Hello. This is the fourth in a series of six connected stories about A2A. It follows a lot of plot elements from the previous three and doesn't make a lot of sense if you haven't read them. The previous three stories are London Fields, Playing with the Big Boys and And If I Start a Commotion.

I

When she bent her head over her desk and read the files before her, her mouth moved silently like someone murmuring in their sleep. He watched that – he could have sat nearby for hours just to rest his mind on what those lips were saying.

He didn't know everything, but he was quickly finding out and committing to memory. And he felt sure that some things he alone knew. Her eyes were hazel, although to the rest of the uncaring world they seemed brown. Her forehead bore a certain crease when she frowned, and she bent her wrist in a particular way when she leaned over her messy desk to pick up the phone.

Not that the phone rang often. And that secretly satisfied him too. That no one cared for her as she sat for hours in her office alone.

Except for me. I watch, and she doesn't know. One day she might notice.

And what would he do then?

"Royce? Royce!"

The hazel eyes were on him. He started and his square glasses slid from his nose to the floor.

"Err … Royce, your dad's calling you." Alex Drake pointed beyond her open office door to across the hall where Gilbert was taking his duffle coat from the coat-stand. "Sounds like it's home time."

Alex glanced at the clock on the wood panel wall of her dim office. Four o'clock. She smiled in sympathy as Royce turned to leave, stumbling over his school bag and scuffing his knees where the grey socks did not reach high enough. She handed him his glasses and he scurried off down the hall. "Until tomorrow ... you little weirdo," she breathed in relief. It was inevitable that he would turn up again promptly at half-past three after school, but if she had to go through too many more afternoons of Royce Gilbert sitting opposite her office, pretending to read his mathematics text book while staring at her fixedly until his father went home ... Maybe I should have a word with his dad. Gilbert was a reasonable sort and the only one who had really bothered to befriend her since her arrival three weeks ago at the Forensics Unit in Lambeth.

Even her manager hadn't said a word to her all day.

I'll fix one problem right now. She went to move the visitor chair that had been shifted yet again to the wall opposite her door. There was a piece of folded paper underneath the chair and she picked it up. A crudely drawn sketch of a woman with an impressive décolletage and curly mop of hair – that would be me – in the arms of a muscled behemoth in a torn singlet and jeans … and square glasses. Oh god. In a nod to naturalism, Royce had even drawn pimples on his likeness's face.

Alex picked the chair up and walked it all the way down the hall to the staff lunch room. A couple of members of the forensics investigation team were making toasted sandwiches in there, and nodded as she nudged the chair under the round table in the centre of the lunch room.

"How you settling in, DI Drake? Making any progress on those cases Marbury gave you?"

She'd been looking through the daunting pile of psychological profiles on some of the worst offenders in the Met's area for two weeks now. By the look on these men's faces, she suspected they knew as well as she did that it mattered not a jot what kind of progress she was making.

"It's very quiet here, isn't it?" She started to make herself a cup of tea. Maybe it was because Christmas was only three days away and people had peeled away slowly to their holiday or maybe it was the office layout itself – the long dark central corridor with its many cell-like offices off to each side. Or maybe it was because this whole team of forensics investigators and psychologists liked their solitude. She didn't even know these men's names.

"Quiet today because everyone's heading off to the game. Always clears out early when our team's playing." The man felt he needed to make an excuse. "I'm usually the goalie, but I've got a groin strain." He coloured instantly although DI Drake was stirring milk into her tea, unconcerned.

"You roll him over."

"It's my back, see." Carling winced as he bent to the sheeted corpse. He had pulled a muscle play-fighting with Chris Skelton and then pulled it again fighting for real with a drunken skin-head who had spent an afternoon smashing bottles against a neighbour's fence in Kilburn.

"You're right." Hunt turned around. "He's a tubby fat fucker. Skelton, get over here and turn the patient for us!" When turned onto his side, the dead man was found to have three substantial knife wounds in his fleshy back. The knife must have gone in deep before hitting his rib cage. Hunt made the motion with his hand and imaginary knife – plunging, repeated, not so careful strikes with a long blade. As usual, given they were standing in the entrance to the dead man's comfortable home, the kitchen knife had to be suspected.

