward the victim.

They approached the tree and look on in silent horror. The boy's body hung limply from the tree, with his shoulders slumped downward and his chin pressed against his chest. His complexion had developed an unnatural hue and his unseeing eyes were still slightly open. He was missing one shoe, and Bo could see dried blood on the sole of his exposed sock. He also had defensive wounds on his hands and forearms. She made these observations in some distant, clinical part of her mind, scarcely registering what she was seeing.

Bo turned to one of the local officers who was standing by.

"Do we know his time of death?"

"Based on rigor mortis and liver temperature, we think it was sometime between 6:00 and 10:00 last night. Body was discovered around 1:30 in the morning."

"By whom?"

"Bunch of kids. They were all hanging out at one of their houses, over there," the officer pointed across the narrow river to a few farmhouses, "and came out here, probably to drink, or smoke, or what have you."

"And they've been interviewed?"

"Preliminary intake when they called it in. Then we sent them home, but told them we'd call them back for interviews. They didn't have anything to do with this, though. They were all accounted for between six and ten last night. Plus, you should have seen how freaked out they were. They seemed really disturbed."

Bo looked back toward the boy's body. "Understandably so." She paused, and then asked, "Can we get him down now? It really doesn't seem right to have him up there."

The officer nodded. "Yes, ma'am. We were instructed to wait for you to arrive so that you could make your own notes. If we have your go-ahead, we'd like to get him down, too."

Hardy stepped in: "Assuming SOCO's already been through here and they have everything they need?"

"Yes, Sir. They finished up just as you were arriving. Davis is still on site to take the branch and rope into evidence once we get him down."

Hardy and Bo walked back toward the parking area, having wordlessly agreed not to subject themselves to witnessing as the other officers worked to release the boy's body from the tree. They went through the officers' notes from their intakes interviews with the four teens who had found the boy's body, and tentatively concurred with the local officers' conclusion that the teens had no involvement in the boy's death other than the discovery of his body.

While Hardy spoke with SOCO to discuss physical evidence, Bo called reception at the local constabularies and asked if any reports had been filed about a missing teenage boy. She set to work researching the details on those files to see if any matched the description of this boy. Later in the afternoon, the group congregated to discuss preliminary findings.

"I think we may have an ID on the victim. Sixteen year-old Fadi Qureshi was reported missing by his parents when he didn't come home after band practice yesterday. The band teacher confirmed that he attended the practice after school, but doesn't know where he went from there."

One of the officers spoke up, "We found his other shoe a little ways down the road there. Based on the state of his sock, it looks like he may have lost the shoe while running, and just kept on running. It's pretty torn up."

"And we're taking the rope back to the lab for analysis, priority one."

Hardy winced as he asked, "Do we know if he was still alive when he was strung up? His parents will want to know."

"We can't be certain until we do the full post-mortem, but based on the marks on his neck, it looks like he was still alive. It…" the officer hesitated and looked down at her feet, "It wouldn't have been a good way to go."

Hardy sighed. "No, I suppose not."

After discussing the details that they had thus-far uncovered for a while longer, Bo looked at Hardy meaningfully before finally telling the group, "You're going to want to call CT Command on this. There were two other similar deaths last night, in Ipswich and Peterborough. It's probably part of a series of hate crimes that CT Command is already investigating."

They were mostly silent on the drive to the hotel. They had agreed to check in and stay for a few days to follow up on leads and try to get somewhere with their own investigation, but beyond that and a few logistics for the evening, they had barely spoken since leaving the crime scene. Hardy couldn't discern whether he was surprised by Petra's reaction to the case.

As they walked down the hall toward their respective rooms, Petra mumbled that she was going to take a shower and sleep for a couple of hours.

"Then shall we meet later to get some work done over dinner?" Hardy asked.

"Yeah. Sure. Sounds good." Petra looked exhausted – the sight of the young boy's dead body was obviously affecting her.

"Was this your first murder?"

Petra nodded as she let out a sigh. "I can't understand how someone could do that to a person. It's just…" she shook her head, at a loss for words.

For his part, Hardy didn't know how to console her. He, too, felt deeply affected by the scene, and by the whole case, but he reasoned that his greater level of experience had steeled him to a certain extent. He watched as she walked down the hallway to her room and wordlessly disappeared behind the door. He entered his own room and heaved an exhausted sigh as he lowered himself gingerly onto the bed.

After a few minutes, he heard the shower running in Bo's room next door, and then eventually shut off, followed by the distinct murmur of the television set. He rolled over and decided to get a little sleep, himself – though he had slept briefly on the car ride from Bristol, the day's events had taken a physical and emotional toll on him, and he knew well enough to recognize when he needed rest.

