Neo spent the rest of the afternoon, after leaving the Phillips' house, lost in thought. There were just so many parts to what was happening that bothered him. The unexplained disappearance of the Bennett's, Jane Bennett's connection to a twenty-year-old murder case that happened at the exact place she and her family disappeared, the coverup by Palmer and her associates, and now a glass decanter that had seemingly vanished.

The case unsettled him, an experience he wasn't used to feeling. He'd agonised over what little the reports had to say, but the investigation had been flawed from the start. Palmer's involvement only added to the issue.

Neo flipped his pad over and stared at the cover. It was boring and grey, nothing fancy and nothing that could distract him from his thoughts.

His kids had left an hour ago with Samira, and that had left him out of sorts. The doorbell ringing brought him back to the now, and he placed his pad on a neat pile of other items related to the case. He'd take them back to his study later.

Charlie stood on his doorstep, a brown paper bag dangling from her fingers.

'You sure it's okay to leave my car here? You're already in enough trouble with Rosy as it is.' She inclined her head towards her beat up jeep.

Neo waved off her concerns and opened the door wider to let her in.

'My neighbours left for Tenerife yesterday, so there's no one to tell her unless someone drives by the road.' And considering Neo and his kids lived in a dead-end street, that seemed unlikely.

Charlie shrugged off her coat and placed her trainers by the door.

'Well I got the Chinese so let's get this pity party started.' She smiled to make a joke out of her words, but Neo could tell she'd been crying. It left a nagging pain in his stomach to see her so much more diminished compared to the woman he'd grown to know as Charlotte Hoggins.

'You don't like to show you're hurting, do you?' Neo asked, taking the food bag from her, his fingers grazing her own for a fraction of a second longer than he should have.

Charlie's eyes flashed to his, and he watched as she swallowed.

'Let's just say I never saw the point. Crying and moaning won't do anything. It won't bring them back or give me answers. I should focus on the things I can change, not on ghosts.'

She rendered Neo speechless. He'd been around numerous victims in his time with the force, but he'd never met one quite like Charlie, and something told him he never would. She was brave, clever, and undeniably a force to be reckoned with, which only made this much sadder side harder to bear.

'Let's eat this in the living room. Good takeout should always be eaten on your lap, anyway,' Neo said in response, not sure what else he could say. Nothing would take away her pain. But there had to be a way for him to ease it.

He watched her as he dished out the contents of the bag onto the coffee table. He'd already had it set up for them, but as he looked at it, he wondered whether it was enough. Samira had always needed more. A five course dinner and a shopping spree was the way she wanted to be cheered up. Somehow, a greasy Chinese eaten off a battered coffee table didn't quite live up to his expectations.

'I should have done this differently,' he muttered, making Charlie look at him in bewilderment.

'Done what differently?'

Neo sat heavily beside her, leaving the two plates on the table. 'Tonight, I should have done more. I wanted you to have company, so that you didn't dwell on your thoughts, but I should have taken you somewhere, somewhere away from Marton.'

Charlie placed a hand on his arm. 'I've been running from Marton since I was a teenager, maybe I'm tired of running. Maybe I'm in the place I need to be, somewhere I want to be.'

Neo's gaze focused on Charlie's lips, and he lent forward. He watched her eyes flutter shut just as their lips touched.

The kiss started small, but quickly grew as they each discovered something about the other person. Neo's hand travelled to Charlie's waist whilst hers wrapped around his neck.

Charlie broke away from him, both of them panting.

'Are you sure about this?' she asked him.

He cupped her cheek and placed a brief kiss on her lips.

'I think I should be asking you that. I don't want you to think I'm taking advantage of you,' Neo said. He'd planned for them to have a pleasant night, some food, maybe a Netflix show. He'd never intended to take her to bed.

Charlie laughed. 'We're both adults, Neo, and besides, I want this. I want you.'

'I want you too,' Neo assured her, for the first time, wording the feelings he hadn't been able to shake ever since he'd seen Charlie at the station.

Neo took her hand and led her up the stairs towards his bedroom. For a fleeting moment, he wondered whether this was the best decision for the case, but then he shook the thought away. His life had always been about the job, but now he wanted something different. He wanted to get to know the feisty woman that stirred something inside of him.

Charlie closed the door behind herself. 'Well, Chief, what have you got in mind.' She smirked up at him before their lips connected again and they tumbled to the bed in a mess of limbs.

                                                                                      ***

Barry stared at the screen, too absorbed to notice the man standing in his doorway.

'Knock, knock.'

The voice interrupted Barry's thoughts, and he looked up into the wide smile of Colin, a CSI from the Shrewsbury team. Usually, the sight of the young, fit CSI would be enough to put a smile on Barry's face, but today wasn't one of those days.

Colin held up a paper bag and a coffee, which even in Barry's tired state, he recognised.

'What do you want, Colin?' Barry tried to say jokingly, but it just came out sounding exhausted.

'Mind if I use some of your equipment?' Whilst the Crime Scene Investigation lab had everything a CSI could want, there were just a few things that a hospital had that Colin couldn't get. Typically, it was the larger, more expensive equipment which his superiors wouldn't fork out on, no matter how much he pushed.

