As usual, it was pouring with rain as I was bundled out of the car and into the gutter. Lying there on my back, I only half-heard the car door slam shut as it sped away, but then I was only half-conscious anyway. With nothing more urgent to do, I lay in the street for a while, my face gently massaged by the light pattering of the rain, lost in the waves of amnesia flowing across my mind.

A few more cars rumbled by before I finally thought about getting up, though when I tried to move I fell painfully back to the ground. Every nerve and muscle in my body felt as though it had been taken out, squeezed, stretched, tied in a knot and then forced back into place. I took a deep breath before rolling onto my side, then I reached one hand up onto the pavement and used it to push myself up onto my knees.

I realised my memory was still firing a lot of blanks, and I wasn’t quite sure who I was, but right now standing up straight and not getting run over seemed to be a more important priority. As if to prove this point, a business class Mercedes sped past me, hitting a water-filled dip in the road next to me and showering me with ice-cold, slightly scummy, freezing cold rainwater. Now felt like a good time to stop being an extra in a George A. Romero movie and rejoin the land of the living.

I put one hand to the side of my head that hurt the most and groggily got to my feet. It took about two seconds for me to work out that some evil physics demon had stolen my sense of balance, but luckily there was a lamppost nearby for me to rest against.

Unfortunately, it was my head that found this out first, but the pain was so bad already I didn’t feel it that much.

I looked up and around slowly – the noise of the city and its bright neon lights glaring on and off all around me was battering my already fragile senses even more. I appeared to be stood in the middle of a typical city street, tough which city I had no idea. The light drizzle of rain had prompted a forest of umbrellas, raincoats and newspapers held over heads, and all around various faceless citizens hurried to find shelter from the downpour. Looking at some of the faces gave me no more clues as to where I was – every city round the world held such a multitude of different nationalities these days, I could just as easily be in Bangkok as in Bognor.

Large road sweepers and buses rumbled past me, the sparks flying from their electric engines spattering over the pavement as I pondered my next move. I still couldn’t remember my name, but hopefully I had some form of identification somewhere on me. I glanced round at the various stores and buildings either side of me, looking for somewhere to take shelter while I patted the pockets of my mud-stained red leather jacket, trying to find a wallet. The "Blue Dragon" Chinese takeaway was closet to me, the raised voices of the dissatisfied customers sounding almost as garbled as the bastardised Chinese the employees were throwing back at them.

To the left of that was a modern fashion store specialising in "street" clothing, all garish neon plastic pads and expensive, flimsy fabrics. To the right stood a boarded-up bar, with a sign rattling in the rain on the front reading "Closed after the March Alcopop Riots." My left hand found a tattered brown wallet in the pocket of my jacket, and I took it out for a closer look.

"Natasha. Natasha Tyreen." A citizen’s I.D. card, sheathed in dog-eared and chewed plastic, printed my names in official-looking bold black letters, next to a passport sized photo of me, though the girl in the photo was almost unrecognisable without several layers of mud and bruises like the ones currently covering my face. Under "Occupation" it read "Private Investigator," which is not really the kind of wake-up call you need when your head hurt like mine. I checked out the rest of the wallet, but it was cleaned out – no money, no recognisable credit cards that could be accepted in hundreds of cities around the world, not even the toy plastic Gold Card I remembered having in there. It’s funny the sorts of things your mind remembers when it’s trying to work out who you are and why you should have this club-shaped bruise on the side of your head.

A crumpled piece of paper had a few phone numbers scribbled onto it, alongside a couple of name. Well, they were leads if nothing else. I needed to know what I was doing here pretty soon, just as soon as I worked out for definite where "here" was. My tights were laddered and dirty, my skirt ruffled and coated with mud, and my boots covered with god only knows what I’d collected from the gutter. I ruffled up my hair in a vain attempt to stop looking like a manhandled hooker and looked at the I.D. again – salvation! It listed my address. Apparently I worked at 1280 Madison Street, which made the country I was in the good old United Kingdom. A spark seemed to light up my memory like a flare gun fired into a black hole at this news, so I headed for a nearby takeaway to see if they could direct me there.

A seedy looking guy in a dark brown Mac walked away from the counter of what seemed to be the Chinese equivalent of a motorway café as I approached, a suspicious-looking package tucked under his arm. I placed both my hands on the counter, seconds later wishing I’d been wearing my gloves as I did so, and called the proprietor over.

"Hey Charlie, where do I find Madison Street?" The wizened old guy serving there wandered over, beat away some bugs from the innumerable bowls of steaming food beneath the glass counter with a filthy towel, and pushed his small, gold-rimmed spectacles up his nose before squinting critically at me.

"You long way from there! Need to take subway, two blocks that way!" he shouted, jabbing down the rain-soaked street with a nicotine-stained index finger. "Take you ten minute to walk, twenty on train, be there in forty minutes." I looked down the road in the direction he had pointed. Looking up into the distance, over the heads of the milling crowds of people and towards the general area I was headed, I was dismayed to see the state of the buildings gradually decreasing the further away I moved from my current position. Madison Street did not look like it was in a nice, cosy corporate suburbia, put it that way.

"Almost lunchtime!" yelled the shopkeeper, jolting me out of my reflections. A large neon clock attached to the side of a shopping centre down the street told me it was about 8:30 in the evening. I assumed the guy was operating on Chinese time and let him continue. "Why not take something to eat? Special today, 10% off for all pretty young Western girls!" He leered at me with what I assumed to be his best Cary Grant smile. I batted my eyelids at him and politely declined, before getting the heck out of there before he had chance to set something from his stand on me.

I prefer my food to stop moving when it gets cooked, which obviously put me outside the hygiene standard of that place. Wandering around to try and find some kind of street map, I noticed the pounding in my head getting worse. I rooted around in the pockets of my jacket for something that could help, and came across a pair of sunglasses. Despite looking like a rockstar going incognito by putting them on at this time of the night, they nevertheless helped and I was able to head for the train station with a slightly clearer head.

The streets were packed with people, both on the pavements and moving in and out of the many stores that lined my route to the station. As the buzzing, headache-induced noises in my ear calmed down, the noises of the city rose up to fill the space instead – arguments from the shops as angry customers bargained with shifty shopkeepers, advertisements, both posters and large videoboards latched onto the sides of the larger buildings, broadcasting their hyper-consumerist messages tirelessly, hour after hour. My brain, still trying to kickstart the memory, dimly recalled a magazine article I’d read which said that recent research into subliminal advertising, and its use by the big corporations, had failed to prove they were using it at all, but in my current state I was being hit by successive urges to drink soft drinks, shop at Gap and buy toilet roll.

I looked up as a gyro car sped overhead, and took a perspective of the high-rise buildings and tower blocks looming all around me. Huge advertising billboards several stories high decorated the sides of some, and giant neon letters spelling out the names of international companies glared down at me like disapproving angels’ eyes. Businesses like these had come to dominate the world, that is the prosperous side of it I was allowed into occasionally. The only gods I pray to are money and chocolate, though to me those were just as important as whatever corporate jargon buzzword ideals those suits up there slaved away for day and night.

At last I reached the train station, an old-fashioned 1950s style building that seemed to have had a grimy, all plastic moulded interior glued directly inside it. I made my way down the steps, trying not to slip on the pools of beer and whatever else, realising as I wandered onto the stuffy, dimly lit platform that I was still on a big zero in the cashflow department. I looked around for a way to get enough cash to get a train ticket home that didn’t involve sex or mugging someone, finally seeing my answer huddled on the ground before me with a blanket wrapped round it.

A homeless guy, clad in navy blue dirt-stained rags with a half-full pot of change in front of him glanced up at me as I passed. The glaring off-yellow neon lighting flickered around him, making him look like he’d been sucked straight out of a Picasso painting and stuck here for dramatic effect. I thought briefly about robbing him, before deciding better of it and heading for the ticket booth. Perhaps I can get credit, I thought.

I weaved my way through the crowds of shuffling businessmen and pasty-faced teenagers in baggy clothes to reach the ticket sales booth. The young girl behind it glanced up at me with almost offensive disinterest, before speaking with a voice that resembled a werewolf scarping its nails down a rusty blackboard.

"Destination?" She blinked once and chewed her gum dismissively, reminding me of a cow in a field with a really busy day of chewing ahead of him.

"Hi there. How much for a one way pass to Madison Street?" I asked with a smile, removing my shades in an attempt to look at least vaguely wealthy.

"Six pounds fifty," she replied.

"Really? Right…listen, I’ll be back in just a moment, okay? Will the train be leaving soon?"

"In about five minutes," she said, turning to the suit behind me and beginning the same bored litany once more. I walked away from her booth and back over towards the homeless guy. I didn’t much like the plan that was forming in my head, but I didn’t have a better one at the moment.

I knelt down in front of him, trying not to notice the heavy, vinegar-like odour hanging around him, and spoke.

"Been a good day?" I asked chirpily, seeing that even the muck-coated floor tiles around him seemed offended by his presence.

"Mmfpt. Been a phew peeple here today.." he said, the words struggling to leave his throat like trapped passengers on a sinking cruise liner. The industrial strength meths he’d been drinking wafted my face, making me feel queasy. At least he was drunk. That would make this easier.

"What’s your name?" I said.

"Richard. Rich-Ri-Ricky! Ricky, ma’am. Yessir, Ricky." He stammered.

"Listen, Ricky, I need to ask a big favour of you. If I come back here tomorrow with some cash for you, do you promise you’ll be here to get it?"

At the mention of the magic word "cash," his eyes lit up through the haze of alcohol and he grinned his half-toothed smile.

"Uh, yeah, I mean, yes, miss, of course. For a bit of cash, I’d stay here all week." I felt kind of sorry for the guy, especially in the face of what I was about to do.

"I need you to loan me six pounds fifty till tomorrow. Stay here and you’ll get the cash, okay?" And with one swift motion I swept the required change from his bowl, still leaving it fairly full, and walked straight over to the ticket booth without looking back. Life is all about priorities sometimes, but at that moment I made a promise to myself to get back here tomorrow and pay the guy back. Else my blessed soul would probably rot in Hell for all eternity. Or at least, I’d feel pretty guilty about it.

The ticket clerk gave me the same bored look as before as I bought a pass and wandered out onto the waiting platform. The graffiti-plastered train swept in on a wave of compressed warm air, and the horde of zombie-like customers began shuffling on board one step at a time. I noticed the weird man from the Chinese takeaway standing several feet down the platform from me, only this time I saw he was bald, and, more worryingly, grinning at me as I boarded the same train as him. I played sardines with everyone else as the train’s electric engine wailed into life once more, followed by an agonised squeal as the doors slid shut on their rusty servos.

A barely audible hum rose up to fill the gaps in the million and one different conversations raging all around me:

"And so I said, well, no, of course it’s going to itch if you lick it like that.."

"What do you mean, "Not Valuable?" I must have had twenty kittens last year!"

"So anyway, this guy walks up to me, looks me square in the eye – well, one eye, anyway, as he was a bit of a lazy-eyed psycho, and–"

"Excuse me? Miss?" I turned, not knowing if I was actually being spoken to or not. It was the bald, grinning guy. A sudden cold sweat came over me as I desperately tried to remain calm. Losing it in the packed confines of this train carriage could prove extremely messy.

"Yes? What is it?" I tried to sound like I was carrying a gun, or at least a full can of mace which I wouldn’t hesitate to use. But the guy didn’t reply. He just grinned at me a while longer. I looked him up and down, rolled my eyes theatrically at some of the other sardines in the train around me, and went back to staring impatiently out of the window. Seconds later he tapped on my shoulder again. I made a mental note to wash my jacket.

"Excuse me? Miss?" I turned round more slowly this time, trying to make myself look as dangerous as possible, in the hope that this pretty creepy guy would leave me alone.

"What?" I snapped.

"You’re her, aren’t you?" he said, still with that dumb grin plastered across his face.

"Who? Marie Antoinette? The Queen Of Sheba? Who?" I said. He did nothing, but grin wider and shake his head at me severely.

"Ah, come now Natasha, you know who you are. And you know what you did. And you know what’s coming to you," he said slowly. People standing around me began to surreptitiously shuffle out of the way. So much for safety in numbers.

"Oh, I get it. You’re crazy, aren’t you? Get your kicks from harassing young women on crowded trains? Well find another sucker, because this broad isn’t playing," I said defiantly, spinning on my heels. He grabbed my shoulder and span me round to face him. The alcohol-soaked smell of his breath was actually starting to make me feel quite ill, so I noticed with some relief that we were almost at the station. His grip tightened and he stared directly into my eyes.

"You will be punished for what you did to us. To all of us. We control you now Natasha, body and soul. You will pay." The grin had gone, replaced by a snarl the guy had obviously perfected by copying Christopher Lee’s take on Dracula. Suddenly I felt more than a little bit scared by this guy. . .

Thankfully, when the train pulled up at the station seconds later, the guy was out of the doors and into the crowd before I could blink, and even though I ran outside as quick as I could to try to spot him, he was long gone. Like today couldn’t get any more disorientating! I headed for the exit, and jogged up the stairs into a street and city that was just as hectic as the one at the other end of my train ride. I began to understand why I had felt so lost when I first came to.

Following road markings – or rather those not obscured by graffiti tags from the city’s many roaming street gangs – I made my way to Madison Street by around eight o’clock, being a little dismayed to find that the nearer I got to my offices, the nearer I got to an altogether nastier looking neighbourhood. Not like a slum or anything, just less obviously affluent as the bright city lights behind me. And yet, I felt strangely at home here, like I’d settled in a place like this a long time ago.

I checked my address again from my business card. 1280 Madison Street was a two-storey apartment building just down the road from me, with badly-weathered dark brown brickwork. A rusty fire escape ran up one side, and the whole thing had the slightly unappealing look of 1960s post-war architecture. I could make out patches of different coloured bricks that signalled attempts at renovations and extensions, but the building seemed to have built up a resistance to them, the same way a bug does to pesticides. The rest of my street was full of similarly old-fashioned houses, a few shops with iron barred windows, well-used cars and a group of bored looking kids hanging out on one corner. I noticed several cars were parked outside my place, and more disturbingly, two of the three were police cruisers.

I walked down the road, trying not to look like I’d been attacked, robbed and dropped on the other side of the city minus my short term memory, and knocked on the battered old oaken front door, not knowing if I had a key or not. A hatch swung back, and a sleepy-eyed old porter looked back out at me. A flash of recognition darted across his eyes, and I heard the sound of heavy bolts swinging back before the door swung open.

"Oh, Miss Tyreen! We’ve all been so worried! Where have you been?" The porter was in his sixties and looked it, with his greying cardigan, pipe and slippers. A sudden chilling thought made me think this guy was my grandfather or something, but the fog in my memory lifted for a moment and I remembered who this old man was.

"Hello Lambert," I said with a smile, recognising the elderly porter who’d lived in this building longer than anyone in it could remember. No-one was sure exactly who paid him or how much he was paid, but he was always there, taking on the additional roles of caretaker, plumber, electrician, fire officer and security guard. My personal theory was that he was the soul of the building personified, keeping it in one piece for the benefit of the lives that passed through its walls. Whatever he was, right now he was a familiar face and I needed as many of those as I could get.

"What on earth has happened to you, miss? You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards," he said in his quaint Kensington accent.

"It’s a long story Lambert – I woke up on the other side of the city with a bruise in my head and a bout of temporary amnesia, and the rest of the day has been spent getting back here. What are the police doing here?" Lambert suddenly looked at his feet guiltily, and my stomach sank to my knees as I realised I could actually be in some pretty deep trouble after all.

"Oh, miss, it was terrible. All those people murdered! It was all over the news, I’m surprised you don’t remember…do you remember anything?" he asked. I was surprised to find that not only had my short term memory taken a knock, most of the last three days was a blank as well.

"No, looks like they hit me harder than I thought," I said, scratching the bruise on the back of my head thoughtfully. Another moment of inspiration saw the fog in my head lift and throw another memory at me, probably sparked off by being back home.

"Where’s Jack?" I asked, remembering the name Jack Zondar, my associate and business partner, one half of the band I always meant to form, the person I had long discussions about old manga movies with, and more importantly, the only real friend I had in the city.

"He’s been upstairs with the police officers for the past few hours, Natasha." Lambert only used my first name when things were really bad. My stomach sank a few more feet and found itself in the basement. The rest of my body made a conscious effort to climb the stairs up to my first floor office. "They’ve been looking for you since all this trouble started – I think they suspect you have something to do with it. . are you sure you can’t remember?"

Outside, it started to rain, and drops of water started to sneak through the odd hole in the roof. Strategically placed buckets were already one step ahead, but the metallic clatter of the rain hitting the patches of corrugated iron in the roof didn’t help my nerves as I climbed the rickety staircase and approached my office, leaving Lambert wringing his hands downstairs.

