A/N; Posted chapter 13 at the same time as chapter 12, as promised. Yay me!

Review, review, review! Pretty please?

(Oh, and as a special treat I uploded a smuttier version of Chapter 2, to be read as a standalone. Its called "Trying to tell". Check it out, but be warned; Its rated M for a reason.)

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Barnaby sat on a chair opposite the bed in the small room occupied by miss Anne Sinclair and her daughter in the small Bed and Breakfast in Midsomer Parva. Anne sat with the child in er lap, and the man that had introduced himself as William (however unwillingly), was sitting next to her on the bed. He was finally ready to start questioning them.

"Could you start with why my sergeant was lying on the floor, barely conscious, when I got here before?"

"Yeah..." the man, William, began. "Sorry 'bout that. It was a... misunderstanding, on my part." This time, he had the decency to look slightly ashamed, and his thick cockney accent seemed to disappear a little, making way for a hint of a more sophisticated upper class accent. there was only a small trace of it, but Barnabys trained ears managed to pick up on it right away. You had to notice things like that to be a good copper. And he was a very, very good copper.

"Could you please tell me what, exactly, was going on here before? Miss Sinclair, you seemed chocked to see him, to say the least. Am I right in assuming you thought he was dead?" He already knew she'd thought that, it had been very obvious, but he wanted to hear it from her, in her own words. Sometimes, by listening to people talking, you could find out more by hearing what they didn't say, than what they actually felt fit to tell him.

"The last time I saw him... There was a fire. I though he died. That was about seventeen months ago. I never heard anything from him to prove he was all right, not until he barged in here about an hour ago." she sent a slightly hurt look towards the man, and he looked ashamed again. He turned his head against the wall.

"I didn't think she'd want anything to do with me. We have a... complicated history. So I took the easy way out and disappeared."

"So, how did you find her?" Barnaby asked. "Why come barging in in her room and punch the lights out of my colleague?" His voice hardened. He hadn't got a satisfying answer to that part of the story yet.

"I was in London. Giles, her..."

"Uncle", Anne supplied quickly.

"Yeah, her... Uncle." William gave her a quick look sideways. "He found me. He never did like me much. He decided he needed to talk to me. Wondered where I'd been an' such." He turned towards Anne again. "We were in the middle of a... 'conversation', when there was a knock on the door, and one of the girls came in and told him there was a phone call from the police. She said there had been a murder, and that Bu... Anne had been involved." he took her hand in his, squeezing it slightly. "It sounded really bad. It scared me. So the fist chance I got, I took a train down to Causton, and a Taxi from there. I needed to see if she was all right."

"How did you know where I were? I don't think Giles told you, did he?" Buffy asked, a curious look on her face.

"Ha! No, he wasn't much help there. Dawn told me. Her little sister," he explained to Barnaby, but didn't take his eyes away from the two girls.

"When the taxi dropped me off, it was the middle of the night, and I had no idea where I was going to start looking for her." he continued."so I waited around for a couple of hours, until I saw someone I could ask. I figured an American girl in these parts ought to be well known around the neighbourhood. Turned out I was right too. About five in the morning I found a guy who was getting ready to go to work or something, and I asked him. He knew right away who I was talking about." he smirked at Anne. "Seems like you've made quite an impression around these parts, pet."

"Yeah, I noticed," Anne muttered, but she didn't elaborate.

"Anyway," William continued, "He told me about the decapitated body in her garden, and he also told me where she was, and even gave me directions to the B n B. He assured me she was all right. Actually, he said hey were both all right, her and her little girl." now he turned his face away from her and stared at the wall instead. "That threw me for a loop. I had no idea she had a kid. And I got... angry, I guess. Jealous." he turned back to Anne. Barnaby was starting to get the picture, but he didn't interrupt him.

"I love you," he told Anne, and seemed almost oblivious to the company they had in the room. "And when I heard that, I thought you had moved on to some undeserving bastard." He almost spit the words out. "And at the same time, I knew I had no right to you. I didn't come back to you, even though I could have, months ago." he closed his eyes tight, apparently battling some strong emotion inside him. Anne squeezed his hand in reassurance, and that got him to continue.

"So I waited a couple of more hours, pacing around and working myself into a right temper. I didn't know how old the kid was, and even if I'd have known, it'd probably had made me even angrier. It never occurred to me that she could be mine." He turned towards Barnaby again. "I thought I couldn't have children. Thought I was sterile. Apparently I wasn't."

"Apparently not", Barnaby said in a dry voice. If he wasn't the father of Anne's daughter, she must have slept with his twin brother or something. It was almost unnerving how much the little girl looked like him.

