Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed this story, it's been a pleasure to write. As ever, the epilogue is just the tying of loose ends and a taster of what's coming in the next story (due around about October time).

Chapter Fifteen: Wintering

"I tried to kill you once."

David Shelley looked down at the steaming tea he had cradled in his hands. Leon couldn't read his expression, but he liked to think that maybe, just maybe, there was a trace of regret in there somewhere. But he didn't ask; he processed what he'd just heard instead. The café they were in was open late, catering to no one but them at that particular time. A pink neon sign flashed in the window, red Formica topped tables clashed painfully with bright yellow walls and the cracked, marble effect lino was showing its age. There was no better place for a grim discussion of their past mistakes.

"Er, thanks … you know, for not killing me," Leon replied. He was genuinely grateful.

His father shrugged. "Possibly, I am exaggerating. But it was very tempting."

"Maybe you should tell me the full story?"

His meal of egg and chips had arrived; thrust in front of him by a graceless and disinterested sixteen year old waitress who didn't catch his words of gratitude because her MP3 player was cranked to full volume. Leon watched her march off down between the tables without as much as a backwards glance. "Charming," he murmured. Crap taste in music, too.

"You eat; I'll talk," Shelley Senior suggested, helping himself to one of his son's chips. It sounded like a fair deal to Leon and picked up his knife and fork, while his father continued. "Your mother went away when you were a baby. You would have been, what, four or five months old. Her sister was sick. Chicken Pox, I think, so you had to be left with me."

They never talked about his mother. She walked into the kitchen one day, when Leon was seven or eight, and came out in a big wooden box several days later; never to be seen again. In Leon's child's mind, the kitchen was nothing more than the place where the biscuit barrel lived, and he simply assumed his mother preferred to be with the biscuit barrel than with him and his father. All these years later, Leon's understanding of brain aneurisms had improved considerably.

When Leon paused between bolting mouthfuls of food, he glanced up at his troubled looking father and frowned. "Was it an accident then?" he asked, gulping down his food.

"Oh, no," his father replied, gently. "You bawled your tiny lungs out from the moment your mother walked out that door. I mean, you screamed and screamed." David paused, a rueful down turning of his mouth betrayed his distress at the memory. "I used to play The Jam to you. Town Called Malice. That's Entertainment. I used to dance you round the room and I'd sing the words."

Leon grinned cheekily. "No wonder I was screaming."

"Fair point," David replied, laughing mirthlessly. "But anyway, it must have been three days of constant crying. Your face was all red and puffy, you looked like Winston Churchill after a week on the razz. The doctor said you were fine; the health visitor woman said you were just tired and I should put you down for a nap. Because, obviously, I hadn't already fucking tried that."

They both sniggered at the sarcasm.

"Anyway, day four and you stopped. Completely out of the blue, you went totally silent and just looked up at me in your cot through those big brown, Bambi eyes. I tucked you in, switched your little lullaby music box on and activated the night light. I must have gotten as far as the door before you started again. The screams, really piercing screams that sounded a hundred times louder after a minute of silence. And I snapped. I pulled the pillow out from under your head and for a second, just one second, I was going to press it over your face and smother you."

Alive and well, but still hungry, Leon used the last few chips to wipe up the residue of the egg yolk, listening to the story. It felt surreal to be in some tacky café, speaking with his own father about their murderous impulses. He set down his knife and fork and looked up at his father. "So, what stopped you?"

"Love," his father answered, without hesitation. He looked as though he was going to add to that, but evidently changed his mind. "Just love."

Leon raised a pained smile. "You've never told me that before."

"I'm not proud of it; you were a baby-"

"I don't mean that," Leon cut over him. "I mean, you've never mentioned my name and love in the same conversation before."

"Christ, Lee, you're my son!" David retorted. "Anyway, your colic is a lot better these days. Although judging by the way you bolted that food down, I could be speaking too soon."

Leon blushed. "Sorry," he said, sheepishly. "But I was hungry and my money won't come through from the benefits place for another week."

MI5 tried to pay him. Lucas was practically forcing the money into his hand. But he wanted none of it. It was blood money. If he was to make amends for what he had done, the process didn't end with the arrest of Emma Richards and all her partners in crime. Slowly, he was learning how to have principles, how to take a stand on his own two feet; without anyone else getting hurt.

"You mean you haven't been fed today?" his father asked, horror struck. "Where are you staying?"

"In a bedsit," replied Leon. "I'm okay. I have some cornflakes left." His new found principles didn't extend to tapping his Dad for cash through subtle means of guilt-tripping.

David Shelley fell silent and averted his gaze as he toyed with salt shaker. After what felt like an age of stilted silence, he finally spoke again. "Forgiveness is a very big word for what I'm feeling right now," he said, truthfully. "But I'm not prepared to lose my only child because of one stupid, catastrophic mistake."

Hope flickered in Leon, a bright ray of hope. "You want to see me again?"

"What I want, is for you to return to education and take your A-levels," replied David. "If you agree to finish your education and make a real effort to get into university, then you can move back home and we can stop trying to kill one another."

Leon smiled. "Thank you," he said, keeping himself in check. But his eyes were welling with tears. "Thank you. I agree. I'll do my best, I promise. But there's just one thing…"

His father's expression darkened, eyes narrowing. "What?"

"Well, it's not just me anymore," Leon confessed. "Starsky the rabbit, Dad. He lives with me back at the bedsit."

The suspicion in David Shelley's eyes melted away to slowly growing laughter. "A rabbit?"

"Yes," Leon answered. "Please let me keep him, Dad. Starsky will be in the garden and you won't even notice him and his old owner didn't have time to care for him properly; I can."

