fredbassett | Fic, Fault Lines, Claudia/Ryan, Team, 15

Title : Fault Lines
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Claudia, Lester, Nick, Ryan, Connor, Abby, Stephen
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : Episode 1.3
Word count : 3,800
Summary : Claudia has a job to do and Captain Ryan is helping her to do it.
A/N : 1) This follows All In a Day’s Work, and Underground, Overground and is now the third in a series of Claudia/Ryan episode tags. 2) The dialogue in much of this is taken from the actual episode and I claim no credit for that!

“Pretty obvious she killed her boyfriend, but we don’t know what she did with the body. Just keeps babbling on about monsters and sea serpents.”

It was obvious to Claudia that the policeman hadn’t been impressed by having a Home Office team foisted onto him by his superiors with little or no explanation. His dismissive tone of voice made that perfectly clear. She knew she would have to work hard to keep the man’s cooperation.

“Would you let me talk to her?” Nick asked. Even in Claudia’s limited experience, the professor was not a man to take dismissal lying down.

The expression on the policeman’s face made it plan that he couldn’t see what good that would do. “What about? Monsters? I’m conducting a serious murder investigation here…”

“There was no murder. Anthony Barton was killed by an ancient marine predator, which then returned to its home, millions of years in the past.” The look on Nick’s made it clear he thought that was all the information the Inspector needed. Without a backward glance, the professor started to stalk off.

The policeman turned to Claudia, an incredulous look on his face as he demanded, “Who are you people?”

Claudia did her best to suppress a sigh. Nick Cutter had absolutely no concept of the meaning of the word discretion. “I’m sorry. Thanks for your time, Inspector.” Without giving him the chance to reply, she hurried after Nick. “Cutter, wait…”

“The girl’s innocent,” Nick declared, clearly not caring who heard his words.

“I know.” She kept her own voice low, hoping he’d take the hint.

“We can’t let her go to jail for something she didn’t do!”

Taking hints wasn’t one of Nick’s strongest suits. “Leave that with me, I’ll do what I can for her.” She hoped she hadn’t just made a promise that she wouldn’t be able to keep, but Nick was right, something had to be done to protect the woman.

* * * * *

“The police have charged Diane Johnson.” Claudia kept her voice strictly neutral. Lester disliked having to deal with any excess of emotion in others and she’d long since learned in her dealings with people in the upper echelons of the Home Office that a certain amount of role-playing was inevitable to get the job done.

“I know.” He sounded wholly unconcerned, which was no more than she’d expected.

“We have to intervene.”

“We’re not going to do that.”

Claudia struggled to keep the outrage out of her voice as she asked, “Why not?”

“Because I won’t allow this story to become public property. At least in prison the newspapers can’t get hold of her.”

“So you’re just going to let them lock up an innocent and traumatised girl?” Her anger was starting to bleed through and she knew it, but Lester’s calm acceptance of gross miscarriage of justice wasn’t something she was prepared to take without question.

“Of course it’s undesirable, but it would be far worse to release her to cause panic and disorder. I’ll see that the charges are dropped when the immediate crisis is under control.”

“That could take months.”

“And would you rather tell the police that an ancient sea monster is cruising our swimming pools consuming lifeguards? I know the injustice stings, but the correct decision is often painful. That’s the burden of government.” With a supercilious smile, Lester walked off, leaving her standing in the corridor, staring after him.

Claudia wondered how he’d react if she told him that Nick Cutter had already imparted that piece of information to the Inspector in charge of the murder investigation. She was very tempted to find out, but his relationship with Nick was uneasy enough as it was, so it looked like she’d continue to have to play the role of peacemaker a while longer.

As Claudia reached the door of her own office, her mobile phone rang. She listened, thanked the woman on the other end of the line for the information, and promptly called Captain Ryan’s number. The operative at GCHQ assigned to monitor all police communications for anything relevant had seen a report of what appeared to be human remains in a boating lake some distance away from the swimming pool in which the life guard had disappeared. She had a hunch that this was something they couldn’t afford to ignore.
* * * * *

Claudia handed a set of photographs to Lester. They weren’t a pretty sight, but the man betrayed no hint of his feeling as he stared down at a mass of flesh and bone that had coalesced into something barely recognisable as human in origin.

“Well, the DNA is conclusive,” she commented, carefully keeping any emotion out of her voice. “It’s the boy from the swimming pool. Or what’s left of him.” She’d had the results from the laboratory only half an hour ago.

“It’s a bolus. A regurgitated mass of flesh and bone.” Nick Cutter’s accent was very much in evidence as he proffered an explanation for the state of the remains. “The beast swallowed him whole and then vomited up what it couldn’t digest.”

Lester stared at the photographs for a moment longer before demanding, “And what kind of creature could have done this to him?”