Sure enough, a frosted glass window mounted in a door facing me marked the entrance to the first of three rooms on this floor. The other two I knew belonged to Mrs Newton Dunn, a novelist down on her publishing deals and eating into the last bits of her previous advance, and Mr Brian Harker, Lambert’s old war buddy and an infinite fount of old tall stories. There was my name, printed in black letters, looking back at me accusingly:

"Natasha Tyreen, Private Investigator." Jack’s name was mounted just below it, the lettering o his name looking less faded than my own. By this point, my memory was almost back to its old self, apart from the missing last three days of course, and so as I swung open the door, noting the four silhouettes waiting inside, I more or less knew what was in my office already.

Three battered gunmetal grey filing cabinets stood against one badly-plastered wall, and I knew the first two were mostly empty. The carpet on the floor was peeling away as though it was trying to make a desperate bid for freedom, and as night had fallen a rainbow of neon street signs from the surrounding area bathed the office alternately in shades of green, blue and then red. There was a guy in a black suit at my desk who I recognised as Jack – mildly handsome, the kind of guy at school was is cool enough to not be a geek but not cool enough to be one of the beautiful people. My kind of guy. He looked up as I entered and a wave of relief washed over his face. I smiled back as I looked round at the other three intruders.

There were two tubby guys in trenchcoats who looked like police detectives, mainly given away by the thin film of doughnut sugar still frosting the lips of the one looking out my window. Seated in front of the desk was a thinner, better dressed man who stood up and faced me as I sauntered in. I recognised him as Detective Inspector I.D. Price, a P.I.-hating police officer I’d gotten on the wrong side of somehow, and whose presence here indicated that yes, I was in deep shit after all. He grinned and flipped open his notebook, obviously savouring the moment before he dropped the bombshell of what kind of trouble I was in.

"Hello Natasha," he said, grinning a sickly sweet but menacing smile that reminded me all too vividly of the bald guy on the train. "I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me where you’ve been for the past three days?"

"I would if I could, D.I. Price, but I’m afraid I can’t remember." Mentally I slapped my forehead for giving such an obviously guilt-soaked line.

"Let me refresh your memory," said Price, looking down into his notebook as though he was already reading out my confession. "Three days ago, on March 2^nd, 2016, at approximately 4pm, there was an explosion at the base of the well-known neo-religious cult called "The Sons Of The Holy." Most of the cultists were killed in the blast, but the one survivor made a positive identification of a local private investigator, one Natasha Tyreen, who was spotted leaving the scene shortly before the blast." Price hadn’t looked at me as he read my name. I think he was already imagining himself reading this story out to a crowded courtroom.

"Two of the victims of the explosion were the two daughters of our town’s mayor, Sarah and Mandie Green. Following a full scale police investigation, it has been discovered that Miss Natasha Tyreen was hired in secret by the mayor to rescue his daughters from the cult’s clutches. From there, the details of the next two days, March 3^rd and 4^th, are unknown, apart from the discovery of a large amount of stolen money, jewellery and personal belongings of the victims, taken from the explosion site at some point in those following two days. Miss Tyreen disappeared, only to be spotted traversing the city again early this evening, seemingly returning to her offices back in Midland City." Price snapped shut his notebook with a loud crack, making me jump like a nervous cat and shocking me out of the sinking feeling I had felt while he was reading. Price looked at me at last, but one glance at his eyes told me that he really, really didn’t like me, and was very glad to have something to pin on me at last.

"Which brings us to now, at 10:24pm on March 5^th, when the aforementioned Miss Tyreen finally returned to her offices, where she was met by, and arrested by, three officers of Her Majesty’s police force." I could tell he was talking in the same manner as his notebook just to wind me up. It was working.

"Don’t I get a chance to explain myself?" I said, suddenly feeling an irresistible urge to break and run.

"Down at the station, maybe. For now, Natasha Tyreen, you and your associate Jack Zondar are under arrest on suspicion of the murder of 47 members of the Sons Of The Holy cult, and the attempted theft of goods and money amounting to two million pounds sterling."

Price continued talking as he read me and Jack our rights, but I couldn’t hear him. Someone had turned the volume down on my world as quickly as the colour had drained from my cheeks. Outside it continued to rain, and I suddenly wished I was back in the gutter where I’d woken up, listening quietly to the sound of the rain..

Someone cuffed me. I dimly remembered being led downstairs, past the horrified form of Lambert, and after that, well, I guess I blacked out again.

The cell door slid gently shut behind me, gliding across the entrance to my new home reassuringly quietly. At least, until it slammed into the far wall with a thud like two charging elephants meeting head on at last, jolting me out of my reverie for a moment.

Okay, Natasha, time to take stock of the situation. You’ve been arrested (wrongfully of course), for the murder of 47 innocent (well, as far as they could be) cult members, and then the theft of goods, valuables and hard currency amounting to a tidy two million pounds from the aforementioned (and now very much deceased) cult members.

I suppose now wouldn’t be a good time to sit and bleat ‘But I didn’t do it!’ until they let me out of here.. I can’t start figuring out what happened in the two days I have no memory of while I’m sat in this little 10 by 6 cell, trying to work out how I’m going to sleep on a bed that’s two feet too small for me, where Jack is and how I can get that guy with the knobbly forehead in the cell opposite to stop staring at my legs. I picked a hell of a day to be wearing my trademark boots, tights and skirt combo. Especially as I still hadn’t changed since being thrown out of that car a few hours ago on the other side of the city.

Sometimes, being a private eye really sucked.

I looked around the cell to see how dangerous they thought I was. Three walls and a ceiling, and a heavy iron grille sealing off the only entrance. A small window set about two feet above my head, a small bed attached to the wall and that was it. I assume toilet breaks meant an armed escort to the ladies’ and back. I’d been handcuffed with my arms tied behind my back, so it was all I could do to sit down on the edge of the bed comfortably and lean back against the cold cell wall. There was no sign of where they’d taken Jack to. He could be anywhere. They could be interrogating him. They could be beating him. They could even be-

"Hi, Nat." A voice from the cell next door. Muffled but still recognisable.

"Hey there, Jack. You okay?"

"As well as can be expected, I guess. You?"

"Trying to figure out the who, why, what, where, when and how of it all."

"You and me both, babe. From what I managed to glean on my way here, while you were making a little trip to La-La Land.."

I grimaced at the recollection. I was so exhausted from my trip back across the city that I’d blacked out when they’d cuffed me at the office. I hadn’t come round until we’d pulled up outside the police station, and Price had been unable to stop grinning as two officers led me from the back of the meatwagon and into the cells. Price had a vendetta against me that rivalled the whole J. Jonah Jameson/Spider-Man feud so it must have really made that fat scumbag’s day to see me getting carted away.

But I wasn’t bitter. Really. Anyway. Jack continued.

"Seems that not long after we were hired by that missing girl’s parents, you followed up a lead that said she was part of that cult. When we found out this was true, the parents hired out the best cult deprogrammer they could find, and your mission was to bring the girl back to him."

"So that he could unscramble her noggin and return the girl to some kind of sanity, right?"

"Right, and also to get us the big fat reward that the parents were offering, which would have paid the office rent for the next five years."

"Rent. Rent! Damn, I knew I’d forgotten something.. how long do we have left on that?"

"About a fortnight, so we need to get out of here and back to work quick, else the baliffs’ll take away all our files and we’ll be screwed."

"Oh, this day just gets better.."

"What happened next no-one seems to know for sure. We both disappeared while trying to find the girl at the cult’s headquarters, but while I woke up back in the office with a splitting headache and no clue as to what went on, you stayed missing for another two days."

"Argh!"

"What? What is it?"

"A great big spider just scuttled across my cell!"

"Oh for god’s sake.. Nat, will you try and get a hold of yourself?"

Jack knew how much I hated spiders. I’m fine with them when they don’t move it’s when they do that.. scuttle.. that gets me. Even saying the word ‘scuttle’ makes me shudder. I’d have made a pretty crap pirate.

"It’s gone now. At least they’ve still got the lights on."

CLICK.

"You were saying?"

"I was saying, Jack Smartarse Zondar, how this day can’t possibly get any worse. I’ll probably be eaten alive by brain-sucking spiders in the night or something, then you’ll have to solve this case and avenge my death or something.."

"You’re overreacting again, Nat."

"Sorry."

"Look, let’s just get some sleep and worry about this in the morning. We’ll get our phone call before they interrogate us, so if you can get hold of that uncle of yours we should be out of here by lunchtime."

"Right." I picked myself up off the floor and curled up on the tiny bed as best I could. Trying not to notice how cold it was. Or how the rain falling against the windows was making me want the loo. Or the killer spiders. Or just how in the holy name of bejaysus I was going to get myself out of this mess..

* * * *

Daylight. It took a few seconds and lots of blinking to work out what was going on. I instinctively reached for the duvet on my bed, before realising I wasn’t at my cosy little apartment, I was in that cell and there were spiders.

I sat up in the bed, my aching joints creaking and complaining at not being able to recover properly from whatever beating I’d been put through the day before. The cell block was a little noisier now as the other prisoners woke up and started their yakking. The atypical clang of cell doors and heckling between guards and inmates made a much different soundtrack to the music I normally played when I woke up of a morning.

"You up yet, Nat?" Jack’s voice called out from the adjacent cell. He sounded like he’d had a rough night’s sleep too. Some guys have voices that you can hear the day’s worth of stubble on.

"You bet. Any idea when they’ll get us out of here?"

"One of the guards said the officers come round to get people for morning questioning at about 9am, which is any second now."

"Great. Have I got time to freshen up?"

"Never mind joking, just stick to the truth and you’ll be okay. You don’t know what happened yet so they can’t pin anything on you. Plus, make that phone call count." Jack had a point. My uncle Elliot had looked after me a lot when I was growing up, seeing as he as good as lived at my parent’s house while he went through a drawn out and very messy divorce about fifteen years ago. Since then, he’d obviously come from the same good business brain genetic stock as my dad because he was a pretty rich guy these days. And thus a good person to turn to in times like this, because not only would he lend me cash at a competitive interest rate (i.e. none), he also wouldn’t tell my parents a thing, which was the most important thing, believe me.

I settled down in the cell, and was just about to try and figure out how to get the sleep out of my eyes with my hands still tied behind my back when a nondescript guard came to the cell grille.

"Natasha Tyreen?"

"That’s my name, don’t wear it out or I’ll make you buy me a new one." Nothing. Not even a scowl. They must be breeding these prison guards with an extra glop of anti-humour DNA these days.

"You’re up for questioning with DI Price in Interrogation Room 4. You get your phone call first. Follow me." He rattled a large chain of keys and selected one that fit the lock, opening my cell and waiting as I stood up and walked outside. My feet hurt., my hair needed washing and I wanted a bath, but I tried to retain my air of feminine dignity as I walked out into the corridor.

Only to have that shattered moments later by the combined wolf whistles of about fifty locked up male prisoners. Flushing the same shade of crimson as my jacket (well, the bits of it you could see under the dirt, anyway), I let the guard lead me to the end of the cell block, and out through two sets of security doors (again, both manned by similarly faceless warders – where do they get these people?) into the police station proper.

Normally, this is the part of the movie where the suspect is led through the lobby of the precinct building, which is full of random street punks and hookers being read their rights by bored looking desk cops, while a big black sergeant sat behind a desk at the far end of the room tries to ignore the horde of pissed off, shouting citizens all haranguing him for his attention. In this movie, however, the lobby was full of bored looking desk cops at a network of little desks as before, and there was even a big black sergeant sat behind a desk, but thankfully the place was a little quieter. And there were no extras dressed as hookers or street punks, either. Well, maybe a couple. I mean, it was only just 9am, most criminals are asleep by now!

The warder led me through the lobby and into another corridor, in which were a long line of payphones. A couple were already in use – one by a scared looking jock teenager frantically trying to get his dad to bail him out of a drink-driving charge, the other by a blank-faced businessman, trying to keep his composure as he informed his wife that he’d been arrested for kerb crawling. Hardened criminals and potential mass murderers such as myself got an armed escort even to make a phone call. I tried not to remember how much I needed the toilet by this point.

The warder unlocked my cuffs so I could root around in my jacket pocket for a few coins to use the phone. I held up a palm full of not much change at all, and was about to give the warder my best puppy dog eyes to get some more pennies, when he gruffly spoke:

"Don’t even think about it, sweetheart. DI Price is not the man you want to keep waiting. Call and make it snappy."

Shit. Oh well. I put in the coins and dialled my uncle’s office’s private line. Having to wait for his ditzy PA Liz to transfer me would have taken more time than I could afford. It rang twice, both rings seeming to last about three hours, when he picked up.

"Hello, Elliot Tyreen."

"Uncle Elliot? It’s Nat."

"Uh-oh."

"No, wait, hear me out. Basically, it’s like this. I’m in jail because they think I killed 47 people and stole two million in.. well, stuff. "

"I see."

"But I didn’t do any of that. I was on a case, something happened, I got beaten up and I can’t remember anything before yesterday evening, when I was thrown out of a car on the far side of the city."

"Mm-hmm."

"So basically, I just need to borrow enough cash to bail me out for long enough to sort all this out, then I can pay you back as always."

"Right." There was another agonisingly long pause. My ear felt like a dragon that ate too much garlic and chillies was breathing down it, and I realised I was so tense I was as good as forcing the phone into my head, as if by squeezing the receiver tight enough I could get him to help me. I was about to hang up in defeat when he answered.

"Okay then. Your mother’d freak out if she knew all that, so I’ll call the station and get you out of there. Can you get back to the office by yourself or shall I have Parker come meet you?" Two things were wrong with that idea. First, when you’re suspected of the theft of a large amount of cash, getting picked up from the police station in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes is pretty high on your list of Suspicious Things To Do, and secondly, who in the world has a chauffeur called Parker anyway? I always used to keep expecting a puppet to be driving, complete with thick Cockney accent..

"I’ll be okay. Jack and I-"

"Jack needs bail too, I take it?"

"Erm, yeah, that’d be nice. Maybe you can get a discount or something." Uncle Elliot laughed. My bail wouldn’t be anything he couldn’t afford.

"You’ll be out by lunchtime, Nat. Take care and call me as soon as you’re back in the office, okay?"

"I will. Thanks you, Unc-"

CLICK.

No more credit. Well, that was one less thing to worry about. I turned and held my wrists out to the guard, which he obligingly cuffed for me before leading me round into another corridor, and the interrogation rooms.

This was where the fun was going to start.

"Aah, Miss Tyreen! What a pleasant surprise to see you here. Do take a seat," said Price, his piggy little eyes beaming with glee at the chance to pump me for information at last.

What a depressing thought that was.

"Interview will now take place, suspect in case number 34A61, Natasha Tyreen, DI Price and DC Hecker presiding over the interview. Questioning begins at 9:11am, March 6^th." Price was all niceness and formality the second the tape recorder was switched on. I could see in his eyes how much he wanted to bust me for all of this, as though it’d prove him right about how much of a troublemaker I was. Not that I was going to let his attitude bother me, of course – I knew in my heart that I was going to get myself out of this mess and back to work before he’d had chance to order his next prescription of diet pills, so all I had to do was survive this interview and get back to the office.

"I assume you are fully aware of my condition by now, officer," I said, no stranger to the formality of police interviews and thus how to conduct myself in them so it’d sound convincing in court,. "I received several injuries during the period I went missing for, one of which was a blow to the head which has left me unable to recall anything that happened over the past few days."

"Yes, we are aware of that, Miss Tyreen, but a physical has been ordered so we can check the validity of your claim," said Price. Smoother than scooping ice cream with a hot spoon, he knew all the jargon, and all the court-friendly words and phrases to use to make himself look great and me look like the filthy criminal scum I was.

"So if you’d like to remind me what I’m charged of, I can answer all of your questions and then get out of here."

"Have you organised bail already?"
"Yes, a relative is going to sort things out for me."

"Then I’ll begin. Natasha, the charges facing you are forty-seven separate counts of murder, and the theft of goods and belongings amounting to-"

"Amounting to two million pounds sterling, yes, I get the idea by now."

"I’d remind you that this interview is being recorded for possible use in court at a later date, Miss Tyreen. I’d advise you to control your sarcasm." Bastard! He was right, though, I was getting a little impatient. There’s nothing a private eye like myself hates more than being cooped up answering other people’s questions, when there’s a case out there not being solved for every moment I spend in here.

"My apologies. First question?"

"Where were you at approximately 4pm on March 2^nd ?"

"I don’t remember."

"You don’t recall or you don’t know?"
"I mean I don’t remember. The first memory I have since early last week was being dumped out of a car several miles from my office with no money, and having to work my way back to the office, where several police officers and yourself were waiting to take me into custody." Which reminded me, I still owed that tramp in the train station. Add to list of things to do, just after ‘Clear name’ and ‘Hunt down those responsible and make them pay.’

"And when was this?"

"March 5^th, sometime in the early evening. From what I have been able to recall, I had been hired by the parents of a missing girl, one Elizabeth Burns, to trace their daughter’s whereabouts and return her safely to them. I can only assume that she was involved with this cult in some way, and that during the course of my investigations I was injured, and there was that explosion."

"Aah yes, the explosion," said Price, grabbing a manilla file from the desk in front of him with a barely suppressed chuckle. Uh oh. This probably meant he was going to flash a selection of grisly photos of dead and dying victims in front of me, in an effort to force a confession out of me via my own guilt.