Picking his way around the blood spatter, Hunt went into the kitchen. Everything in it had been painted or tiled a dark peacock blue and he paused to admire the neatness of the room. Everything in its place. And the knives? He opened drawer after drawer until he found them. Nothing seemed disturbed, but how would he know? Cook books crowded onto one of the higher kitchen shelves, and to one end of them a collection of diet guides – recipes for high-blood pressure, for the diabetic, for the invalid. "He don't need to worry about losing a few pounds now," he murmured to himself.

In the living room with its puffy forest green leather couches and soothing cream marble fireplace, Skelton and Carling were making themselves at home, unconcerned by the bustle of the forensics team around them. Carling had checked the brass fireplace poker as soon as they entered the living room. He did this at every crime scene, always willing the murder weapon to be a poker.

Evidently someone in the family wove rugs for a hobby. A loom, hung with a half-finished bright orange and blue creation, dominated one corner of the living room and a grand piano another. Rugs hung from many of the somberly painted walls – in the hall, in the bedrooms, even one facing you as you sat down on the toilet. Where there were no rugs on the walls, bright abstract paintings hung instead and in the hallway Hunt winced in distaste at a huge canvas painted in sloppy broad strokes of primary colour – a large naked woman stepping into a bath. He bent closer – there were spatters of blood across the canvas. The fleshiness of the painted woman mirrored the actual fleshiness of the shrouded victim lying further down the hall. Russell Conning, scientist and evidently diabetic with high blood pressure and heart trouble.

"What is it with posh folks? They can't leave a wall alone or just put a nice photograph of a bloody seaside town up." Buying a big house in St John's Wood, decorating every square inch of it with hippie rubbish. That was one future he knew he'd never have to face.

"Chris and I had better get moving, Guv." Ray started to zip up his leather jacket. "The match starts in half an hour and I've got to warm up properly or me back'll really go this time. It's bloody cold out there now and it's turning dark n'all. It's just the Forensics team, but we've got to paste em just to protect our reputation."

Hunt had seem fixated by the naked lady's huge pink nipples, but he turned on Ray suddenly. "Who did you say you're playing?"

"The fairies from Forensics. Come on, Chris, now. Have to get over to Lambeth."

Hunt blocked the entrance way. "I feel terrible for having detained you, Raymondo. Let me drive you over there so you're not late."

The caretaker had not been thoughtful enough to switch the pitch lights on until fifteen minutes before the game was due to start. Consequently the lights had warmed up only enough to share an eerie faint glow onto the field, and the two teams jogged around the park, sprigged boots treading gingerly, worrying about the holes in the dark uneven turf. It hadn't rained in London since December 10th and the pitch was hard as clay.

In the rickety stand on the Eastern edge of the Lambeth community sports grounds, a small crowd had assembled to watch the inevitable blood bath. Shaz Granger blew on her gloved hands, waving faintly to Chris as he jogged to stay warm in the goal as the game kicked off. There'd been a few mumbles about the referee from Biro, who sat beside her and followed the play with an intensity unmatched by any one else in the drift of reluctant spectators.

Rodney injured himself in the second minute with a slide into the ball that split his legs unnaturally, and heads quickly turned with a "phew god" and "what did I miss?" as he bit back tears and was helped to the club room bathrooms.

Justin Marbury, manager of the psychological assessment team in the Forensics unit, could only rally enough team spirit to rug himself up and watch from his car. Fenchurch East were thugs and he was sure, as he was sure he'd rather be home pouring himself a glass of brandy, that his unit's team would soon be crushed beneath the bull-dog sulleness and flying elbows.