Instead of answering the question, Nick promptly countered it with one of his own. “What you should be asking yourself, is how the remains of a boy who was attacked in a swimming pool, end up 20 miles away in a reservoir?”

“Maybe there never was an anomaly” Lester replied, in a way that Claudia was certain was designed to cause maximum irritation. “Maybe the girl murdered her boyfriend in the swimming pool and dumped his body in the reservoir.”

“It’s very likely, provided you also believe she swallowed him whole and then drove 20 miles down the motorway to regurgitate his remains.” The rs were out in full force again, drawing out the word regurgitate to its full extent and then stretching it a little further for good effect.

Lester waved his hand at Nick. “All right, then you explain it.”

“We know it was the same beast in the pool and the reservoir. Perhaps the anomaly has a fixed point of origin in the past, yet somehow it remains fluid in our time. They don’t just open, they move.”

Claudia took some satisfaction from the fact that Lester now looked like a man with a bad headache building. And on that score, she felt some sympathy. She’d had a headache ever since those photographs had ended up on her desk.

* * * * *

The drive to the reservoir in Ryan’s vehicle was accomplished in companionable silence. The soldier clearly felt speculation was pointless, which is why Claudia had opted to travel with him, rather than in the other car with the civilian members of the team. Connor and Nick would no doubt have been in full flow, bouncing ideas and theories around like kids on a sugar-high.

Once there, the soldiers promptly deployed and took charge of clearing the area while the civilians started checking the water and taking samples. What they were looking for, she didn’t know, but no doubt someone would enlighten her at some point. She watched as Nick greeted Ryan warmly and shook the captain’s hand. At least Nick Cutter wasn’t the sort of man to bear a grudge, even though Ryan had dealt with the professor’s stubbornness in the Permian in a gloriously direct manner. There had been times when Claudia had longed to adopt the same methods.

“We haven’t found anything yet,” Claudia told Nick, reporting on the progress – or rather lack of progress – from the military side of the team. “No creature, no anomaly, no nothing. We’re still searching the reservoir, but with any luck the anomaly’s closed again.”

“I need detailed local maps, lists of swimming pools, rivers, lakes, anything nearby. Can you get those for me?”

As ever, Nick sounded like a man in a hurry. She was beginning to wonder how his students ever managed to learn anything from him. He delivered explanations only when he needed to make a point. Other than that, he seemed to expect everyone to simply trail around after him like well-trained dogs. The way Stephen usually did.

“Should I be asking why?” He really was almost as infuriating as Lester.

“It’s just an idea.”

She waited, but the explanation never came. After a moment, Claudia decided it was time to allow her irritation to surface. “Do you know what I miss? Those soul-crushingly dull civil service meetings, which made suicide look like an exciting career option. I used to sit there praying something would happen in my life…”

“Careful what you wish for.”

Claudia sighed. There was no point in resorting to sarcasm when the other person refused to take offence. Now if only she could get Lester to accept that…

“Professor! Professor!” Connor’s yell took Nick to his side in an instant. It appeared that Connor’s observations had finally borne fruit.

From what he could hear of the conversation, the water-level had fallen by something like 40 centimetres, leading the two men to the inescapable conclusion that water was pouring out of it through the anomaly, still present somewhere beneath its surface. Claudia closed her eyes for a moment. It didn’t take a genius to know what Nick’s next plan would be. She was going to be asked to sanction an underwater search. She just wondered how long it was going to take him to come up with that suggestion.

A quite conversation with Ryan, out of Nick’s hearing, established that he had taken the precaution of coming equipped with several sets of diving gear in one of their vans and one of his men was an underwater specialist, but the Special Forces captain wasn’t intending to volunteer the information unless Cutter asked. Ryan’s views were much like hers, if they could avoid contact with the anomalies, they should. There was no point in borrowing trouble, as Claudia’s grandmother had been so fond of saying.

Half an hour later, Nick was still staring out over the surface of the water, deep in thought. Claudia had passed the time standing next to the mobile command centre Ryan had set up in one of their vehicles, fielding calls from Lester and apologising to the owner of the water park for the loss of his business. The silent presence Ryan at her side, dressed in his black combat uniform, had been enough to keep the man’s protests under control, especially when she’d informed him that the team was checking the reservoir for potential contaminants. At that point, he’d gone back to his office, looking worried. Ryan’s men kept her well-supplied with tea and when one of them gestured to the professor and raised his eyebrows, Claudia nodded.

She walked over to Nick and handed him the hot drink. “Here you are.”

He smiled. His hair was practically standing on end from the light breeze blowing over the lake and he looked cold. “Thanks very much.”

