Author's Note: Well, I just can't seem to stay away ;) Or maybe I should say that Sandra - and Gerry and Brian and Jack - don't seem to want to go away. Everyone received my first effort so warmly that I thought I'd try another. This is not the sequel to Same Time, Next Week (although I'm working on that); it's something totally different and definitely darker, although there will be humour. Also, I'm posting something I haven't finished writing, which feels odd to me, but I promise to update regularly. I anticipate having about fifteen chapters, but who knows?

Also, I suppose I should go ahead and mention now that this story will involve themes that some of you may find disturbing, but that are really nothing the show hasn't dealt with on some level itself, so I figure they're fair game.

Summary: All her life she's been told she should've known better, but sometimes better isn't best. Memories maybe best forgotten, old acquaintances, and a case Sandra never wanted to see reopened blindside the nearly-fearless leader of UCOS, changing the way she looks at the past and shaping her future.

Knowing Better

Chapter One: The Innocents

"I hate it," Gery mutters, desperately loosening his lavender and pink checked tie and loathing the smoking ban more intensely than ever before, "when there're kids involved. Makes me sick to my stomach."

Brian casts him a half-heartedly enquiring look over the rim of his tumbler filled with orange juice. Jack knows the former D.I. must be wishing for something considerably stronger right about now. "But you were in the paedophile unit."

Jack himself had considered ordering a pint just for form's sake, but had bagged that idea in favour of a large scotch and soda.

"Exactly," Gerry responds dismally. "Worst job I ever had. Wrecked my health and ruined my marriage."

"That ruined your marriage?" Jack asks, but like Brian's, his heart isn't in it.

Gerry shrugs and takes a long pull from his scotch, draining the glass of all but a few lumps of melting ice. "Didn't help."

Sandra stares down into her gin and tonic, her chin propped on her hand and her eyes far away, until Jack prods, "Sandra?" and she flinches like a sleeper waking from a nightmare that she is plummeting down, down –

"Those eyes," she says reflectively. "Those horrible, lustreless eyes – They were like lead or… or coal. I could barely see his pupils while we were questioning him."

Brian blanches. "Obsidian," he suggests, attempting to put his finger on the exact shade.

"Like a fuckin' snake," Gerry snarls with unusual viciousness. "All right, it's a cliché, but he makes you realise why they were invented, doesn't he?"

"Did you hear what he said, his justification for abducting and brutally murdering four little girls, all under the age of six?" Sandra sneers, her jaw locked and her own eyes glittering with outrage. Brian, who sat in on the whole interview with her and knows what's coming, winces in anticipation. "That they should've known better. They should've known better than to follow him into the woods to look for his lost puppy."

A long, heavy silence descends. Gerry eventually breaks it. "Christ, how many times do you say to your kids, Don't talk to strangers?" he asks rhetorically, scrubbing his palm over his face. He has pronounced bags under his eyes and looks exhausted. They all do, especially Sandra, who has been putting in sixteen-plus-hour days for the last two weeks, since the remains of the clothes five-year-old Lisa Palmer had been wearing on the sunny autumn day when she'd disappeared had been found in a rusted-out caravan bound for the junk heap.

"You say it," Gerry continues, "but you never think of somethin' like this happening to them. Something like that monster Tanner gettin' hold of them."

"You can't, can you?" Jack surmises. "You could never let 'em out of your sight if you did. It's enough to make me glad Mary and I never had any."

Sandra only shakes her head. She'd like to sleep for a week, if she didn't think she'd be plagued by horrible nightmares of all those precious green-eyed girls staring sightlessly at her from out of the past.

It doesn't matter that Tanner committed his heinous crimes decades ago, or that those innocent little girls would now be in their mid-thirties. Some wounds time shouldn't heal.

They should have known better. Hearing the words, Sandra tosses back the remainder of her drink in disgust.

"Pure evil," Jack says suddenly, as if reading her thoughts.

"I'm going home," Brian announces abruptly, getting to his feet.

Jack glances up. "I'll give you a lift."

"No. I could use the ride – Time to clear me head."

The older man acknowledges this but stands too. "I'm off anyway."

