Disclaimer - I don't own Scott & Bailey. While I am sad the series has ended, I think that it had a good run and Sally Wainright and ITV had the realistic approach, unlike other TV people and writers who tend to bleed the stories dry until the actors and actresses and the producers and directors are bored witless with the endless plots that are used and reused without imagination.

Author's note - It's been a while, hasn't it? I am sorry to say I've almost lost the urge to write more Scott and Bailey, but then I came up with this plotline. I hope you enjoy it. Please drop a review and leave some feedback, cheers.

Should I, shouldn't I?

Rachel was tired, and she sagged with relief when she pulled her car into the drive of her flat. It was nearly 3 in the morning when she got home from work. She stumbled into her flat, where she tripped up and almost crashed to the ground.

"Fucking hell!" she hissed, but he managed to stop herself from falling to the ground in time. Her long dark hair fell past her head and the tips touched the floor, and she stood up, groaning at the sensation in her body that felt as though it were shutting down, but she knew it was just her exhaustion.

Dumping her coat and bag in the hallway, Rachel locked the door - it had been years since Stephanie, her daughter, had moved out and gotten a flat of her own, so fortunately she didn't need to worry about waking her up like she had in the past. The thought of Stephanie made her heart clench, and she wondered if either Gill or Janet had felt this when they'd raised their own kids. While Taisie, Elise and Sammy had become amazing people in their own rights, Rachel knew that growing up with one of their parents, or both of them in Sammy's case even if one of them had wandering eyes and a wandering penis, had been rough for them at first. When her daughter had been born after that mess with that online murder game where people were slaughtered for nothing else but others sick amusement, Rachel had sworn to be there for her daughter, but over the years there had been a rift between her and Stephanie. When she'd been younger, such a rift would've hurt her at first, but her natural gutsiness and her ambitious demeanour had helped her push it aside, but now Rachel was older and more experienced, those events made her incredibly reflective and upset.

Rachel checked the time, pushing the thought of Stephanie out of her mind, cursing and groaning before rubbing her eyes. She had hoped to have a bath to soothe her sore and aching muscles, have a meal or something - she didn't want anymore of her nights spent sleeping in front of the telly with a bowl coated with the remains of weetabix lying on the coffee table. Unfortunately, she had finished so tired tonight that she was too tired to do any of those things.

After stripping out of her clothes, Rachel wrapped herself in her dressing gown and headed for the bathroom so she could have a shower. She wasn't going to bother with a bath, or a meal come to that - she was so fucking tired. As she rubbed Radox over herself and letting the piping hot water soothe her aching muscles, Rachel sighed with relief, looking forwards to just going to bed.

The latest case she'd dealt with had been a disaster. Paula Lewis had almost walked because of the fucking idiots that were higher up had decided that the case should be rushed, Rachel had been in the Job long enough and she'd been a Detective Inspector and later a Detective Chief Inspector long enough to have some idea and understanding of the politics that coated and clogged the police force in the same way that resembled the lungs of chain smoker who got through three packets of fags in a day.

Politics.

Rachel grimaced at the word, feeling herself becoming more exhausted after having days of it in a never-ending surge, and she was left wondering when policing became less and less about catching criminals and stopping things like drugs and terrorism and became more about parading an army of smartly dressed men and women wearing caps and black and white uniforms down the street with their uniforms so bright they reflected in the bright sun. She closed her eyes, wondering how Janet, Gill and Julie would have taken it, and she bit her lip as she remembered how, one by one they'd died. Now she was alone - Anna might have been nice and a good copper, but it had taken Rachel a while to get to know her properly, and once again Janet had been right, as she usually had been, but Anna had not been part of the quartet that had consisted of her, Janet, Julie and Gill.

Rachel wondered if Anna was as pissed off as she was with how policing had become, but she wasn't sure if it was worth contacting her to find out for herself. Paula Lewis was another in a growing number of cases where the higher ups were putting pressure on SIOs to get the cases solved and made to look nice and lily white. Rachel wondered if being promoted higher than DSI meant people started losing their brains, all they needed was a smart uniform and polished buttons, and then their brains seemingly turned to mush. But they should not have pushed the Paula Lewis case. It had been delicate enough as it was without their meddling. Quite a few people had died, dozens of families had been bereaved and hurt, tortured by the knowledge their loved ones - brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, daughters, sons, etc had been caught by Paula. Unlike other killers, Paula didn't give a monkeys about race, age, creed or colour. All she cared about was her 'masterpieces'. That was what had made her so vicious and savage.

Rachel closed he eyes and shook her head as she remembered the numerous bodies that had been stacked up during the murder spree. Paula Lewis had been a brilliant, but psychopathic art student attending the University of Manchester. The teenager had started murdering people, arranging the bodies so then they resembled gruesome portraits and living sculptures.

Rachel shuddered - it wasn't often she was afraid or even affected by the types of things she had seen over the years of her career, but the bodies with metal spikes holding them up by having the metal driven right through their limbs, rings of metal welded around the arms, legs and torsos only for the twisted bitch to douse them in petrol and set them on fire, even Rachel had felt sick. But the vats of acid where the victims flesh was melted off, leaving the skeletons behind were worse. Rachel hated it when acid was involved.

