Kate Fleming sat at her desk staring into space completely unaware of her colleagues working around her. It was a fairly quiet day in AC-12 and Kate hated not having much to do as it gave her time to think. Her life hadn't quite turned out the way she thought it would when she had found out fifteen months ago that she was pregnant.
She'd been with Mark for a couple of years when she had conceived unexpectedly, and, then three months ago, when her son Josh was only three months old, he'd just upped and left saying he wasn't cut out for parenthood. She hadn't seen or heard from him since.
Kate had been devastated at the time but she was always very resilient and was soon giving herself a good talking too and dusting herself down. She was going to have to carry on and look after her son by herself. It would be hard, but many women did it, and she would be no different.
The first thing she had had to do was sort out her finances. Her maternity pay would only remain the full amount for another three months and she knew she couldn't survive on it once it halved. She was going to have to go back to work. Ted Hastings had been very supportive when she had come to him, asking to return to AC-12 a lot earlier than planned. With that problem solved, she then turned her attention to her son. With a lot of searching she found the perfect nanny for Josh who didn't mind her working shift pattern and more importantly, both she and Josh really liked each other.
Which brought her to the present day - sat at her desk dwelling on the dreadful guilt she felt at leaving her son with someone else for large periods of time and the fact she'd also managed to let her son down by choosing a totally useless father for him.
"Kate!" Ted commanded from his office, dragging her from her thoughts. She looked over to the gaffer's office and saw he was wanting a word. She quickly got to her feet, hoping he might have some work for her so she could justify being away from her son.
"We never talked about you doing any more undercover work when you came to see me about coming back," Ted said as he closed the door behind Kate and took a seat at his desk. Kate took one vacant chair in front of him.
"It would probably depend on what it was," Kate replied.
"How do you feel about a bit of counter terrorism?" Ted asked hopefully as he handed her a folder.
"I dunno, sir. I've got Josh to think about now. Sounds a bit dangerous. I can't make him an orphan before his first birthday," Kate said as she took a peek inside the folder, interested nevertheless on what her potential assignment might be. She saw some black and white photographs inside and pulled them out to see them better. The first showed a man of what looked to be Asian descent lying dead on the floor. His blood seeping out onto the clothes he was wearing.
"Karim Ali," Ted informed her. "Shot dead by an armed counter terrorism officer,".
"Yes I remember seeing it on the TV whilst I was on maternity leave," Kate said, flicking through more of the pictures, all showing the same scene. The story had dominated the local news for a time. Karim's wife had tried to accuse the police force of unlawfully killing her husband but the judge had ruled in favour of the force, believing them that Karim had been acting aggressively; he'd lunged at an officer who had shot him in self defence.
Kate came to the last photo in the pile. It was still in black and white, but was different from the others in that it showed a police officer, a sergeant judging from the epaulets. His number 156 also on display. "This the officer that shot him?" Kate asked.
"No," replied Ted. "That's DS Arnott. He was co-ordinating the raid on the day. We've received an anonymous tip off that he purposefully misled the raid to ensure the shooting of Karim Ali after some history with him,".
"Jesus," muttered Kate.
"Which I don't need to tell you, Kate, makes young DS Arnott of great interest to anti-corruption. A vacancy has just come up in his unit and would be perfect to embed an undercover officer such as yourself into,".
Kate took another look at the photograph of the officer. Now that she studied him closely, he was actually quite a good looking guy, although she wasn't going to admit that to the gaffer. She prided herself on having an excellent gut instinct about her targets, something that her undercover work had taught her. Her gut was telling her that he wasn't a bent copper. "Was any evidence supplied to back this claim up?".
"No," Ted admitted. "That would be up to you to find,".
Kate was drawn to DS Arnott's eyes. Being in black and white she couldn't tell the colour, but she could see that they looked haunted about something. Whilst she didn't think he was guilty of ordering the assassination of Karim Ali, something had definitely happened at the scene for him to look like that which is what piqued her interest in the case. Before she could talk herself out of it, she was accepting Ted's offer.