A/N: This is something I've been planning for a while now, but changed slightly when I moved to Ireland. It's set in Series 4, after Jack and Sandra's crash, but before Sandra finds out anything about her father.

It might be a little bit of a slow burner, and the case is the key to the rest of the story.

Sarah x

"Strickland wants us to re-investigate this case," Sandra informed her team, pinning the crime scene photos and family photos provided onto the whiteboard. "Linda and Calvin Johnson, March 13th, 1996. Stabbed to death-"

"On the way home from a school football game. Calvin was their best defender," Brian interjected, standing up to get a better look at the photographs of an athletic-looking young boy, his blonde, blue-eyed teenage sister, and their parents behind them, looking nothing short of ecstatic. "Very promising young lad."

"Exactly," Sandra confirmed. "Now, the sister, Samantha, and her dad, Robert, were up in Edinburgh for a half-marathon. They'd been training for months. Woman and her child, stabbed to death near a school – it should have been headline news, but-"

Gerry ran his hand over his face. "Dunblane massacre," he sighed. Sandra nodded. "Happened that morning. It was all anyone was talking about."

"Yeah," she murmured. "So, anyway, the original investigating team never got to the bottom of it. Can't really blame them – they had next to nothing in the way of forensics."

Jack spoke for the first time, and he hadn't gone in the direction she had expected. "Wasn't Samantha adopted as a baby? When Linda and Robert thought they couldn't have children? And then, six years later, Calvin comes along, their little miracle?"

Sandra nodded yet again. "Yeah, they told her when she turned sixteen. I know what you're getting at, Jack," she added, her eyebrow slightly raised. "I don't think Samantha had anything to do with it. She loved her mum and brother to the ends of the Earth. Every officer on the original case said so. And she was up in Scotland when it happened, anyway." She sat down next to Gerry, and sighed as she glanced across the board once more. "I think we should make a public appeal for witnesses. We'll have the clothes and retested and the post-mortems reviewed. Gerry, I want you to come with me to speak to the dad and sister. Jack, talk to Calvin's teachers, see if there was anything untoward they remembered that day. Brian, do the same with any friends of Linda's you can find in the case file," delegated Sandra.

In all honesty, Sandra didn't know why she chose to pair herself with Gerry for this case. She knew he would only wind her up in the end, but she also knew she felt comfortable with him, despite how infuriating he was capable of being. He was always honest with her, but she didn't always like that; sometimes she would rather kill him than listen to the truth he told her. There was just something about this case that made her feel she ought to have him by her side.

She didn't like investigating child murders – none of the team did – but there was something she could not put her finger on that set her teeth on edge about this one.

Once they were in the car, Gerry asked her, "What else do we know about all this?"

"Well, Robert and Samantha upped sticks and moved to Ireland. They came back to London last summer," she told him what Strickland had told her earlier this morning. "Samantha's living in Croydon now, with her husband and little boy. Robert lives in Lewisham."

She said nothing else, mostly because there was nothing else she could tell him at this point. "What's wrong with you, Sandra?" asked Gerry. She turned her head to glance at him, somewhat alarmed that he could see that she wasn't feeling her normal self. "You look like you're waiting for a bomb to explode in your hands."

She focused on the road for a moment, eventually replying, "I just don't like these cases. You know that."

"You've never looked like this before," he commented persistently.

"Christ!" she exclaimed in irritation. "You're like a bloody dog with a bone, Gerry! I'm fine! I just want to catch the bastard who did it and give the family some answers. Is that such an awful thing?!"

She felt Gerry's stare burning into her. "Alright, keep your hair on!" Sandra did not talk back to him, nor did she want to. How could she tell him what was wrong when she couldn't even figure it out herself? "You know when you're adopted?" Gerry asked.

"Hmm," Sandra acknowledged, barely listening to him.

"Well, do you have your original birth certificate as well, or just your adoption certificate?"

"Both, if you're adopted and you get access to your original birth certificate. Though the adoption certificate looks exactly like the birth certificate anyway, so there's no way of knowing unless someone decides to tell you. Samantha's adoption certificate will have looked just like Calvin's birth certificate, but it's filed in a different place. Even though the adoption certificate is her birth certificate for all legal intents and purposes, her original birth certificate – if her birth mother registered her before giving her up – still exists. So if she was registered by her biological mother, and she wanted to find out who that was, she could, because the record will still exist," she finished explaining, although feeling she had not done so very clearly.

Again, she felt Gerry's gaze eating through her. "How do you know so much about it?" he demanded suspiciously.

"Old case I worked on years ago," she shrugged, quickly getting rid of his question. "We're here," she added, nodding towards a house to their left as she slowed the car to a halt in a parking space. "Try and be tactful, Gerry."

"I'm always tactful!" he defensively exclaimed. "When am I not tactful?!"

Sandra snorted, ringing the door bell. She found herself telling him, "I'd write you a list but I'd be writing all year."