All of it was done to provoke a reaction from the general public, so in a way Rachel could very well understand the appeal behind getting rid of the bitch, but such an investigation would be needed to be done properly. No rushing. No politics. Unfortunately, Rachel was the only person it seemed to know about this.

It had taken them a while to find out it was Paula of course. No investigation was that simple except on some occasions. It took time and lot of persistence to get some idea of who the murderer was, but once Paula was identified Rachel had investigated her closely, prepared to move onto another suspect if they presented themselves. The girl had gotten cocky. As Gill had so often said, they might be smart at first, but eventually had become cocky and overconfident, and Paula had, for all of her brilliance, made the mistake of asking for metal from a number of scrapyards dotted around Manchester, and had them delivered to a garage she owned. One of the companies had recognised and identified the metal, and phoned it in, even supplying the police with the details of the address.

The moment Rachel had walked inside the garage and saw it for herself she knew without a doubt this was the place where the murders were taking place. The place was cross between an old fashioned abattoir and an artists' studio. There were canvases coated with the varnished remains of human flesh, with puddles of dried and black blood everywhere, and there were blowtorches and soldiering irons littered everywhere. The garage was in a fairly busy part of town - if you wanted to hide something, the best place to hide it would be in plain sight, and with the hustle and bustle of the city and the blood soaked rags Paula had used for gags, it was easy to hide what was going on. When Rachel had seen the gags for herself, she could understand why no-one had actually heard the screams, the loudness of what was happening outside made it impossible to hear a scream or a gasp.

The demands to get Paula locked up had been loud and clear, Rachel mused to herself as she towelled herself dry. After that she washed her teeth and cleaned her face of makeup before turning off the lights and climbing into bed, thoughts of the latest case still clear in her head, and she hoped that she would at least get some peace for tonight before morning.

When the higher ups demanded for Paula to be convicted and imprisoned, Rachel had dug her heels in - she had learnt over the years that sometimes if you wanted to get the right result then you needed to really work for it. The crime scene in the garage alone provided the police with more than enough, and they had even found photographs Paula had taken, depicting that the original number of people was not entirely accurate. Rachel sighed in her bed, the sound hoarse in her bedroom. The police and the public had originally believed there were 6 bodies, that was bad enough, but when they'd done their research in the garage, they found it there weren't six victims.

There were 12.

Finding the other 6 hadn't been easy - it had taken a lot of time, and Rachel's team had needed clock in a lot of hours of searching, cross-checking, and hunting any more bits of information to add to the case. They managed to find the remains of the victims, each one of them the pieces of art cooked up by Paula's twisted brain. The higher ups wanted Paula charged regardless of how the investigation was going, but Rachel had stalled, and it had caused more than a few headaches, and so Rachel had spent as much time fucking around with them than she had with her office.

It had taken days before Paula had finally cracked. For all her cockiness and her confidence, she wasn't that strong willed. It hadn't taken long for her to crack, and when it happened, Rachel had nearly jumped in the air with glee. It had taken only a couple of weeks and so much work, and Rachel had gotten the interviewers of her team to work on all possibilities, and deepen the cracks for more information.

But the higher ups had taken that breakthrough and they had milked it for all it was worth, and they'd ordered her more and more to push through with the arrest. They hadn't seemed to have given a flying fuck about the amount of information the bitch had. The result was while they'd had had plenty of breakthroughs and the case was cracking, it simply wasn't ready yet to hand over to the CPS. If there was one thing she had learnt during her time with Gill and Julie, sometimes you needed to work harder and longer to make a case stick.

Paula had nearly walked because when they'd taken the case to the CPS, some of them had pointed out that there wasn't enough pieces of info here and there, something that had galled Rachel, who had been a DCI for a long time, a great deal. But Rachel had managed to get her in, and today she had just been convicted of multiple counts of manslaughter and mutilation.

Rachel wanted to sleep, she just wanted to forget work, lie down and not dream. She just wanted to close her eyes, sink her head down into the pillow and just sleep. But she simply couldn't sleep, her brain was still whirling with the misery and the stress of the day, the trial and the conviction of Paula Lewis, having to listen and speak to the idiots in those uniforms who wanted to look nice rather than to look like coppers who spent their time doing things right.

Nowadays the very act of just getting a conviction made things worth it in Rachel's mind, but the thought did depress her. These days, just being a police officer was simply not enjoyable. Rather it had become depressing.

Most of the time, no one really knew for sure whether or not the investigations would hit snags that were hard to clear up. It always reminded Rachel of the mess that came out of her first case as an Acting DI. At the time she had done what she'd thought Gill would have done, but she had been so furious with Pete and Mitch, the former because he seemed to be determined to make her time as SIO a misery, and the latter for losing his case book and not telling her right away. If he had then maybe Mitch may not have died, and that was one of the issues that had caused her problems.