"At some time around 4pm on March 2^nd , two days before you reappeared, there was a series of explosions at the headquarters of the Sons Of The Holy cult, a neo-religious sect based just outside our city limits. Their activities were strictly small scale, and even though there were nearly fifty members, we didn’t perceive them as a threat."

Lying bastard. Ever since that bombing campaign a few years back, when one mad cult had decided that tall buildings in the city were trying to deliver an army of devils up into Heaven, and thus set out to level anything taller than a city bus, police observation of cults was a well known thing. They were very jumpy about anything like that happening again, so I didn’t believe for a second that they’d let 50 cultists that close to the city just get on with business unwatched. But anyway, that was something to work out later.

"I’m afraid that at this present time, my memories aren’t quite up to speed with all of this, officer. I assume that the files back at my office will tell me all that I currently can’t remember, so I can make a start on investigating all of this."

"You’re not investigating anybody, you’re a murder suspect, Natasha!" He was losing his cool. Good. "We can’t just let you go snooping back around the sites in question, you could be tampering with the evidence to clear yourself."

"With all due respect, detective, " I hissed, "I’m not in the employ of the police, I am a freelance private investigator and I have a contract to the parents of that girl. It’s my job to find her, and I will carry on with my job whatever I’m accused of. If you want to carry on trying to pin something on me while I’m busy solving this case for you, be my guest." Careful, Nat, don’t blow it..

"We’ll see about that. I’d like to show you something." Price stood up and started to walk around behind me. Uh oh. "Suspect is about to be shown photographs detailing the blast site," he announced to the tape recorder, before opening the file and starting to flop down a series of black and white glossy photos in front of me like we were about to play solitaire. They weren’t pretty.

"Can I ask what the purpose of showing me dead, burned up bodies is, officer?" I said, nice as pie despite suddenly feeling as if I’d eaten an entire seafood buffet at Dirty Joe’s Seaside Diner. These were very nasty pics. Basically, try to imagine what kind of a mess almost fifty dead bodies would make after having been separated into various limb and torso sections and thrown randomly around a square mile area, then blowtorch the results and take lots of close up shots of them.

Exactly.

"I’m just giving you an idea of what it is you’re involved in here, Miss Tyreen." The sudden switch back to formality told me he was turning the heat up again. "These are your victims."

"My victims? Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself here?"

"You’re the only survivor, we have a report of you leaving the scene-"

"Do you now? Why wasn’t I told about this? I have as much of a right to know what’s going on here as you do!"
"You have no rights at all!" barked Price, slamming his fist and the empty folder onto the table. I tried not to flinch but it’s hard not to get a little bit jumpy when faced with an angry 200 pound man. "These people died as a result of your actions, and until we know what those actions are, I intend to watch you very closely until we have enough evidence collected to put you away for this!"

"You’ll be waiting a long time, officer. I didn’t kill these people and I fully intend to prove that to you."

"We’ll see about that. Interview terminated by DI Price at 9:34am."

"So that’s it?"

"Don’t get smart with me, you little weasel," snarled Price, the façade of niceness now fully out the window now we were off the record. "I don’t know how you did it but I’ll find out. I’ve been telling Burton you were trouble since day one and now I can show him once and for all, an get rid of you into the bargain."

"Why do you dislike me so intensely, DI Price? Is it because I wash regularly? I understand that may be an alien concept to you, but.."

He didn’t bother answering. Price stared at me, shaking with concealed rage, for a few seconds before storming out of the interview room and off into the corridor beyond. The uniformed officer left in the room looked around nervously for a few moments.

"Don’t sweat it, he gets like that all the time with me." He didn’t say anything but I did manage to get a grin out of him.

"I’d best be going.." he said, before nodding to me and leaving the room also. I sat and drummed my fingers on the desk top for a few seconds before the warder who’d escorted me here poked his head into the room.

"Okay, Tyreen, your bail’s come through so get out of here." I grinned and stood up, taking my time to stretch before walking outside and back into the gradually increasing melee that was the police station’s lobby. Jack was already waiting for me..

"You alright? I saw Price’s face as he came past, and he looked like somebody had just told him he’d won the lottery and then sued him for every penny of it."

"He’s just being his usual self. Come on, let’s get back to the office. We have a lot of catching up to do."

I headed out the station, Jack following me, and back into the world I felt some vague sense of control over. Time to find out what happened those past few days.

Aah, the office. My office. My home away from home (well, not including my lovely apartment) that was the only place in this big city where the whole world made sense. Basically because I can spend time here with my feet up, drinking hot coffee and listening to David Bowie while I peruse the relevant case files at my leisure, not being bound to any kind of deadline.. aah, heaven. Anyone who gets frustrated with working for somebody else should try going into business by themselves at least once.

I had to actually get back to the office first, however, so I had a few arrangements to make. Scurrying across the street with my jacket pulled up over my head, I headed down the steps outside the police station, across the street (dodging a couple of the cars and trucks as they slid past on the slippery tarmac) and up to the line of payphones over the road. Jack followed me at his own pace, never being the kind of guy to rush for anything, and also not concerned about getting wet the same way I was. That darn rain was still beating down as heavily as when I’d made my resurgence into the world, and this really wasn’t helping the fact that my clothes were still damp and dirty from the other night.

"Jack, do you have any change? I used the last of mine up calling Uncle Elliot!" I asked him, as he finally walked over. The phones were in a line along the edge of the pavement, their backs facing the police station. Behind us was a small park that was empty except for a hobo still sleeping off last night’s meths hit, and either side of that were nondescript shops that didn’t seem to be any use to me right now.

"Yeah, hold on," he said, rooting round inside his jacket for his wallet. I caught a glimpse of Jack’s secret armour plating panels that made the jacket such a handy combat accessory. He’d picked up a load of kevlar plates cheap some time ago, and had the bright idea of sewing them into his favourite short leather jacket to turn it into a secret bulletproof vest. It had saved his neck quite a few times since he’d bought it, which was good for both of us. Good for him because, well, he’s still alive, and good for me because a new partner would probably ask for more wage money.

Jack handed me a bunch of coins, and I slotted a few into the machine and called the office. The video screen on the phone was a little fuzzy, but when it connected I could see Lambert on the other end. He couldn’t see me, though, the phone in my office building was an antique model.

"Hello?" he asked, his aged features still showing signs of concern. He fretted a lot. Just like his boss.

"Lambert, it’s Natasha. I’m here with Jack."

"Oh, Miss Tyreen! Good to hear from you again. Your uncle called to explain what was going on, so I’ve been waiting to hear from you."

"Lambert, where’s my car? I didn’t see it at the building last night, and I’ve been having a little bit of trouble remembering things lately.."

"It’s at Green’s Garage, miss, there was a little bit of a problem with the engine but I think it’s been ready for a couple of days now. The invoice should still be in your wallet."

"Hold on, let me check.." I searched through my wallet and found the tattered bit of paper. It didn’t look like much, but if it’d get me my car back it was like gold dust to me right now.

"Yeah, I found it, thanks. I’ll be home as soon as I can. I need a bath and a change of clothes. Did the police come back to search the place while we were here?"

"No, miss, everything’s as you left it. I hope the police have been treating you well! I know the right people to call if they haven’t."

"I’m fine, Lambert. See you in a while." I hung up and turned back round to Jack. He was looking me up and down with an odd expression on his face. I squinted out through the pouring rain at him from underneath the shelter of my jacket.

"What? You’re looking at me the same way a hungry dog looks at the bins behind a kebab shop on a Saturday night."

"Nothing, it’s just.. well, the way you look at the moment."

"A mess, you mean?"

"No, something else. Can’t put my finger on it. Never mind, it’ll come to me. Let’s go, the garage is this way." jack headed off and I jogged after him, trying not to notice how cold I was.

Green’s Garage was about ten minutes away. The weather had gotten a little bit better, as the early morning sunshine was starting to pierce the cloud cover a little. It was still a brisk March morning, however, so I envied the people walking past in nice, fuzzy looking coats as Jack and I stopped outside the garage. It was on a street just off the main city centre road, with a few other mechanic type places dotted around it.. A bus stop down the road was lined with wobbly old ladies, all of whom were frowning disapprovingly at me as Jack and I walked up.

Trying to ignore the attentions of the face-chewing old dears, I turned to Jack as he caught up to me. Sometimes I wondered how I ever got anywhere when I had to keep waiting from him every five minutes. The inside of the garage was divided into two halves – a small office area with a bored looking secretary and a tinny old radio playing, and the mechanics area where at least four cars lay in various stages of disrepair as the boiler-suited grease monkeys walked about, whistling tunelessly and getting increasingly covered in grime and oil without actually ever seeming to do anything.

In one corner, I spied the prize – my car. The Natmobile, as I had christened it, was a little black Honda Civic, about 17 years old now but still looking like a million quid as far as I was concerned. It seemed innocent enough, and it’s shiny body belied the inhuman amount of dents, bumps, scratches and extensive repanelling that it had seen over the years, but beneath the hood lay a monster V10 turbocharged Mugen Honda engine that could top 150 mph without blinking, and could do 0-60 in a time that made those macho guys who read car magazines weep quietly into their cans of bitter. The car had been through several owners, and probably had a reputation to rival that of the Millennium Falcon, but for now she was mine and I was glad of her. The ‘engine problem’ Lambert had mentioned was coming back to me now – I’d burned out half of the cylinders after a chase down the motorway at Ludicrous Speed the other week, trying to catch up with a low-rent thief who just happened to have stolen a car with some rich guy’s baby strapped into the back seat.

I’d caught him, of course. Natasha the PI always gets her man. Or woman, in the above case. Jack sauntered over at last.

"About time! Look, wait here and I’ll go in and get the car, hokay?" Jack nodded, then paused with his mouth half open as if he was going to say something. I waited a moment then turned away, which is when he decided to blurt out:

"A hooker!"

"WHAT?!?"

"That’s what you look like! I knew it’d come to me if I-" I shoved him to the ground before he got chance to finish.

"Do NOT bite the hand that feeds you, Mr Jack Zondar. You know I just need a change of clothes and a good long bath!"

"Yeah, sorry," he said, picking himself up and dusting himself down, "but I think my mouth was running at a different speed to my brain.."

"Most men’s usually are.." I walked into the garage and prepared myself for the usual barrage of sexism that seemed to breed in these places like cholera or something.

I walked into the office, trying not to notice two of the younger mechanics eyeing me up while the swarthy-handed chief was busy yanking some oddly-shaped chunks of metal out of the front of a car. I winced in sympathy for the poor car’s engine as I closed the door. The bored girl behind the desk looked up at me, raising an eyebrow at my dishevelled appearance, that hadn’t been helped one bit by walking here in the rain. I caught a faint whiff of the smell of wet dog, realised it was me and decided to start talking before she noticed it too.

"Hello there, I’m Natasha Tyreen, I’m here to pick up my car." I tried not to sound like I was broke. People who are planning to buy things on credit have the ability to suddenly develop this air of affluence and wealth, as though whatever it is they’re about to buy is well within their financial limits.

"Ah yes, Miss Tyreen, the black Honda, isn’t it? The one with the.. er, modifications," she said, picking out the car’s files and casting her eye down it. It was a long file.

"That’s the one. So, er, I take it I can just get the keys and pick her up as usual then?" I said, placing the invoice down on the counter. It was in a bit of a sorry state, but like the rest of me, my wallet and its contents had seen better days recently.

"Well, there is the small matter of the fee, Miss Tyreen," she said, and I gulped loudly as she fetched her calculator from one of the desk drawers. This can’t be good. Calculators mean something too big to add up in her head, so I crossed my fingers and prayed she was just bad at maths at school.

"I understand. In the past, though, Bill’s always let me have credit when I was.. well, when I was inbetween paycheques, as it were." Bill Green was the place’s owner, and the guy who’d helped me find the Natmobile in the first place. I always remembered never to ask how he knew about it, but I did always thank him for it. He’d let me get away with not paying for a week or two if I was hard up for cash, because he knew I always paid up. Eventually. Yep, good old Bill.

"Mr. Green has a strict no credit policy, Miss Tyreen, I’m afraid you’ll need to produce the cash before we can let you have your car. The total comes to.." She tapped out an increasing set of digits on the calculator, each tap making my heart beat a little faster.

I suppose that from outside the office, the following conversation would have gone something like this:

"(muffled figures)"

"WHAT!?!"

"(muffled explanation, figures repeated)" Followed by the sight of me leaping across the desk to grab the secretary and snarl a few choice phrases at her, then her nodding frantically and her hand darting out to a big board of keys on one wall. Her hand knocked most of the other keys down before she got the Honda’s set, which she passed to me. I let go of her, rearranged her crumpled blouse politely, smiled and left. Jack was standing outside, a quizzical eyebrow raised at me, Mr. Spock style.

"What?" I asked. "She just needed to be reminded that I am entitled to a few week’s grace like I always do, and that I’ll be back to pay in a little while, and also just how bad a day I’ve had and that if she didn’t give me those keys, she’d need the mechanics outside to remove all the things I was going to insert into her.

Jack just shook his head with a grin and walked over to the car.

"Come on, trouble, we don’t have all day."

"That’s my line!" I protested, following him over. I unlocked the car and got in. She felt as good as gold, and the comfort of the seats was such a welcome relief when compared to the cold, hard bed in the cell and the stiff-backed chair in the police station that I almost felt like crying in joy.

But I didn’t. Instead, I started up the ignition and revelled in the satisfied purr of the deceptively high performance engine in front of me. Slipping the car into first, I rolled out of the garage and out into the street., past the mechanics who had stopped their wandering to gawp at me again as we left. Whatever.

We hadn’t been on the road long when a little orange light flashed on inside the car. That was a bad sign. I was mid-way through trying to rescue a tape from the depths of my car’s cassette holder to listen to when I noticed.

"Those cheap gits!" I cried.

"Now what’s the matter?" said Jack. I pointed down at the light and the empty petrol gauge next to it.

"Typical! They didn’t even bother to fill her up. There was a full tank in this when I took her in, and now we’re running on fumes. Kind of suspicious, don’t you think?"

"Do we have enough to get back to the office?"

"Of course we do, this car’s never let me down yet," I said confidently.

Half an hour later, once Jack had finished pushing the car I pulled on the handbrake to park it outside 1280 Madison Street, home sweet home. Well, sort of. Lambert was waiting outside, wondering why we’d taken so long to get back. I told him Jack had forgotten to fill the car up and walked past him up the stairs. It was midday by now, so the afternoon sun was getting ready to illuminate the whole block. My first floor office door glowed back at me as the sunlight illuminated it from behind. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I swore I could hear a choir of angels singing. It was a happy moment.

But all happy moments come to an end, so I opened the door and walked in to sit down at my desk. The large, reclining chair behind the cluttered desk whoomphed as the air in the cushions took my weight. I leaned right back in it, propped my feet up on the desk and removed my boots for what felt like the first time in years. I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh of relief.

Jack walked up the stairs and closed the door behind him.

"Well, back at last. Now we need to-"

"Ssh!" I said, lifting a finger to my lips to silence him.

"Why? I don’t hear anything."

"Exactly. For the first time in days, no traffic. No angry policeman. No creepy Chinese guys. No random religious loons on the train. No leering mechanics. Just.. quiet. Let me have just a moment of it, please."

Jack obligingly shut up and headed for the filing cabinets against the right hand wall. He slid the top most draw open very carefully, so as to avoid the screech of badly-maintained metal on metal that always got my back up. My eyes were still closed but I heard him rifle through the folders in there, looking for the case we were working on before all this happened. He was a good partner for anyone to have – sensitive to his boss’s wishes for moments of quiet time and competent enough to get on with things without me having to keep an eye on him. I heard him sit down at his desk, the smaller one to the left of my own, and start leafing through the files quietly.

I guess I must have dozed off because when I opened my eyes again it was twenty minutes later, Jack had finished a cup of coffee and was pacing around the office in deep thought. I put my legs down off the edge of my desk, carefully because the joints had stiffened up a little at the first sign of rest (that’s to say the first sign of not being battered and bruised by unknown kidnappers), and coughed to get his attention.

"Sorry, I was pondering."

"Pondering?"

"Yeah, about this case and how we need to continue. You look surprised. I do do some work, you know!"
"No, I was more surprised at your use of the word ‘pondering,’ but never mind, pondering is good. What’s the news then?"

"Well. Two weeks ago, we were hired by the parents of Elizabeth Burns, a seventeen year old waitress from this city, because she’d gone missing one day from her local college, and her parents were recommended us by a friend."

"Remind me to thank them. Sorry, do go on."

"Anyway, we retraced the girl’s steps back up to her college, and you spent a few days posing as a new student to gain access to all of her classes. You found out that she’d been seen talking to several shady looking characters, but seeing as she was attending an arts college you took that as read."

While Jack was talking, little dark patches in my head were starting to clear up at last. I now had pretty much total recall as far as the time of the explosion. I remembered that I’d applied at Elizabeth’s arts college as a late entry student, and had managed to wrangle my way in as far as joining the classes she took. I'd introduced myself to a few people and managed to find out who her friends were, then gotten chummy with them. Being a social butterfly is an important P.I. skill.

