A/N

TRIGGER WARNING: Child Abuse, Physical/Psychological Abuse, are a prevalent topic of this fic but not what it's about.

XXXX

Sleighberry Street in London wasn't much of an interesting place, just a normal row of middle-class semi-detached houses like so many other streets around London. People raised their families, older folk did their best to outdo each other's gardens, the occasional grumble was had over a parking spot, a perfectly normal street – apart from numbers 13 and 15. A little over nine years previous, 13 had caught fire with the family trapped inside, and the flames had soon spread to the neighbor, burning both to the ground. Ever since then, a blackened shell peppered with graffiti had tarnished Sleighberry Street; an eyesore residents had been forced to wait almost a decade to have torn down. It should have been a relief; it should have finally allowed people to forget an entire family had tragically lost their lives, but then two corpses had been discovered stuffed into a chimney and work had ground to a halt with gasps and screams.

Police had swarmed the area after a panicked call from workers, tape thrown up, and forensics teams summoned to work their magic. Yet, when police had realized exactly which street they were on, the Cold Case Unit had been given full control of the situation and crime scene. Boyd had, of course, questioned why his team had been handed it, but that answer had come swiftly with Sleighberry Street's other dark secret: Patrick Montagu. He'd lived almost directly across the street with his wife for over fifteen years before anyone had discovered his evil, that he was little more than a demon wearing a person suit; he'd been arrested for the brutal murder of seven teenage girls and sentenced only a little after the fire. Assumption, that was how the case had found its way to Boyd's team; the assumption these were undiscovered early victims of Patrick Montagu, therefore something for a less busy unit to deal with. Boyd had grumbled but ultimately hadn't cared, not when they'd arrived only for Eve to tell him one of their victims was a girl probably under the age of ten.

Most of the houses might have crumbled long ago, but 13's chimney had remained surprisingly intact and given Eve a decent amount of evidence to bag up; sure, it was encased in thick soot, dust, and a dozen spiders had needed evicting, but the team had long since stopped underestimating Doctor Eve Lockhart. Most of the early stages rested solely on her; Boyd had nobody to yell at, Grace couldn't profile anyone, and scrounging up the houses' history would only do them so much good without an identification for the bodies. Stella and Spence had dutifully spent the better part of two days alternating between talking to residents and scanning missing persons for possible matches without much to show for it. Then Eve's first results had come in causing both Boyd and Grace to gather in the lab while Eve set it all out for them.

"All right," began Boyd as he donned a white coat with Grace hot on his heels. A swoosh from the lab door being so commonly heard that it went unnoticed. "What you got for me?"

Up from her desk rose Eve quickly and made her way to the two decomposed bodies atop sterile steel tables at the back of the room. Two people who'd had lives, dreams, and probably loved ones reduced to blackened dolls.

"Okay, so we've got an adult male somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. DNA has come back on him, and, while he's not in the system, I can confirm he's Afro-Caribbean. As for the child, she's a Caucasian prepubescent girl. My guess is on the younger end of the age scale, but there's signs of malnutrition, so she could be as old as ten or eleven. Moving on to cause of death, they've both suffered stab wounds." Eve pointed out numerous slits in the soot-coated fabric of the man's shirt and girl's red dress – not that it was all that red any longer. "On our male I've counted twenty-one wounds, while the girl has two to the chest."

"Jesus Christ," Boyd sighed deeply as he pulled his glasses off to rake a hand down his lightly stubbled face. "So some sick fucker stabbed a kid?"

"Now let's not assume the killer is mentally ill."

"What else could they be?! Grace, someone has to be sick in the head to brutally stab a child."

"Em, if I may, the blade punctured the heart and left lung, so she died pretty quickly. There wouldn't have been much suffering." The gray-haired man clearly wasn't all that comforted, so Eve simply carried on with her report. "They're both caked in soot; that tells us that they were already in the chimney when the fire started. If they'd gone in after, their clothing would be smudged with soot from the fabric making contact rather than totally coated. This buildup is the same thickness as around the rest of the chimney, which means it was all deposited at the same time. Fortunately for forensics, the top of the chimney had collapsed which stopped a lot of rain getting in further degrading the scene. I managed to find traces of their blood dried onto the inner walls. Now, their blood samples were on top of each other rather than mixed together, so one sample had enough time to dry before the second was deposited. I think he was killed at least twenty-four hours before the girl."

"So they were killed in the house and probably by the same person?"

Eve nodded to the older woman. "I can't say one hundred percent, but more than likely they died in the house. As for the same killer, I don't know. I just know that they died, at most, a few days apart. They were already dead when they went in, and they were in before the fire. I've not finished my tests yet, but so far the wounds fit with something along the lines of a kitchen knife."

