Author's Notes: One of the things I love best about Lewis is the subtle weaving of parallels between it and Inspector Morse. Inspector Lewis is very much the man he is because of the experiences he lived through in those years he served with Morse. In these two episodes, in particular, the similarities and contrasts are beautifully done.

This story, unlike the last, did not write itself. It is one I've wanted to write long before I ever got up the nerve to try my hand at a Lewis fic, and maybe that is why it has been so difficult to get down. I've known since the minute I first saw Lewis lean over Monkford in The Quality of Mercy and recognized almost the same shot of Morse and Marriot in Dead on Time what I wanted this story to say…unfortunately it seems to be above my limited abilities as a writer. I've given it my best try here, and, maybe, one day in the future I'll try it again and see if I can't get closer to the mark.

I have used quite a bit of dialogue straight from the shows. Credit is due to Daniel Boyle and Alan Plater.

Disclaimer: This is purely for fan purposes. No copyright infringement intended.

On Trust and Team Dynamics

Misgivings and Reservations

Sergeant James Hathaway had been working cases with Inspector Lewis for two years when he brought Simon Monkford in on a frauds charge and solved a five-year-old, hit-and-run case. In that time, he would have liked to think that he'd grown as a cop, as a detective, and as a man from watching and learning from arguably the best man in the Oxfordshire CID.

He wasn't at all sure that had been the case. There were those who did know. Monkford, who'd certainly had enough experience in evaluating both effective and ineffective policing and who himself was not very good at what he did, could easily have told him if he had asked. Philip Horton, the autistic, art student who had lost his only friend and found one in Hathaway knew, but he hadn't the communications skills to pass that knowledge onto the sergeant. And Jessica Rattenbury, the partially paralyzed girl wounded as much by her parents as the man who had driven a truck into the back of her car, who had found comfort and support in the sergeant's presence might have said if she wouldn't have been struggling so hard under the weight of sorrow and guilt. And, there were others.

But Hathaway himself was in the dark. He couldn't tell from his periodic service evaluations which should have settled the matter once and for all.

They continued to be glowing from Chief Superintendent Innocent despite her rather caustic comments to the inspector/sergeant team in their presence. That didn't tell him much about what sort of a cop he was becoming because she'd always favored him for reasons that Hathaway no longer saw as necessarily having any relevance to being a good cop. Sure he had the background and the education to put him in good stead in the admittedly snobbish, academic community of Oxford. But, the people skills and the intuitive grasp of the essentials of a case…those were the things to which Hathaway aspired. The things he'd come to value in Inspector Lewis.

Lewis, like all the other inspectors Hathaway had worked with, diligently and dutifully filled out his service evaluations. Checking boxes and noting strengths and weaknesses in the impersonal, unenlightening manner Hathaway suspected they were taught in the inspector courses. He could imagine some tired, old boy standing in front of a classroom of Lewis' and Grainger's' and the like saying, "Now service evaluations. Waste of time, waste of paper, but if you hope to pass your own, you'll have to tick the boxes, add some sort of comment or another, and sign your name. Keep this printout handy…it's a list of terms and such to get you though the paperwork. Long as it sounds serviceable, it'll do…nobody reads 'em anyway. Sooner done, sooner to the real job."

Hathaway's read pretty much the same, regardless of which inspector had filled them out. The adequate box was ticked in the majority of rows. And then there would be a good or above average in those relating to organizational skills; a needs improvement in communication skills, interpersonal relationship skills, and a couple more along that line. Lewis, as far as that went, varied only in that where Hathaway's previous governors had given goods and above averages, his new boss bestowed very goods and excellents and called their needs improvements as goods and adequates. Hathaway attributed the differences not to his improvement at the job but to the fact that his new governor had a more generous nature.

And that, quite probably, came from the sad fact that the majority of Lewis' own service evaluations from his sergeant days (as Hathaway had discovered, idly snooping around in old files when there was nothing better to do) had been written by a less than liberal soul.

Chief Inspector Morse had not dutifully or diligently filled out evaluations on his sergeant. On the rare occasions when he had apparently been brought to task and forced to fulfill his duties as the then Sergeant Lewis' supervising officer, Hathaway had to assume he'd been in quite the snit and taken his ill-temper out on paper. Because, surely, if the chief inspector would have been that dissatisfied with Lewis' performance; poorly written reports with blatant and frequent misspellings; garrulous nature; reckless driving; and impetuousness among other noted condemnations handwritten on evaluation forms with all the boxes smartly marked needs improvement he would never have kept the man with him for one year, let alone fifteen.

There was never, not in one of them, a word of commendation or praise. Not even something like the rather cryptic note Lewis had recently begun typing into Hathaway's reports: "Should opportunity for advancement become available, Sergeant Hathaway has my full support." (The sergeant was never sure if that was a recommendation for promotion or an attempt to pass him off to someone else.) It seemed that there would have been no doubt in anyone's mind that the officer in question on those old evaluation forms should have been terminated immediately. Yet, either no one actually did read those old reports, or no one took Morse's opinions seriously because that was obviously not the case.

