Hi there, this is the final in my A2A series of six connected stories. (The others are in order: London Fields, Playing with the Big Boys, And if I Start a Commotion, In Paradise, and Walk into the Twilight. They all follow a plot arc that ends here with Apricity :)

I

Evan White ***.

At this moment on a cold but fine morning, Evan White held the car door open meekly as he waited for Alex Price to finish her tantrum and slam the front door shut.

Evan White, a man with three asterisks next to his name in the Actaeon file – what did that mean? That he had helped kill her parents? That he might have been responsible for her own death but for an escaped balloon?

"Come on, Alex," he remonstrated, and his voice was just as she remembered, never raised to her even at her worst stroppy moments.

Watching from the car at the nudge of the corner, the street where she'd lived with Evan after her parents' deaths, Alex Drake wondered what was annoying Alex Price this morning. She certainly couldn't remember what the reason was, but she recognised that look of hysterical tension as Alex Price got into the car and belted herself in.

"Make it click, every trip," she murmured sympathetically as Evan stood hands in pockets for a brief moment, looking up into the sky where the clouds threatened morning showers. Sympathetic at his stress as Evan crossed around the front of the Ford – another bloody blue Ford – and opened his own door. Suddenly he looked her way and Alex sank down - "shit" - glad of a fast-moving car that passed by her own on the corner and provided some cover.

Evan got into the car and soon drove off.

"How could you be involved in all this?" She stared ahead, unblinking. "You are a good person. You are a good person."

"Last I heard, birds weren't into reading Viz so get that pile of rubbish off Drake's desk." Hunt kicked Jimmy's bin over as he walked past, hands scrummed down in pockets. In the same foul mood as when the team had worked through the night to dress CID for Lord Scarman's visit.

Ray pretended to be absorbed in the file notes about a series of fights at the Woolwich docks. Stuffed if he'd lift a finger to tidy the office just because Drake was swanning back into tomorrow morning. One glare at Chris stifled his inclination to get up and help either. Don't you think about it. Drake had been gone a bare six weeks or so, and now she was bloody back and it was like Lady Di – Princess Diana, Ray corrected himself – was about to pay them a visit. And all because, if the rumours and Chris' half-witted deductions were true, Hunt had pulled the snotty cow on their trip up North after Christmas.

Ray knew he wasn't the only one. They could each imagine the look of triumph on her face as she made her grand entrance back into second in command. Bloody hell, he could hear the superior tone in her voice going through his head. We did just bloody fine without her too.

And maybe it wouldn't have been so fucking annoying if Hunt wasn't acting like the Manc Lion on tenderhooks – I mean tenterhooks – and Jimmy, Biro, Lewis and the rest of the soft bastards weren't running themselves ragged to do his bidding. He'd had enough. "Guv, how about we get a drink and let this lot clean their own mess up."

Hunt turned slowly.

"Just a quiet one like, Guv."

The knot of anticipation she'd gone to bed with - it was still there in the early morning when she woke, sweating. In a few hours she would get dressed, lock the door to her flat and walk across the road to Fenchurch East. Back through those heavy swinging doors into the white brightness of CID, her desk under the chess-board black and white ceiling panels. The oppressive feel of the dark wood walls all around. It was her creation, her memory turned into a stage set.

Had she just heard a noise? Alex sat up in her bed, the blood thumping through her head in the silence as she strained to hear. This happened a lot now – waiting for something to happen.

It had only been two weeks since she and Hunt returned from Lancashire, but she'd had little to do between the panic of that trip to Bowland and her return to CID. Today. You could almost grow mad waiting for something to happen.

Two weeks ago, she'd opened the note from CS Paulson welcoming her back to her old position as DI at Fenchurch East. Who had wanted her back? The same people who had tracked them through Bowland? The same people who set up a roadblock to trap them? The same people now setting another trap?

This world is my creation, she thought, but tonight it was no comfort. She wasn't in any control of it, and she no longer really thought it contained a puzzle she needed to work out. She could be hurt in this world, killed, prevented from returning to Molly.

Yeah, but Alex could be surprised in this world … the LED lights on the digital clock blinked green in the dark. Two AM.

Surprised because she hadn't woken from a nightmare of pursuit by MI5 or the death of her parents, not about about Evan White. She'd been tangled in the sheets with Hunt, reaching for him in her dream. Her limbs, as she sat back now against the head board of the bed, itched with that frustration - time and again in the dream she hadn't got far with him, though she'd wanted to. Kept going back to the mirror in that stuffy hotel room in Bowland, kept looking from the mirror to see his eyes on her in the dark.

But it had felt so real that she looked down at the film of sweat on her breasts, and wiped a tear away from her eyelashes.

A tear on his cheek – wiped it away quickly – a tear of tiredness as he sank further into the cream vinyl seats of the booth. It was a club but Hunt was wishing they'd turn the music down. In touch with the ground / I'm on the hunt I'm after you / Smell like I sound, I'm lost in a crowd / And I'm hungry like the wolf. Wished the people swaying around him, dancing too close to the booth, would disappear. But the flashing blue, green, red lights hadn't relented a bit. Ray slumped down across the booth with a pushy young secretary-type who had been pestering them all night to dance.

