This is the first in a series of six connecting stories I've written about A2A. The stories follow one big plot arc so if you like them, start here :)

I owe a large debt of gratitude to ThisisZircon for beta-ing this story. Thank you :)

I

"Take me out tonight … take me anywhere, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care." The Smiths.

The past is another country, she thought as she yawned into the flickering television, and the dignified man reading the evening news seemed to yawn back. With his curt voice and the twitching shuffle of the papers as he moved onto a new story, she could hardly wait for him to end the bulletin.

Outside her flat, London - centre of the world - dozed. The streets were empty and she could see the occasional nodding worker stand up from their desk in the office blocks surrounding her, filling a lit window for a minute as he put on a coat, a scarf, even a hat sometimes. Soon the only glow on the street emanated from Luigi's sign. The London she knew – silver and green, always brilliantly lit by some invisible art director, so noisy she couldn't think without music in the back of her head – the city was waiting to be born again. Here on the same streets thirty years back it seemed all shuffling sighs, brick and concrete, old wallpaper that hadn't given up the ghost yet.

Worst of all downstairs … the pastel murals, the candlelight and World War Two jokes. The whole team would be down there, and for the whole night if they weren't desperately holding out for their next pay packets. Alex knew if she stepped outside her door and walked down the stairs, Luigi would greet her by pouring a hasty jug of Chianti for the "signorina", and the gang would look up from their table. The noise would not diminish for a second, but Chris and Ray and Shaz and the rest would note her presence.

They think I'm a moody cow. And crazy. They wish I'd just transfer out.

She didn't care. I wish I could transfer out.

Alex put on her white jacket and made her way down the stairs as Luigi changed the music in the tape deck and a song she'd heard for many nights began – a heart-breaking love song to a girl from Venice who haunted the regretful singer every time he stepped outside his door. Well, it was heart-breaking if you understood Italian and longed for the bridges of the Rialto.

She passed into the candlelit café.

Oh yes, there he was, as always sitting apart from the team, tapping the cigarette into an ash-tray, unimpressed by the jokes flying back and forth. After a while, not even listening to the rest of them, looking through them. He's waiting for me, she thought.

It was an awareness Alex ignored most of the time: the fact that here or at CID he hardly looked at her, rarely spoke except to issue an order. He'd asked her out once. And despite the innuendo and smut … the idea that her boss wanted to take her out, get through a whole dinner even though he appeared to find much of what she had to say exasperating, yes get through the ritual of dinner just so he could cop a kiss at her front door and invite himself in - it had floored her.

But after that one dinner Hunt had backed off, a very neat reversal in fact.

Still, she sensed that when she and Hunt were in the same room, he knew exactly where she was at any one time, was interested in who she spoke to, and monitored whether she smiled or frowned.

The fact that Gene could hide it so well, or cover it with a crass come-on, would flatter her momentarily. But then, why pursue it?

For the past few days she had stopped every now and then to look down at her hand, almost in amazement. Beyond imagining, she could almost feel that very hand in his as the red balloon skimmed off skyward. And she would say again to herself, "It was you."

But then her mind swept around to the obvious: I was shot. I am lying on a filthy blanket over rotten beams and the tide is making the pier sway beneath me. I am near death and my mind is making this up. I cannot escape this grey and brown stew that my mind has created, and this is not real. Molly is real, she's waiting for me. I have no idea how many minutes have passed there, but she will be worried. Entering into some cat and mouse game with him would only keep me from finding a way back.

This is not real.

Hunt would have told her to snap out of it, seeing the funk she'd worked herself into tonight.

Alex didn't give him the chance, because she walked straight through the entrance, out the door and up the steps onto the street and the autumnal Wednesday evening.

"Quite the tableaux," the forensics man Gilbert said, leaning down to poke the body with his gloved finger. He looked up, his duffel coat shifting heavily around him in the cold sun. "DCI Hunt, doesn't it feel like we've been here before?"