Sandra turns to look at them over her shoulder as they pull their jackets on. "You did good work, guys," she says, her fatigue evident in her voice.

As they go, Gerry leans into her across the table. "You did good work, gov. I know you're probably not very hungry – I'm not – but let me take you for a curry." She opens her mouth – to refuse, surely – and Gerry hastily adds, "Look, as bad as I'm feeling right now, I can imagine nothing worse than going home to my empty flat and a six-pack."

Sandra sighs and slumps a little more. She can't deny that the thought is the opposite of appealing to her as well. She envisions herself stopping at the shop nearest her flat, picking up some microwavable meal she won't eat and a midrange bottle of plonk that she certainly will drink. Gerry's company seems preferable to being left with her own.

After a moment she nods and begins to tug on her black and white wool coat. It's the last day of March and they've already had some sun-drenched, pleasant days, but this week winter has roared back in with a vengeance, leaving all of London huddling with frozen fingers clasped around paper coffee cups. By now it's as dark outside their local as if it were bleak midwinter.

D.A.C. Strickland phones Sandra as she is fastening her safety belt in the passenger seat of the Stag, and Gerry says, "Let him wait 'til morning at least," but she answers, looking agonised.

Her end of the conversation is brief, and Gerry watches her expression change from surprise to displeasure to grim resignation. "So what kind of course is it he's sending you on?" he asks when she has finished and dropped her mobile into her lap with a sigh.

She glances over at him before returning her gaze to the road ahead. "Not sending me on a course, exactly; sending me to do a course. A seminar for the trainees in police college."

"On -?"

"What's old and moldy and not a pizza topping?" she retorts. Her voice drops an octave. "'Sandra, notice has been taken of the exemplary results achieved by UCOS with your experienced senior personnel and minimal budget, and the college would like to prepare the future graduates for work on similar initiatives,'" she minces, and Gerry knows she's tired and fed up if she's imitating her boss. That's usually Gerry's bag. "At any rate," she continues in her normal alto, "it's three days starting from Monday, so it'll be a bit of a vacation for you lot not having me round the office. Christ knows you could use one after this."

"So could you," he points out mildly, easing to a stop to wait his turn at a roundabout. "And if I were you I'd insist he gave me one, at least after that course." He casts a quick, speculative look at her sharp profile. "Police college, hey? Don't you think the additional voice, of an older, more experienced –"

"Fatter, balder," she chimes in mercilessly, but at least she cracks a smile.

"—More seasoned colleague could be of immeasurable help to this course?"

She snorts indelicately, and Gerry feels that stubborn twinge of inappropriate attraction that's prone to rear its head at the oddest of times. "Right," Sandra says, oblivious to what's running through his thoughts. "No doubt Caitlin would be over the moon to have her dad show up to impress all her new mates."

Gerry sighs moodily. The dogged determination of his youngest to pursue a career in the Met is a bit of a sticking point.

"It's different now, y'know," Sandra comments in a softer tone after a moment. "It is. The young women coming through now, they don't have to put up with the bullshit we did back in the eighties." She darts a sidewise glance at her companion. She can't resist. "And you know why that is, don't you? Because the rest of your lot have gone the way of the dinosaurs. So you don't have to protect Caitlin from tossers like her dear old dad."

"Cheers, gov," he retorts drily. "Unbearable to work with, am I?"

"Insufferable." Even in the dim light of the car, her teeth flash startlingly in that quick, devilish grin. "Really, though – Do you think they would've had someone like me doing a seminar back then?"

Gerry readjusts his hands on the steering wheel. "You mean someone –"

"Without a dick," Sandra supplies bluntly, and he smirks.

"I was going to say someone with breasts, actually. Because, y'know, there was Joe Craddock –"

Sandra snorts again. "Yeah, cos he weighed three hundred pounds. I think that's a bit different. He still had that all-important Y chromosome. Knew him, did you?"

"I had that misfortune."

"At any rate, every last chauvinistic one of them would've thought you were having a laugh if you'd even suggested having a woman run a course."

She remembers the way dozens of pairs of eyes had flickered over her from head to foot and back again. I knew your father, their owners had all said to her. Sandra had only thought she knew what that meant.

