AN: This fic more or less disregards S13, and I've also given Camille a promotion because it didn't seem fair for her to be a DS for 13 years.
This was not a good situation. This was not a good situation at all. The rough hand on her arm jerked her forwards, relentlessly forwards, and the woman teetered a little on her ridiculous high heels for a moment before she managed to regain her balance.
"Now, is this really necessary?" She complained. It would have only taken a moment of distraction in the imbecile's demeanour to allow her to slip away. Only a moment. "Can't a girl go take a piss?" The words and accent seemed rough in her mouth.
The big idiot yanked open the door in front of them, pushing her inside.
"Found this nosy bint sniffing around outside." He growled. "Reckon she's police."
She brushed the sleeve of her dress off, very aware of every eye in the room turning toward her. Even though to the outside world she would have appeared entirely calm and composed, inside her chest was starting to tighten. She roughly tamped down on the sliver of panic that ran through her. Panic benefits nothing, a familiar voice whispered in the back of her mind. Play the game.
"Thank you so much for that kindly introduction. Not that you've got anything right, you dumb bastard."
After what felt like forever, someone finally spoke into the vacuum. He was an older gentleman, with snowy white hair and beard, rather looking like Father Christmas had been poured into a suit. His stoic expression cracked, shaking an exasperated, sausage-sized finger at the man. "Have you lost your fuckin' mind?" He snapped, with the frustrated timbre of someone that was one bumbling henchman away from firing all of them. Perhaps out of a canon.
"She's the bleedin' bartender, you muppet."
She cast the giant a haughty look. "As I was telling him the whole bloody time he was towin' me here. I better be getting a bonus out of this, see."
The room was silent, all looking at Father Christmas. He looked at her consideringly, and she hoped desperately that her cover was holding. She could see his mind ticking over behind those crystalline blue eyes. Ah, to kill her? She had seen their faces, there was always the possibility that she could identify them from a police line-up. On the other hand, she was just a dumb, mouthy bartender and people had an unnerving habit of paying attention to corpses popping up, particularly if they were attractive women. The last thing Father Christmas wanted was to end up on some internet sleuth's true crime podcast.
The decades-old bullet wound to her shoulder seemed to itch.
Finally he snorted, waving a dismissive hand.
"Get her the hell out of here."
Her eyes narrowed. "I better be getting paid nicely for this shit, see."
"You will be compensated for your time." Father Christmas said coolly, and the giant seized her arm once more. She winced, knowing that she would definitely have a bruise. "Give her a few quid and drop her off somewhere."
"Oi!"
"On it." The look on the giant's face was vicious, and she met his hard look with one of her own.
I can take you.
That was when the door opened once more and she felt herself tense. Father Christmas got to his feet, but the man that had entered raised his hand to halt the conversation before it started.
"Who the hell is this?"
"Just the bartender." Father Christmas snorted. "Sylvester's getting jumpy."
"And he should be, you dumb twat." She couldn't see the second man behind the first, but the voice was English. Working-class. Harsh. "At least one of you is paying bloody attention. She's a fucking cop."
The magic word had been uttered. Chairs tumbled to the floor as people immediately jumped to their feet.
"You're police?" Father Christmas demanded.
"I told you she was a fucking copper!" The guard bellowed. "This place is probably already sodding crawling with 'em!"
The situation was spiralling out of control much quicker than anticipated. She slowly began to back away, muscles prepared to spring-
-and in an instant the room was bristling with guns, accompanied with a chorus of safeties being thumbed off.
"You set us up!" A rather weaselly-looking man with a pencil-thin moustache screamed.
"Oi, or you did, you froggy French bastard!"
Merde.
She slowly sank back against the wall, thinking that perhaps she could slink out in the chaos. Suddenly a hand grabbed her forearm, sharply jerking her back from the crush-
And fair through a door that had been hidden behind a thick red curtain.
With her free arm, she threw her elbow back into the ribs of the man that had seized her, and the air exploded out of him in a rush. Whirling, she planted one foot firmly before hooking her other foot around his ankle. Hands flat on his chest, she pushed sharply at the very instant she yanked her foot forward.
Winded and already unbalanced, the man went down hard onto his back.
"Stop!" The English voice was different from the first, but still rough and demanding. White-hot fury seemed to spike through her, and she drew back her foot to deliver a blow that would most definitely neutralise the enemy.
He caught her boot. In the shadows and the dancing light the bastard caught her boot. Hand gripping the heel he yanked hard, sending her crashing backwards against the wall. The man sprung up with an agility that she hadn't been expecting, his voice stern. "Stop this idiocy."
