Disclaimer: I don't own Ashes to Ashes or any of its characters. Just my ideas and the characters I invented for this fic.

Once again, thank you to everyone who's read and reviewed to date. Please keep the feedback coming in!

I am SO relieved that I posted Chapter 4 before Episode 6 was aired, with Alex leaving letters for the team. Great minds think alike. I just wonder how much of what I'm writing is set to be disproved by the next two episodes...

"And I'll leave behind my Molly

She's the girl that I adore

And I wonder if she'll think of me..."

- John Tams, The Scarlet and the Blue - From War Horse, play adapted by Nick Stafford from the novel by Michael Morpurgo

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7 February 1983

My own darling Molly,

I don't know if you will ever receive this letter, and yet I feel that I must write it. If you do, it will be many years from now. I must tell you at the start that I am going to ask you to believe one impossible thing. If you can do that for me, then everything else I am going to say will fall into place. If you can't, then this letter could cause you a lot of pain, and you should stop reading, now. But if you love me and trust me enough to believe and accept what I am going to say, then please keep reading.

I know how you and Evan watched over me in hospital, as I lay in a coma after Arthur Layton shot me. But what you don't know, my darling, is that Layton's bullet sent me back in time to 1981, to just before when Gran and Grandad were killed. I have been living in the 1980s ever since, working as a police officer with the Met. That is the impossible thing that I am asking you to believe.

I tried so hard to get back home to you, to wake up from my coma. I was utterly determined that I was not going to die. I vowed with everything in me, that I'd never stop fighting to see you again. I spent months in the 1980s, trying to take control of my destiny so that I could return to you in the future. I just would not give up. But nothing worked. I think, now, that it must have been because I was not strong enough in 2008. That if I had recovered consciousness, I would have died.

Then I was shot again, in 1981, and I went into a coma there as well. It was a revenge attack from a criminal we'd put away. That second bullet sent me to a place between my past and my future, where I was told that I had to choose between my two lives. I would wake up in one life and make a full recovery, but I would lose the other life for ever. Of course, I instantly said that I wanted to go home to you. But I was told that, before I made my final decision, I had to see what would happen in both times, depending upon when I lived and when I died.

What I was shown then, changed both of our lives for ever. I learned that, if I came home to you, then two years later we would both be in an appalling car crash. You would be killed, and I would be left paralysed from the neck down, despairing, longing for death but unable to die, trapped in a hateful, useless existence. While back in the 1980s, a good man about whom I had come to care very much, and to whom I owe my life, would also die a terrible death because I was not there to prevent it. But if I died in 2008, you would live past the day of the crash in 2010 because you would be living with Daddy, and he would take you to school by a different route. You would have the chance to grow up, to grow old. I would have an active, useful life in the 1980s. The man I love would also live, and we might have a chance of happiness together.

I realised then, that the only way to save your life, to save all three of us, was to give up all hope of ever seeing you again. But even then, it was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. I want you to know that, Molly. I didn't make my choice lightly, and I didn't do it because there was someone waiting for me in 1981. I didn't choose him over you. I did it because I knew that, if I went back to you, two years later your broken little body would be cut out of the wreckage of my car and hoisted onto a hospital gurney, and I would recover consciousness in hospital after the accident, to be told that your neck had broken when the car crashed. I had to put your life and your future before my desire to see you again, and that decison all but broke my heart. I couldn't even say goodbye to you. All I could do was watch you sitting by my bed as I died in 2008, before you faded from my sight forever. But I knew, and I know still, that you will survive this terrible loss, just as I did. I know how strong and clever and brave you are, and that the world will be yours for the taking.

