Chapter 10

Keats laid down his tools and gave a smirk. He couldn't believe the day had actually arrived. How many years had this been in the making? Too many. He should have taken the direct approach a long time ago. He couldn't believe he'd never done this before. But then, he'd never had this much power before or been this dark and malicious before.

"I'll tell you a little story," his voice was cold, almost emotionless as his eyes rose to the board on which he had assembled a collection of images. It wasn't unlike the wall found in his old flat in 2010 on which he'd gathered innumerable photographs of Simon, so obsessed with catching 'the one that got away'. But this time Simon was not the sole focus of the montage.

He'd gathered the pictures from various sources... CCTV footage, files, personal photographs and quite simply from following them unseen. He addressed them all as he spoke, as though he expected them to listen to his every word.

"Once upon a time there was a little boy called James," he told the wall as his hand ran across the desk, his fingers brushing the odd components he hadn't used and the tools that helped him to complete the job, "And James wanted to make his mother proud. Unfortunately he never knew his father," his eyes skipped involuntarily to a picture of Robin near the centre of the board, "although that might be just as well." He got to his feet and walked slowly to the wall as he continued. "So he joined the Police force. And she was so proud of him, every time she saw him in the uniform. But something went wrong." He felt himself shake as he said, "and James went for a very long sleep." He let his hand skim the photographs one by one; all the people he'd targeted in different ways. All the people he wanted to see the end of.

All the people who'd fought back against him.

Because when it came down to it, what's what they'd done, wasn't it? Every last one of them.

"Now," he continued trying to block out any semblance of connection with the tale that he told, "while he was asleep, James went to another place where he continued his work. But he knew he wasn't like the others. For a long time he tried to find his way home but then he found he was better where he was. He could change things. Policing the police. Sorting out the ones that were going wrong." His eyes focused squarely on a photograph of Gene, one hand on his car door, "of course, some of them were going more wrong than others." His plain, emotionless expression began to crack as his anger started to filter through. He couldn't stop it. Where Gene was concerned there was no holding back his fury. "In fact, when I came to look at one particular case," he changed suddenly from the third person, "I got more than I bargained for."

His eyes scanned the rest of the faces. He knew them all well. Far too well.

"You all let me down… I gave you every chance… but in the end you always go scuttling back to Mister and Missus Fenchurch East." He looked at the faces on his wall I turn; Eddie, Robin, Simon… "Dances With Staplers, wandering strands of my DNA, the one who got away…" his eyes settled on a different photograph, an older picture, one from almost two years earlier; a young girl with bleached, cropped locks, metal placed around her face and heavy boots upon her feet. He felt a stirring of emotion that he had to frantically beat away and turned his face so that he couldn't see the image any longer.

"This is it," he said, "this is the end. No more, Hunt. Game over, Drake. It's time to lay your little kingdom to rest."

He drew in his breath and let it out slowly. The clock was counting down the seconds to the end. In his head, it had been counting down for years.

~xXx~

Why someone had thought it was a good idea to let Eddie take charge of the Police: Do Not Cross tape was anyone's guess. He had been trying to unstick himself from it for the best part of five minutes already when Simon and Robin arrived and raced from their car to the small gathering of CID, plus Shaz whose dog was going slightly crazy at the scent of the smouldering device.

"Sorry, we got here as fast as we could," Simon apologised, "Edwina Currie wouldn't stop throwing eggs in the car."

"At me," Robin muttered, trying desperately to shake bits of shell and yolk from his shirt.

"Bloody hell Batman," Gene tried to stifle a smirk, "what's that song again? Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an –"

"Yes, thank you," Robin said through gritted teeth, "I've had it from him –" he jabbed a thumb in the direction of Simon, "- in the car for the last ten minutes."

Simon watched Eddie standing on one portion of the tape to hold it in place while he attempted to pull it from his hands, turning round on the spot and sticking it in another area entirely instead.

"How long had Eddie been stuck in the Police: Do Not Cross tape for?" Simon asked.

Marci checked her watch.

"About four and a half minutes," she said.

Simon nodded.

"Should have run a sweepstake on how long it will take him to get free," he said.

"I'll remember that for next time," Marci nodded.

A figure running frantically towards them caught their attention.

"Guv," Jake raced toward Gene, "I've got something on the backpack girl. Leila." He held up a bundle of papers. "College IT technician gave me a copy of her computer history. She'd been using the internet."

Simon had to note with some amusement that using the internet was still something of a novelty.

"What's she been using it for? Looking up the latest in backpack design?" Gene mumbled, taking the papers, "flaming crocodiles, looks like she's taken an interest in how to make things go with a bang."

"Let me see," Alex took a few of the pages as line after line of information about explosives and bomb-making appeared before her, "shit…"

"Are you telling me that this net bollocks can actually tell you how to blow yer own home sky high?" Gene demanded.

"You can find just about anything online," Simon gave a sigh, "unfortunately."