Tableaux? Twat. "Yeah, junkie and dealer. I'm just glad this sod took out the dealer as well before he shuffled off this mortal coil," Hunt enunciated the last five words carefully, and stepped over the corpse's head to a second figure, still lying under a sheet and waiting his turn with Gilbert.

Ray squatted to lift the sheet from the second body's face. "It was only matter a time before this one ended up on the slab."

"Yes, Raymondo. But I was so sure that little chat you and I had with him last week in the cells would set him on the right path." He felt like giving the body of Delbert Blyth a good kicking for forcing him away from his lounge and the Saturday afternoon match. The mouthy little dickhead couldn't have waited until Monday before blowing a hole through that junkie's stomach?

Blyth had been paroled from the Scrubs not three weeks before for his second dealing conviction, and it seemed he had immediately gone back to working this endless field of scrubby, untended grass, concrete pilings, and smashed-up trolley carts. CID had already picked him up once on a routine drive through the area, but they'd let Blythe off with a warning. He was one of those tricky little fuckers that made you like him just a bit, despite the string of dealing convictions. He always had a story about sorting his pathetic life out. In fact, it was hard to shut him up – he seemed to like talking to them – and they were relieved to fling him back on the streets.

Hunt squinted up into the damp clouds as the sun dipped behind the haze. The field was extensive, a huge up-and-down expanse surrounded on three sides by tall blocks of flats. Behind him the fourth end of the field straggled out into scrub and up a short slope onto a road. How many eyes had stared out from those flats as this junkie murder went down? How many people cheered as the dealer got his, and the junkie too?

"Hey up, who invited her?" Ray's thumb was jabbing her way again. He had a special thumb jab for her. Hunt glanced just once at Alex's slow descent from the shoulder of the road down to the field. Under the violet sky her dark hair framed her white face and the wind whipped it savagely. Drawing close after a few minutes of picking her way through the rubble in her ridiculous white boots, her look dared him to have a go.

"What's this?" Alex asked, all business and drawing a small notepad from the back pocket of her jeans.

"What's this is that while you have been absent without leave, Bolls, drug dealers and junkies have been topping each other in exotic locales." He waited, toe of his boot tapping on a piece of rubble. "Now care to explain why you didn't turn up for work on Friday?"

"How about we investigate this crime scene?"

"I don't think London's mouthiest dealer Delbert Blyth and this scabby junkie are going anywhere! You have time to explain."

"I don't want to." Alex pushed past him and knelt down beside the second body, identity unknown.

"Shot in the stomach," Gilbert said to her. State the obvious as always, Hunt thought; the lower front of the dead man's shirt and army-issue parka were sodden with rusting blood. Gilbert showed Drake all the points of interest he'd found, carefully lifting the arms to display the untidy ring of track marks, and remarking on the noticeable flecks of white spittle around the mouth.

The junkie's face wore a joyous smile and Hunt caught her looking away for a second. Yeah, it was quite revolting, he agreed.

She and Gilbert moved onto the body of Delbert Blyth, half of whose dark handsome face had been obliterated by the junkie's bullet.

Hunt grew restless after a quarter of an hour of their consulting together, and broke Gilbert away from her. "I ain't wasting any more time on this. Write it up and we can all get back to our weekends."

The violet sky was darkening, seeping some of the ugliness of the field and the flats away, and Hunt began the walk back to the Quattro, parked over on the shoulder of the road where he'd judged it least likely to be hit by any fool exiting too fast from a nearby roundabout. Sick of this dump. He'd call the plods out to join Chris and Ray in a door-to-door in those scummy blocks of flats, and then he would resume his place in front of the television with a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

"Hunt, wait!"

That command summoning him back. "Ohhh," he groaned and stopped without turning around. "No!" he yelled out.

"Hunt!" she insisted. "There's blood over here, and it's not … I don't think it's from the two victims."