Rich brown eyes forced themselves away from the innocent little girl who'd had her life so cruelly stolen from her. Adults hurting adults had always made sense to Boyd; he wasn't exactly the least violent man to have lived, but adults hurting children turned his stomach and caused that dogged determination of his to flare up.

"Right, so you're saying this has nothing to do with Patrick Montagu? We can just box that theory up right away."

"Almost certainly." Eve nodded her head, which caused her fringe to wobble. "He only killed girls in their mid-teens, never males, and he strangled all his victims while these two have been stabbed. Montagu also left his victims where they'd be found; he didn't hide them."

Grace nodded. "I'm inclined to agree. Montagu wanted to cause a panic, wanted to shock people because it excited him, so he posed his kills. While the act of stabbing can have a sexual connection due to the penetration, Montagu got off on being on top of his victims as they died, on watching it. It was all about power for him; that was why he strangled. He'd stop right before his victim died so he could do it all over again and drag out the suffering. To put it bluntly, Montagu is a sadist."

Boyd sighed – an all too common occurrence with his job. "Yeah, yeah, and he wasn't brave enough to take on someone his own size. Hopefully the bastard is playing hard to get at the prison dance!"

Grace chose not to comment on that, a wise choice because Boyd had already had his coat half off by the time he'd finished his sentence. That didn't stop Eve from calling out to him though.

"You should know you're probably looking for at least two people!" That had Boyd spin on the spot in the lab doorway. "The male was tall and well-built; it would have been extremely difficult to get him in the chimney alone."

"But not impossible?"

"Well, no, not impossible. Extremely difficult, like I said."

"So unlikely but not impossible."

Then he was gone, back to his office to glare at something for a few minutes before he barked more orders at Stella and Spence – the usual. The two women shared a look before Grace returned to her own office.

~X~

With nothing to really go on since the corpses were unrecognizable and hadn't triggered a DNA hit, the team had moved their attention to the occupants – there hadn't been much hope there either. The bodies of the Callaghans were believed to have totally burnt up in the fire nine years ago, while Donovan Padmore, the neighbor, had apparently skipped out on his rent a half week before the fire. With little else and many Sleighberry Street homes having changed hands in the last decade, Boyd had insisted Eve reconstruct the faces of their victims as best she could so they could be circulated to the general public for leads; hopefully it would get them further than their guesswork.

Meanwhile, Grace and Stella had littered the ever-present board behind Spence's desk with everything and anything they thought noteworthy, then gathered the team in one of their usual campfires so they could go through it. Spence and Stella sat at their desks with Boyd leaned against a tiled pillar, while Grace stood at the board. Rich coffee filled the air – a comforting, warming scent to punctuate an otherwise horrific case; a quiet reminder the world was still beautiful. All might have teased her for being part French, but it had brought a damn fine coffee machine into their lives.

"This is Donovan Padmore," started Grace as she pointed to a picture of a handsome black man with a shaved head and goatee. "He worked as a bartender at a nightclub called the Blue Gem, which has since been shut down due to health code violations."

Spence shivered. "I remember that place. I always thought they were stirring the drinks with a rat toward the end."

Chuckles erupted from the team before Grace went back to it.

"Anyway, about a week before the fire, he was accused by the head bartender of stealing from the register. We know this because investigators already questioned his employers when they looked into the possibility he set the fire. It isn't stated in the report if there was any corroborative evidence, so I called DI Haverlock, and he'll apparently get back to me about it. After that incident, he vanished, his bank account wasn't touched, he had no family to help locate him, and nobody could find any real motive for setting the fire – not that it mattered after it got ruled as an accident."

"So why did they assume it was him initially?" Stella asked as she leaned back in her chair, a cup of steaming coffee in her hands.

"Good question. The only possible reasons seem to be the timing of it all and that police spoke to Amanda Callaghan, who lived at Number 13, and she said Donovan had gotten himself mixed up with drugs. Apparently, he'd even gone so far as to harass her for money. Before you ask, there's no indication of drug use that I can find."

"Well, that doesn't make sense. A guy addicted to drugs steals from work and his neighbors, but never touches his own bank account again. That's weird, right?"

"Not if he didn't touch it because he got stuffed in a chimney nine years ago." Spence pointed out with a shrug. "I think it's most likely Donovan Padmore is in the lab." Brown eyes raked over the board. "Why aren't there any pictures of the Callaghans?"

"See, now that's another odd thing; I can't find any pictures of the Callaghans. We've got infant pictures of the daughters and one of the husband, but nothing else."

Boyd rolled his eyes. "I was hoping for a bit more than odd, Grace."

While no one ever really mentioned it, the relationship between Boyd and Grace was akin to a civil divorce without the actual marriage.