"I never even worked closely with another woman until I got moved to AMIP in the mid-nineties," she says aloud.

"And now you're makin' us all pay, yeah?"

"For your sins." Her tone is sharp, but she tilts her head back comfortably against the leather upholstery, settling in like a contented tabby as the heating finally kicks in.

They must say that to Caitlin too, she muses idly. That they knew her father. It wouldn't mean the same thing when they said it about Gerry – but then, some of them would think it did, which almost amounted to the same thing. He'd been dogged for decades by the reputation of being bent. In her years of working with him, Sandra had come to the conclusion that, ironically, the villains were the only ones who knew for sure that Gerry was straight.

Well, and she and Jack and Brian knew, of course.

Some of Gerry's old mates were still kicking around as instructors at police college. Hers too, for that matter. The thought sparks a query, something she has often half-wondered. "You know, I'm surprised we never met before."

"I hate to break this to you, but you've been seein' me five days a week for eight years. We've met."

"In the job, you pillock," she returns unfazed, because of course he knows exactly what she meant. He doesn't answer right away, which draws her eyes to him as he stares out into the night, waiting for the light to change. She frowns. "We didn't meet," she says, a tinge of doubt creeping in.

"What, you mean to say you think you could've met me and forgotten about it? Au contraire, Detective Superintendent." The light changes and he shifts with a little more force than necessary. "You never had the pleasure, no. That's probably a good thing, don't you think?"

Her eyebrows creep upward. "Because -?"

He grins ruefully. "You would've head-hunted me for UCOS if I'd previously tried to sleep with you, would you?"

Sandra quickly blinks twice before coolly pointing out, "I didn't head-hunt you, Gerry. Jack did. I thought you were a bastard."

He shrugs. "Potato, po-tah-to," he offers cheerily. Her remark would only have offended him if she hadn't used the past tense. They may not exactly see eye-to-eye all the time – as in, she may hurl vicious invectives at him, and he may not infrequently want to shake the smugness right out of her – but he's confident that they respect one another down to the ground.

Besides, she's the only one who will share the scorchingly spicy chicken vindaloo with him. An asset not to be undervalued, in Gerry's book.

"And anyway," Sandra resumes abruptly, "if you'd tried it on with me, you wouldn't have lived long enough to make it to UCOS."

"Cos you'd never get involved with a bloke who's got a wife and a few kids," he scoffs, and as soon as the words roll off his tongue Gerry wishes he could haul them back in.

She is silent for a few seconds, her head turned away from him as she looks out at the passing buildings. "Touché."

"Aw, shit, Sandra, I didn't mean –"

Her shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. "Let's be fair. I'm not morally superior to you, Gerry; I'm just more discreet."

The polished voice has a jagged edge to it that makes him wince. Her bluntness, with its undercurrent of disgust, wounds Gerry, but not for himself. "All that was a long time ago," he replies calmly.

After a few minutes she clears her throat. "I actually just meant I'd shut down anyone with such terrible taste in ties," she says, and he rewards her with a chuckle.

"What's wrong with my ties?"

"The same thing that's wrong with your politics and this bloody car: they're from the wrong century."

"Admit it: you love this car."

Her eyes roll toward the roof. "Oh, passionately," she agrees glibly. "Such is my abiding love for this car that you're dead lucky I don't know any junk dealers."

"Yeah, yeah, consign us to the rubbish heap. The younger generation has no respect." But his lips twitch, and Sandra is grinning openly.

At least they're not talking any more about those four little girls who never got to grow up.

In the autumn of 1978, Gerry realizes, his Emily would have been the same age as two of those girls. He briefly imagines a world in which he never knew his oldest existed, and the idea is so awful that he closes his eyes for a second, reopening them before Sandra can notice and squawk, "Jesus, Gerry, watch the road!"

"Do we get to choose our next case, then?" Gerry asks when they're settled at a rickety table – this place isn't packing the punters in because of its tasteful décor – with the aforementioned vindaloo steaming between them. He watches Sandra's glossy, manicured nails divide a piece of naan with near-surgical precision before she answers.

"I suppose," she says, glancing at him. "Within reason."