"It's early," Ray protested as Hunt tried to get out from the table. "You can't leave now."

Ray was doing what blokes did. Getting him drunk enough to be hammered at work in the morning. Hammered enough to take home the girl Ray had been lining him up with, thrusting at him all night.

"Don't tell me what to do...." But he returned to his place, crowding Chris into the middle of the booth. A few hours ago, he'd been just as eager as the other two to make a night of it. Another bottle of cheap champagne was placed on the table and he barely knew himself to be drinking it. He barely heard or saw anything until the music tapered off into a slow dance and somehow Hunt roused himself to go the bathroom. Who the fuck wanted to look at ugly people going at it hammer'n tongs right in front them?

There was silence between Ray and Chris for only a minute.

"Bet you're glad Shaz's not round to put the handbrake on," Ray fairly spat across the blonde girl.

"I don't see why she shouldn't have come." Chris was just as drunk as the rest of them, but not in a fun way. "I promised her when I got back from Clitheroe that we'd go out on the town, so she's going to chuck me when she hears about us leaving her out tonight."

"That reminds me.... What did Drake and the Guv get up to in Clitheroe?" Chris had been ridiculously coy about the exact circumstances of Hunt's suddenly appearance at his parents' caravan park. "Come on, no secrets between armed bastards. I want a lot of details."

"I have no idea," Chris admitted, squirming as the girl slipped her arm about his waist. She had pretty feathery hair gelled up to a sharp edge at the top of her head. "The only thing I know is that they stayed one night and they stayed in the same caravan although we gave them two caravans." He could barely recall, but there had been more to it … uncomfortable silences, looks between them, a glimpse of Hunt streaking across their lawn in the dead of night as Chris awoke to the sound of an owl and peered out his bedroom curtains.

"I bloody knew it."

"Knew what?" Hunt had returned suddenly, surveyed both their faces, knew at once what they had been jabbering about. Fucking Chris.

"Your caravan romance," the girl chipped in brightly.

Hello Jimmy. Viv, hello. Biro, Lewis, Rodney, Ray, Chris.

They could barely acknowledge her as she sat down, a definitive staccato movement to let them know this was her desk and she 'd reclaimed it. The room was fugged with cigarette smoke – CID covering up the silence with heavy-duty puffing. Ray nodded to her and then turned on the cassette player. Only Viv flicked Alex a smile as he presented her with the triplicate forms for getting after-hours access to CID premises.

It was nine am sharp. Hunt was in his office with the door shut. She was aware they hadn't met since she'd pushed him out of her flat after their return from the North. Two weeks later, those days seemed dream-like, both the running from MI5 and the sex. Maybe two weeks' space was all it took for them to be able to pretend it hadn't happened.

She'd spent the waiting time trying to concentrate just on the two monumental points – that Evan White seemed to be implicated in her parents' death, and that she and Hunt were now targets. Matthew Mantle had seemed so certain about that.

But her thoughts were still tangled as she opened her desk drawers and found her collection of pens and notepads. Nothing was clear. It felt like she'd been in stasis.

Be cool. She looked across at Chris and Ray. What would a cool person do? Pretend to catch up on the important cases CID were looking into? Chat with the team? Slink off to the kitchen for a cup of wretched instant coffee? Barge into Hunt's office and demand some work....

No need. The Guv opened his office door, his eyes shifting slightly as he saw Drake at her desk. If he hadn't felt like a capsizing ship he would have put on a front and a show for the lads. His eyes were tearing up again – bloody embarrassing. Must've looked like he'd been crying.

Welcome back, Drake. It's amazing that we've been able to solve cases without your insightful lady comments, but we've pulled off a few miracles. But he bit his lip, glowering at the queasiness in his stomach. I must look like five kinds of shit.

Drake frowned and glanced across to Ray and Chris. Were they drunk too? Hunt obviously was, wearing a crumpled navy suit and white shirt, a tie loosely knotted. You look dirty and seedy, she thought ... but the flop of hair about his face as he clapped his hands together and shooed off Biro and Rodney to investigate the morning's muggings. The roughness of his features and the scars about his mouth. She'd lain in that bed in the caravan, touching those scars idly with her thumb.

He walked between the desks – Ray had changed the tape in the cassette player. Fucker.

All I'm saying, it takes a lot to love you
All I'm doing, you know it's true
All I mean now, there's one thing
Yes one thing that turns this grey sky to blue
That's the look, that's the look
The look of love

Ah. Clapping his hands together again. He stopped by her desk, eyes looking past her. "Viv gave you them forms and all that?'

Yes.

"Got everything you need?"

Yes.

Well obviously we both know it. Need to stay away from each other. Playing it cool was about more than quelling the embarrassing rumours going around the team – it was about knowing she was marked and that any reckless action could hurt them both. But Hunt met her gaze long enough... she couldn't hide, didn't want to, that she was glad to be back. And Hunt looked grim but jingled the coins in his trouser pockets as he walked out through the swinging doors.