A young woman opened the door, a young boy held to her hip, a smile upon her face. Her thick blonde hair was tied back into the messiest of buns and she was obviously halfway through doing her make up – there was a foundation bottle and brush in the hand not supporting her son. "Hi," she smiled. "Can I help?"

"Who's there, Sammy?!" called a man, whose Irish accent surprised Sandra more than it should have. "If it's your man next door wanting to borrow my tools again, tell him to fu-" he stopped when he saw who was at the door from the end of the hallway. "Sorry 'bout that," he grinned.

Sandra allowed a small smile at the young family, seeing nothing but sheepish grins in return. "I'm Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman; this is my colleague, Gerry Standing. We're re-opening the investigation into the deaths of Linda and Calvin Johnson."

She watched with dismay as the light in Samantha's bright blue eyes faded and her wide smile faltered at the mention of her mother and brother's murders. "Come in," she beckoned them, and Sandra watched as she fixed the smile back onto her face. "It's been a long time since anybody talked about that," she sighed, passing her son to her husband.

"Come on, Jamie," grinned the Irishman, though Sandra could see he was worried. "Let's go and do a fry up. God knows I need one after that shift! You know, I'm just after gettin' a smack to the face?! Poor Daddy, eh?!" The child giggled at his father's imitation of the punch in the face he had received. "Charmin', Jamie-boy. Just charmin'. You're gas, you know that?"

There was the sound of Gerry's low chuckle; Sandra briefly wondered if that was how he had been with his children when they had been babies. Had he been the comical dad, always the good guy?

Sandra looked at Samantha, who was busying herself with finishing her make up. "Sorry about this, but I'm heading out soon," she apologised, looking over her small mirror at them. "What do you want to know?"

Gerry looked at Sandra, and she knew what he was thinking: why wasn't Samantha more upset than this?

"We want to know what you can remember about the day your mum and brother died," Sandra gently said. "Anything. Even the smallest, inconsequential detail might be a clue."

Samantha bitterly laughed at Sandra's words, leaving the older woman taken aback. "I wasn't even here, detective. I was up in Edinburgh with my dad. We're in the hotel room, watching the news, hearing all about that awful shooting in Dunblane, and my dad gets a call to say Mum and Cal are dead. That is literally all I know. Nobody told me anything else."

"You didn't find anything out afterwards?" Gerry persevered, obviously hoping the eleven intervening years had jogged her memory.

"No," Samantha firmly replied. "I'm sorry. I've tried and tried for years to work out what happened, who killed them, but I don't know anything except that they were murdered on a residential street," she continued, tears welling up in her bright, piercing eyes. "I wish I could help you, Mr. Standing, but I can't. You could ask my dad, though. He might have remembered something." Her voice was rising as she became more upset, causing her husband to come back to the doorway to watch them in utter silence, his young son still pinned to his side with one arm.

Samantha was telling the truth; her luminous blue eyes were burning with the desire to be helpful, and the frustration that she couldn't tell them anything useful. "It's alright," Sandra assured her, acutely conscious of the surprised look Gerry was shooting her. She reached out and grasped Samantha's hand reassuringly; it wasn't her 'normal' behaviour, but she felt like Samantha needed it. "We'll talk to your dad, anyway. Can you think of anyone else your mum was close to?"

"My aunt, Cassandra," Samantha said. "Last I heard, she was over in Wandsworth, but I've not seen her since the funeral. The last time I saw her, she was trying to tell me something, but my dad interrupted her. Never did get to know what she wanted to get out her system," she wistfully sighed.

"OK," Sandra smiled. "Thanks. We'll leave you to it," she added, nodding her head towards the make up in Samantha's hands.

Samantha showed them out, and as soon as the door was closed behind them, Gerry rounded on her. Sandra should have expected it, but she was caught off-guard. "When did you become Mother Theresa?"

Sandra looked at her car to avoid his gaze; she was not able to tell him what she felt, because she was unsure of it herself. But cogs were turning in her head already. Why had Samantha's aunt not spoken to her niece in eleven years, particularly after the trauma of losing half her family? Why had Robert taken Samantha to Ireland, only to return to London once she was married with a child?

"Sandra, why didn't you push her?" Gerry demanded. "She was sixteen when it happened. She was old enough to know things. You didn't ask where she was going today, or where she works, or what her father's doing now. You didn't even ask the husband's name. How do we know she ain't lying?"

He had a point, in retrospect. She had neglected to press for details about her time in Ireland, or her current life. And, if he had been the one to be so off his game, she would have been ripping strips off him right now. He was not out of his rights to want to know what she had been thinking, even if she was his superior.

Sandra put her seatbelt on and started the engine. "I just know. Call it my instinct," she told him, recalling an old argument they had once had over a case left unsolved on a retired detective's instinct. "Yes, Gerry," she added, seeing his surprised expression when she glanced around to pull out onto the road safely. "I still have one."

Please feel free to review and tell me what you think!
Sarah x