Certainly, Chief Superintendent Strange's own evaluations of the sergeant had not reflected Morse's sour nature. He'd found Lewis a 'fine, capable officer who discharges his duties in a proficient and timely manner, behaves himself in such a way as to uphold the good name of the Thames Valley CID, and is to be commended for his good work'. Except for the crisply typed name at the top of the forms, no one could have guessed his comments were of the same man as the one Morse had so critically evaluated.

Still, Hathaway imagined years of Morse's harsh reviews must have been difficult on the sergeant his inspector had once been. Even if, as Hathaway was certain, they had not been a fair or accurate evaluation of Lewis' performance, they couldn't have been easy to laugh off. Hathaway himself would have found them devastating and considered choosing a new vocation. He would have liked to know just how his boss had taken them, but, of course, he didn't ask because he suspected that Lewis wouldn't be all that happy to find out he was digging around in his records.

He also would have liked to know what that note on the bottom of his own evaluations really meant and whether he was supposed to be warmed by Lewis' vote of confidence or duly warned. But, he didn't ask that either. The evaluations were useless when it came to telling him what he really wanted to know; was he merely an adequate police officer doing an adequate job, or was he becoming something more, something better than that? Should he give it all up and find something in which he could succeed, or was there hope for him?

He thought that once he would have been satisfied with just doing the job and collecting his pay, but that was before he'd become Lewis' sergeant. Now he knew that wasn't enough. He wanted to be better than that with an intensity that surprised him. He had thought he'd left his passion behind him when he left the seminary, yet he found that it had simply been redirected. The kind of cop a man would want to be the one to interview his wife or daughter or sister after a violent crime, the kind of cop who would give the murdered a voice and their family the answers they needed to begin to heal…that's the kind of cop he wanted to be.

Only, not today, not this family, not this case. Why hadn't the Met done their job right five years back and brought this murderer to justice when Valerie Lewis' husband would have been numb from the shock and pain of her death? When it would have been just one more blow on top of another and not a fresh blow to an only partially healed wound? When it would have been all over and dealt with in the past and not something that still had to be painfully faced.

When it wouldn't have had to be his sergeant breaking the news to him.

Oh, Hathaway believed that Monkford deserved to be caught, and he believed that the inspector deserved and needed his wife's killer to be brought to justice…but today, in the midst of a murder investigation, coming just days after a birthday she had never lived to celebrate? Hadn't losing his wife been enough? Did he need hit with the horrors and nitty-gritty of it all this time later? Just how devastating would it be for Lewis to discover the man responsible for his pain and sorrow was sitting two floors down in a holding cell?

The enormity of what his investigation had uncovered and what it might result in weighed heavily on the sergeant. He was very much out of his depth.

It should have been a simple enough thing. Not really Hathaway's problem at all. He had the evidence, he had the confession, and he had the man. All he had to do was turn in the paperwork, nothing to do with him how charges were made or when. Only, it wasn't that simple, because he worked with the man who would have to deal with the emotional ramifications of everything those charges would bring back to life.

Worked with him and cared for him. Deeply. Inspector Lewis was more than his governor, mentor, and colleague. He was not his only friend, not even his closest, but he was…well, he was a good man who Hathaway respected and admired.

Hathaway's father had been an estate manager…a very good, very efficient, very well-organized manager who loved his family in much the same way he ran Crevecoer. His mother was his perfect match. There hadn't been shared jokes and casual banter around the family table. When Hathaway and his parents spoke on the phone there was no easy affection between them like in the one-sided conversations he'd occasionally hear between Lewis and his daughter. Hathaway loved his parents in a detached, slightly…well, he wasn't afraid of them. Of course not.

But, he wasn't comfortable with them either. He was always on edge waiting for…well, something like Morse's scathing service evaluations of Lewis. For one reason or another, he was always waiting for their disapproval and disappointment. It was silly really, for he was not ashamed of the man he had become, and they had never given him reason to believe they were either. But, still he felt it was there waiting to rear its ugly head at any moment. With his parents, with his teachers at school, with the priests in the seminary, and with those over him at work.

He couldn't have said where his fear came from, or why, as Lewis would one day ask him, he always had to be better than everyone else, but it had been a part of him since he was a very young boy at Crevecoer. Not a crippling fear, just a vague dread and expectation that made him slightly uneasy in the company of others. Only when playing his music was he completely comfortable around other people. And sometimes, with Lewis. The happy-go-lucky Lewis who exuded friendliness and acceptance. The Lewis the old-timers around the station knew and recalled so fondly; not the mercurial one that those same men didn't quite recognize as their old colleague.