"Odd is all I have at the moment, Boyd; we're working with it. The Callaghans consisted of John and Amanda Callaghan. This is John shortly before his death in 1995." Boyd snatched up the picture he was handed for a cursory look before passing it off to Spence, who stuck it up on the transparent board. John hadn't looked all that remarkable; average height, average build, just all very average. If forced, Boyd might have said the guy had a nice smile, but that was it. "He worked as a mechanic until an accident left him in a wheelchair. He died of a heart attack two years later and was cremated."

"They all were."

While meant as a joke, Spence's comment found itself met only by unimpressed expressions and a light chastisement from Stella.

"The Callaghans had six children -"

"Six?!" Stella exclaimed as Grace was yet again interrupted. "That's too many."

"Hmm, not in their minds. Now, they had one biological child, a boy named Adam born May of '78, but they also adopted five girls over the years – if you ask me, they got these girls extremely quickly. Social Service records suggest the Callaghans provided a good stable home for them, though there weren't any issues beyond normal teenage stuff, even after John's death. Thanks to Spence and Stella, we know that Amanda was deeply religious and, while not the friendliest person in the world, was a kind woman very capable of caring for so many troubled girls."

"All right, so she was a saint," huffed Boyd. "What about the girls themselves? They all supposedly died in the fire, right? Is it possible our little girl is one of the Callaghan kids? I mean, we don't have DNA, but we've probably got Padmore in the lab, so why not one of the kids?"

Grace grabbed up a file which she flipped open and tossed down for all to see. "These are the only pictures we have of the girls, all taken when they were very young. It also seems that John and Amanda renamed them all when they were adopted. Elizabeth was the eldest, born in 1983 and of Asian descent. She was removed from her mother because of a drug addiction and fostered by the Callaghans until her adoption. Next is Sapphira, who is only a month younger than Elizabeth and adopted at virtually the same time. Records show her mother was fourteen at the time of her birth."

Stella nodded. "Yes, there was a nice old man further up the street who remembered them. He said John Callaghan always referred to them as 'the twins'."

"Rachel came into the house when her sisters were four and arguably had the worst background." Boyd cocked an eyebrow expectantly. "Her mother tried to drown her in the Tiffany Fountain when she was eight months old."

"Fuck." The word slipped from Spence's lips before he'd even realized he'd spoken; frankly, no one blamed him.

Grace continued: "A couple of years later was Abigail, she'd been abandoned in a hospital. And, lastly, was little Mary whose mother had her in prison. She's serving forty-five years for murdering her boyfriend, presumably Mary's father, and his sister with a screwdriver."

"None of these girls had a good start, did they?" Stella sighed before beginning to chew on the end of her pen.

Spence's brow furrowed deeply. "Wait, having no pictures of these girls post-adoption isn't just odd, Grace; it seems suspicious."

"I'll give you that, Spence, but you have to remember there was a devastating fire. Any family pictures would have burnt up, and it's not a crime to be absent from school photographs. After John's death, Amanda chose to pull them all out of school and homeschool them."

"I've been going through the fire report, and I don't think they did a very thorough job -"

"Kind of obvious, Stella, they missed two bodies playing hide-and-seek in a chimney for God's sake. Don't firemen look in chimneys when trying to find the source of a fire?!"

"My point is: Are we really to believe seven people were burnt to ash without so much as a tooth left behind? I looked into it, and house fires don't get that hot very often. The fire was ruled an accident caused by faulty electrics, so any criminal investigation wasn't needed. It's like they did the bare minimum then shoved everything on a shelf so they could head to a bar." The rest of the team tended to agree with Stella. The case had been treated like any other fire and had ignored how many children had died. Then there was Donovan, him running away after an allegation of theft just didn't sit right with the Cold Case Unit. Of those five girls, only Abigail and Mary fit the probable age of their victim – No! No, all of those girls were victims; they'd not deserve to die helplessly in a house fire. "And what sort of word name is Sleighberry anyway? What even is that?"

"London has a lot of streets, they've got to be called something." Spence chimed in.

"Mary's biological mother is in prison, yeah?" Boyd questioned only to be met with a series of nods. "Okay, Spence, find out which prison and get a DNA sample from her."

Spence nodded as an affirmative left his lips.

"There is one more thing." All eyes snapped back to Grace. "There's a survivor. Sapphira Callaghan had actually run away a few days before the fire and police eventually picked her up. She was placed in a children's home until she turned eighteen; no one has seen her since."

Sapphira needed to be found quickly. That girl was somewhere, and she seemed to be the only real wealth of information they had. Eve finishing the facial reconstructions was the other main thing; that was what they needed to circulate, and soon it was. Boyd saw to getting the faces in the public eye over the following days while Spence and Stella did their best to track down Sapphira Callaghan. They'd had plenty of cases with next to no leads before, so they'd not give up. A little girl had been brutally murdered then shoved into a dark hole like trash. Boyd would find out who'd done it and make them wish they'd never been born. The Cold Case Unit knew how to fight a losing battle and come out the other side with a win.