Maudslay

[almh]

Spoilers for series 6 and 8.

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She enters the restaurant, and after days of no food, she pays little attention to the menu. Half at random she picks a meal, but she's on her guard with regards to Sholto, so the name at the top of the menu slips by her. It's only later when she's leaving the restaurant, having left Sholto behind, no closer to finding Zaf, that she turns round and looks at the name of the restaurant. "The Maudslay." She double took, staring at the name as though it was a figment of her imagination. It wasn't. She shook it off as a mere coincidence, and continued back to the Grid.

It's only when she's walking away from her own funeral that she starts to think back about the name of the restaurant. Maudslay. Like Maudsley, the surname of the man involved in the Cotterdam operation, the one where Ruth died. The operation where Ros betrayed her, and the team. She betrayed the team by agreeing to Sholto's offer of co-operation at the Maudsley restaurant. Now she was dead. She wasn't a superstitious person by nature, abhorred those who were, but as she slept the voice inside her head quietly whispered to her, words of revenge, justice, betrayal, Maudsley, death and karma.

Two years later and she's back on the Grid, as is Ruth. Neither were as dead as their funerals seemed to suggest. They've both changed, they'd both had to change. There was no point dwelling on the past though, no point overanalysing things that had no connection, attaching bad luck to a name.

"Ros? Tariq and I are going to the Maudsley, it's a new pub, coming?" Her stomach filled with dread.

"No, sorry, busy," she said as nonchalantly as she could. She wasn't superstitious, never was. She was just busy.