"So it is useful for something more than playing that Astley bastard and fapping to tornado sirens," Gene muttered.

Alex stared at him, aghast.

"What made you say that?" she demanded as the bottom fell out of Gene's stomach. A feeling of cold dread washed over him. This was not the Alex who'd confided about her siren-fapping ex. He hadn't realised. Hadn't even thought.

"What's that, Bols?" he asked loudly, trying to bury the subject, "you want to see the rest of the notes, you say?"

"What?" Alex frowned as he completely ignored her.

"Well here you are," he lumped them into her arms and shuffled away to the other side of their gathering to avoid any further questioning just as an uncomfortable Robin began to unfasten his shirt.

"It's no good, I can't stand this," he declared as he took the egged garment off, dropped it to the ground and stood there with his toned, tattooed abs on display.

"Oh, for fu-" Jake closed his eyes and spun around for the second time that day. Had the entire thing been designed to torture him? His first crush in god knows how many years and now he couldn't escape it.

"Simon, have you got anything spare in the car?" Robin asked. Simon remained unresponsive. "Simon?" He realised that in stark contrast to Jake Simon couldn't take his eyes off him. It was the first time that Simon had seen his body in full view since he'd arrived back in Gene's world with an inked, toned torso and Robin suddenly felt extremely self-conscious. "Shit," he mumbled. As he glanced around he noticed Simon wasn't the only one staring at him. In fact, the only people who weren't reacting to his chest-exposure were Gene, who had no interest in looking at any body part that belonged to Robin, and Eddie who still had ten tons of Police: Do Not Cross tape stuck about his person. He thought for a minute that Marci's eyes were going to pop out if her head on stalks and even Shaz was smirking a little hesitantly as she admired his form. "Oh, for fuck's sake," he mumbled as he started pacing back to the car.

"Have you all quite finished watching the one-man Chippendale show?" Gene demanded as a slew of anxious faces glanced at him, embarrassed to have been sprung in their ogling. Even Alex had been staring. "Good," Gene said crossly, "Maybe we can do something worthwhile now. Like finding out who set up these bloody indoor fireworks here."

"Well this seems to connect Leila with the first incident," Alex flapped the papers a little, "but she can't have been working alone clearly."

"If the two are connected," said Marci.

"They've got to be connected," Simon put his hands in his pockets and shuffled a little on the spot, "come on, the pattern's obvious."

"Is someone targeting them because they are under our remit?" Alex wondered out loud, "or are they trying to attack us?"

"One step at a time here, Bols," Gene told her, "keeping the other polling stations in one piece is priority number one. Telling Leila we've been doing our homework and asking if she expects to pass this off as hers is priority number two."

"Let's pay Leila's family home a visit," Alex suggested to Gene, "Marci, you and Eddie take this and head back to the station," she handed Marci the papers, "finish your interview. See what she has to say about her browsing habits."

"Dawson, have a word with our friendly neighbourhood bomb disposal expert," Gene said as he watched a man emerge from the building with some wires in his hand, "see what he can tell you about the device. What it was made of, what went wrong, which airfix kits some kiddy's stuck together in the wrong order to make it smoke and die out."

"Right," Jake nodded.

"What about me, Guv?" asked Shaz.

Gene felt a little strange giving Shaz instructions. It had been hard enough seeing Shaz – a different Shaz – Shaz part 2, coming back into their lives in the first place.

"You, Miss Granger," he began, "can wait for Batman to change his super-suit and between you take yer mutts round the other stations, make sure there's nothing about to blow up like a gutful of the canteen's sprouts at Christmas."

"Yes Guv."

"What about me?" asked Simon

"I'd thought that was blindingly obvious," Gene told him. He hesitated as Simon stared on, waiting for an explanation. "Lattes. Eight of the buggers. You know how many sugars I require to keep me finely tuned gears running."

Simon groaned and hung his head.

"Yes, guv," he mumbled.

As the gathering disbanded and Eddie finally released himself from the tape Gene felt strange and oddly disturbed. It wasn't just the incidents that were worrying him. They had leads to chase up and avenues to pursue. He was confident they'd find the truth and catch whoever else was involved. But there was something beyond that, something darker like a stormcloud rolling in that he couldn't yet see.

He tried to shrug off that feeling. He tried to put it to the back of his mind. He was just paranoid, that's all it was. He was just getting back into the swing of things after all. Today it was walking without his cane, tomorrow he would get over the strange feeling of paranoia that he just couldn't shake. He felt like Dick Van Dyke predicting the onset of Mary Poppins.

"That's all I need, some bloody toffy-nosed bint floating down on her umbrella, making me pens all jump around me desk to tidy themselves up," he mumbled to himself, glad that Alex hadn't heard him. He was one step away from dancing with animated penguins and skipping across the roof with a troop of chimney sweeps.

~xXx~

A/N: Go vote in my poll! :D