“Thinking about Helen?” Claudia hazarded, wondering whether she stood any chance of drawing him out on the subject of his missing wife. Stephen’s comments when he’d been brought out of the tunnels after his brush with the giant centipede still intrigued her, and she couldn’t shake off the impression that both men knew more than they were letting on.

“How did you know that?”

“Highly trained civil servant,” she said, as lightly as she could manage, half-surprised that he hadn’t denied it. “We’re famous for our emotional empathy.”

“Whatever I’m doing, she’s always there. She never really goes away.”

“Strange. Of all the people in the world to hallucinate, Stephen chose Helen.” The casually delivered words were met with silence and Claudia began to wonder what it would take to get the truth out of Nick. They couldn’t afford secrets on the team, not when lives were at stake.

“Steam.” The abrupt change of subject took her by surprise. Nick had become more animated, pointing enthusiastically across the surface of the water. “Don’t you see? The tide must be coming in, bringing in warmer water from the other side. The steam is telling us exactly where the anomaly is!”

* * * * *

Claudia watched the soldiers preparing to take boats containing the diving team out onto the water. Nick and Stephen were kitted out in dry-suits and one of the Special Forces team was already in one of the inflatable boats, methodically carrying out checks on his equipment.

He was one of the older members of the team, a quietly-spoken man in his late 30s with close-cropped ginger hair and a very broad North Yorkshire accent. The man was an experienced diver. His name was Frank Morris. He had a wife called Karen and two young children, a boy called Davey and a little girl, only nine months old, called Ellie. He’d shown Claudia a picture of the three of them that he always carried around with him.

Claudia watched Nick and Stephen making their final preparations before getting into the boat. She walked up to Nick’s side and commented quietly, “I suppose there’s no point in asking you not to go down as well.”

He smiled. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I’m not,” she responded, wholly untruthfully, even though she was actually worried sick about all three of them, but there was no way she was revealing that fact to Nick Cutter, or anyone else for that matter – apart from Ryan. “I’m just thinking about all the paperwork I’ll have to do if you drown. No idea how many forms I’ll have to fill in.” She paused and then added, “What if you’re right and the creature’s still down there?”

“We’ll find it. All right?”

His words brought her little comfort. It was anything but all right, but she knew perfectly well Nick wouldn’t listen to her reservations. She was still struggling to see what they would gain from this dive, while Nick was adamant that they needed information that could only be gained by a closer examination of the anomaly. What sort of information hadn’t been made clear as Nick Cutter was all too accomplished at not answering straight questions.

* * * * *

Claudia checked her watch anxiously. “They should have been back by now, shouldn’t they?”

“Yes.”

His answer caught her like a fist in the guts even though she’d been half-expecting it. Ryan clearly wasn’t the sort of man to sugar-coat anything and she liked that about him. They both had jobs to do and she couldn’t do hers unless she could rely on him to tell her the absolute truth.

“How long have they got before they run out of air?”

“I’ve got no bloody idea,” Ryan said quietly. “I don’t know what depth they’ve gone to or how hard they’ve been breathing. It all makes a difference. But we agreed no more than 30 minutes and they’ve already exceeded that.”

She stuffed her hands into her pockets and sunk her chin into the soft folds of her favourite purple scarf, but Claudia knew it wasn’t the chill wind blowing across the lake that had made her shiver. She’d had a bad feeling about this dive from the minute Nick had suggested it and she now wished that she’d taken a firmer line with their excitable consultant.

* * * * *

At the end of the longest day Claudia could ever remember enduring, she pushed the door to her flat open and tossed her keys onto the table in the hall. “Thanks for the lift home, Tom. Can I offer you a drink?”

When they’d finally left the Home Office Claudia hadn’t felt in any fit state to brave the tube, and driving would simply have been monumentally stupid.

He hesitated for a moment then nodded. “Thanks. Better make it coffee.”

She kicked off her shoes and hung up her coat and purple scarf. In spite of the over-heated atmosphere of the Home Office, Claudia still felt cold and was glad of the warmth in her flat. “You’re not the only one with a spare room, you know. Would you prefer a beer?”

His smile was all the answer Claudia needed. She poured a beer for him and set another bottle on the coffee table, knowing the first wouldn’t last long. Alongside it was a bottle of red wine for herself. Claudia didn’t normally take refuge in alcohol but after the day they’d had, she was prepared to make an exception.

Frank Morris, the Special Forces diver, had unaccountably gone through the anomaly in the reservoir and had died. She’d seen Abby and Connor attacked by a something that looked like the bastard child of a crocodile and a killer whale but she’d had been too far away to help them. Hasty improvisation on Connor’s part had saved their lives and before the soldiers could open fire, the beast had retreated. They’d barely finished poring over maps back at the Home Office when, as Nick had predicted, another anomaly had appeared on what he was calling a temporal fault line, this time in the cellar of a private house, spitting out something that looked like a prehistoric cormorant with a very nasty attitude, followed later by the body of the dead diver.