Barry waved his hand. 'Carry on.'

Colin frowned at Barry's haggard face but said nothing as he placed the peace offering on his desk and left.

Barry watched the man's pert bottom as Colin waltzed into his lab, ignoring the cadavers stretched out on the stone slab. Both were too used to bodies to care about the covered corpse just feet away from them.

He leaned forward and went straight for the heady smelling coffee. He took off the lid and breathed deeply. Even just the scent filled him with warmth. Two shots of caffeine with a mix of caramel, his preferred drink that somehow the CSI had committed to memory.

With the buzz of coffee in his system, he finished the last of his reports whilst he waited for the one that was really on his mind. As the minutes ticked by, he nibbled at the carrot cake Colin had brought him and pulled the Felton Pond murder case in front of him.

The more he read the pathologists' report, the more he was disgusted by the findings. His low grumblings even brought him to Colin's attention.

'Someone's got a bee in his bonnet. What's got you so worked up?' Colin sat down in the chair opposite Barry. His test still had another twenty minutes to process, and spending some time with the handsome pathologist seemed a good way to kill time.

Barry took off his glasses and cleaned them. 'My assistant is on her honeymoon, so I'm handling the case loads alone until she gets back. I've got the coroner's office breathing down my neck for results. And now Neo has me looking into this.' Neo pointed to the report, glaring at where it lay on his desk. Unassuming and bland, and yet it boiled his blood.

'Neo Denzel? The DCI at Marton?' Colin knew he and Barry were close. He'd sometimes wondered if the two were more than just friends.

'The one and only,' Barry mumbled.

'Would this have to do with the missing family?'

Barry nodded. 'I'm guessing you're involved with the case?' As the lead CSI, it would be unusual for Colin not to be.

'Yeah, not that I've been much help to him. I'm backed up with cases myself at the moment, bloody holiday cover, it'll be another few days before his evidence gets processed.'

The Shrewsbury CSI team was only small, so it wasn't surprising that a few holidays by staff members could cripple it, it was another thing that Colin's superiors liked to ignore. An additional team member would reduce the budget, which was already stretched enough. Instead, they expected his team to work short most of the time.

They were just lucky that Colin was an exceptionally organised man, so getting the most out of his limited team came easily. Though that didn't mean that Colin's personal life was unaffected. He hadn't had a date in 6 months.

'So what's got you so ticked off in that report?' Colin nodded to the folded notes.

Barry finished his coffee, wishing that the cup could be bottomless. He had at least another three hours of work ahead of him. He'd be lucky to get home before 10pm.

'It's just shoddy work. Someone straight out of school must have compiled it, and the supervising pathologist hasn't signed it off. Pages from the report are even missing,' Barry groaned. It had been a hard read. He'd tried to locate where the junior pathologist was, but the lad had left the force a year after the report was dated.

'Missing? Deliberately?' Colin queried, but Barry shook his head.

'All the reports were digitised, so it's more likely that it went missing in transit, but I have to wait until I have clearance.' He rolled his eyes. The red tape was one of things he really hated about his job.

Colin smirked and walked around the desk, wiggling his fingers. 'Good thing for you, you have a friend with ample clearance.'

He leaned over and brought up his police page and logged in, scrolling through the options until he found the report they needed.

'Voila,' he announced, stepping back for Barry to see the screen.

'Why didn't I think of this before?' He facepalmed.

'Not just a pretty face, see?' Colin winked at him.

'Oh, I don't know about that,' Barry teased before focusing on the report.

He flicked through the pages his report was missing, his smile slipping as he read the details.

Colin could feel the atmosphere in the room change and judging from the thunder clouds rolling across Barry's face; the report held nothing good.

'Fuck,' Barry exclaimed. He pushed away from his desk and started pacing.

'Not what you were expecting?'

'That junior pathologist was a complete idiot!' raged Barry. 'There were traces of mifepristone and misoprostol in Lucy Bennett's system when she died. The bloody idiot noted it and the fact she was on her period, but he didn't connect the dots.'

'Hold on, mifepristone and misoprostol? What did the poor lad miss?' Colin queried.

Barry stopped pacing, forgetting that he was talking to a CSI and not another pathologist. Colin's work was more about analysing blood splatter and footprints.

'Mifepristone and misoprostol are used to cause a medically induced abortion.'

Silence followed Barry's words whilst Colin's eyebrows shot up into his hairline.

'How could the pathologist have missed that?'

Barry shrugged. 'He was inexperienced. Not to mention the body had been in the Pond for two weeks when they found her. It would have been impossible to do a conclusive HCG test on the girl's urine to confirm the pregnancy. He probably just wrote the results off.'

'Can you tell when she took the drugs?'

'Not accurately, but considering she was bleeding. It's likely that she took the drugs within seven days of her death.' Barry rubbed at his clean-shaven jaw.

'What are you going to do now?' asked Colin.

Barry printed the report off and added it to his file.

'I'm calling Neo, a possible pregnancy changes things. Maybe it'll even help him in his missing persons' case.'