Marbury looked up from his novel at the flash of white passing by his window. That was a surprise – DI Drake in her ridiculous white leather jacket, wandering down to the edge of the dark field. She had hardly communicated with anyone in the Forensics Unit since her hurried arrival. Of course, he'd had a debrief with Chief Superintendant Anthony Paulson about the need to find her a suitably absorbing piece of research, and he had to consider the matter for a day before dropping his case files into her office with the instruction to read the psychological assessments and look for any possible environmental connections.

Something about the stillness of her expression indicated that she had itched to throw the files on the floor, but she had taken them into her new office with barely a word, and he had left her alone from then on. Maybe it was her reputation for showing off her background in psychological profiling, or maybe her beauty and its unnaturalness in a workplace full of bearded men, red-haired men, curly-haired men … it made him uneasy and he hadn't invited her into his office for a drink as he did with the three other members of his team.

Five nil. Why didn't they call it off already? Shaz had paid no attention to the game, only to her own breath visible in front of her face. She wondered if the cold was why DCI Hunt had not stopped pacing the white paint line at the pitch edge. Since the incident with Dorothy Lange and her sons, he had had to throw his coat out and he hadn't bought another yet.

From her vantage point near the top of the stand, Shaz finally saw the reason for his pacing. She smiled to herself – he hadn't spotted DI Drake across the pitch, standing with a couple of the Forensic Unit's wives and just now accepting gratefully a thermos cup of coffee or tea.

Like little boys, the Forensics team had forgotten their game strategy and now followed the ball around the field in a pack. As the rumbling of their sprigged boots faded down yet again to their own goal area, and the full-time whistle blew, Hunt paused and looked down at the hard cold turf, green and bitten by the frosts that had descended every morning for a week.

He hadn't seen Drake in three weeks or so, and maybe the rapidity of her departure had felt like the suddenness of a frost. He hadn't really dwelt on the muttered explanation to the team at CID and her disgust at his capitulation to Vanderzee's demands – going over and over it would be so bloody weak. And so would sitting there at Luigi's, waiting for her to cross the threshold.

In fact Hunt had kept away from Luigi's, and consequently the others did too, so that the owner himself had finally come across to CID one afternoon to complain about their desertion. I don know what is going on wit you, but why you punishing me for?

He'd tried to remember what the steps were, how you enjoyed life with vigour, like he had in the good days back in Manchester with Tyler. Catching the rotten bastards who thieved from the people in the community, driving recklessly and waving a gun about because he was the law and that's what coppers could do. Side-stepping the orders of the brass, and falling asleep drunk a few hours before sunrise.

He sniffed, nose beginning to run. It was a beautiful still night. He wasn't sentimental, but there was something about floodlights – the purity in the light, the particles almost visible in the night air – that appealed to him. And under the white lights he found her, walking across the pitch to commiserate with the forensics lot, demoralised in their double-digit defeat, huddled in a circle as if the assault had only temporarily stopped although Carling and the others had run cheerily from the park, carrying Viv in their arms for his five goals.

The lights snapped off suddenly. The caretaker was anxious to get home to his steak and kidney pie. Christmas was nearly upon them, and who didn't want to be in their living room, with the decorated tree, the television on, and a bottle of beer in hand.

She walked on past her new colleagues – and something in him was gratified at her wanting nothing to do with them – heading straight to the stand. She's coming to give me a piece of her mind. She is going to give it to me something rotten. And meanwhile, he had lived without that queasy mix of annoyance and lust that had woken him early in the mornings. The surety that she was coming to the same place as him every day. If they fought, and if she rejected his crude advances, it had been enough.

And Alex Drake paused before the stand as the few spectators drifted back to their cars. "I just came to tell you that in case you think ..." The tone in her voice conveyed that she wasn't entirely sure what he might be thinking. In case you were pining away for me, Bolls? He never would have thought that.

"I did you a favour." He walked down the steps, slippery in the night dew. Didn't come too near. But really, after only seconds, he couldn't help himself. "Let me give you a ride home."

They were quite alone in this great expanse. Earlier in the day he had fantasised a little about ignoring the betrayed feelings she must be nursing, the righteous anger. He had thought about pounding on her door, bullish and demanding. They might not work together now, but why not continue on? Why not?