Later that night, after an early dinner and his best rendition of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Ben is himself tucked up soundly in the Barnabys' spare room. He's exhausted after two months of constantly being on his guard, not to mention being bashed on the head, but he can't sleep. He tries reading, hoping that will lull him under, but the words swim before his eyes, and his head throbs with every beat of his heart.

It's too hot under the bedsheets and duvet. He feels suffocated, trapped. It's a reaction to the day's events, he knows, but that doesn't make it any easier to handle. He thinks about going downstairs to make a cup of tea, but he doesn't want to disturb John and Sarah.

Instead he lies on top of the covers and stares at the ceiling, trying not to think. If he had his phone he could put on a podcast, or listen to music, but instead he's alone with just his thoughts in the dark.

Tomorrow he'll interview Wade and Butler, start the process of unraveling the threads of the larger scam. He had a conference call with the lead investigators while Sarah was making dinner and John was filing some paperwork at the station. They were pleased with the results, giving Ben leave to clear up any loose ends in Midsomer before being debriefed.

He tries to sort through the past days, create the beginnings of a narrative for his report, but when he closes his eyes, all he can see is a cricket bat swinging at his head, Melody's look of disappointment, the words "Captain Jack" flashing over and over on the scoreboard. It's better to keep his eyes open.

Just after midnight, he hears a tap on the door, and Barnaby pokes his head in. "Just checking to make sure you haven't slipped into a coma," he says.

"You know that's not part of the concussion protocol any longer," Ben says. "You only need to check in on children."

Barnaby doesn't say anything, just smirks, and Ben knows he stepped into that one. He sits up, feeling vulnerable just lying there. "I'm fine, I don't think she hit me as hard as she could have."

"Hard enough to knock you out," Barnaby retorts. "Unless you're telling me she was able to drag you across the grounds and string you up while you were conscious. So indulge me." He pulls a chair up next to the bed and sits down. "What's your name?"

"Jack Morris," he says, just to see the alarm flash across Barnaby's face. He's never been able to resist tweaking Barnaby's chain. "Ben Jones." Oddly, it doesn't flow as easily off the tongue as Jack Morris. He wonders if he's lost some essential part of himself, and if it will ever come back.

Barnaby frowns, but presses on. "What day is it?"

He glances at the clock. "Monday. Would you like to know who the Prime Minister is?"

"I wasn't sure if you would know that," Barnaby says. "I'll try something easier. How did you keep Germaine from killing you? It took minutes to triangulate your phone, longer to get there."

He shrugs. "Begged a bit. Tried to get her to talk. Tried to scare her off. Generally looked pathetic and helpless. I don't think she really wanted to kill me."

"She was winding up when I walked in," Barnaby said.

"That was the third or fourth time she'd worked herself up to swing." He cringes involuntarily, his body remembering the burst of terror, arching away from the killing blow that never came and now never will.

Barnaby doesn't say anything, just sits quietly until Ben's heart stops racing. "You're safe now. I won't let anything happen to you."

It's not a promise he can realistically make, but Ben exhales shakily and relaxes. "Psychology," he whispers and laughs.

"If by that you mean I'm here if you need to talk about it, then yes, psychology."

"I don't know if I can," Ben admits. "The case, yes. But not the rest of it."

"Being undercover is never easy. No one you can trust. No one you can confide in."

"I thought I could trust Germaine. I thought she liked me. She was kind, in her blunt sort of way." Until he says it out loud, he doesn't realize how deep that betrayal had cut.

"Of course, she liked you," Barnaby says, as if he can't imagine anything else. "You have a gift for getting along with people. It's why you're so good undercover."

Ben snorts, tucking the compliment away to savour later. "You didn't like me. For the first few weeks, you acted like I was some unfortunate piece of country life you picked up on your shoe."

Barnaby inclines his head in acknowledgement. "As I recall, you gave as good as you got."

Ben can't deny that. He'd resented Barnaby for stealing the promotion he thought he'd deserved and suspected Barnaby thought of him as just a dumb country plod. By the time he realized he was wrong on both counts, the smart-aleck remarks had become part of their dynamic.

"I don't like getting close to junior officers," Barnaby continues. "Blurs the lines of command, makes it difficult to give hard orders. Some people can do it, but I've always struggled."

Ben understands. He's close to his team back in Brighton, and every injury, every disappointment they suffer, he suffers too. The one thing he never learned from either Barnaby was how to distance himself.

"Tom warned me, though," Barnaby continues ruefully. "Said I could try to stay aloof all I wanted, but that it was impossible not to get sucked in by your Welsh whimsy."