Jack was still talking so I turned my ears back on to catch up.

"You spent some time observing events at the college and learned of a cultist at work there, someone recruiting likely looking students to join the now defunct Sons of the Holy cult. He started talking to people who seemed in need of some kind of a direction in life, offering them access to a community full of like-minded people who’d help them achieve their goals in life."

"You’re starting to sound like one of their advertisements, Jack! And if this guy was looking for directionless young people, he chose a good place to start – I’m surprised he had time to sit still! He must have been running round recruiting every long-haired chick in a tie-dye top and flared trousers.."

Jack was right, though, he had picked a good place to start. I’d heard about religious extremist groups picking up students at universities, and making sure they got hold of students who were taking subjects of use to them. After the whole 9/11/01 thing, any kind of ‘recruitment’ activity was a punishable offence in schools, colleges and unis, so this guy was obviously taking a big risk trying to attract some new members. Why would he do that? I made a mental note for later.

"He got his claws into young Elizabeth and you found out that she was last seen leaving campus with him the day she didn’t come home. A few more enquiries led you to the headquarters of the cult. And it’s at this point that the notes get a little sketchy."

A word about Jack and his notes. He had an awful memory, and it had plagued his professional career until he’d discovered a simple system. He always carried around at least two tiny notepads with him, and wherever we walked, whatever we were doing, I’d see him scribbling down little notes to himself. He basically kept a log of both what was happening during each day, and also his ‘’thoughts and musings on things in case he couldn’t remember them later. They came in very handy for sitting down and evaluating cases, and also for occasions like this when there were gaps in the chain of events and we needed to fill them as best as we could.

"And when your notes get sketchy things all get a bit Elmore Leonard round here, with this guy now knowing who did this to that guy, et cetera. What can you tell me about the three days I was AWOL for?"

"On March 1^st, you left a message on the phone here at the office telling me you were going to try and infiltrate the cult headquarters, find Elizabeth and get out."

"Do we have the message?"

"We certainly do, left as always in your own inimitable style." Jack walked over to the answerphone on my desk and scrolled through the messages.

"Message received at eleven twenty-four am, March 1^st 2016," chirped the female voice of the phone. Why did these things always have girls voices?

"Jack? It’s Nat. I’m going to bust into this cult place and get the girl back. See you later. Oh, and don’t forget to-" BEEP.

Jack looked up at me, giving me that Vulcan eyebrow again. I poked my tongue out at him and he walked back over to the files.

"So I tend to be a bit brief. Big fat hairy deal."

"Anyway, that’s the first of two messages received from you. I stayed here to keep an eye on things, and also in case you needed me. But as always, your timing was impeccable and while I popped out to use the toilet, you called again with this message. Press play again, will you?"

I tapped the phone’s play button.

"Message received at four ten pm, March 2^nd 2016."

"Jack? It’s me," whispered my voice. I was obviously using my mobile phone from somewhere inside the building, as I could hear muffled voices all around. That reminded me.. I checked my jacket pocket. No phone. Damn. That could have helped, but never mind that now. I carried on listening. "I’m here, I’ve found Elizabeth, but there’s something else – the mayor’s two daughters are here too. I don’t know if they’re part of the cult or not yet, but I’m going to try and get them out of here too. Don’t forget to water my plants for me. Bye."

So that helps. Price had told me that the explosion happened around 4pm, so that actually meant that I was still in the building around the time it blew up.

"There goes your alibi," said Jack, just as I was thinking exactly the same thing. This message placed me at the scene of the crime and at the time of it as well. Of course, it was largely circumstantial, but as I was one of the only survivors that didn’t make things look too good for me at all..

"We know next that the place blew up. I remember watching the story on the news, just like when that Waco place burned down over in America back in the early 1990s. And I remember starting to get very worried about you, because I didn’t know what had happened or if you’d actually made it out in one piece or not! But then.."

"But then what?""

"Then I have a blank in my memory too. I don’t know why, but for those two days you were missing I have no recollection. From talking to Lambert I’ve managed to find out that at just after 5, I went racing out of the building after you."

"And? Don’t keep me in suspense!"

"And after that I don’t know. I can vaguely remember leaving the house and getting to the explosion site, but after that I don’t know. I came round in the office on the 5^th, a couple of hours before the police showed up. I don’t know how I got there or what happened for those two days, and.. Nat?"

Jack had stopped because I was slumped face down on the desk, bumping my forehead lightly against the leather writing patch in the middle of it with a distractingly pleasing ‘thump’ sound.

"Nat? Look, I know this is bad-"

Thump.

"I mean, we don’t have alibis-"

Thump.

"And I know we can’t account for our whereabouts-"

Thump.

"So we need to do some detective work-"

Thump.

"Nat?"

"Ssh, I’m thumping."

Thump.

"Oh, this is ridiculous. Gradually giving yourself frontal lobe trauma isn’t going to solve this!"

"Maybe they’ll lock me up," I said, still face down on the desk. It felt soft and comfy. Suddenly I wanted to stay like this on my desk for the rest of my life, because nothing could hurt me while I was here. Jack brought me back to reality by slamming the folders of the case down onto the table in front of me.

"There’s more," he said.

"More?"

"I was going to get round to it. When you found out that the girl was part of a cult, you contacted the parents the day before you went in after her. They got involved too."

"How? You know I never like it when normal people get involved, Jack, it makes me very nervous."

"They asked if there was anything they could do, and it seems you told them to let you handle things. For some reason, they didn’t trust you."

"People never learn, do they?" Thump.

"They hired a cult deprogrammer, and asked you to deliver Elizabeth to him so that he could make sure she was free from the influence of any brainwashing before they’d be sure she was safe."

"Right, because things are always that easy," I muttered sarcastically. "So what’s the story on this cult deprogrammer guy then?"

"That’s the problem, I think my memory blank may be linked to why some of our files are missing."

"Missing?"

"All the contact info for the deprogrammer is gone. Our best bet is to get back in touch with Elizabeth’s parents and see if they’ll give us the name.."

"How do we get them to talk to us when they think we killed their daughter, I wonder?"

"How can you be sure she’s dead?"

"Well, I kinda saw a lot of pictures of dead cult members, Jack, I think there may have been an explosion or something," I said, even more sarcastically than before. Jack deadpanned me with his finest Al Pacino face and waited until I simmered down a little.

"Correction. You saw a lot of pictures of dead people. We have no way of telling yet if they were the cult members or not."

"So what are you trying to suggest? That the cult blew up a building and made sure there were enough dead bodies lying around to account for all of the members, then got out of there?"

"Exactly." I grinned back at Jack as we both realised this was actually a very likely state of affairs. If there were little or no ID records at the building, identification of the bodies would prove very hard, so the cultists had plenty of time to get away, and also to pin the blame on me for it all.

"I think we found out about this, but they did something to us to make us forget, and then tried to set us up for the explosion and theft so we’d be put away before we could tell anyone."

"Jack, I think it’s time Tyreen Investigations reopened for business," I said, standing and striding purposefully over to the door.

"Er, Nat?" said Jack. I turned to ask what was wrong, before looking down at myself and realising.

"Oh, right. The dirty clothes and lack of bath and stuff. Meet you at my apartment in a little while, then?"

"Don’t take too long. I’ll get some lunch and bring it over, then we’ll go visit Elizabeth’s parents. As long as we can convince them that she’s still alive, we’ll be able to get the name of that deprogrammer and make a proper start on all this. The game is afoot, my dear fellow."

I went into the back room of the office to get my belongings as Jack left. The office had a small living room at the back which held a TV, a fridge and a fold-down bed for those late night sessions. No clothes here at the moment but I remembered they were being washed back at my flat. I picked up my car keys and some change from the little pot by the tv before heading back downstairs to the car. The plot thickens, as Holmes would have said.

Aah, the apartment. Yes, I know I already went through a similar narrative with the office, but my apartment was different. It was safe. Quiet. And had a proper bathroom as opposed to the emergency one at the office. And better clothes. And the TV picked up more channels. Jack had kindly arranged for a pickup truck to drop off some more gas so I could fill up the Natmobile before I left the office, and with my little chariot of fire all full up and purring happily, I drove home.

My apartment was in a little pseudo-suburb outside of the city limits called Schofields. If it had more cash it could afford to be a proper suburb, but neither it nor the people living in it could really consider themselves gainfully employed enough, and so it was always just on the cusp of being respectable. I don’t mean to say that it was run down or full of roaming packs of gangs or anything, just that it was safe and quiet without being expensively so. My flat was part of a set of apartment blocks that resembled beached Borg cubes, that had this annoyingly tight road snaking round their perimeter. There were never less than thirty cars crammed along this road, some parked up on the pavement, some with owners more sensitive to their vehicle’s suspensions just parked by the roadside. I manoeuvred my way carefully along the road until I found an empty Honda-sized gap, and with a bit of expert reverse parking I managed to leave my car somewhere where the front wheels weren’t sticking out into the flow of traffic. That’s the sort of parking error you only make once. I have the repair bill receipt to prove it.

I jumped out of my car, grabbed the handful of files I’d decided to take with me from the office and started to walk over towards the cube of 8 flats that my home away from home was part of. One of the neighbourhood’s local stray cats came up to say hello, so I knelt down to say hi back. I’m a cat person in many ways, not least my talent for curling up into impossibly small spaces and sleeping, and how I scurry for cover at the slightest sign of rain. My hair even goes ‘poof’ and volumises itself when I get wet, too. This cat was the one we called Mr. Patch on account of the mixed heritage his multi-coloured coat gave him. He was kind of dopey but friendly enough. I petted him for a few moments, using him as a kind of mobile stress toy, then stood back up and walked over to the building’s front door.

That’s when I realised my keys were in my backpack, which was back at the office. I looked down at my feet. Patch was there, rubbing himself against my mud-stained boots, pausing (no pun intended) for thought, cleaning the mud off himself, then purring and rubbing again. He wanted in to go looking for snacks, and I wasn’t about to get this close to a bath and have to give up now. I looked down the intercom list. I lived at #34 on the third floor, but I knew one of the women who lived at #24 on the ground floor so I buzzed her, hoping she was in.

Bzzt "Hello?" Her voice answered. She was called Julie, a pleasant middle-aged woman who I got on pretty well with. She lived alone but had a teenage daughter so I’d been called upon to help her out a few times when the daughter needed picking up and Julie was working late. I pressed the receiver and spoke back.

"Jules? It’s Natasha from #34, I locked myself out. Again."

"Oh, hi, Nat, give me a minute."

The buzzer clicked and I could just about hear the muffled sounds of her moving towards the door through the glass-fronted front door of the building. The staircase up to the higher floors was just to the left of the entrance, and Julie’s apartment door was facing me. It opened and she stepped out, fumbling with a set of keys to find the right one. Julie was about 5’ 5", with long, straight brown hair and looks that flattered her age. She opened the door for me and threw a concerned look at my by now very dishevelled appearance. The last time I’d slept had been in the police cell this morning, and the last time I’d washed had been something like three days ago. Thank god girls can hide it better when they sweat!

"Good grief, Nat, where on earth have you been? You look like you got dragged through a hedge backwards and then thrown back through it again!"

"Thanks for the concern, Jules, but I’m fine. I just got a bit sidetracked while I was out on a job and kind of lost the ability to pick up fresh clothes."

"You’re on the news, you know."

"Really? What for this time?"

"Well, not you directly, but the police have had a spokesman on to talk about that cult bombing and have made a few hints as to who the suspect they had in custody was."

"Great, that’s all I need. I’ll have bounty hunters kicking my door down at this rate. Again!"

"Never mind that now. Go and get yourself washed and changed, I’ll talk to you later."

Julie went back inside and I started the climb up the stairs to my room. Why is it that whenever you’re this close to home after a long day, those last few steps to rest are the hardest and most tiring of the whole day? My boots suddenly felt like those of a deep-sea diver, and it was through sheer force of will that I made it to my front door. I stood there for a few seconds before I remembered I didn’t have any keys. The sound of my palm hitting my forehead as I unleashed a Homer Simpson-style ‘D’oh!’ must have been heard miles away. How was I going to get in? The janitor here had said the last time she’d used her master keys to get me in that it was the absolute last time ever. And had filled out an order form to change my locks if I did it again just to keep me in line. There was nothing else for it. I was going to have to break into my own apartment.

If anyone had happened to come up those stairs during the ten painstakingly slow minutes I took using the penknife, hairclips and other assorted sharp things in my jacket pockets to pick the front door lock, I’d probably have gone to prison. Or rather, gone back to prison.. But luckily I knew the only other person who was definitely in was Julie, because today was her one day off, so unless I was about to fall victim to one of those unexpected unfortunate coincidences that always seem to befall the heroes of detective novels, I was ok. The last chamber of the lock pinged open with a satisfied click, and I was in at last. I darted inside before anyone could see how I’d managed to force my way in.

Straight away, my keen detective brain started picking out clues to the past few days. Mainly because someone had obviously been into my apartment and ransacked the place, although what it is they were looking for I had no idea. Now would be a good time to make the old ‘oh my god! I’ve been robbed! no, wait, this is how messy it usually looks’ joke about my apartment, but I’m proud to say that this was one place I managed to keep fairly orderly. Jack’s apartment was the messy one.

My little flat consisted of a small hall area which led into a corridor about ten feet long. The bathroom, storeroom and bedroom all led off from that, and at the end of the corridor was the lounge, and once in that the kitchen was on your left. My place was cosy enough for someone who only spent less than half their time here, thanks to the big squashy sofa and TV in the right hand corner of the lounge. At the moment, the place was literally upside down, thanks to whoever the bastards were that had ripped through it.

The sofa was upended and the TV was on the floor. Whoever had done this had been thorough. I had a desk in the left hand wall with my PC on it, this had been as good as smashed onto the ground. It looked as though somebody with a big set of fists had been trying to rip out the panels in the wall, probably in the thought that I’d hidden something inside the walls. To be honest, I wasn’t that inventive.

I peered into the kitchen. All the pots and pans and cooking thingies were spread across the counters and the floor. Well, that was an improvement of sorts because at least now I knew where everything was..

I held my breath and took a look inside the bedroom. That one had been hit worst of all, with my mattress almost ripped in two. Someone had been at it with a knife, and there were similar slash marks up and down the wallpaper. Well, it was about time I redecorated anyway. All the clothes out of my wardrobe were strewn across the floor and what was left of my bed, which if nothing else helped me pick out a change of outfit,

In the bathroom, they’d removed some of the tiles and kicked open the side of the bathtub looking for whatever it was they were after. At least the shower still worked. And if it leaked, there was only an old maintenance room below me so I wouldn’t rain on anyone’s parade, so to speak. I kept the storeroom locked but that hadn’t stopped these people, but all my cleaning stuff was in there so they’d given up and left.

So why would anybody want to ransack my apartment then? What did they think I had that was so important? My guess was that it had something to do with the cult explosion, like pretty much everything else at the moment, but until I’d done a quick check to see if anything was missing I couldn’t be sure. I heard the phone start to ring. From somewhere. I kept it in the front room but at the moment my front room looked more like the cloakroom from a poltergeists convention so I was forced to hunt through the scattered bits of furniture until I found the little bleeping handset, at the bottom of a pile of dirt that used to live in a plant pot but now had migrated to the floor.

"Hello?"

"Nat? It’s Jack. Is everything okay?"

"Well, my apartment’s been raided and I suspect you’re about to tell me that yours has too, right?"

"Right. I swung by to pick something up as I was getting us some lunch and found the place had been turned end over end. Any ideas what they were after?"

"It’s got something to do with the past few days, I’ll bet, but at the moment no idea. I probably left myself a message somewhere so I’d remember."

"Where do you normally leave yourself messages?"

"I can’t remember.."

"Look, never mind, I’ll be over soon. I’ll give you chance to get changed first then come over. Don’t touch anything or try to clean up, they may have left us some fingerprints or something."

Jack hung up. I put the receiver back on the window ledge and picked some of the rogue dirt out of my ear. Well, at least I could still take a shower. I headed back for the bathroom and turned the unit on. The raiders had thrown my towels on the floor, but they’d landed over one of the heating pipes so they were nice and warm. That was something, I guess.

Jack arrived twenty minutes later. I was out of the shower and sat in the front room a little dejectedly. I’d put on a pair of tracksuit trousers and a hooded top, but my hair was still bundled up in a towel. I’d had to wash it three times before I felt it wasn’t made out of processed fat so I was just letting it dry off at the moment. When Jack walked in (he had his own key) I was watching the TV, having propped it back up with the smashed plant pot, and drinking coffee from a cracked mug. He’d brought lunch round, and I tucked into the hot toasted sandwich he’d brought round as he paced around the apartment looking over everything.

"Whoever did this was a professional," he said a few minutes later. He’d been using one of his little gadgets, a hand-held scanner that showed up fingerprints on things, and when it was working properly could attempt a DNA match if fed a sample of the print’s residual skin tissue.

It wasn’t working today.

"They didn’t leave me a single print. I mean, with the amount of stuff they turned over both at yours and mine, you’d have thought they’d have left me something. But as it is we just need to hope they left some kind of clue behind because at the moment we’ve got.. well, jack, really."