But they were one and the same man. One weighed down by grief and angry at the world and God for what had happened to his wife, and the last thing Hathaway wanted to do was add to that sorrow. He decided he would wait to file the paperwork concerning Monkford. The fraud charges were enough to keep the man locked up for awhile longer. There was more than a good chance that they'd catch their killer in that amount of time.

The only problem with his decision was he couldn't escape being around Lewis, and…every time they talked and Hathaway didn't tell him the horrific truth he was keeping from him, he felt himself to be lying to the man. And worse, he felt a Judas. He found it difficult to do his work with the truth looming over him demanding to be told.

He took his troubles to the chief super. She hadn't been Lewis' biggest fan when he returned from the British Virgin Islands, but her opinion of the inspector had risen over time. She still found plenty of room for complaint with his attitude, conduct, and methods, but Hathaway knew she was a lot less disapproving than she let on. He'd hoped she would take the decision out of his hands, but she left it there. She offered her support and wished him good luck, but it was still his dilemma to face.

In the end, he didn't decide it was the better course or wiser decision to tell Lewis what he'd found out about Simon Monkford. He simply couldn't hold the truth back any longer. He couldn't keep walking beside the man, working beside him, smiling at his jokes, and offering insights into the case with it suspended over their heads waiting to drop on his unsuspecting boss.

There had to have been a better place than the hallway of the college. And there had to have been an easier, kinder way to tell the man what had to be told, but Hathaway couldn't find either. It came out garbled and not really coherent.

"Simon Monkford…I'm sorry, Sir. He's the one…the one driving the car…"

"The car, Sergeant? What car?"

"Uh…the car, Sir, that…your wife."

"My…my wife?"

"I'm afraid so, Sir. He was…he, uh, lost control and swerved—it was a get-away car."

"I see," Lewis said, but the news took a moment to settle into his understanding. It was as though he heard the words but there was a thirty-second delay before his mind processed them. When they did sink in, his body hunched over as if he'd been socked. He opened his mouth and gasped in air as though he couldn't breathe. And then, for just a moment, he went very still and quiet. Hathaway looked away to give him time to compose himself if that was what he was going to do.

Instead, he erupted, striding off down the hall like a mad bull. And, his anger wasn't directed towards the man responsible for his wife's death but at Hathaway.

"How long have you known?" he demanded. When Hathaway answered him, he asked, "Why didn't you tell me then?"

"Because the last time I mentioned your wife, you made it very clear to me I wasn't to mention the subject again," Hathaway tried to defend himself. He'd said much the same thing when Innocent had asked him what the problem was, and it had seemed perfectly reasonable then. But it sounded ridiculous now, even to him. He was a grown man, had he really tried to keep back the truth like a child sweeping a broken vase under the rug? Here was his inspector having to deal with this horrific news, and his sergeant hiding it from him because he was afraid of a bollocking.

"This is different. This is purely professional!"

"How can that be?" Hathaway asked in disbelief.

Lewis ignored his question to shout his own, "What were you frightened of? That I might go barging into the interview room and batter the living daylights out of the man?"

Yes, that had been very much what Hathaway had been frightened of. Not for Monkford, but for Inspector Lewis and, if he were honest, for himself. For Lewis, because if he did do just that it would destroy his career and his life. And that fear had not been ridiculous or unfounded. Hadn't Lewis sided with Anne Sadikov and her adopted mother when they had sought their own sort of justice against the Sons of the Twice Born? Lewis' sympathy had been with them to the point he'd practically condoned the horrific murders of three men in cold-blooded revenge. Hathaway had been, and still was, afraid the inspector would jump at a chance to wreak his own vengeance on the man who had run over his wife and left her to die.

And if a man like Lewis could…well, then what hope could Hathaway hold onto for the rest of mankind—and for himself? He needed to believe in the goodness of man, needed to believe that all the horrors he saw in his work and all the tribulations that he might be called upon to face in his life wouldn't reduce him to just another cold-blooded and callous soul. If there was anyone in the sergeant's limited experience who hadn't let the rigors of the job eat away at his compassion and humanity it was Inspector Lewis. Hathaway knew he'd be lost if Lewis couldn't find it in himself to let justice prevail but gave into hate and bitterness and need for revenge.

"Well, I think I might be tempted under the circumstances," he said. And, indeed, even though he'd never met the inspector's wife, he was tempted to do just that for her husband's sake.

"Well, maybe I would be tempted too," Lewis shot back. "But it wouldn't happen. Shall I tell you why?"

Hathaway, hurrying to keep up with the inspector, reluctantly gave him what he wanted. "Why?"

"Because you're a good cop, and you'd stop me! As it is all you've done is prove you don't really know me. And you don't know yourself either!"

By then they'd reached the car, and the drive back to the station was far from pleasant. Hathaway had no defense for his actions. He had chosen to keep the information from Lewis, and he'd felt the traitor in doing so. Little wonder that the inspector saw it the same way. Lewis had gone quiet, and the sergeant worried about what was going on in his head. He'd have preferred the angry recriminations and demands to the silence.