Just no kids, Gerry thinks. I can't handle another one with kids right now.

It's not a new phenomenon for him, this casting of his daughters and now his grandson in the roles of the juvenile victims he encounters. It doesn't matter that his own girls are all adults. Each time their faces come to him unbidden, and the fact that he expects it doesn't lessen the sickening impact of the horror he feels. It's a hazard of the job, he supposes, like being prone to divorce and alcoholism.

Gerry chews and swallows, taking the opportunity to study the woman across from him because she's too absorbed in the food before her to notice. Her father, of course, had been Old Bill too. Gerry has never seen a picture of Sandra as a child, but he can imagine her, that pert nose and firm, jutting chin in miniature, soft, round cheeks and a face swimming in blue eyes. Was that the face Gordon Pullman had seen when he looked at victimized children?

Maybe. Or maybe he'd been too preoccupied with his own problems. He'd risked his life to protect one of his children, but what of the other, the one efficiently tucking into chicken vindaloo, the one soon to celebrate half a century on this planet?

She looks directly at him, half-smiling, half-quizzical, and Gerry feels ridiculous. Sandra has never been a damsel in distress. She saves herself, repeatedly, and probably in more ways than Gerry has fathomed. He's only on the outside looking in, after all.

Jesus, this case has gotten to him. Gerry shakes his head to clear it and thinks again of his youngest daughter. "Say hi to Caitlin from her old man, will you?" he mutters, and her blonde head nods.

He'd hoped Caitlin would give up the idea of the police by the time she'd finished university, but no such luck. She was every bit as stubborn as her father.

"I should have known better," he says aloud, distracted, and Sandra jerks as if electric current has run through her but casts her eyes down at her plate.

They should've known better, Tanner had explained, unconcerned, dismissive.

You should've known better, Detective Inspector Pullman, whispers a second voice, this one from the much less recent past.

The last voice shouts, enraged, never to be forgotten as it vibrates to an undercurrent of near-panic. "Sandra, you know better than to do something foolish and reckless like this. What were you thinking? You're nearly grown up. I have to be able to count on you."

He'd grown almost plaintive as he'd uttered that last sentence. Sandra had never seen her father's eyes so solemn or so urgent, as if he were no longer scolding her but making a pact with her, and she'd felt as self-important as only a 14-year-old can feel at 3 a.m., the darkest hour of a spring morning that promises to dawn rosy and fair.

Some promises are made to be broken.

"Try not to worry so much," Sandra says now with unwonted gentleness. "I'm sure Caitlin can take care of herself."

"So am I," Gerry grouses in return. "She's my daughter, after all."

"Well then?" Sandra prods logically.

"Well then, that's it, innit? She's my daughter." Gerry grins, half reproaching himself, half excusing his parental concern, and one corner of Sandra's mouth lifts in a slight smile.

The street is torn up and impassable thanks to some sort of emergency repairs, so she has Gerry drop her a few blocks from her flat. It's black as pitch out, but it's still early, and of course she's perfectly safe.

I was perfectly safe, Dad. I'm not a baby. I know how to take care of myself.

You're going to need to know how to take care of yourself in this world, he'd said. You could take care of yourself and your mum if you had to, couldn't you, Sandra?

What he hadn't said was good-bye.

Of course, you couldn't know you were going to have a heart attack in four hours, could you?

But you could damn well know you were planning to top yourself. (Her inner voice suddenly sounds like Jack.)

And Gordon Pullman had done exactly that on that soft April morning, rosy and fair, after making sure that his daughter was asleep in her narrow bed.

Shit. It's ancient history and she doesn't want to think about it, it doesn't do anyone any good, but something has opened up a door – this case, those words, Gerry's concern about his child.

They should all have known better.

It's funny, she thinks humourlessly, that she hasn't really thought about it in these last few years: that final conversation. For so long it had been a cherished memory. Prophetic words from the future, an eye opened from another dimension.

Bollocks.

There was nothing glamorous about asphyxiating yourself in your bloody car. Nothing mystical, nothing hallowed.

Jesus, Sandra, what does it matter? It was more than thirty-five years ago. You did take care of yourself. You grew up. You did fine. You nick evil bastards who think innocent little girls should "know better."