His father was still laughing. "I don't see why not. But really, Leon. Starsky, as in Starsky and hutch? That is painfully bad!"

Leon shrugged and grinned. "I love it," he replied, stubbornly. "I love him ... and you, for what it's worth."

"It's got to be worth something," replied his father. "Come on; let's go home."

The funeral procession wound through the streets of Lucile's home town. Past her childhood home; through the places she played as a child, where she had her first kiss and all the other small events that made a lifetime. Past her old school, towards the church she never went to in life. Harry and Ruth, along with the rest of Section D followed, keeping a discrete distance as they attended the small, secular service. The casket was bore by Lucile's father, husband and brothers amidst a silence that was still more stunned than grief stricken. Sudden death was just that: sudden and unexpected. The healing process had barely begun for the family.

Afterwards, they all convened in a small pub outside town, just Section D alone. None of them wished to impinge further upon the grief of the family. There they talked among themselves, sat huddled together in the fierce summer sun like a flock of black clad carrion crows. They spoke a little more softly to one another; the couples held each other a little more tenderly and the friends, colleagues and comrades were that little more affectionate. Death affected them the same way it did everyone.

But that night, Harry and Ruth stayed together. A clammy, humid night spent in somnambulant tossing and turning until the temperature dropped. Harry didn't question it. Snow was falling from the pitch dark skies and he was standing outside the pub. He felt like he'd run a marathon; lungs burning and a soft sheen of sweat freezing on his skin in the cold, biting air. An Irish tricolour hung limp from a nearby telegraph pole; 'Brits Out' was spray painted on the lower wall of the pub, alongside 'Victory to the IRA'. He viewed the scene through a screen of squalling, silent snowfall. Even the solid edifice of the pub was half-obscured from view, like the world's lighting system had suddenly gone on the blink. The walls reclining into the night, mostly out of view and bringing with it the threat of something happening just out of his line of vision.

But the lights shone golden yellow from the windows. External spotlights shining on the path, now carpeted in thick snow, quickly obscuring the trail of blood. But he could still see it; twinkling and frozen, like rubies scattered in the pure white snow. Harry knows who he is looking for, and he knows he's too late. "Céad míle fáilte" it says above the door. Welcome.

Inside, the pub was still warm but utterly devoid of life, like a new made corpse. Barstools over turned, broken glass crunching under foot, dirty glasses stacked on the bar and ashtrays still emitting thin wisps of smoke from cigarettes that hadn't been properly docked. Five minutes, just five minutes earlier, and he could have been here in time. Above the bar, an old fashioned analogue television retunes itself, giving him a fright. He hadn't noticed it before. But while the screen clears of the static snow and that old familiar buzz faded to reveal an RTE news broadcast.

"Garda Síochána and the PSNI are once more working together to locate the bodies of the Disappeared," the newsreader announced. "All of the victims, including a mother of ten from the Falls Road, were abducted, tortured and murdered by IRA in the Seventies and Eighties…"

The Eighties hadn't happened yet, Harry knew that. He looked sharply up at the screen, where the newsreader continued the broadcast. He knew that man. He knew him well. Harry moved round the empty bar, where a large pool of blood came into view. It spread across the lino like a blossoming flower, with empty shell cases scattered around the edge. It was smeared where someone had slipped in it and livid red footprints led to a side door. Then he looked back at the screen, at the man he knew well. Fearful and with adrenaline coursing through him, he vaulted the bar and pulled the television clean from its sockets, sending up a shower of sparks as the wires snapped. To stop the dead man talking about the other dead men, Harry finished the job by throwing the telly to the ground with a crash of splintering glass.

"Harry! Harry!"

He was shaken roughly back into the real world, coming to with a jolt and a gasp of panic. But Ruth was behind now, wrapping her arms around him, pressed close. He could feel her soft breaths against the bare skin of his shoulder. All the while, he peered vacantly in the darkness as the residue of the dream fading from his eyes.

"You just elbowed me in the face," she murmured softly.

"What?" he asked, turning his head. "Shit, Ruth, I am so sorry."

"You were having nightmares. Flailing about everywhere," she added, giving him a squeeze for reassurance. "What was it about?"

But Harry didn't want to talk about it. Ruth was not there; she was not part of that bitter past and only someone who was could possibly understand. "It was nothing," he whispered. "Let's just go back to sleep."

Lucas knew Ros couldn't sleep either. But he didn't move, or say anything. He lay with his back to her, gripping the pillow under his head with a clenched fist. Even with the room in near total darkness, sleep eluded him. The clock on his bedside table informed him of the anti-social hour, so he reached out and jabbed the off button, now making the darkness absolute. Moments later, her hand touched his hip under the covers, sliding slowly up his body and coming rest over his ribs. It made him smile. Someone else's hands in the darkness; someone else's hair on his pillow. Another body, soft and warm, beside his own. Then the shifting of the covers, the crackling fabric as she moved and kissed him, lips pressing gently between his shoulder blades. When she spoke, her voice was husky and low.

"That boy unsettled you," she stated. Not what he was expecting. "Why?"

The sheets rustled again, mattress springs snapping, as he rolled over onto his back, face to the ceiling. "Nothing," he replied, his voice barely more than a whisper. "It was nothing."

After all these years, he would make it nothing. He was expecting her to protest, but instead she let her fingers trail down his bicep, tracing the outline of an old prison tattoo. They turned to each other, before slipping away under cover of darkness.

The End.

Thank you, once more, to everyone who has read and reviewed this story. It really means a lot, so thank you. See you all again in a month.