Ben looks around. It's not the first night he's spent in the spare room. There's a kit bag Sarah keeps stocked in the guest bathroom and his favourite beer is always in the pantry. He's not sure how or when it happened, but it's become a second home, the Barnabys a second family.

"Sarah came to visit me about a week after she got here," he tells Barnaby. "Just after William Bingham tried to blow us up. She brought me a casserole and a heating pad for my back. Brilliant detective that I am, I deduced two things. One, that you told her about the bomb and made it sound worse than it was."

"You dove off a balcony into a stack of newspapers," Barnaby protests. "I could hardly make it sound worse than that."

"But I landed on pizza boxes. Love pizza boxes." He'd been sore for days though, and the heating pad had helped. But what helped more was knowing the Barnabys cared. Both of them.

"What else did it tell you?" Barnaby asks, changing the subject quickly.

"That Sarah is a way better cook than Joyce."

Barnaby explodes with that funny little chuckle that Ben has spent years trying to provoke. Most of the time his jokes earn an exasperated look, but now and then he strikes gold.

Pleased, he decides to give Barnaby a reward. "I liked being Jack Morris," he admits. "Pride of the Panthers." He can still hear the crack of the bat on that final six, feel his fingers tingle from the solid connection, see the ball arc and descend over the boundary. Jack Morris is a hero. Not Ben Jones, ambushed by an old woman and strung up to be beaten to death by a cricket bat. A detective inspector now, but still being rescued by John Barnaby.

"Ben Jones, pride of Midsomer County," Barnaby retorts, and for once Ben knows he isn't mocking. "Jack Morris might have hit the winning six, but Ben Jones always makes the diving saves."

Ben ducks his head to hide a pleased smile. "I'm sorry I couldn't let you know I was here," he tells Barnaby.

"You could hardly take the chance of being seen consorting with the local coppers," Barnaby reassures him. "Not if you wanted to keep your cover." He smirks. "I probably should have let Winter keep you on the suspect board. That would have given Jack Morris some street cred."

Still, Ben remembers the disappointment behind the surprise when Barnaby first saw him. He wished his team had coordinated the operation with Causton from the start, or at least let him give Barnaby a discreet heads-up. "It's not that I didn't trust you…"

Barnaby doesn't let him finish. "I admit I was annoyed at first, seeing you like that. Knowing you were undercover on my patch, even if you wouldn't admit it."

"I got tagged for the assignment after what was supposed to be a friendly cricket match, but was really just an audition," he explains. "You know how it is with these cross-county operations. Everything on a need to know basis, no sense of the geography. It wasn't until they told me the team I was infiltrating that I realized they were dropping me into the outskirts of Midsomer. But by then it was too late."

The hardest part had been avoiding familiar faces. His game was in top form, mostly because he begged off pub nights in Causton to hit the net or watch Germaine's old tapes. When he saw Sarah arrive at the quarter-finals with her sixth-formers, he'd volunteered to clean up to avoid running into her in the clubhouse. Which just meant he'd been on a straight line to a dead body and John Barnaby.

"The thing is, Betty will always be my darling baby girl, even when she's as old and desiccated as I am," Barnaby says. As usual, Ben has no idea what he's talking about. It's oddly comforting.

Barnaby looks at Ben, not quite smiling, but fondly nonetheless. "And I guess I'll always think of you as my cheeky sergeant. Hard to see you all grown up and running your own show." He claps Ben on the shoulder. "But I couldn't be prouder."

Ben looks at him incredulously. "For missing the fact that I was lodging with a murderer? Getting bashed on the head with a cricket bat? If it hadn't been for you and Winter, we wouldn't have arrested Wade, and I'd have been Germaine's last century."

"You found Leo's money when my entire team missed an obvious locked drawer. You flushed Wade out so we knew where to look. And you didn't know about Cilla and her son, so why would you have suspected Germaine? I didn't even suspect her until it was nearly too late." He frowns. "Is that what's keeping you awake? You think you failed?"

Ben can't answer that. For most of their working relationship, he felt like he was just scrambling to keep up with Barnaby. Even now, all he can do is keep scrambling and hope it will be enough.

Barnaby doesn't have an answer either. "I'll see you in a couple of hours," he says, standing up. "Try to get some rest."

"You don't have to keep checking on me. I'm fine."

"Of course, you are. But sometimes it's okay to be taken care of." He kisses his fingertips, tilts Ben's head down, and brushes his hand lightly over the bump left by Germaine's cricket bat. "All better," he murmurs and slips out of the room.

Ben sits still for a long time after the door closes, even after the last remnant of the touch fades away. He thinks he might be able to sleep after all.