I avoided following up the pun and headed for my stricken PC instead.

"They made a point of attacking this. Do you think they’d have tried to get into it first?"

"More than likely," said Jack, "let’s try to switch it back on and see if we can find out what they were looking at."

I turned on the power as Jack righted the tower and monitor. It hummed loudly, a sign that the cooling fan wasn’t working properly, and when the monitor faded up into life it was obvious that same big-fisted henchman who’d sliced up my bedroom had put his paw into this thing. Probably more because my computer was ordered in a very illogical way than because he couldn’t find anything. But with a few deft keystrokes and a basic knowledge of keypad logging I was able to find out that the raiders had searched my PC for files that contained the words ‘ledger’ and ‘cult.’

"A ledger? That’s where people keep records of accounts and business transactions and stuff, right?" I said.

"So maybe that’s it?" said Jack, voicing what I was thinking. "That there’s some kind of ledger book that you took from the cult, and that they’re trying to find out if you brought back."

"I honestly have no idea. It does sound like the kind of thing I’d do, though. Maybe I hid it somewhere?"

"You may have forwarded it to somebody you trust in case anything happened to you. That is also something you’d do."

"I wonder who, though?" If I was brutally honest about it, I wouldn’t trust that many people with something like that. But it had to have gone somewhere, because if it was in this apartment those crooks would have found it. I ticked off the possible suspects on my fingers.

"Detective Burton?" Ian Burton was a police detective who I considered a friend. In fact, the only police employee in the entire world I considered a friend. We’d known each other a long time, back from those few hectic months when I’d actually been a police detective myself, and had helped each other out when needed, but would I really send an item that valuable straight to the police?

"Maybe, but with the amount of police involvement in this that’s unlikely. Plus, we know that Price always has an eye on whatever you send to Burton so you may not have wanted to risk getting it intercepted."

"Yeah, good call. Okay, what about Mr. Lawrence?" Lawrence was my criminology degree lecturer, and someone who I’d kept in close touch with since moving to the city. If I was Dr. Watson, he was my Sherlock Holmes, the person I turned to for inspiration in my work. Or to help me figure out clues when I was still scratching my head and wishing I had a Bat-Computer.

"Possible. We’ll have to call him to check. You’d never send anything like that to your parents, would you?"

"Never." After what had happened with my little sister, I’d made a pact with myself to keep my family well clear of anything to do with my work. That didn’t leave me many options, however.

"Well, I can’t think of anyone else you’d send that sort of thing to. You wouldn’t have sent it to me because you’d have known they’d search my place too.

"Me neither. Unless.."

"Unless what?" Jack asked. Jack had that distant look in his eyes again. If I looked hard enough, I could make out the hamster on its little wheel that powered his brain whirring round as he gathered his thoughts.

"The office wasn’t raided, right? Because of the police."

"Right."

"So if anything had been sent back there, not only would they not have had chance to get it, it would also have been more secure and thus more likely to be there.."

"But we were both in the office this morning, how could we have missed it?" I threw Jack a sideways glance until his mind’s eye came up with the image of the office. Notably the four foot high pile of unopened mail on my desk and the similar pile by the door.

"It’s perfect," he said. I was expecting a ‘Great Scott!’ or ‘Eureka!’ but that’d do fine. "You must have known that the police would get involved, so you reasoned they’d come to the office, so you made sure that when they got there you’d have all the evidence you needed right in your very office!"

"I’m glad this is all making so much sense to you, because I honestly still have no idea what happened or where I sent the book.. if I did actually send it!"

"Well, I’ll go check. You were going to see Elizabeth’s parents still, right? To try and track down the deprogrammer?"

"Yep, once I’m ready I’ll go talk to them. And make sure they don’t think I killed their daughter either."

"I’ll head back to the office and go through the mail, then, and see if we have the book. After that, I have another idea."

"What now?"

"Well, you know my friend Stacy that works at the university science labs?"

I nodded and tried to hide the sulky put face that loomed up inside me at the mention of her name. Stacy Davies was a bubbly blonde lab technician who was handy when it came to cut price use of expensive lab equipment (i.e. free) but who was also, in my humble opinion, a vacuous bimbo who spent all of her time trying to sleep with Jack. Not that I was interested in Jack and getting jealous because of that, I hasten to add, but because she became a distraction to him and more importantly tried to tempt my best friend away from me. With all her blonde hair and her dimples and her corny little ‘really? * blink blink *’ feigned airheadedness.

That didn’t make me sound very good, really, did it? All I mean is I appreciate her usefulness but I just wish she wasn’t so annoying. There. Anyway.

"I asked her if there was any way we can both take a toxins test to see if we were drugged or something. The memory loss we’re experiencing can’t just be from a blow to the head, it’s too specific."

"Yeah, we both can’t remember those two days at all. When could we have been drugged though?"

"Beats me, that’s what I intend to find out. I may need you to swing by the university to get a blood sample later today if she can sort that out for us. Is that okay?"

"As long as I don’t have to actually speak to the girl, yes, that’s ideal." I switched my PC off because it’s lack of air thanks to the broken fan was making it vibrate at a painfully low volume. Local cats had started wailing outside so I guessed I’d hit some kind of restricted frequency with it.

Jack stood up and got out his mobile phone while I dipped my head forward and started to towel dry my hair. That’s when I noticed something. I was sat on a swivel chair at my desk so I rotated it for a better view. There was something wrong with the side of the TV. I hadn’t noticed it before, it was only from a certain angle that the light showed up what I could see. Two little scratch marks, as though someone had forced open the plastic casing of the TV unit..

Jack was talking to Stacy on the phone as I started to crawl slowly across the carpet, my eyes fixed to the scratches in case I lost sight of them. I could hear him raising an eyebrow at me but I didn’t dare look away. I got up close to the TV, half the towel still wrapped round my head and the rest of my still damp hair falling around me, and ran my fingers over the scratches. Someone had definitely prised the case open, but why? Probably to hide something inside it. I kept my fingers on the marks and looked round to Jack. He finished his call and put his phone back in his pocket.

"Alright, what?" he asked. "And you crawled through the dirt from your plant as well, by the way."

I glanced down at the knees of my tracksuit bottoms. Damn.

"Necessary evil, Jack. Make yourself useful and get me a screwdriver or penknife or something. There’s a knife in my jacket."

"Why?"

"Because I think I may have found the ledger." Jack dashed into the hall to root through my jacket, reappearing with my penknife a moment later. I carefully opened out the longest, thinnest blade and slid it along the mould line holding the two halves of the TV’s casing together. With a deft twist of my wrist I popped it open, and although I received a quick electric shock for my efforts (I’d forgotten to switch the power off!) I saw straight away what had been so valuable as to hide it so carefully. A small leather-bound book, wrapped in plastic and half-hidden inside the electronics of the TV set, nestling alongside the tube. I reached in and lifted it out, unwrapping it and taking the book out.

"Looks like you hid it better than you thought," said Jack. I noticed some writing on the cover, and a little slip of paper with my handwriting on.

"Book one of two. Second sent to the usual place for safekeeping," I read off the note. Great. So I had half of the evidence that could hopefully clear my name in one hand but no idea about where to find the other.

"At least we have some of what we need, right?" said Jack, taking the book out of my hands and starting to leaf through it. "If we’re lucky there should be a list of contact names or something similar in here, as well as an exact record of how much cash the place had and what was being done with it."

"The police told me that the money had gone missing, but I’m betting it had been diverted away to different places before the explosion. This whole operation seems to have been designed to fleece people out of their cash one way or another, so if we can prove that money didn’t go to us we’re in the clear. Well, for one set of the charges, anyway. The murder of nearly fifty people may take a little longer to sort out.."

Jack was reading the ledger and flicked through to the end. He handed me the book back with a dark look.

"No names in this one, and the accounts only go as far as last October. The levels of cash moving around seem to be building up to the amount the police say went missing, though. If we can find that other book I think it’ll tell us the rest."

"So that’s the plan, then. You go back to the office, I’ll make myself a bit more presentable and go pay a visit to Elizabeth’s parents and see what that gives us. And if your blonde friend comes back to us with the chance to do a tox screen call me right away."

"Got it. Speak to you later, Nat." Jack picked up his coat and left the apartment.

"No, that’s fine, I’ll clean the place up by myself," I muttered as the door slammed shut. I switched the TV back on but I’d somehow managed to slightly misalign the tube, so I only got three quarters of the picture. With a resigned sigh I tried the last bit of my now cold sandwich and coffee.

When it was time to get ready, I trawled through the spray of clothes around my bedroom to pick out my more demure looking formal wear. I was going to talk to the parents of a girl who may think I caused the death of their daughter. And I needed them to trust me enough to help me find the location of a cult deprogrammer who’d gone missing and may or may not be implicated in the cult business. So what is a girl to wear?

I decided on a floor length black skirt, a relic from my days spent hanging round goth bars and wearing too much makeup (I think that was after the whole David thing. remind me to tell you about that some other time), a plain blue skinny fit jumper and my plain black leather jacket. I had a leather jacket for any occasion. I had the file for the Burns family, or what was left of it, so I got their home address from there. I decided it was prudent to call ahead before I arrived, to make sure they’d actually let me in the house and not chase me down the drive with a shotgun.

I rescued the phone from the front room/bomb site and dialled their number. A nervous sounding woman answered.

"Hello? The Burns residence?"

"Hello, Mrs Burns, this is Natasha Tyreen, the private investigator who was looking for Elizabeth for you."

"Oh, oh yes, yes. Natasha. How can we-" She didn’t get any further. There was the sound of the phone being snatched away and a gruff man’s voice started talking. Someone who sounded a lot more pissed off than the woman.

"Tyreen? What the hell has happened to our daughter? The news has been telling us that place blew up!" They hadn’t worked out the police thought I was a suspect. Good.

"It did, but don’t worry, Mr Burns, I am absolutely positive that your daughter wasn’t there when the accident happened."

"Accident? It blew up! Fifty people dead!"

"I don’t believe they’re dead, Mr Burns. I need to come and see you both, when is a good time for you?" Please say now. Please say now. Please-

"Any time from now, I suppose," said Mr Burns with a sigh, "we’ve done nothing but wait by the phone anyway, hoping either you or Lizzie would call us."

"I’m glad to hear that, I’ll be right over." I hung up and grabbed my backpack. It was a small black bag with a funky knobbly rubber moulding outside it, like the result of a hedgehog meeting its end in a plastics factory. It was deceptively durable, as I’d found out from the time when I was locked inside a car and pushed off a bridge into the river, as it had survived my eventual swim for safety and also kept my phone dry enough for me to call the police afterwards.

Thus armed, I grabbed the car keys and left the apartment again, locking it securely behind me as I left. This may be a tough meeting but at least the parents still knew I was on their side. I just prayed I’d get to them before DI Price found out and popped round for an interview.

The Natmobile started up and purred happily when I slid back into it once I was outside the flat. I’d let Julie know where I was going (just in case something else happened) and so all I had to do now was psyche myself up for the meeting with the Burns family.

A meeting which, if my current run of luck was anything to go by, would probably go something like this:

"Hello, it’s Natasha."

"Hello, Natasha. You may have killed our daughter. If you’d like to take a seat and maybe have a cup of tea, I’ll go get my husband’s rifle."

I pulled away from the curb, wound my way out through the annoyingly windy road that led up to my apartment block, cursed a few times at the inconveniently parked cars and joined the main road. Elizabeth’s parents lived in a reasonably nice area about half an hour’s drive away, which gave me time to think of what I needed to ask them and why. My memory had an annoying habit of failing me during routine questioning sometimes, although thankfully so far it was bulletproof whenever it came to anything important.

I needed to catch up with the deprogrammer I was supposed to bring Elizabeth back to. My notes on him had gone missing, or rather been taken from my office, so seeing as the girl’s parents had hired him they’d have to have a contact number for him. Then I had to reassure them that their daughter wasn’t dead, and the pictures of various dead bodies blasted to the highlands of bejaysus that the media were splashing everywhere weren’t actually dead. Which admittedly, was just a slightly loopy theory at this point. But one which did make a crazy kind of sense.

How was I to approach them, I wondered? My car seemed to be driving itself to our destination, which helped me as it meant I could devote the other half of my brain to thinking up what I was going to say. I decided that calming them first and then asking questions was the best approach. The possibility of Blonde Bird (yes, I know she has a name but I prefer not to use it) running a toxin scan to see what was making Jack and I lose our memories was worth following up too. I’d deal with that after this little interview.

I pulled over at the entrance to their street to gather my thoughts. Their road was a pleasant one, nicely secluded from the main roads (but still with that audible hiss of distant motorway traffic) and peppered with middle class-looking little semis and detached houses. It reminded me a little of my own home, which was in a similar area but thankfully what seemed like a million miles away from the area I worked in. I took a deep breath and drove down the road, parking outside the Burns’ residence and trying to look as sympathetic as possible as I walked up to their front door. The doorbell chimed some unrecognisable ditty, and a few moments later Elizabeth’s mother, whose name I now knew was Catherine, opened the door.

"Natasha, hello, do come in. Greg and I have been waiting for you ever since we first saw the news reports about.."

"Yes, I understand, Mrs Burns, shall we go inside so I can tell you what’s going on?"

I followed her into the front room. The house had the slightly closeted atmosphere of a place where people have recently been operating at extreme levels of stress, as though their negative emotions charged the air with bad karma and made my Spider Sense tingle like an overcharged Duracell bunny. Her husband, who she had thankfully reminded me was called Greg, was sat trying not to watch the television, concentrating hard on something in the distance. If he didn’t have frown lines before he certainly did now. Catherine sat down and I followed suit, taking my files out of my bag and placing them on my lap.

Catherine obligingly turned the television down as I began speaking.

"First of all, I would like to say that I am very, terribly sorry for any distress that all this has caused you. Believe me, I certainly had no idea that any of this was going to happen." I’m still not sure what did happen, I added to myself.

"It’s fine. Really. We just need you to tell us where our daughter is," said Mr Burns sternly. Clearly a man of few words, he wanted to ease both his own and his wife’s worrying as quickly as possible.

"The honest answer is that I don’t know. But I am one hundred percent certain that neither she nor any of the other members of that cult were killed in that explosion." Which was only half a lie. I was reasonably certain, at least.

"Well who on earth would do such a thing?" asked Catherine.

"It’s my understanding that the cult was in the process of channelling the money it had made from its members out to private bank accounts when I began my investigation, and at some point in the last few days they realised they were about to be exposed, blew up the premises to cover their tracks and escaped with the cash."

"What about the people in there?" said Greg.

"At the moment, that’s what I don’t know. I can’t say for sure how many of them were in on the scheme, although I’ll bet it was only a very select few. It’s more than likely that the cult members had left the premises long before the explosion, and that the bodies on the news reports were planted there to make everyone think they were dead."

"’More than likely’?" said Greg, leaning forward in his chair. He didn’t look too happy at this pretty vague assumption, and I had to admit if I was in his position I’d see why.

"By that I mean I don’t see any other way this could have happened. The bodies are unidentifiable, but I intend to find out whether that is a coincidence of has been purposefully engineered."

"What can we do in the meantime?" asked a flustered looking Catherine. I got the feeling that fresh tears were on their way. Her husband reached out to take hold of her hand.

"I know you don’t want to do any more waiting, so there is something I need to ask of you," I said, treading on eggshells and making damn sure not to say anything that would enflame the situation.

"What do you need?" asked Greg.

"As I’m sure you recall, you contacted a specialised cult ‘deprogrammer’ shortly after hiring me to investigate your daughter’s whereabouts, and my objective was to bring her back to him so that he could do something about the brainwashing she’d doubtlessly received whilst part of the cult."

‘Mr. Edgar Criddle, yes,’ said Mr. Burns.

Catherine nodded, and I carried on.

"I need to get in touch with him, because at the moment he’s my best link into all this. If I can talk to him I’m sure he’ll be able to help me trace back through the events of the last few days."

Greg stood up and walked into the back room of the house as Catherine spoke.

"Yes, yes, of course. Greg will get his number for you. We haven’t heard from him since all this happened either. We tried to call him but there’s been no answer so far.. do we have his address as well?" she called back.

"Just a minute," answered her husband, "I’ll write them all down."

"He was ever such a kind man, he told us about other people that he’d helped. He was planning to book the two of them into a hotel nearby, and he’d promised us faithfully that he’d be able to undo all their damage inside a few weeks."

The poor woman seemed to have been dragged through too much of an emotional whirligig recently to realise how dodgy that whole deal was, and also know that it was one of my hunches that this deprogrammer was in league with the cult. I recalled having had a suspicion about this right from the start, and my plan was to keep him and the girl under surveillance for the duration of her stay with him. Greg returned clutching a few scraps of paper which he handed to me.

"There’s his original phone number, which he doesn’t answer, the address he gave us and the address of the room he had booked in at the hotel. At least one of these should lead you to him."

I smiled thanks and stood up to leave. Greg held up a hand to stop me.

"One last thing. When you find our Lizzie and bring her back, I want you to do one more thing for us."

"What?" I asked, already half expecting his answer.

