A/N: I apologise for the sense of deja vu this will incite in anyone who caught the final chapter of the last story before it vanished. That chapter was laying the foundations for this story, as a follow on. Now, that story will follow this one. Thanks for reading, reviews would be welcome.

Chapter One: Therapy?

"A letter, Lady Pearce."

Ruth carried on walking through Thames House reception without breaking her pace. She and Harry had spent the last two weeks honeymooning in Tuscany and now they were paying the price with a fortnight's worth of paperwork to catch up on. She sighs to the joys of working overtime on a Grid where everyone else has gone home. At least Harry was still in his office, she wasn't completely alone. In fact, she never would be again. She smiled at the thought and hugged the recently purchased bag of sandwiches close to her chest.

"A letter, Lady Pearce!"

Ruth stopped dead in her tracks, nearly dropping the bag in the process. She heard the girl the first time, but only just realised she was addressing her. Flushing deeply, she about turned and backtracked to the reception desk where the young girl held the large envelope out towards her.

"Please just call me Ruth," she sheepishly requested. "Because I will never get used to being called Lady Pearce!"

"Sorry, Ruth," the girl replied, handing over the letter. "For a minute there I thought I was gonna have to curtsey!"

The mere thought of it sent a shiver of horror down Ruth's spine; quite apart from the fact that she was still using her maiden name. Thanking the girl, she tucked the envelope under her arm and headed towards the pods. Once inside, she dropped the sandwich bag on Harry's desk. The noise jolted him out of his bureaucracy coma and he looked up at her with a smile. Handing the envelope over, she said: "don't get too excited, it's probably just more paperwork."

Where did she get that photo of his father? Lucas distracted himself from that stubborn ghost by glancing over the children's toy box in the corner. Discoloured Crayolas were scattered near dog eared sketch books and a knee high, greying chalk board with a plastic clock face in the bottom left corner. A balding, one-eyed rag doll and a naked Barbie whose nylon tresses were standing on end; all in a soup of mismatched lego bricks and chipped wooden blocks. Were they supposed to help traumatised children talk? He suppressed a shudder and looked back at Lydia, who was sitting in an over-stuffed armchair with her clipboard on her knees; making him wonder how many boxes he was ticking. Her hands were folded in her lap and she smiled benignly at him, peering through gold-rimmed granny glasses, eyes magnified by the bifocal lenses. Everything about her was soft and inoffensive, unobtrusive with carefully cultivated airs of professional sensitivity. In other words, she treated him like he was made of glass, and there was something cold and calculating about the way she did it. The only times he ever felt mad was when he came here, every Monday evening after work for an hour long session. Maybe, he thought, he should tell her that; maybe the irony would raise a real smile?

Lucas lifted his cup of tea from off the coffee table and sipped at it to wet his mouth.

"I don't talk about my father precisely because I loved him," he finally answered her last question. "Can you understand that? That for me to continue in this job, in this life that I lead, I needed to protect him. The best way to do that was to sever ties. He died while I was in Russia, as it happens…"

His words trailed off. Lydia's inscrutability unnerved him whenever he made a big revelation. He didn't realise how much he relied on approval or disapproval until Lydia starved him of both. She just sat there asking pointed questions, making no judgements to the point where he sometimes wondered whether she was even listened to his answers at all. In Russia, anything he said was met with anger or violence; at work, big revelations were met with varying degrees of dread. To be met with nothing was new, and he was yet to decide how to handle it.

"I can understand that, Lucas," she finally replied, hinting for the first time towards what she was thinking. "But I find it interesting that you have had two other strong male presences in your life, beside your biological father."

Let me guess, Lucas thought to himself, but I think you want to reveal me to myself; so go ahead…

"Oh, really?" he asked, taking another sip of lukewarm tea.

Lydia nodded, her expression suddenly thoughtful. "Sir Harry Pearce," she replied, naming the first. "And, rather more interestingly, Vaughan Edwards."

Lucas choked on the last mouthful of his drink, accidentally sucking it into his lungs; it was like being water boarded with sweet tea. Harry, he could accept. It was true. Then, he expected Oleg Desharvin or, perhaps, even Arkady Kachimov or someone else equally perverse and ill-suited. Then he expected that old spiel about Stockholm Syndrome. But Vaughan Edwards was a real curveball and he had to admire her for that.