Her hands flashed up to his throat, feeling the man's lightning-fast pulse under her fingers. All it would take would be one downward thrust with her thumbs to his Adam's apple and he was going to be choking to death on the floor of this grimy strip club. By the way he tensed under her hands, he knew it too.
"Camille."
She stilled, her hands frozen around his throat, fingers digging into his neck. Detective Inspector Camille Bordey desperately sought the eyes of the man in the darkness who had so quietly said her name. Everything was shadowy and indistinct and punctuated by flashes of neon light, but there was no, it couldn't possibly, it couldn't-
The man didn't make a move to try and unpick her fingers from around his throat. He spoke again, all remnants of the rough accent gone. "Listen to me. We have exactly thirty seconds remaining until some rather heavily-armed men bust those doors down and flood in here, so I strongly suggest that we abscond forthwith."
Camille stepped back from the stranger. "One wrong move and I will kill you."
He snorted in reply.
"Believe me, I am well-aware of that."
The answer was so faint that she wasn't sure she heard it at all.
Seconds later all the doors to the building burst inwards in a shower of splinters as armed tactical officers stormed the site. The few girls that were rehearsing screamed and made a break from the stage, while the bar staff and bouncers, no strangers to police raids, stepped back with their hands in the air.
Those that had arrived for the conference that had been too busy flinging accusations instead of wisely taking the time to flee and were rounded up with surprising ease. An operation literal years in the making over in mere minutes.
Camille burst out into open air through another staff entrance, coming nose to nose with a semi-automatic. Her hands immediately shot into the air.
"DI Camille Bordey." She shouted over the chaos. "I'm DI Camille Bordey." Camille briefly glanced back for the one that had dragged her out of the crossfire.
The man was gone, like a ghost fading back into the night.
Camille woke the next morning to the sounds of her little girl cooing at her stuffed animals. Seeing that her mother was awake Aimèe pulled herself upright on wobbly legs and started promptly gnawing on the top bar of her crib, maintaining eye contact the whole time. I hunger, Mother. She had to laugh.
"All right, chèrie, Maman is coming."
And so the morning routine commenced. Camille took a lightning-fast shower before changing and dressing her daughter. Toast hanging out of her mouth, she attempted to feed an uncooperative baby, getting more food on the child than in her mouth. The doorbell rang and Camille let in the babysitter, Aimèe squealing with delight as she brandished her bottle. Camille kissed her squirming girl on the top of her head, exchanged a quick goodbye with the sitter and ran out the door for work. Slipping her phone in her pocket, Camille found a handful of blueberry puffs that Aimèe had somehow managed to slip into her jacket. Shrugging, she popped one of the puffs into her mouth as she unlocked her car. It could have been worse; she'd once reached down to find a pocketful of jelly.
She had almost managed to convince herself that the previous night had never happened until she walked into the station and immediately she was getting stares from her coworkers, abruptly reminding her that yes, indeed, she had been blown quite spectacularly the night before, before proceeding to threaten imminent death to an apparent undercover English officer.
A man fell into step beside her.
"Bordey."
Camille's gaze flashed to the side and then forward again.
"DuPont."
She would grudgingly admit that despite his flaws Jack DuPont was one hell of a good detective, and Camille supposed she may have even owed him one since he had introduced her to Leo and that had ultimately led to Aimèe, but neither of these detracted from the fact that he was a despicable human being.
"Heard you punched out an English officer."
Of course the rumours had already taken on a life of their own.
"I can't think of where you would have possibly heard that."
DuPont scoffed. "Not that the English don't deserve it, but I'm pretty sure you're in trouble."
The man was the proverbial pain in the backside, but Camille couldn't deny that his combination of brownnosing and plain old nosiness meant that there was very little about the station that Jack didn't know.
Not that she would ever tell him that, of course.
"Tell yourself what you like."
He stuck his hands in his pockets. "Champion and Renard have been in meetings with assets from London for hours."
That in itself was hardly a surprise. This wouldn't exactly have been the first time that operations had crossed over either, both sides notorious for playing their cards close to the chest.
"Imagine that." Camille said dryly. "If you're fishing for information you're going to have to offer up something more substantial than something an average rookie would pick up."
DuPont smirked, and in that instant Camille cursed herself for stumbling into such an obvious trap.
"Pendergast is here."
She stilled. She hadn't seen Pendergast and his team in years, the investigators from Lyon.
"Interpol is here." Her eyes narrowed. "Is there an active investigation we don't know about?"
He grinned. "You've done it this time, Cam. Well, maybe you're just getting too… old for the job."