Rachel remembered how determined she had been just to move back down to London. She had loved it there, loved the hustle and bustle, the chaos, the opportunities that such a large city had that Manchester simply lacked. But it had all worked out - she had had her baby, a little girl she called Stephanie, a job, and soon she became a full DI. Over time she spent all her time working hard, learning how to be a good leader and detective, and it had led to her current position as DCI.

But it was no longer fun. It had become tedious, and as more time passed Rachel wondered why she bothered trying to put scum behind bars when so many seemed to conspire to put them back on the streets. Okay, so there were perhaps logical reasons, but often Rachel thought they deserved being put into prison if the cases were investigated properly.

Rachel rolled over, sighing and groaning as her body caught the sheets and duvet, wishing for her mind to simply shut down so she could get some kip. All policing did nowadays was remind her of how good things had once been. As a PC and then a DC, she hadn't had to worry about the politics and just left it all to the SIO unlucky enough to be landed the job and had to shoulder the blame when things went wrong. Now she was a DCI herself, she now wished she had seen for herself what kind of problems SIOs like Gill and Julie had to deal with during every case.

When Rachel first became a full DI, she had worked her socks off to try to build her repertoire up, but now she felt so tired with everything. It was like climbing a mountain with the hope of seeing what was at the top of it only to discover there was nothing special up at there at all. It was depressing. She was tired with the politics of the Met. She was tired of the higher ups showing more and more interest in her cases, in meddling with the investigations to the point where she doubted if anyone would be convicted.

Suddenly Rachel sat up, rubbing her eyes tiredly. A thought had just popped inside her mind, one even she couldn't believe.

"Should I pack it in?" she whispered to herself, wishing that Janet was still alive, or even Julie or Gill, or any of the retired coppers she'd encountered over the years, so she could get some advice from them. "I can't leave," she added to herself, her mind overtaken by the sudden thoughts about her colleagues, her team, the cases that wouldn't solve themselves.

"Well you can't stay around for ever."

Rachel looked up. Standing there was Gill, dressed in the classic suit, short crisp hair with neat and pressed suit. "I belong in the police, Gill," she whispered. She wasn't really surprised the rational part of her brain, the part that told her staying in the police was a bad idea would conjure up this woman. "What's this, every hour I'm going to be visited by you, Julie and Janet like Scrooge with the ghosts?"

Gill snorted. "Maybe," she replied, "but do you remember Rachel, when you asked me why I had to leave? I was tired of the Job after Helen Bartlett. But I had been tired of it all long before that, I was just able to able to handle it better. I'd always pictured myself leaving a good five-six years after that horrible year, but the stress with the sessions with the shrinks after Helen kidnapped me got me down."

Rachel looked down as she remembered that horrible time. No, that had not been a good year for her either, and she had to stop the flood of self loathing as she remembered what she'd done to Sean during that year along with that mess with Dom.

But Gill's ghost wasn't finished yet - Rachel was unsure if Gill was a ghost or if she was something that her own mind had conjured up to talk some sense into her - and Rachel wasn't surprised. "I'm proud of you, kid," Gill said. "I am proud of how well you've done; granted, you fucked up here and there, but that happens. I fucked up myself occasionally. Your problem is you're afraid to leave, you're comfortable. Never get comfortable, Rachel."

"Do you think I should leave?" Rachel whispered, while it was good having her 'inner Gill' speak to her after all this time, she just wanted a straight forward opinion.

Gill shrugged. "It's up to you, Rachel. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life," she replied. "But I can tell you straightaway that your latest case is a sign that the police are going downhill. Maybe there are coppers being trained who'll be able to adapt, but you're not the type of copper to immerse yourself into politics. You know that. You're the type of copper who likes being on the frontline. I knew you were going places, but I knew you'd never become Assistant Chief Con anytime soon. I couldn't picture you acting like bloody Theresa May. It's not you. This is the latest example of you not being able to cope with those boring idiots who have turned the police into a laughing stock."

Rachel nodded, her head swimming with fatigue.

"If you stay in the police then you might not be able to cope mentally, and I don't want that to happen. We both know you can't let this go on, maybe it's time for you to leave. But give it time, solve a few more cases and see if you can still do it."

Rachel thought that made sense rather than just making some rapid decision. "I miss you Gill."

"I miss you too, kid," Gill grinned back.

'Bye, Godzilla," Rachel smirked.

Gill laughed.

Ciao until next time. Most of the scene with Gill Murray was inspired by the season 10 episode of New Tricks, The One that Got Away. In that episode Sandra Pullman was offered a job catching Nazi war criminals, but she was reluctant since her time in UCOS had been exciting and rewarding to her. At the beginning, however, she'd resented it because she was given the task of solving crimes that had been closed off and unsolved, and given the help of elderly and retired coppers for a team. However, Sandra came to enjoy her work.

In the scene, the ghost of Jack Halford, her old boss who'd trained her and died in season 9 of Liver cancer, came to her and talked her round. That scene inspired me to write the ghost scene with Gill. Hope you enjoy it.