Anne Marie hadn't lived so far away from the Pullmans; a twenty-five-, thirty-minute walk at most. Sandra doesn't remember now what the fight was about, which is odd too, because it was in the days before everything in her life was a fight, before she was the mean girl, the school bitch. She does remember that feeling of bursting with the desire to get out of the Thorpes' house into the pre-dawn hours, to separate herself from the other girls spending the night just because she could, because she was mature enough and strong enough and clever enough to by God make up her own mind and trot home along those eerily silent streets.

Her pace slows now, the wooden heels of her patent leather flats clacking slowly, as she remembers. Yes, at fourteen she had found that deep, unusual quiet unnerving, and as a result had forced herself to walk slowly, sauntering as if unhurried. She tries to recapture that feeling, briefly imagining that the years lift their weight from her mind and her body. She is a girl, scared and posturing, jaunty, giddy with the sense that the entire world is before her, unfolding its treasures for her eyes only, reaching out to her.

A gust of wind whips Sandra's hair into her eyes and she blinks. She's not fourteen, nor does she have any desire to be. 49 suits her just fine, at least for the next few weeks.

She vaguely wonders who Bob Strickland pissed off to get her stuck with this seminar. That's really how she wants to spend her weekend, cobbling together notes for a series of lectures. Her own time at police college feels like a thousand years ago, and not in a bad way. Head girl, top recruit, top of her class – and she vastly prefers poking around in the dust with her three boys. Who would ever have thought? She'll never say as much to Jack and Brian and Gerry, but only because she's pretty sure they already know.

Sandra is smiling slightly as she lets herself into her flat and toes her shoes off. The dark, quiet rooms seem much more inviting now that she's slightly buzzed and pleasantly full of Indian food. Gerry does have his moments of inspiration, be it said (just not to him). She gathers her post – junk, junk, bill, junk, another bill – and wanders into the kitchen to fling it all down on the counter, flooded with the mildly enjoyable sensation of flipping her brain onto autopilot and operating according to daily routine. As she does, her eyes fall on her wall calendar, the "Vintage Pin-Ups of 2011" one she got as a joke from guess who?; the one still showing a scantily-clad, cartoonish Miss February coquettishly rolling down her stocking, even though tomorrow is April 1st.

"Can't have that," Sandra murmurs under her breath, reaching to flip the glossy page and allow Miss March her brief moment in the sun. She grabs two by mistake and finds herself eye to eye with the first week of April. Her gaze fastens on the thick black numbers and something in her brain clicks, tumblers gliding into place.

Oh, shit. She really has been out to lunch, all her energy focused on the investigation. April 4th. Monday she has to go start her seminar, and it's April 4th.

Of course it is, an interior voice jeers at her. April generally follows March, and the fourth generally follows the third.

The guilt wraps around her like a fist. How could she have forgotten?

But then, perhaps she hadn't, not really. Her father's voice has been there all day, whispering, shouting.

Part of her wishes she hadn't been reminded. She'd like to skip it this year, the visit to the cemetery, the lugubrious lunch with her mother.

She won't, of course.

Sandra flips the light off again and sighs. A nice, quiet weekend organising her notes now sounds like a luxury.

They should've known better, Tanner had said.

You know better, Gordon had told her.

Sandra is beyond exhausted, maybe a little delirious. She is fourteen again, confronting her father on the threshold of their garden door, half ashamed, half proud of herself. The stone is cold and solid beneath the soles of her trainers. His face is flushed and adult Sandra dispassionately notes that he's been drinking.

"Yeah, well," she says aloud to her kitchen, as if carrying on a conversation with a ghost (and she doesn't believe in ghosts), "you should've known better too, shouldn't you, Dad?"

Lilies, she reminds herself, the thought clattering confusingly on the heels of the last one. Grace always used to buy lilies for the grave, and it's her responsibility now. Sandra will ring the florist as soon as the shop opens tomorrow morning.

More nattering from the author: I'm not entirely sure where this is going, unlike Same Time, Next Week, which I had completely finished before I started posting. Please, please do R&R. Not only is it super encouraging to an attention whore like me, but you might help me decide what to do with this.