"I want you to tell me where to find the scum that did all of this and then turn a blind eye to whatever happens to them." The determined look in his eye told me two things – that he was a proud father who had every intention of avenging the wrongs done to his family, and that he was a potentially testosterone fuelled revenge killer who could very easily double his family’s heartache by landing himself in prison. I made a snap judgement..

"Leave it to me," I replied, "but please consider that I am legally bound here, and if the police take them into custody first there isn’t anything I can do." I took a chance and laid one sympathetic hand on his shoulder. "I give you my word that I will fix everything for you, Mr and Mrs Burns. I will bring your daughter back and you can all forget this whole affair."

Satisfied with my conviction, Greg nodded solemnly and led me to the door. He paused for a quiet word in my ear as I walked out.

"I understand that you can’t just leave him to me. But I want justice on these people for what they’ve done to my family, and I trust you to help me get that."

I nodded once and walked back to my car. Once I was safely round the corner and out of sight I pulled over to breathe out at last. That had gone better than I was expecting but was still more tense than the first time I watched ‘The Usual Suspects.’ I retrieved my phone and dialled Jack up.

‘Hello?’ Jack answered. It sounded like he was still driving, where was he? He should have got to the office by now.

‘It’s Nat. Why aren’t you at the office yet?’

‘Ah, traffic, roadworks, burst water mains, you name it. It’s as though a higher power is stopping me from getting back there. Plus, I keep seeing lots of patrol cars in the area so I’m having to really take my time getting there. You want to head over and meet me there?’

‘Will do.’ I started the car’s engine.

‘How did the meeting with the parents go?’

‘Pretty well, I got contact info for the deprogrammer guy so we’ll give him a call once we’re back at the office.’

‘Right. See you soon.’ I hung up and drove out towards the office.

* * * *

Jack wasn’t kidding, something pretty major seemed to be going on all over the city. Electricity mains were blowing, water mains were turning the streets into swimming pools and there was more traffic than the queue to get out of an Eagles reunion concert. Still, I persevered and eventually fought my way through to the office. Jack’s car was there so I parked next to him. As I stepped out, I waved a friendly hello to the two badly-disguised undercover cops in the car across the street before I headed inside. I don’t think they waved back.

Nobody else seemed to be home so I made my way straight upstairs. I heard Jack talking to someone on the phone before I walked in, but he’d slammed the phone down as I opened the door. I hung my coat up as he massaged his temples from what must have been a very stressful conversation.

‘Well?’ I said, indicating the huge pile of letters and packages that remained undisturbed by the letterbox in the door.

‘Don’t start,’ said Jack, leaning forward and rubbing his temples to de-stress after what must have been a particularly heavy phone call. ‘It seems almost all of your clients past and present have tried to call you over the past few days, ever since that news article. Some think you’ve been framed and want to help.’

‘Well, that’s kind of encouraging,’ I said hopefully.

‘I’m not finished,’ said Jack, holding up a hand to stop me. ‘Some want their money back because they think you’re some kind of fraud, and some are talking about suing us for collateral damage incurred during our investigations.’

‘Collateral damage? Like what?’ I protested.

‘There was that businessman whose fleet of company cars you trashed, and then there was that airline who had a hangar burn down, and then..’

‘Alright, I get the point,’ I said. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now to stop using those special explosive bullets in my gun.’

‘For the time being it may be a good idea,’ said Jack. The phone rang but without looking up Jack lifted the receiver and plopped it straight back down again. I heard a brief enraged customer’s voice, sounding awfully like a flock of shrieking parrots, before the click of the receiver plunged the office back into relative quiet.

‘Had many of those, then?’ I asked.

‘About twenty since I got here half an hour ago,’ said Jack. ‘We need to start sorting this out now, Nat. Show me what you got.’

I placed the open folder on the desk and added the contact details that the Burns’ had given me.

‘The guy’s name is Criddle, Edgar Criddle although a name that daft is undoubtedly an assumed one. We have a home number and a mobile number but we’ll have to see whether either of them check out. He was due to take the girl to this hotel room,’ I said as I showed Jack the part of the note which read ‘Room 419, Lanza Hotel, Midland City Central.’

‘I’ll go check out the hotel, see if they can tell me what he did and how long he was there. He’s probably out of town by now so hopefully we can trace him somehow,’ said Jack, making a note of the hotel details. Midland City Central was in the business district end of the city centre, full of faceless anonymous buildings and equally bland people. It was a corporate sector and populated almost entirely by dull men in smart suits. Not a good place to hold a house party but an ideal place to hide any surviving witnesses to the dirty deeds of the cult..

‘I’ll start by checking out these numbers and seeing where they lead,’ I said, ‘and then I’ll try making some sense of this ledger. I know a guy who works in one of the banks downtown, he owes me a favour so I’ll get him to tell us what these books are hiding.’

‘Books, plural?’ said Jack raising an eyebrow. My gaze shifted to the second pile of unopened letters and parcels next to him on the desk. Looks like we had some letter opening to do first.

‘Oh yeah,’ I mumbled, ‘you get started on these and I’ll do the heap by the door.’

‘Agreed,’ he replied, opening my desk drawer to look for a letter opener. I grabbed a metal comb from the top of one of the filing cabinets (don’t ask why it was there, it ‘s the kind of thing I always leave lying around!) and picked up a bundle of letters. Seating myself back at the desk, we both made a start tearing into the first packages.

One hour later we were both knee deep in brown paper wrapping but there was still no sign of the ledger. However, I may have already won a new car, a trip to an island paradise resort, several thousand pounds worth of cash and a paraglider, and I was also apparently in need of Viagra prescriptions, breast enlargements, breast reductions, a personal loan at an affordable interest rate, a penis extension and fat dissolving tablets to help me with the lo-calorie diets I should apparently be on. Jack was having similar success. My mind kept wandering back to one of the early scenes in the third Indiana Jones movie, where Indy has to find the Grail Diary from his father by sorting through a stack of papers on his desk. Or was that from the computer game?

My mind was just beginning to wander into some unrecoverable retro computer gaming zone when Jack suddenly stopped and called my name to grab my attention.

‘Huh? What?’ I said, narrowly rescued from blowing a mental fuse trying to remember how the theme music to Double Dragon went.

‘This looks promising.. in fact, this looks very promising!’ he said, turning a thick package in his hands. It was the same size and weight as the book from my apartment, so I urged him on to open it. Sure enough, under the layers of wrapping and padding was a red leather bound book, with a note in my handwriting attached to the front of it.

‘Dear Natasha, this is also Natasha. How are you? I always wanted to talk to my future self so now here’s my chance,’ read Jack. I chuckled.

‘Ah, that girl, always with the funnies.’ Jack’s stern look shut me up. ‘Erm, sorry, carry on.’

‘Anyway, this is the second half of the ledger from the cult’s base. I hope one of either me or Jack is reading this because I wouldn’t like to be dead.’ Jack threw me a bemused look, so I just batted my eyelashes innocently. My sense of humour tended to warp a little bit when I was faced with actual life-threatening danger. Jack continued.

‘As for what’s inside the book, well, you’ll need to see old Bob Pearce at the WestBank to decode it, because it may as well be written in Martian for all I know. Love, Nat.’

‘Well then, that’s one step closer!’ I said brightly. ‘Do you want to finish off the rest of the mail?’ I said, indicating the piles that were left over. Jack looked blankly at me, then without shaking his gaze swept the remaining parcels and letters off my desk and back onto the floor. I smiled at him.

‘And that, Mr Zondar, is why we make such an excellent team. Our minds operate on the same unique wavelength.’

‘You mean, I’m just as daft as you are,’ said Jack, getting out of his chair, ‘and now it’s time we did that thing that we sometimes get paid for.’

‘Right. Call me when you know what’s happening at the hotel, I’m gonna pay a visit to the phone company and trace these numbers, then go by the bank to get Bob to take a look at the ledger.’

I always preferred it when I could get all assertive and professional like that. When you work in the private investigation field, the absolute worst thing you can ever do is sit around and do nothing. Sitting around and waiting for something to happen, that’s different. But when you have no clues or leads to work on you can almost feel the money draining away as you sit there like a confused two year old in a burst paddling pool.

And while I was trying to figure out where that last analogy came from, I suddenly remembered the police waiting outside. They were bound to tail us wherever we went, and if they figured out we were continuing with our investigations they’d come down on us like a ton of something large and heavy.

‘What is it?’ said Jack. He was halfway through putting his coat on and had seen my eyes flicking round the room. And probably heard the little hamster on the wheel inside my brain whizzing round faster than usual.

‘The police outside, did you see them earlier?’

‘Of course I did, that’s one of the first things they do in a case like this. Keep a close eye on the movements of all the suspects.’ I waited a moment for this thought to sink in. ‘Ah, they’re going to try and tail us, aren’t they?’

‘You betcha, we need either a diversion or some way to get out of here unnoticed.’

‘A diversion would be best, we’ll take hours to get where we need to if we can't get out front to use the cars.'

‘Good point. Hmm, I may have an idea actually.. do you still have that friend who works at the garage round the corner?’

‘Yeah, Kit Wilson.’

‘Would he do you a favour?’

‘What did you have in mind?’ asked Jack, a little suspiciously as the grin rose on my face.

‘The diversion that we need..’ I said.

The scene would have gone something like this. Bold as brass, Jack and I leave the office and saunter down the steps to our cars. I turn and wave at the cops again, then we both leap into our cars and screech off in separate directions. The cops no doubt started their car up with a flurry of curses and move to follow one of us. That would be the moment when Kit Wilson’s pick up truck pulls out of the side road in front of the police and grinds to a halt as Kit jumps out of the cab to load up one of the parked cars in the street. Completely blocking the police in, of course. I know they can’t reverse and drive round because the side of the road they were on leads to a dead end about twenty metres behind them. Sure, they could probably pull off a twelve-point turn to get past the hopefully awkwardly-parked truck, but by that time Jack and I are well on our way. I just hope they didn’t bug our office so they wouldn’t know where we were going, or if they did that Jack’s anti-surveillance gizmos were still working properly..

I pulled up outside the local branch of MidComTelesystems, thankful that I was still wearing my demure ‘meet the parents’ outfit from this morning, and after grabbing a pair of old non-prescription glasses from my bag, I tied my hair back into a bun and tried to get into the mindset of an efficient corporate secretary. My line was going to be that these were my bosses numbers and they weren’t working correctly, so I wanted the engineers to look into them and find out where the problem was. Which should, if I bluffed this correctly, give me the location of the phone lines and what numbers had been called on them. In theory. I took a deep breath and walked in.

The girl at the reception counter looked suspiciously similar to the bored desk girl at the train station from the other day, but I reasoned this just proved my theory that there are factories around the world that clone bored blonde girls to work at these sorts of desk jobs. She looked up indifferently at me as I walked in. The lobby area was a pleasant glass-fronted room, with plenty of busy looking people wandering up and down staircases and popping in and out of lifts all around me. Random cheap pieces of modern art were framed on the wall, but the slightly plastic looking décor just made me think of a fast food joint minus the greasy teenagers.

‘May I help you?’ asked the receptionist. I peeked over the top of her desk to read her name off her badge.

‘Yes, Miss.. Calendar, is it?’ The receptionist just blinked at me, so I carried on. ‘My name is Rooney, Rebecca Rooney, and I work for a Mr. Charles Vantage, VP of Vantage Publishers. Are you familiar with the company?’ I hoped that my prim public school accent would complete the illusion I was trying to maintain.

‘Yes, I’ve heard of it, I assume you’re a customer with a complaint?’

‘That’s right, Mr. Vantage has asked me to-‘

She raised a palm to cut me off as she dialled in an extension number into the large phone on her desk. I hate it when people do that, but I drummed my fingers on the desktop to stifle my anger. The girl spoke to what sounded like another cloned girl on the other end of the line.

‘Jenny? It’s Sue. Got a complaint at front desk, I’ll send her up to you.’ She replaced the handset and motioned towards the set of elevators on the left hand side of the lobby. ‘Take the elevator up to the seventh floor and ask for Sue at the desk. She’ll take you through to one of our engineers who’ll help you. Thank you.’

She looked back down at whatever magazine she was sneakily reading at her desk and I realised the conversation was over. I stepped into one of the lifts and thumbed the ‘7’ button. There were two suits behind me chatting quietly about one of the other cloned desk girls in the building, and I suppressed a shudder at the thought of them breeding. When the lift dinged to announce my floor, I stepped out and headed for the receptionist at the other end of the plushly carpeted corridor which the lift opened out onto. I hoped Jack was getting somewhere at the hotel, because if this and the ledger came to nothing we were down to just one lead.

More evidence of cloning awaited me as I spoke to Jenny, the girl who would be taking care of my ‘complaint..’ The atmosphere upstairs was a little warmer than the frankly sub-zero reception I’d received in.. well, the reception area. The corridor and the offices beyond were plushly carpeted and well furnished, with the relaxing background buzz of dozens of phone calls flitting round the edges of my hearing. Jenny heard my story (checking the phone line for Charles Vantage Publishing, in case you’ve already forgotten) and led me past the reception desk and into the engineers rooms.

There was a long, open plan office area with a bunch of bored looking teenagers manning the call stations, their headsets slowly starting to bond to their acne-sporting heads through so many hours of low level radiation exposure, and beyond that, separated from the office area by another large glass partition, were the engineers themselves – mole-like geeks, all in their receding hairlines and short-sleeved shirts, glasses reflecting their PC screens back at them and a huge wall of wires and cables behind them that looked like the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was making its assault on the world of telecommunications.

Jenny led me into this area and pointed me in the direction of one of the guys at the back, then wandered back over to her desk, followed by admiring gazes from practically every male in the room. My geek for the day was called Gareth, he stood and briefly shook my hand with his unpleasantly sweaty palm, then sat down again as I took a chair next to his station.

"So, ah, what seems to be the problem then, Miss Rooney?"

"Well, Mr Vantage had this line installed but it just plain doesn’t seem to be working. We think it may have been connected wrong or just not hooked up at all," I said, handing him the piece of paper with Criddle’s numbers scribbled on it., "so if you could just run a few checks on these numbers, I’d appreciate it." I finished with a big smile, and settled down to watch him get to work.

I had an appreciation for nerds, having almost been one when I was a lot younger at school.. They filled a useful part of the world even if their efforts or talents weren’t always recognised. Sure, there were the drawbacks, number one being that they were geeks and had all the antisocial qualities that came with that – bad personal hygiene, an obsession with low grade pornography, appalling dress sense and often very jarring laughs, but they also did helpful things, like run everything in the world that had anything to do with computers. At all.

Gareth the Geek opened up a number search screen on his little PC, which seemed to be connected to about eighty different wires and cables from the wall behind it,. and typed in the first contact number for Mr. Criddle the deprogrammer. A bewildering chain of green letters and numbers descended over the screen. I was half expecting Gareth to turn round and offer me a red pill or a blue pill when he made a few notes and then turned his attention to me.

"Well, Miss Rooney, it seems that this line is indeed connected incorrectly. Whereabouts did you say this was for again?"

"Vantage Publishing down in Midland Central," I said, "Why? Where does it lead at the moment?" I tried not to sound too suspiciously curious.

"Well, it’s quite strange actually," he replied, gazing at the screen for a few moments more and making some extra notes. "It appears that this line is actually being routed through a couple of different places, so it’s a ‘floating’ number as we call them."

"Floating number?" I said, trying not to get a Sesame Street style image in my head.

"In as much as that it can be accessed from a variety of locations, making the actual source harder to pinpoint. Are you sure this was set up as a company line? This looks more like an attempt to avoid paying any charges to me."

"Well, it was purchased in good faith," I lied, rapidly trying to think of ways to continue the charade, "but perhaps some hackers have gotten hold of it? Don’t they use things like this to use phone lines but get the bill paid by other numbers and accounts?"

Gareth blinked a few times then nodded in agreement. "Yes, that’s actually very likely. I tell you what I can do, then. Unless the person in question is actually on the line at the time, we can’t trace the caller to their location, and even if we could it’d take some time so we’d probably lose them. However!" he said with an air of triumph.

"However what?" I asked, though not wanting to spoil his moment of glory.

"The police can. They have some fantastically advanced technology in this respect these days, so if you give the numbers to them they’ll basically call the line and track it down that way."

"I think my employer would rather keep the police uninvolved where possible, especially if the setup of this line may not have been entirely legal," I answered with a brief eyelash flutter and a hopefully convincing tone of pleading.

Gareth paused for a few moments and rubbed the bald patch on the back of his head. Finally he spoke.

"Okay then, next best thing I can do is give you the four possible locations and you can check them out yourself. I know of this very good private investigator, actually, pretty young thing whose offices are over on Madison Street."

I tried not to smile at the results of my advertising as he continued.

"One of these is bound to either actually be the base line itself, or be able to point you in the right direction." he sat back in his chair looking pretty pleased with himself. I remembered the mobile number listed too.

"What about this number? It was meant to be a private mobile phone line, but it also isn’t working so may have fallen foul of the same dramas," I said as I pointed out the second number I’d been given.