Much against Claudia’s better judgment, Lester had agreed to Nick taking a trip through the anomaly by himself to talk to his wife – or should that be ex-wife? She didn’t know and frankly, she didn’t care. Unsurprisingly, that expedition had nearly ended in disaster as well, with Nick barely making it back alive. But as a result of a further trip into the past by a hastily co-opted team of SBS divers helicoptered in from Poole, they now had Helen Cutter in custody.

Ryan had advised against any attempt to question her immediately and Claudia had agreed, although no doubt for different reasons. They’d all been exhausted and on edge – even Lester, although as ever he’d done a good job of covering up any suggestion of human frailty under his usual veneer of sarcasm. Nick had been furious at their plan to keep Helen in custody overnight but for once Claudia hadn’t cared. He was too quick to keep secrets and that concerned her. They needed to work as a team if they were to stand any chance of containing the threat posed by the anomalies, but Nick didn’t seem to be much of a team player.

The first bottle of beer and her first two glasses of wine disappeared in silence. By the third glass, Claudia had tucked her feet up underneath her on the sofa and anger was beginning to give way to sadness. Another man on Ryan’s team had died. A man that she’d started to get to know. She even knew what his wife and children looked like.

“Have you spoken to Sarah Morris?” she asked, breaking the silence.

Ryan nodded. “The major was already up in Catterick. He went over to see her to break the news. I spoke to Sarah while you were in with Lester and Cutter. Her parents are with her now.”

Claudia didn’t ask how she was. The answer to that was obvious. Sarah Morris’s husband was dead. She’d be in pieces, like anyone who’d lost a husband or a loved one. Like the girlfriend of the dead life-guard. The only good thing to come out of the day was that by the time she’d arrived back at the Home Office from the reservoir, Lester had arranged for the woman’s release in spite of his callous words earlier that day. She had no idea what strings he’d had to pull to achieve that result and she hadn’t asked. The important thing was that the woman was now no longer a suspect in her boyfriend’s murder.

“Does it get any easier, Tom?” The question was out before she could bite it back and with it came silent tears that she simply allowed to course down her cheeks. A good man had died that day. Two good men, to be precise. She wasn’t ashamed to grieve for them.

“No.”

She smiled through her tears. “Thanks for not lying to me.”

Beer glass in hand, Ryan came over to sit next to her on the sofa. She leaned against him, her head on his shoulder, glad of the contact. He finished his drink and slipped one arm around her.

“Lying’s not a good basis for teamwork,” he said, in an echo of her recent thoughts. “The professor wasn’t a happy bunny with us, was he?”

“No, but what the hell does he expect us to do, Tom? I very much doubt that she would have responded to an invitation to afternoon tea. She’s been gone for eight and yet she doesn’t seem to have exactly rushed back into her grieving spouse’s arms. Stephen saw her in the tunnels, I’m certain of it, but neither of them was willing to talk about it. I don’t know where I stand with them, and I don’t like it.”

Ryan put his glass down on the table and drew her into his arms. She snuggled against him, glad of his presence and quiet, solid dependability. They finished their drinks in comfortable silence. Finally, Claudia couldn’t hold back her yawns any longer. It was nearly 1.30am and they both urgently needed sleep. Ryan tidied up the bottles and glasses while she found him a spare toothbrush.

She paused in the doorway to her bedroom and smiled at him. “Thank you, Tom. Today would have been a lot harder without you.”

He brushed a stray lock of hair away from her face and his fingers lingered for a moment against her cheek. Claudia wondered if it was going to turn into one of those awkward moments where no one quite wanted to make the first move, but then Ryan closed the distance between them and his lips brushed softly against hers.

The kiss was light and undemanding, giving her plenty of opportunity to break it off. Instead, she slipped her arms around his waist and opened her mouth to him. When they finally drew apart, Ryan smiled and rested his forehead against hers for a moment.

Neither of them spoke and she was glad that he made no attempt to apologise for the kiss. When they finally broke apart, he ran the backs of his fingers gently down her cheek. She caught his hand in hers and squeezed it. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she already felt light-headed with exhaustion, Claudia would have been tempted to take things further, but even the ever-stoic Ryan looked tired.

She kissed him on the lips again. “Let me cook you a meal tomorrow night,” she offered.

He smiled. “Thanks. I’d like that.”

As Claudia prepared for bed she wondered what her chances were of getting to the end of a working day without having to mourn another death.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

freddiejoey.livejournal.com

Well, I'm going to squee very loudly over this fic.

Great plot development - and fabulous dialogue, no matter where it came from.

From:

Fic, Fault Lines, Claudia/Ryan, Team, 15

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