The patience that she had spent so many years carefully cultivating was wearing dangerously thin. She glared at him threateningly in a way that would have any normal man immediately cowed, but DuPont was either too bold or too stupid to heed the warning.
"Now, you listen here-"
"Yes?" He blinked innocently.
Camille was about to lay into him with the ferocity that would have a lesser being quaking in their boots when a door was thrown open.
"Bordey, now!" Her boss snapped, and the office door was slammed closed.
"Good luck." DuPont said with false sympathy and Camille yearned for the days where she would have returned with a sharp punch to the nose or simply pushing him out the window and into the ocean and let him make his own way to shore to see whether he sank or swam. "I'll look after your desk when you're fired."
Oh, how she wished she could push him out a window.
There was no two ways about it, Commissaire de Police Charles Champion was ass. But still, Camille had a soft spot for the man since Champion had plucked her out of a graduating class of fifty men for specialised training and undercover work. Nina Renard was Champion's main offsider, a career undercover officer with a police family that stretched back generations, a woman not to be crossed.
"Close the door." Champion said.
Any other time Camille would have gladly sassed him back, but gauging the atmosphere of the room she decided that ultimately it wasn't worth her job.
"You were blown last night." Renard said flatly.
Camille noted that she wasn't invited to sit down and stood there awkwardly at attention. Everyone was silently looking at her, and Camille had the sudden stray thought that there was spit-up on her blazer that she had missed.
"It wasn't by choice." She said. "It may have just been a lucky guess, both sides looking for an excuse to attack in a volatile situation." Her lip curled. "I would have been fine if the English asset hadn't interfered."
The room was suspiciously silent and her hands tightened their grip on each other as her bosses didn't ask her how she knew, didn't ask her how, didn't ask her if she recognised him. And that in itself told Camille that they definitely knew more than she did about the whole situation.
"It appears that we stumbled into an ongoing investigation that the English decided not to tell us about." There was a strained note in Champion's voice that wordlessly said that some of the English in question were currently in the room and that was the only thing keeping him from launching into a full rant.
Camille frowned. "About the drugs?" Ultimately she had done her job. She was there to track Father Christmas to the great big pile of cocaine. She had done that, and additionally presented her bosses with five other drug kingpins and their men as a bonus. At any other time, Camille would still be busy riding the adrenaline high of a job well done.
"Apparently it's deeper than that." Champion glared quite pointedly at another man in the room. Ah, the English. Camille felt her teeth begin to grind. "The Security Service has consented to read us in after last night's cock-up."
"How gracious." Renard muttered, echoing Camille's thoughts.
She stared at the back of the man from MI5. He smoothed his tie and for a long ridiculous moment Camille had a stupid moment to think that it was actually him, in his impossible wool suits, when the man turned to reveal yet another generic Englishman.
"This is Officer Roger Sadler."
"Sir." Camille said steadily, and a moment later the name sunk into her subconsciousness.
Her brow furrowed.
"I know you."
She was going to crack, she could feel it.
"You lying-"
"Bordey." Champion snapped.
"I see you remember me, even after all this time." The man said dryly.
Of course she did. That day was burned into Camille's memory. The blood. The icepick. The screaming.
Her screaming.
She felt herself step forward unconsciously, like her body was moving to strike him while her brain was yet to fully engage. Officer Roger Sadler watched her approach, with that same easy self-assured egotistical way that had driven her up the wall during the murder investigation. His gaze was unconcerned, a slight smirk to the corner of his mouth.
"It seems you've stumbled onto something far above your pay grade, Detective Inspector."
"Oui?" Camille said lightly. "I believe you worked in real estate?"
"I'm moving up in the world." The man seemed utterly unconcerned about her obvious contempt. If anything, he seemed slightly amused by it and Camille tried not to bristle.
"I busted a France-UK drug smuggling ring that Paris and London have been working on getting someone into for years."
Sadler snorted. "This goes much further than a few trans-Channel drug runners."
"Is that so." She said flatly.
The man sat down on one of Champion's smart leather chairs, and at her boss's look, Camille also sat.
"I'm talking about police corruption."
Camille raised a sceptical brow. There was always police corruption. Regrettably there would probably always be police corruption. "And that's more important than an operation five years in the making?"
Sadler smiled thinly. "Inspector Bordey, if you want to compare ops, I've been working on this and making arrests for the last fourteen years."
Camille frowned. Fourteen years. So that meant that the first time she had met him on Saint Marie during the murder investigation, he was…
"How far up?" Her boss asked.