Do you remember that, when I was driving you to school on the day I was shot, you were reading a confidential file about a man called Sam Tyler? He had been in a prolonged deep coma, during which he believed that he had travelled back in time to 1973, to work for the Greater Manchester Police. His boss in 1973 was a man called Gene Hunt. When Sam recovered consciousness, he made reports and tapes about his experiences, which he sent to me. He died shortly afterwards. When I went to 1981, I found myself working in Gene Hunt's team. Sam had gone back to them after his death in 2007, and he had died there in 1980. The rest of the team had subsequently transferred to the Met. From what I had heard from Sam, I expected Gene Hunt to be an arrogant, violent, sexist bastard, whose ideas of policing were out of date even in 1981. I found him to be all that, and much, much more. Under enough thick skin for a herd of elephants, I found a strong, vulnerable, proud, damaged, flawed, lonely man, a good, brave, decent, kind, caring, compassionate man who has guarded me ever since I came here. Deep down I knew that we loved each other, but I would not admit it, even to myself. I was so determined to get home to you and I didn't want anything to stand in my way. But when I returned to 1981, knowing that I will be here for the rest of my life, I awakened in hospital to find Gene watching over me. He had been there all the time since I had been admitted, talking to me, trying to arouse me from my coma. I knew then that, although I have lost you forever, my home now is with him. That wherever he is, I am meant to be.

We have been married for six months. I am so happy here with him, happier than anyone has any right to be, but I have one great sadness that he must never know - that I will never see you or hear you again, never hold you in my arms, never know how you will grow up or what you will become. Above all, that I could not tell you why I had to leave you to live here, and that I will always feel terrible guilt at having left you, even though it was the only thing I could have done. I have had to accept that, and accept how fortunate I am, to have been allowed this second chance of life with this infuriating, impossible, glorious man by my side. I have just learned that I am carrying his child, and that knowledge has made me decide to write this letter, on the day which will be your birthday in thirteen years' time. I hope that, by writing down everything I long to be able to tell you but never can, I will achieve some sort of closure. I owe that to Gene and to our unborn child, and to any other children we may have in the future, and I owe it to you. Even though I know how unlikely it is that you will ever read this, and that you will not even be born for another thirteen years.

Goodbye, my own dear Mols. I hope you will know that, whatever happens to me, in this life or any other, I will always love you and remember you and miss you. I hope that wherever and whenever you are, you will always remember me, and that you will grow up into the strong, clever, brave woman I have always known you will be. Please try to forgive me for leaving you, and understand why I had to do it.

The letter broke off at this point, and resumed further down the page. It was written in a different ink, and the handwriting was slightly different, as though the writer's eyesight was less good than it had been.

30 January 2018

I didn't sign this letter back in 1983 because I knew that there would always be more that I wanted to add to it, and there was no point in finishing it when you wouldn't be alive to read it for so many years to come. I put it away and got on with the life that I was allowed, with my beloved husband and two wonderful children. But now everything has changed.

Gene is dead.

He is gone, and without him, I am nothing. All these years he had been my whole life, as I was his, and together we reached for the stars. I know how fortunate I have been, and how much I still have - my son and daughter, their families, all my friends. But it's as though I'm an old fashioned clock, and when he died, someone took the mainspring out. I can't go on. He died so suddenly that I knew nothing about it until the manager of his golf club rang me to say that he had collapsed and that the ambulance crew had been unable to revive him. I never had the chance to say goodbye to him, to tell him again how much I loved him and how much he always meant to me. I think he knew, but I still needed to say it, and I couldn't. Just as I was never able to say goodbye to you.

We had been living in Spain since we both retired. Secretly I'd wanted to stay in England, near to our children. But it was better so. If I'd been living in England, I would have met people whom I knew in my other life, and it would have become increasingly difficult to explain away. And I have wanted so much to contact you, especially after my death in 2008, even more since Gene died. But what would the point have been? You had seen me die in 2008. If I had come back into your life and claimed to be your mother, you would have rejected me as some madwoman. It would have caused us both unimaginable pain. I have never been able to tell anyone about my other life for fear of being thought insane, and Gene and our children would never have believed me if I had told them that I had borne a child in 1996 who was not his. We were all together all through that year, and they would have known that it could not be true. They would all have been terribly hurt. Evan knew me in the 1980s, and I could have got in touch with him to ask after you. I could have tried introducing myself to you without telling you who I am. But I am so afraid that if I contact you again in any way, I might somehow put you in danger. I have tried and failed so often to change the past, that I know that I must not interfere with the future. The price for my saving all our lives when I decided to die in 2008 and live in 1981, was that I could never see you again. However hard it is for us both, I must leave you to work out your own destiny.