Harry reached inside the envelope and selected a paper at random from amongst the many inside, like it was some sort of lucky dip. Ruth had gone to make them both a coffee and, whatever was inside, it would fill the time until she returned. When the chosen paper slid free of its confines, he looked it over carefully. His green eyes scanned the first few lines of the official Government document before backtracking and starting over. Before he'd finished, he put it to one side and returned to the envelope. This time, he looked for something specific. After a second, he withdrew a colour photograph of a corpse. The man's pale, waxen skin was scored by a livid, purple jagged line running from the breast bone to the lower rib cage. X-shaped stitches held the fatal wound together. But the thing that struck Harry most was that the eyes were still open. He could see the blue of the iris peeping out, almost demurely from beneath lowered lashes.

"Anything exciting?" asked Ruth, placing a steaming mug of coffee in front of him.

He hadn't heard her entering and gave a quick gasp of surprise. She sat at the opposite side of his desk and took another bite of her sandwich as he slid the picture over to her. Normally, he would wait until after she'd eaten, but Ruth was used it by now. She'd seen worse before breakfast on some days.

"Bloody hell, Harry!" she said, gulping. "Is that…"

"Vaughan Edwards," Harry nodded, finishing her sentence. "He was murdered in the prison yard while on exercise."

Edwards had been flown back to Senegal five months previously, as soon as the truth about the Dakar bombing emerged. That other Lucas North had been extradited to Senegal from his prison in Liberia, too. To the same prison, it would seem. Harry looked across the desk, towards Ruth who was still gnawing at her sandwich. When she finished, she put the rest to one side.

"I don't wish anyone dead, Harry. But my only real regret is that he didn't face justice." She shrugged then, and added: "But at least they have the truth."

A poor substitute for justice, under the circumstances, or so Harry thought.

"I can understand why the guards looked the other way when the attack happened," he conceded. "But you're right. He never did face up to what he'd done and now, he never will."

"Still, they've got Dylan Hughes haven't they," said Ruth, thoughtful. "The other Lucas North, that is."

"I remember who he is," replied Harry. "I'll not forget him in a hurry. But Ruth, that's just it."

When he elaborated no further on just what 'that' was, Ruth sat back in her chair and regarded him closely. "What?" she asked, already feeling a cold flicker of dread in the pit of her stomach.

"Does it surprise you to hear me say that, Lucas?"

Lydia gave him that searching look again. He slowly recoiled, like a snail retreating into its shell. Nervously, he ran a hand through his hair, mussing it up at the back. After taking a moment to marshal his thoughts, he attempted to explain his precise feelings about the relationship he once had with Vaughan Edwards.

"He was never a father figure to me," he replied, emphatically. "But I've been thinking about this constantly since … well, since it all resurfaced. The other person, Hughes, probably saw him as a father figure. I mean, he was out there alone, with no family or friends. He was adrift in the big wide world, looking for some purpose; he latched on to Vaughan. Or, that's what I believed at the time."

"What do you believe now?"

Lucas shrugged. "I don't think I know what to believe anymore."

That was the truth of it. He'd been caught up in a mesh of lies and deceit – deceit he had actively participated in – that he no longer had a sense of what was real. He was guessing, extrapolating from what he had since learned of the other Lucas. All he had found out was that his parents' divorce when he was young, his mother died when he was thirteen and he left university in 1988, promptly leaving for Africa on what was meant to be a yearlong work contract to teach English as a foreign language. That, and his real name, Lewis Norwood, was all Tariq had been able to help him unearth. The enigma of the living ghost remained.

"So the artist formerly known as Lucas North actually did it?" asked Ruth, brow raised quizzically. She'd had one phone conversation with the Artist Formerly Known As. In exchange for information about the Dakar bombing, she had offered to negotiate a relaxation in his prison regime. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, she realised it might not have been such a good idea. However, she only did it on the understanding that the relaxations applied only to his time in Liberia. Once he arrived in Senegal, all of a day after the arrival of Edwards, it would be back to over-crowded cells and sharing a lice-infested bunk bed with ten other guys.

"Well, the only reason we got him to talk was because he and Edwards had had a fierce falling out over something," Harry reminded her. "What I want to know is, did the prison authorities put him up to it? If they did, what is our old friend getting in return?"

"A relaxed sentence and nothing more, surely?" Ruth quickly answered. "Nothing can take away the fact that it was he who planted that bomb. Edwards may have triggered it, but it was the fake Lucas who put it there for the triggering. They're equally culpable."

Harry, however, didn't share her confidence. His expression was measured, more cautious. Looking back at Ruth over steepled hands, he weighed up his response carefully.