"Hmm. Mobiles are a little trickier, I’m afraid, you’ll need to get in touch with the actual network people to trace that one. We can only really do landlines here."

"That’s no problem, Gareth, you have been more than helpful. What did you say that investigator’s name was again?"

"Er, Byron, Laetitia Byron, I think. Quite an odd name, anyway."

I suppressed a scowl and with a little wave I took my leave of Gaz the Geek so I could continue my search. Well, I at least had four places to go looking for our missing suspect now, and once I’d been to see Bob at the bank I’d have some evidence to show the police. I didn’t have much time, mainly because my uncle’s bail wouldn’t keep me out forever, so I was hoping that Jack was having good luck across town at the hotel to keep up with my developments.

My next port of call was the local head office of the WestBank, which wasn’t linked to the old Israeli territory but actually the biggest banking service in the Midlands at the moment. It was good for one thing, namely being a reasonably efficient bank that didn’t lose money or personal details as often as some of its rivals, but it also meant that you had a lot less choice when it came to loans. And overdraft extensions. And flexible mortgage repayments. And other things that Jack and I knew the wrong side of all too often.

A short drive into the city, with the associated crappy parking in stupid multi storey car parks full of idiots who couldn’t park inside a pair of white lines if they were TEN FEET LONG (*whew* sorry, pet hate..), and I was on my way down the street to the WestBank head offices. I stayed in the same demure outfit as before, mainly because it would help me sweet talk old Bob Pearce into helping me decipher the ledger. He was getting on a little bit and as such had an old fashioned sense of how a woman should look and conduct herself. He was often found muttering to himself at the cloned blonde girls wandering round in their belly-baring tops and ickle ‘business’ skirts. By the same hand, he had one of the sharpest brains in the business and also was one of the few people I trusted with such sensitive information, so I was hoping he’d be able to help me out.

Getting in to see him was a lot easier than my cover story at the telephone company. I walked in through the automatic doors to the main lobby of the bank, past the queue for the cashiers and round to the cubicle offices at the back. Bob’s office was near the back so I could get a little privacy, and luckily he was in when I knocked.

His office reflected his mind – absolutely chock full of stuff but kept neat and orderly. The way I’d like my office to be but I quite simply don’t have the time to spend organising it. Bob was sat behind his desk, about three PCs running various programs buzzing away in the background, and two large books full of computer printouts of figures open in front of him. Bob was a well-built man in his fifties who still enjoyed a full head of wavy silver hair, but whose dress sense allowed him to wander into war veteran parties without standing out. He glanced up as I entered and motioned for one of the chairs in front of him.

"Have a seat, Natasha my dear, I’ll be with you in just a moment." He went back to poring over the books and I took a look around the inside of his office. Various diplomas and certificates showed him to be a well-educated man, and the framed photographs of him shaking hands with members of governments and financial institutions told me he was a man with plenty of high ranking friends and contacts. He closed the two heavy books and peered over the top of his half-crescent glasses at me, like a schoolteacher looking at a naughty pupil shortly before delivering one of those dreaded ‘"I’m not angry, just disappointed’ speeches.

"Hello again, Robert, it’s been a while, I know, but you know how busy I get." I said, trying to assume the kind of carefree air that stopped people thinking I was out to get something from them.

"What is it you’re trying to get from me then, my dear?" he replied. Old Bob didn’t miss a trick, alright.. I grinned and put the two ledger books down on the table in front of him.

"Now then, Mr. Pearce, I have an interesting task for you," I said, "and I know you are the only man with the talents for the job."

"And the only man who, despite having seen the news for the past few days, would never actually think that you’d killed all those people and run off with their money." I paused for a moment, thrown off-balance slightly by his openness. This was why I liked Bob, I could trust him and he was a 100% zero bullshit kind of guy.

"Well, yes, that too. These are the ledgers from the cult in question."

"Aah, I see.." he said, leaning forward and opening the first book with an interested look in his eye. I let him leaf through the first few pages before I spoke up again.

"I need to be able to prove that I didn’t take their money, and I think these will show where all their cash went. My hunch is that they’d been siphoning money off their members and feeding it into different bank accounts, most likely with the help of an outside man who I am also hopefully tracking down. Unfortunately-"

"Unfortunately you know as much about ledger books and their unique language as I do modern day dance music," said Bob without looking up, "but don’t worry, I can help."

I sighed with relief. "Thanks, Bob, I knew I could count on you. I know you’re probably busy at the moment.."

"It’s nothing that can’t wait to help a friend out, Natasha," he said, looking up at me with a warm smile, "I’ll get to work on it right away and call you when I find something that helps prove or disprove your theory."

That was a good point, I hadn’t considered the option that my hunch might actually be wrong. But then, no detective worth their salt ever doubted their hunches. It would be like Spider-Man ignoring his Spidey Sense, and we all know he got walloped every time he did that.

"Thanks a lot, Bob, I look forward to hearing from you." I stood up to leave and was halfway out of the door when Bob spoke up.

"One more thing, Natasha, I’d keep one eye behind you on the way out."

I paused and threw him a quizzical look. "Huh?"

In reply, Bob shifted one of the PC screens round to show that it was actually linked to the CCTV cameras watching the shop floor of the bank. He motioned for me to come over.

"I spotted this chap following you in, and he’s been hanging round ever since. I think you’ve got a tail, Natasha."

Bob was right. The guy looked disturbingly like that weirdo from the train the other day, and I didn’t fancy bumping into him again.

"Is there a back way I can get out of here?" I asked. Bob smiled again.

"Of course, follow me," he said, rising from his chair (slowly, he was getting on a bit, remember) and picking up a ring of keys.

Bob let me out through the service door at the rear of the bank’s offices, which led out into the alley and from there into the main street. I sneaked out there, and keeping one eye on the bank in case my mystery man showed up again, I hurried back to my car as fast as I could. Time to head back home and wait to see what Jack had found out.

When I got into my car, I called him up again.

"Hey there Nat, I think I found a few things out," he answered.

"Whatcha got then, pardner?" He hated it when I called him that, but after the uneasy feeling in my gut from seeing that stalker again I needed to relax the way I normally did – by winding Jack up. I swear I heard him wince before he continued.

"Criddle checked out the day of the explosion and left no forwarding address."

"Figures."

"But I managed to bluff my way into his room, claiming I was from an insurance company and we were tracking him down for unpaid tax bills."

"You must have looked the part in your suit then! I had to dress up a bit more to get round the phone company, but I’ll get to that later. What did you find in his room?"

"Well, I popped a few clues into my little evidence bags to check out later, but I couldn’t work out where he headed or what he’s doing. He covered his tracks pretty effectively."

"I may have a lead, no pun intended. The phone company said that his line was a hacked one that bounced between four different locations, so if we check those out we may find something there as well."

"Good stuff. Oh, and you’ll be pleased to know Stacy called, we can go over to the lab for the tox screen any time you’re ready."

Great. I sighed inwardly at the unpleasant thought of being diplomatically friendly to that girl again, but if it’d help us get to the bottom of all this then I guess it was a necessary evil.

"Okay then, may as well get started. I’ll meet you at the university."

"Right, see you in a bit then."

I sat back in my car for a moment to gather my thoughts. So far, we had the ledger books for the cult and so soon we’d know what happened to the money. That was problem number one solved. And we had a lead on the deprogrammer so we could hopefully find him quite soon and have another problem solved. Things that still needed to be resolved were what happened to me and Jack, what happened during the time we have no memories of, and where both the cults members and its leaders were. Once I could answer all those questions, I cold solve the final problem, namely stopping the police from thinking I’d taken them all out and run off with the money. I started the car and headed over to Birmingham University, hoping I’d be able to find some answers in the bottom of a test tube..

* * * *

Birmingham uni, as anyone who’s ever tried to visit it will tell you, is like a little rat’s maze. A vast series of interconnected streets, housing areas and little colleges and sub-colleges that would probably fill twice its current area if it was allowed to spread itself out a little better. It is also a horrifically easy place to get lost in, mainly because most of the street signs and road markings now live in the front rooms of the hundreds of student houses nearby rather than actually on the roads, so you tend to find where you’re headed by luck rather than judgement.

I knew a few short cuts, however. A couple did involved driving across the front lawns of the medical colleges, admittedly, but I managed to arrive at the front entrance to the biology department lab where Stacy worked not long after Jack did. The Queen Mary medical centre was a typically 1960s architecture-looking building, all straight lines and badly painted panel work, and the variety of cheap, clapped out cars in the parking lot told you more about the average wage of the staff than what kind of place it was. The facilities inside were actually pretty good, if a little unnerving. The place was chock full of creepy looking archaic medical instruments and equipment, the sorts of things that usually showed up in goth rock bands’ videos.

Jack was waiting for me in the reception. The building felt very much like an upmarket version of a school’s science wing, as various lab-suited personnel and either scruffily or outlandishly-dressed students came wandering past as we walked up the stairs to Stacy’s lab.

She was on her own in a large room filled with desks and glass cabinets on the wall full of unpleasant looking things in jars and bottles. At the far end of the room was a door that we knew led into the testing area – full of fluoroscopes and x-ray machines and other bits of kit with unpronounceable names. Stacy was busying herself with something at the rear of the room, but came over to us with a wave when she heard us come in. Jack beamed back at her and the two hugged. I stifled a shudder and just waved back with a fake smile. She was her usual self, white lab coat and protective goggles, blonde hair tied back into a bun.

"Hello, hello, how are you both?" she chirped. jack opened his mouth to answer but I butted in.

"We’re doing okay. Wanted by the police on suspicion of theft and murder, possible chemical-induced memory loss, and I think I may be being stalked, but other than that, fine. You?"

I knew that most of what I said would just sail straight through that head of hers, but it felt kind of satisfying to say it. Jack glared at me, but Stacy didn’t seem to have noticed my sarcasm.

"I know, I heard about all that. Pretty bad stuff! But I’m sure I can help you find out what happened to you both. If you’d like to walk this way?"

She wandered off towards the back section of the lab. I started to mimic her catwalk-model style walk but Jack tapped me on the arm to stop.

The rear section looked a little intimidating, especially as I wasn’t the sort of girl who was amazingly keen on needles, but hopefully this would be over soon. Stacy opened up a program on the desktop PC, and then brought out a row of little test tubes with different coloured solutions in them and placed them onto a rack on the surface. She then put on a pair of sterilised gloves and picked up a small airhypo needle, something that was remarkably similar to those seen on Star Trek back in the 60s and operating on the same principle – a pen-like object that used a burst of pressurised air to inject rather than a needle. This one was designed to extract rather than input, however, so would doubtlessly hurt more.

"All I’ll need to do is take a quick blood sample from you both, then I’ll test it in these solutions here to check for the presence of various toxins. After that, I’ll pop it in the shaker over here," she said, pointing to what looked like a small tumble dryer with an attachment to hold twelve small test tubes, "and I’ll use that to mix it with other control substances to check for other traces."

"Before we get started, in your professional opinion," I asked, taking extra care not to say the word professional too sarcastically, "what kinds of things could have done this to us?"

"I’ve done a little research on this already since Jack called me the other day," she said, preparing the first airhypo as she spoke. Jack was already rolling his sleeve up. "There are a couple of drugs that are quite easy to conceal, say in food or via light skin contact, that absorb quickly and then cause memory loss, the length of time being equal to the amount of drug used."

"They should all be fairly controlled drugs as well, so if we know what we were given we can try to see if any came into the country recently and go question the suppliers," said Jack, followed by a wince as Stacy pressed the hypo against his forearm and drew out a capsule of blood. She seemed to spend far too much time touching his arm for my liking, but after she’d taped a little swab over the hypo mark it was my turn. I looked away and waited for the brief stab that told me she was drawing the blood out. I’ll freely admit that I am a complete wuss when it comes to needles. I hope to god I never get captured and interrogated, I’d crack before they even stuck the sodium pentathol in me!

As Stacy swabbed my arm, Jack continued.

"I know a few guys who used to fence drugs in the area, so we go check them first and see if they have any news for us."

"And if I know what you were given I can find out if there’s any way to reverse its effects. The memory loss may be permanent, it may not. The human mind records everything it ever experiences, it’s just our ability to recall it that isn’t particularly brilliant," said Stacy. "Have you remembered anything at all?"

"A few tiny flashes of info but that’s it." Stacy nodded.

"That’ll be your unconscious mind fighting the effects of the drug, but until I can get hold of some kind of antitoxin it won’t do more than that, I’m afraid." She held up the two capsules of blood and picked up a long, thin tube-like instrument. "Now I’ll get to work on analysing your blood and I’ll get back to you both when I have results."

"Sounds good to me. Thanks a lot, Stacy, we owe you one," said Jack, putting on his jacket.

"Oh, don’t mention it," she said, blushing in an irritatingly cute way. "I like having interesting things to work on, it helps fill the quiet moments of my day!"

"Yeah, you must get a lot of those," I muttered as I picked up my jacket. As I was pulling it on, something fell out of one of my pockets and onto the floor. I looked down to work out what it was, but before I could Jack suddenly exclaimed "Holy crap! Where did you get that?!?"

"Huh?" I didn’t even know what it was but he was already swooping down to pick it up. It looked like a small black box, about the size of a postage stamp, but Jack was holding it like it was some kind of explosive.

"This is a very, very sophisticated, very dangerous piece of equipment, Nat, what are you doing with it?"

"Don’t ask me, " I said, exasperated, "it just fell out of my damn pocket! I never saw it before ten seconds ago!"

"What is it?" said Stacy, craning her head forward for a closer look. Jack was turning it over in his palm. It still looked like a small black box to me.

"It’s a tracing beacon, military technology," he said.

"How do you know?"

"I know a lot about these sorts of things. It transmits a signal back to its receiver at anything up to twenty miles away, but is also fitted with a security feature."

"Security?" I said, taking a small step backwards as my mind cottoned on to where Jack was leading. As I watched, he tapped the centre of the beacon and a small red light started flashing on one side of it.

"Yep, just as I thought. Looks like someone slipped this into your jacket to keep tabs on you, Nat. This is a tracking device that very few people can afford, and if I let it carry on bleeping like that, it’ll detonate."

"Detonate?!" said Stacy and I in unison, leaping back behind cover of the nearest desk.

"Relax, I can deactivate it again just as simply. I may even be able to find out where it’s transmitting to, as long as-"

Jack paused. A look of concern washed over his face. Stacy didn’t look like she knew what was going on, but I was already starting to hide again, having seen that look before.

"Ah. Actually.." He tapped it a few more times. A bleeping noise started to accompany the light, and Jack started looking round him for somewhere to get rid of the tracer.

"Now what?" Is everything ok?" asked Stacy. Jack didn’t answer, instead looking for something he could use. Spotting a controlled reaction cabinet in one corner of the room (the sorts of places they do all of those cool experiments at school where they mix two chemicals together and let them burst into flames), he dashed over, threw the tracer inside and threw himself to the floor.

"Hey, is that thing going to-" started Stacy before I reached up and pulled her back to the floor.

Seconds later, the device blew up, shattering the glass front of the cabinet and knocking a couple of shelves off the wall. Other jars and bottles clattered to the floor as smoke started to pour out of the burnt hole in the wall where the cabinet used to be. I turned to Jack, who was prone on the floor a few feet away.

"Slight problem disarming it, then?"

"Just a little. one, yes.."

"Oh.. my.. God! Jack Zondar, what have you done to my lab?!?" screeched Stacy, who was now stood up and staring, shocked, at the blast zone. Jack and I picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves down.

"Well, at least it wasn’t anywhere near us, right? What’s the worst that could have happened?" he protested.

That was when the smoke triggered the fire alarms. And the sprinkler systems. As the sounds of a university of thousands of people evacuating filled the air around us, I pulled up the collar of my jacket against the descending water and walked quietly out of the room. Jack followed a few moments later. Stacy just stood there, quietly blanching with horror.

"I mean, she could have lost an arm if she’d been closer. I could have lost an arm!" he said once we were outside. I tried to ignore the lines of people neatly queuing up in the fields opposite and got into my car. Men, eh?

So, somebody was trying to track my movements, I thought as I drove away from the university car park and back into the real world. Question is, who? And why on earth did they think I actually knew what I was doing? Did this have something to do with the guy following me? And why was I nearly out of petrol again?

As I got a bit closer to the city centre I experienced another slight traffic problem – all the traffic lights in a two mile radius seemed to have gone haywire, and the resulting queues of cars was stretching back for about six miles every way in or out of the city. Seeing as it’d take me a while to get back to the office, I had time to stop and think.

I was currently on hold until a few things got back to me. Bob had to finish looking through those ledgers and Stacy had to run the tests on mine and Jack’s blood samples. The hotel room booked out in Criddle’s name hadn’t given us any definite ideas, and the attempt to trace his phone line was more than likely going to result in four bogus locations, used to mask the source of his calls and thus avoid leaving any kind of bills he could be traced by. Somebody was definitely watching me, or at least paying somebody to watch me, which fitted in with my theory that the leaders of the cult, namely Criddle and whoever else was involved with him, were still alive and well and were not taking kindly to my attempts to find and expose them.