"All the way." Sadler said. "We've managed to take down some, but-" He shook his head. "They're all ultimately low-level. The top dogs have been there for so long that they know the game, when we get too close they cut loose one of the minnows to take the fall, and then it starts all over again."
"We?" Camille asked.
"Operation Silent Sweep."
Her eyes narrowed.
"Silent Sweep?" Renard enquired.
"Regrettably it didn't come to our attention right away." Sadler said. "It was only a few officers here and there, at first. Superior officers would approach junior PCs to see if they wanted in with the cool kids, start low level with asking them to roll a few drunks for their wallets, ease them into evidence tampering by assuring them it was morally right to plant coke on the local drug dealer to get a conviction. From there it was just a slippery slope all the way down." His eyebrows rose. "Officers that refused to play ball or attempted to report the situation just happened to have tragic accidents, or tiny indiscretions were used to get them fired. Or if their record was spotless and they couldn't just be booted from the Force, they were shipped off to the back of beyond where they couldn't interfere."
"You weren't there for a reunion." A leaden weight dropped in her gut. "You were on Saint Marie to interview Inspector Poole for your investigation."
There was a twist to his lips. "I hadn't seen those people since university. If it wasn't for my job, I wouldn't have crossed the road to say hello to any of them."
Camille pressed her lips hard together. The silent fury the man had during the murder investigation had settled into an icy imperviousness. Or maybe this was the way Roger Sadler always was, and the anger back then had been caused by frustration that Richard Poole had died before he could talk to him.
"Why didn't you tell me or my people at the time?"
"If Rich's death had turned out to be something other than random happenstance my hand would have been forced. Thankfully that didn't happen."
Random happenstance.
"Thankfully."
He ignored her tone. "Guns and drugs are smuggled through the Caribbean all the time." Sadler said, and as much as Camille wished to refute it, she knew she really couldn't. "The only person I could be reasonably sure of was Richard Poole, and he was dead. Of course I wasn't going to tell your team. Any of you could have already been working in the network."
She ignored the lump that was threatening to form in her throat.
"And ten years later you're now sure of me."
Sadler cocked his head to the side. "Since you ran into our asset last night and you were completely unawares, I have an inkling."
"Is that why you're here?" Camille asked.
Roger Sadler folded his hands together. "It may have been pure luck that the drug smugglers identified you as a police officer, but our asset made you, Inspector Bordey. Hence, it's very likely that someone else has as well." He was staring at her like he was waiting for it to sink in entirely. "The people we are investigating are police, Inspector. You need to treat this situation with the seriousness it deserves. We don't have the intel yet to send you into Witness Protection, but-"
"You believe that is a possibility?" Champion asked.
"Your officer was burned last night." Sadler said flatly.
"Will you be withdrawing your asset?" Renard asked. "There is a possibility that they too have been exposed."
"Perhaps." Sadler said. "We're… playing it by ear."
"So that's a no."
"We can't stop now when we're so close." The Englishman said. "We're almost there."
Camille frowned. "So you're potentially risking a man's life by crossing your fingers and hoping that no one spotted him spiriting me away?"
Sadler's lips thinned. "If we don't move now we lose whatever advantage we have and the whole operation is passed on to the next generation of law enforcement. We must press on."
Despite herself she understood. She had worked operations that had spanned years, and being forced to scrap an operation when she was so close to the big payoff almost caused physical pain. "And you're telling me so I don't interfere in your operation."
The corner of Sadler's mouth ticked up in a smirk. "You do have rather the reputation."
Her eyes narrowed.
The man stood, hand in a pocket, standing in the same cocky easy-going way that Camille remembered from ten years ago. The investigation. The murder. She stared hard at him.
Smug git, the internal voice of Richard Poole whispered in her mind, and Camille had to agree. And her heart immediately started to ache.
Did he know? Did Richard know he had been hunted out of his station because he was an honest cop? He wouldn't have told them without irrefutable evidence, but surely he suspected something from the moment his reputation at Croydon started to be systematically dismantled.
Camille stood as Roger Sadler thanked her bosses for their cooperation and gave assurances that he would be in touch with relevant information, and their eyes met.
"Does your operation involve Doug Anderson?"
She was hoping for a tell, a twitch, a flinch she could latch onto, but nothing of the kind happened as he smiled coolly at her.
"Have a good day, Inspector Bordey."
AN: So the part about 'rolling some drunks' is based somewhat on truth. A friend of mine was a uniformed officer when Roger Rogerson, probably Australia's most notorious corrupt police detective, was still in power. My friend was asked by Rogerson to 'roll some drunks', and when he refused, he was reassigned to the police choir in rural NSW.