He woke up a couple of hours later, and after briefly consulting the digital clock on his bedside table, decided to check on Bo and see if she'd like to go have dinner. He was still worried about her response to this case; though he didn't know her well, her quiet, reserved, forlorn expression that afternoon had left him feeling perturbed. She hadn't seemed like herself, and he didn't know what support she would need during this time. He remembered too well the nightmares that had haunted him following the Sandbrook case, and the self-destructive spiral it had led him down.

He first knocked softly on her door, not wanting to disturb her if she had also fallen asleep. When she did not respond, he considered simply texting her, but then decided to knock once more. She came to the door and he was immediately taken aback by her demeanour.

"Hey, come on in, I was just gonna text you. Um, we should probably get our case files together and head downstairs for dinner. Are you hungry? Or did you already eat? I can just grab something quickly." Hardy tried to scrutinize her tone, confused by the flurry of her movements, in conjunction with her avoidance of eye contact, and her quick, clipped manner of speech.

"Erm, yeah, I could go for a bite." Hardy sat on the foot of Bo's bed as she flew around the room packing up her files. "There's no rush, of course – it's open late." He paused. "Erm, Bo, are you feeling…quite okay? I know that we had a tough day today."

"Yep, fine! Just gotta brush my teeth!" She called as she traipsed into the washroom and closed the door – a little too harshly – behind her.

Hardy sighed, perplexed. He hated to think of Bo in this way, but his investigator's instincts were telling him that there was something wrong. Or did he just not know her well enough to know that this is how she coped with grief? Or had she already bounced back from the day's upset – and with a vengeance? Even with these possibilities lingering in his mind, something felt wrong. He sighed again as he leaned back slightly on the bed. His hand felt something under the comforter, and his heart immediately sank.

Glancing at the washroom door and still hearing Bo brushing her teeth, he carefully peeled back the comforter, and grimaced in disappointment. Bo had clearly raided the refrigerator in her hotel room and consumed the contents of several small liquor bottles.

Hardy stared at the bottles, struggling to collect his thoughts and figure out how best to respond to this situation. We was acutely aware of his lack of qualification to intervene on Bo's drinking – for one, it was a position that he had never been placed in before; and for another, he wasn't even sure that he knew Bo well enough to broach the topic with her. He didn't have time to think, however, as Bo abruptly flew out of the bathroom, and stopped dead in her tracks at seeing what Hardy had uncovered.

They stared at one another for a seemingly interminable time. Hardy could see that Bo was flipping through a catalogue of well-worn excuses in her mind, and struggling between coming clean and covering up what she had done.

Hardy finally broke the deafening silence. "Bo…you know you shouldn't be drinking,"

She still looked like she may have been trying to come up with an excuse, but ultimately gave up with a sigh and sank heavily onto the foot of the bed beside him. "I know." She raked her fingers through the short-shorn side of her hair, a contemplative tic that Hardy had noticed her doing before. She was staring at her hands in her lap. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry; you have to think about your health, and your life. A really bad day is not a reason to…erm…self-medicate like this."

She shrugged. "I know that, too. I'm an idiot. I knew I was throwing away my sobriety, and I did it anyway."

"You're not an idiot, Petra." Hardy spoke firmly. "And you've only thrown away your sobriety if you continue to drink." He paused. "Are you going to continue to drink?"

"Well, I certainly don't want to." She mumbled.

"Alright, that's a start. Everyone makes mistakes. You just have to move past it and…try to avoid making the same mistakes."

Bo nodded slowly. "I know. I have to be better."

"This need only be a wee setback. You're not the first person to fall off of the wagon, and you won't be the last. It's been a bad day – probably would drive lots of people to drink. But you're also better than lots of people, so I know that you're going to get past this and be just fine." He patted her gently on the knee. "You're going to be okay."

Petra looked down at where Hardy's hand lay innocently and comfortingly on her knee. She placed her hand on his, and turned her face upward to look at him. They held a locked gaze, both now acutely aware of their location and the vulnerability that they both felt. Hardy felt his heart pounding in his chest, and thought he could sense a buzz of energy between them.

Petra leaned forward and kissed him gently on the mouth. He met her kiss, but did not encourage her any further. After a few seconds, she pulled away. He dazedly opened his eyes – he couldn't recall closing them – and looked at her soberly. His body compelled him to lean toward her, and for a moment he desperately wanted to. Ultimately, he stood from the bed and gently touched her shoulder as he straightened himself.

"Well, I should probably get going. Don't you worry now, everything is going to be alright." He turned and headed to the door. He paused with the door slightly open and said, "I'll see you in the morning, Petra."

His mind and body fought mercilessly against one another as he forced himself down the hallway to his own room. Once safely inside, he closed his eyes and leaned heavily against the door for several minutes as he processed the events that had just taken place, and waited for his heart to regain some normalcy.