"Anyway, when I finally made myself go and find her, I see she's not alone." He got a bitter look in his face. "She's with some... man!" He spit out the word again, like it left a foul taste in his mouth. Barnaby fought the little smile that threatened to settle on is lips. Jones had apparently been in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Looking right cozy they did too," William continued, and crossed his arms. A slightly petulant look settled on his features. "Yeah, I guess I was wrong, shouldn't have pounced on the git, but I saw red. Though he was the guy that knocked her up. Got her to forget about me."

"I didn't forget you. Never could. Even when I desperately wanted to, I never could. You were always there." Anne Whispered. Barnaby couldn't help but feel a little touched. It was a sweet little scene that had played out in front of him.

"I didn't know that, did I? " William grasped her hand again. "And really pet, I wouldn't have blamed you if you had. All my fault, you know? Me 'n my poncey insecurities."

"Well, now I feel like we've sorted that out," Barnaby said. "Now, miss Sinclair, how about we start talking about the body in your garden instead, hm?"

Before he could ask any further questions, his phone rang. He excused himself, rose from the chair and answered it. There was a clipped and hurried conversation, and then he hung up.

"I'm sorry, but we'll have to continue this conversation some other time. I'm afraid I have to go. Miss Sinclair, I hope you don't have any plans to leave the area. We will have to talk again." He gave them a court nod, and then left the room.

Buffy was perplexed. "What was that all about? A minute ago he couldn't wait to interrogate me. Not that I'm complaining."

Spike didn't say anything, but stared at the door the policeman had disappeared through. He knew what it was all about. Vampire hearing was a good thing at times.

They'd found another body.

***

Barnaby met up with George Bullard at the scene of the crime. Or at least where the new body had been found. Again, there were nothing to indicate that the murder had occurred there. There was a minimal amount of blood, and again the head was missing.

The body had been found in the middle of the road leading up to the cottage where the other body had been dumped. Apparently, whoever had placed the body there had wanted to be as close as possible to the original dumping site, but hadn't dared venture inside where the police had closed the property off.

Bullard didn't waste any time. "Same procedure as last time, Tom. Killed somewhere else, dumped here. Cause of death, decapitation."

"So there was nothing to indicate that the first one we found was decapitated after death?" Barnaby asked.

"No, but I'm still waiting for some test results. Not that I think they will show anything different."

"Thank you George. Anything else?"

"Apart from the fact that this one is a woman? No. Quite young, in her early twenties I guess. Fully clothed and with no sign of any kind of struggle. No visible damage to the body. Well, apart from the missing head of course. "

"Of course," Barnaby said dryly. Georges humour could get a little to macabre even for him at times. Still, he guessed he needed it to be able to do the job. It must be easier to cut the corpses up if you distance yourself from them first.

He sighed. This case began to look like it would be one of the hardest ones to solve in his entire career. Two unidentified decapitated bodies in two days. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. He needed to inform Jones about the new developments. It took three signals before the sergeant answered.

"Sir?" He sounded like he'd just climbed out of bed. Barnaby guessed he had, after the morning he'd had to endure. He quickly filled him in on the new findings, but when the sergeant insisted on coming back to work he stopped him. He said it was no need, and that it was better that he stayed in and rested for the rest of the day. He said he'd call if anything else came up.

Barnaby hung up the phone and turned back to Bullard. He gave the okay for them to take the body away. The only thing about this case he felt he had some knowledge of was that it obviously was connected to Anne Sinclair somehow. It was not a coincidence that both corpses had been found within thirty feet from the cottage she had inhabited for less than four days. And the mysterious man with the sometimes thick northern London cockney, sometimes upper class Oxford English accent was one piece of the puzzle he didn't quite know what to do with. Maybe that piece belonged to another jigsaw puzzle altogether?

He needed to know more. Miss Sinclair and her daughter seemed to have a slightly shady background, to say the least. He needed to know more. A background check. He wanted to know exactly where in the united states she came from, and what she had done there. If she had been in Britain before. He felt sure that somewhere in her background story he would find the crucial piece of evidence that would unlock the entire case for him.

He needed to get back to the office. He had some phone calls to make, some friends to get hold of, and some debts to cash in on. He knew from experience that getting information from the Americans about their citizens was hard, and that he needed all the help he could get. By the end of the day, he felt sure he would have some information about the mysterious woman in the cottage. In the mean time, he would try to find out as much as possible about William Sinclair, the father of her child.

At least he was British. That should make it much easier to find out everything about him. Birth date, parents, employments and so on. Maybe he even had a police record. That would make Barnabys day. He almost felt quite optimistic.

.

It wasn't very often Barnaby was wrong about something, but this time he really didn't know what he was going up against.