"On the surface, that's what you'd think," he eventually replied. "Search a little deeper and god knows what you might find. We need to prepare for worse."

Ruth looked incredulous. "You're not seriously suggesting they've released him?"

Harry shrugged. "We can't rule anything out," he reasoned. "So we should rule everything in. Including a potential release deal."

"And if he is released," said Ruth, "what's to say he won't simply vanish underground again? Could our Lucas be in any danger?"

"Again, rule it in," replied Harry. "But, if I'm right, the last thing we need is a man like that on the loose and getting up to his old tricks. I want him watched. In the meantime, Lucas has his meeting with Loopy Lydia. I'll pick him up and break the news. Will you be okay here by yourself for half an hour?"

Ruth replied with an affirmative nod. "You really need to stop calling her that, Harry. You'll forget yourself and call her that to her face."

"I already do," he deadpanned.

Lydia looked almost as relieved as Lucas felt when she wrapped their session up. She set her clipboard aside and, with almost disappointment, Lucas noticed there were no boxes on the sheet at all. Collecting his jacket from where he'd folded it beside him on the sofa, he stood up and bid her farewell. She now had a whole seven days in which she could pick over the emotional entrails he'd spilled during the session and he found himself wondering whether or not she enjoyed her job. Could she just switch off? Or did she subconsciously absorb the complex head-fuckery he and his colleagues offload on her, day in and day out?

"Next Monday, Lucas," she said, just as he reached the door. "I want to talk to you more in depth about Russia. Your feelings about being left for eight years and who you blame for it. Is that okay?"

If she did have any job satisfaction, he thought, she'll be in for a euphoric session next Monday.

As soon as he made it outside, he leaned against the wall of the discreet psychiatrist's office and breathed in deeply. He'd stuffed his father's photo into his pocket on his way out. Before setting off for the tube station, he looked both ways along the street. It was growing dark, with only a few late stragglers trudging the pavements. The rains had fallen while he was inside, the streets were wet and glistening slickly under the streetlamps. Lucas zipped his jacket all the way up and jammed his hands deep in his pockets before setting off at a brisk pace. A minute later and a car rounded the corner behind him, the headlamps throwing his shadow across the wet pavement as it righted its position and drew to a halt beside him. Lucas stopped to see who his kerb crawler was, when the passenger door was opened from within.

"Lucas, get in."

The interior light made Harry look deathly, casting shadows across his eyes. For a moment, Lucas considered telling his boss what Lydia said about their relationship, but in reality it would be quite laughable. Instead, he climbed into the back of the vehicle, all curiosity about the impromptu pick-up. Without a word of explanation, Harry started fishing around inside his jacket, producing an envelope and handing to Lucas. In the meantime, the driver started up the engine and pulled away from the kerb.

"Vaughan Edwards was killed in prison," said Harry, with a nod to the envelope now in Lucas' hands he added: "Happy snaps."

"He's dead?"

For just the briefest of moments, a pang of regret gripped him inside. It was gone in an instant, but he couldn't deny it was there. It would have been the same for any man he'd known, killed suddenly and unexpectedly.

"It happened a week ago," Harry explained. "Do you not want to look?"

He didn't realise he was still holding the envelope with the photographic proof. Inside he found just one picture, but it was enough to confirm the truth of what Harry was telling him. He felt nothing, just a peculiar blankness; even when Harry told him who was responsible. Looking out of the window of the car, he pushed the envelope and photo back in Harry's direction. Lost in his own spiralling thoughts, Lucas did not notice the uncomfortable silence. He could almost feeling that deep, intense gaze boring into him. Any minute now and Harry would be nagging at him to reveal his feelings, just like Lydia. It was as though once everyone knew you were getting therapy, they all wanted to have a go. Everyone's an expert.

"We're going to the George," Harry declared. "We need a drink."

Or maybe not. Lucas raised a grin and looked at Harry. "You know, for a minute there I thought…"

"What?" Harry asked. "You didn't think I was…" he trailed off, leaving the unpalatable unsaid.

"It's just, Lydia. She's having a bad effect on me."

Harry grimaced like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle. "I like to think you know me better than that by now."

"Yeah, possibly."

Through all his doubts about everyone, at least that should have been a given. For the remainder of the journey, Lucas turned to the rain spattered window and watched the streets roll by until the car park of the George swung into view. Its façade providing a reassuring beacon of stability among the every shifting shadows of their cruel world.