Yet something still tells me that it might be easier for you to believe what I have to tell you if you read it, than if I were to tell you to your face. That it might even help you. So I am finishing this letter, and I will seal it up with a snapshot taken shortly after I arrived in 1981, so that you can see that it really is me writing this. I will hand it to my dear son Sam, and I will tell him that, if ever he should meet you after I am gone, it will be up to him to decide whether or not he should pass it to you. I know that he is the kind of man who can make that decision. I will also ask him, if he finds you, to be a guardian angel to you, just as his father was to me, and to treat you like another sister. I know that he will.

I know that I do not have very long here now. You must not grieve for me. Your grieving should all have been done in 2008. I know that somewhere, Gene is waiting for me, and I am waiting until I can join him, wherever he has gone. God grant that, someday a long time ahead, you and I will meet again there.

I have just one more thing to say, and it is very important: Beware of Arthur Layton. I know that he is still at large after all these years. He is a dangerous and evil man. Even now, he could still try to harm you, and Evan if he is still alive. You will know that, when he kidnapped me, Layton phoned Evan and said that he would tell me the truth, why my parents died. After he rang off, and before he shot me, he told me that Grandad had discovered that Gran was having an affair with Evan. That Grandad grew so bitter and twisted that he paid Layton to blow the car up with him, Gran and me in it, to keep us together forever. I died believing that. But when I went back to the 1980s, I have discovered that it was all a pack of lies. I met both Gran and Grandad, and Evan, who worked for them then, and I came to know Gran and Evan very well. Of course, none of them knew who I really was. They just thought that I was a slightly eccentric police officer. I tried so hard to save Gran and Grandad from Layton's bomb, but I was unable to change what had already happened. At the very last moment, Gene and I tried to warn them, and we witnessed the explosion. I had to watch my parents die all over again. I saw a little girl, my younger self, shielded from that horror by a tall man in a black coat who carried her away to safety. It was Gene, my Gene, saving the child who later grew up to become the woman who would travel back in time to fall in love with him. I think that was when I first realised that he and I were destined for one another. Later he helped Evan get custody, so it was due to him that Evan was able to bring me up.

But when we were investigating the blast, we learned why Layton had done it. It was because he had taken a grudge against Grandad, something about the way Grandad had conducted his case after Gene and I arrested him, and he hated Evan because he worked for Grandad. So he had plotted to murder Gran, Grandad and me, and get Evan blamed for it. I had only escaped by the merest chance. After the explosion, Layton disappeared, leaving forged evidence implicating Evan, which Gene destroyed to protect Evan and my younger self. That meant that Gene and I were never able to pin the murders on Layton. He didn't surface again until he shot me in 2008, trying to finish the job he started back in 1981. So beware of him. He might try to destroy you because you're my daughter, and Sam and his sister Carrie because they're Gene's children. If ever he is caught and brought to trial, he may try to repeat his claims. But he will have no proof. Whatever he says, remember, it will all be wicked lies from a wicked man.

When I first wrote this letter, I finished by saying goodbye to you, thirteen years before you were born. Now I say goodbye again, knowing that if, God grant it, you are still alive, you are now a woman. I hope and pray that you have everything that you could have wished for in your life, that you succeed in all that you choose to do, that you have health and happiness, and that you learn, as I have, that the greatest blessing in life is to find someone whom you love more than yourself, and to be loved in return. The one abiding sorrow of my life is that I will never know.

I always hold in my mind a vision of the last time I saw you, walking away with Evan across the Millenium Bridge. I blew you a kiss, and you jumped up to catch it. I will never forget the ecstasy in your little face at that moment. I called out to you that we'd blow the candles out together. I'm so sorry that I never made it to your party.

Your loving mother,

Alex Hunt

You knew me as Alex Drake.

TBC