Which was a good thing, right? The attention proved I was on the right track for now, but the way to proceed wasn’t quite so clear. Once I got back to the office, I’d have a look through those things Jack said he’d found there, which would hopefully give us a few clears. I looked at the clock on my car’s dashboard, and in accordance with the early evening sun I saw it was nearly 5 o’clock. It was looking like another working evening, but as neither Jack or myself had a life we could get away with a few hours overtime.

I arrived at the office about an hour later. Night was setting in fast now, so I knocked on Lambert’s door on the way in to sort out getting some food ordered in. His light was on so I rapped lightly on the door and waited for him to answer. He opened it a few moments later, wearing his cardie and slippers, bless his little heart.

"Good evening, Miss Tyreen, how is everything today?"

"Still suspected of murder at the moment, Lambert, but I’m working on it. Jack’ll be here soon, we’re going to be pulling an all-nighter so I was wondering if you could call up some food for us?"

"Certainly, miss. What would you prefer this evening?"

"It’s been a while since we tried Sideways Gino’s Pizza, give them a call and order one large barbecue chicken and one large hawaiian for us both." Lambert scribbled a few notes down.

"Righto, I’ll get them to deliver as soon as possible."

"Thanks, Lambert." I closed the door and headed upstairs. I could hear my phone ringing inside the office, so I fumbled for my keys and pushed the door open. I was halfway through the door when I saw the person sitting calmly in my chair. As fast as my ninja-trained reflexes would allow (finely tuned from many childhood years spent watching cheap Chinese ninja movies), I reached for my gun on the holster inside my jacket.

Which was when I realised I’d not got my gun with me. In all the fuss of the past few days I’d either lost it or just forgotten to pick it up.

"Relax, you’re looking for this," said the man at my desk, placing my handgun down on the desktop. The office was dark so I could only just make out his outline, but he soon obliged me by flicking on the anglepoise lamp on the desk to light the place up again.

It was Detective Ian Burton, my number one buddy within the Midland City Police Force. He looked very tired, although I doubted somehow he’d been through as much as I had the past few days.

"Well, if you’re going to break into my office and scare me like that, of course I’m going to try and go for my gun!" I protested, taking off my jacket and closing the door again. "How did you get in, anyway?"

"I remembered where you hid your spare key. Besides, it’s always nice and warm in this office and I wanted to be sure I’d see you. Where’s Jack?"

"He’ll be here any minute," I said, putting the files from the day’s work on top of my main cabinet, "although I think he’ll be a bit less tense when he sees you." Burton was a reasonably tall guy of medium build, with close cropped black hair and a classic anti-hero jawline. Kind of like Harrison Ford post-Indiana Jones, and he also had a similar affectation for occasional attempts at facial stubble. He was also one of the few people I trusted without question, although I hadn’t been able to speak to him before now because of his department’s interest in me over the whole bombing and theft thing.

"You’ve not been to see me for a while, so I thought I’d better come to see you. Plus, we found your gun and I wanted to bring it back to you." He seemed to be trying to stay calm but I got the feeling there were a few important things he was going to get round to telling me. And knowing my luck, a few bad important things.

"I’m sure D.I. Price will love you bringing a wanted murderer a fully automatic handgun with optional laser sighting, Ian," I said, "but I’m guessing nobody else knows you’re here."

"Only my dog, who’ll be wanting to be fed some time soon so I’d better make this quick. Take a seat."

"Nope, it’s my office, so you take a seat and I’ll have my desk back, thank you very much." I stood with my arms folded, waiting for him to move. With a grin and a resigned sigh, he obliged, taking the seat on the other side of the desk while I sat down in my nice big comfy reclining leather backed chair. It was probably one of the most expensive things in the office, so after a long day’s work I was damn sure going to settle back and let the moulded seat works its magic on me.

"We’ve been continuing our investigation into the explosion as, I have no doubt, have you, and we’ve found a few things that I think may be of interest to you, given your current state of memory loss."

"Do go on," I said, popping my feet up onto the desk so I could take my boots off. Burton paused for a moment while he looked at my legs (still largely covered by the long skirt I’d been wearing, but I guess a man like him could really appreciate a flash of ankle and a bit of thigh at 6 in the evening), then carried on.

"We have the names of the cult leaders for you, and if I’m right then you already know half of the story with them."

"I don’t think they’re dead, for one thing," I said. "In fact, I’m positive of it."

"Well, I don’t either anymore, but what makes you think that?"

"For a start, the whole business smells of a classic ‘fake our deaths and escape with the money’ thing. Did you identify any of the bodies yet?"

"Not yet," he said, letting me smirk with satisfaction, "although that doesn’t mean we won’t."

"If any of them are identified at all, they won’t be any of the people you knew to be in the building. I will bet you any money that all 47 of those people are alive, and that the leaders are off somewhere with the money."

"That’s a possibility. Not one that some of my more efficient-"

"Or narrow minded, anyway," I interrupted.

"That some of my other colleagues are entertaining, but I’m starting to consider it.. It does make a lot of sense."

"So what were the names of the leaders, then?" I asked, starting to rummage through my desk drawers for both the cleaning cloth for my lovely gun, and the jar of wine gums I kept stashed away.

"Robin and Graham Caldwell. But that’s an assumed name. Their real surname is – get this – Criddle."

I found the jar but dropped it in shock as Burton read the name out. It didn’t smash but made a suitably dramatic ‘thud’ as it hit the floor.

"What?!?" I said, snapping back upright again.

"Ah, so I was right," he grinned. "You probably know their brother, Edgar. It’s a scam they’ve run before."

"Scam? What, setting up cults and then blowing everybody up?"

"Kind of. Edgar worked on the outside, and the other two brothers made sure that anyone who wasn’t part of their disappearing act was sent to him so that he could ‘deprogram’ them."

"He brainwashed them, right? Made them forget everything about what they’d seen at the cult, right?" I was leaning forward, eager to hear that I was actually on the right tracks with all this.

"That part we don’t yet know. All we know for definite is what I’ve just told you, and when I found this out I figured you should hear it. Three brothers, originally named Criddle but operating under different names in each area, set up phoney cults, accrue capital off their members then do a runner with the money. Except they’ve never blown anything up before, as far as I can tell."

"How many times before have they done this?"

"Twice. Once in France, once in Italy."

"Does the rest of your department know this yet?"

"Not yet, I only found out myself a few hours ago, when one of our contacts told me that Caldwell/Criddle link. I worked the rest out and headed straight over to you."

"To exchange information?" I said with a grin.

"The thought of a mutual exchange of information had crossed my mind, yes," smirked Burton. I heard Jack coming up the stairs at that moment, so I leaned back in my chair for him to arrive. Ian leaned back too, turning to face the door. Jack came in, absent mindedly hanging up his coat.

"Hey, Nat. Oh, hi, Ian," he said without missing a beat.

"Good evening, Jack, how’s things?"

"Ah, you know, murder and stuff, we’re working on it," he said, not looking up from the notepad in his hand. Burton turned to look at me but I just beamed proudly at the ‘similar wavelength thing Jack and I shared’ that his little entrance speech had just proven. Burton stood up to leave.

"We’ll have to talk again soon. If the other detectives figure out the link I have, then they’ll be onto the same places you’re looking pretty quick. I can hold them off for a few days but that’s it, so try to stay one step ahead of them. If you’re caught running your own investigation into this, they’ll lock you up again for obstruction of justice."

"Thanks for the tip, Ian," I said, with a little salute, "but have no fear, we’re on top of things. And thanks for bringing my gun back. Where di you find it, by the way?"

"Recovered from the scene of the explosion, I’m afraid. Don’t worry, no ballistics evidence to show you actually fired it or that anyone was killed by it, so it was in cold storage for the duration of the case."

"How did you get it out?"
"I switched it with a similar model. Nobody’ll check it." Burton threw me a funny look as I picked up the gun, cradled it in my arms and started cooing at it like it was a soft fuzzy kitten. "Maybe I ought to leave you two alone, then," he said, heading for the door. "Later."

"Yeah, thanks a lot, Ian." Jack took Ian’s seat as the detective walked out of the door. Jack was still looking down at his notebook, but as he read through his notes he popped a clear plastic bag with a few random items in up onto the desk.

"Whatcha got there?" I asked, craning forward to take a look.

"Things from Criddle’s room that may give clues to his location," said Jack. "Nothing definite, but if I remember right, you said you had four addresses that his phone line was using?"

"Right," I said, pointing over to the files I’d put on top of the cabinet. Jack got up to get them, then sat back down and opened it onto the desk.

"So, if any of the goodies here point us in the direction of any of these places, it’s a safe bet to assume that he’s used one of them recently during his activities."

"Yeah, the hotel was probably just somewhere he used to brainwipe whoever was sent to him," I said. Jack looked up with a frown.

"So what exactly did Burton say then?" I recounted the details, and Jack nodded throughout, as though ticking off things on a mental checklist.

"Which brings us to this," he said, pointing down at the things from the room. A till receipt, a little cardboard pack of matches and another of toothpicks, a serviette and the front pages of a newspaper. Hardly a neon sign saying ‘CRMINALS THIS WAY,’ but it was a start.

"I’m with you, I think. We find out where the places he got these are and see which are near to our four target locations, right?"

"Right," said Jack," so let’s get started with the till receipt. It’s for a few bits of food and a couple of random household chemical things, and is from a place called ‘Day & Night’ in Thorpland Street. Sound familiar?"

"Hang on," I said, walking over to one of the shelves on the wall and coming back with an A-Z of the Midland City area. I searched through the index at the back to find Thorpland Street, then turned to the relevant page. "Okay then, the Hotel Lanza is here, right?" I pointed to a dot on the map. Jack nodded, and I grabbed a pen and marked it on.

"So Thorpland Street is this one here," he said, using a highlighter pen to draw along the length of the road. It was a few miles from the hotel but not exactly a clear sign. "Next up is the matches."

"They’re from a nightclub called ‘La Chien Rogue’ in Excel Row, apparently. Know where that is?" I asked. Jack looked a bit guilty all of a sudden.

"Er, yes, it’s a strip club some friends and I went to for a stag party once."

"Jack Zondar, I’m disappointed!" I said with mock indignance. "I thought you were above such things."

"Three rounds of tequilas and I’d have parachuted into North Korea that night, Nat!" he said. "Anyway, Excel Row is here," he said, marking a road on the other side of the city to the hotel. "So that doesn’t help much, but does give us a slightly smaller area to work in."

"Now for the toothpicks. They’re from ‘Smoky Robinson’s Steak and BBQ Hut.’ Hopefully no relation to the Smokey Robinson!" I said, opening up the little cardboard book of toothpicks for a closer look. They were shaped like little cutlasses. Two of them had been broken off. I guess that meant he’d either been there twice or had just had a really difficult piece of rib stuck in his teeth. If he’d been there a few times, then there was a chance the staff there would recognise him, at least! The address on the back read ‘134 Darlington Road.’

"Darlington Road would be.. here," said Jack, making another mark on the map. this one was a few miles away from both the hotel and the other two addresses. We seemed to be forming a kind of triangulated pattern here, so if the next address was also in the same area we’d be on to our target pretty damn quick.

"The serviette doesn’t seem to have any address on it, but there is something written on it," I said. "It looks like a phone number, but it’s a bit faded. Must have been in the bin with something damp."

"Yeah, there were lots of bits of fruit in there. Our man is quite a healthy eater!" said Jack, also squinting to try and make out the number on the napkin. It looked like an ink blot if I was being honest, but I could make out a few numbers. After a few moments of staring I put it down.

"Let’s come back to that. Last up is the newspaper. May not help much apart from giving us the date he was last in the room," I said as I picked it up. It was a copy of The Express dated March 2^nd. "Aha!" I said triumphantly. "So he moved out the same day we both did, so to speak. Significant?"

"Worth considering, for sure," Jack agreed. "So we know he’s involved with the leaders of the cult, and that he did a runner the same day the building went up. Too many coincidences. Thing is, where is he? Or where is someone who can tell us?" Jack looked down at the map again, and picked up some little safety pins as he spread it out onto the desk. "Okay, read me out the four addresses you got from the phone company. Let’s see if we get any matches."

"Cromwell Gardens," I read. Jack consulted the A-Z and the map for a few moments, then shook his head.

"Miles away. Must have been one of the dummy numbers. Next?"

"Baxter Court."

"Getting there, look," he pointed as he stuck a pin into a grid reference only five or six miles from the hotel. "It’s not inside any of his movement patterns but it’s a possible. Next?"

"Langdon Avenue." Jack shook his head again.

"Nope, that’s also about fifty miles away. Let’s try the last one, and if there’s no match we go to the Baxter Court number."

"Patchwork Crescent."

"Bingo!" said Jack, jabbing a safety pin into a road that was right inside the boundaries we’d marked out from our target’s movements. "Most likely a safe house to make any incriminating calls. Did you get a number or just a street?"

"Just a street for that one, I’m afraid. It says ‘insufficient data available’ so he was probably trying to mask the signal."

"He didn’t mask it well enough, then! Grab your keys, we’ll go in your car and go scope the place out." Jack leapt up and dashed over to his coat.

"You know, I’m beginning to wonder which of us is actually in charge here, Jack! For someone who is basically an employee of mine, you do an awful lot of ordering about!" Jack paused and then turned to face me.

"Yes, you’re right, sorry. I was just getting a bit enthusiastic." With a grin he continued. "So where to, partner?"

"To Patchwork Crescent, Mr Zondar. I’ll drive," I replied with another grin, grabbing my leather jacket and sweeping past him. Lambert was trying to fix one of the leaking water pipes in the lobby as Jack and I rattle down the stairs from our office.

"Everything alright, Lambert?"

"Yes, Miss Tyreen, just a little leak. Nothing I can’t take care of," he said, his shirt sleeves rolled up as he was slowly disassembling the offending section of pipes and getting himself coated in grease and dirt. "Things like this have been happening a lot the past few days, all across the city! It’s very strange, like there’s some kind of electrical problem or something. Anyway, I’ll have this done in an hour or two," he said, kneeling back down to face the open boardwork and the exposed piping.

"Right. Jack and I are just popping out, we’ll be back later." Lambert waved us off. Outside, the police car from last time was nowhere in sight, although that didn’t mean they weren’t around. I threw a few cautious glances up and down the street before Jack and I got into the Natmobile.

"Any sign of the police?" Jack asked as he fastened his seatbelt.

"None yet," I said, starting the car, "but keep your eyes open. Ian said they’ll bust us if they think we’re conducting our own investigation."

"Which would be bad," Jack announced grimly. "Step on it."

We arrived at the top of Patchwork Crescent about half an hour later. I suspected it was going to be one of those pleasantly named roads that turned out to be slap bang in the middle of a slum, filled with pimps, pushers, hookers and tramps from top to bottom. It wasn’t quite that bad, but the ‘Patchwork’ part of its name seemed to refer to the dozens of different shapes and sizes of building all down the street, as though twenty different town planners had each designed a little section of the road and then stuck it all together. In the dark. I cruised slowly along the road, letting Jack do the observing. It was just after 7pm by now, so the day shift people were home and the night people weren’t out just yet. This gave the street quite a mellow feel, and also meant we could safely cruise along without some random cop trying to bust us for kerb crawling.

"Anything yet? We’re looking for a suitable looking safe house type thing," I said helpfully, as Jack scanned the road for likely-looking buildings.

"Best get right to the end, then we can park up and walk back along, checking all the ones I reckon we should try," he said. A few moments later we’d parked up, although I took some extra time to set up my Fort Knox-esque array of security devices. Not that I was at all paranoid about leaving my car here. Heavens no.

"This one was somewhere that caught my eye," said Jack, pointing to the outside of a grubby looking diner. "These places always have back rooms, and in an area like this for a bit of cash they’d turn a blind eye to someone borrowing it from time to time."

"Plus, it has phone lines, " I said, pointing up to the lines leading from the telegraph pole above us to the front of the building. "That ought to narrow it down a little."

"Shall we go in?" he said, holding the door open for me, a tiny bell dinging as he did.

"Why thank you, kind sir," I said as I entered. "I’ll decide on a cover story, leave this to me," I said, grabbing a pair of glasses out of my jacket pocket.

The inside of the diner was your average, twenty-person capacity greasy spoon café restaurant. Plenty of fatty, fried food on the menu, and lots of little stars cut out of neon coloured card to advertise special offers and meal deals. There were about four people in the place, all sat separately and munching quietly on plates full of sloppy fry-ups. I tried not to notice the smell of the fat trucker sat near the counter as Jack and I walked over. I grabbed one of the three random I.D. badge wallets I kept inside my jacket and waved it in front of the off-duty housewife-looking woman behind the till.

"Good evening, madam, Department of Health and food Hygiene. We’re just here to make a quick inspection of the premises." She looked a bit taken aback, and became visibly more nervous.

"Ooh. Right. Ooh, well. Er, hang on a minute then." She disappeared into the back of the shop through a tinkling bead curtain. Tinny commercial radio music was wafting through from the rear of the building, and a few seconds later the woman came back, accompanied by a slightly tougher-looking woman, who I guessed must be the manageress.

"Health inspectors?" she asked, in a gruff, forty-a-day kind of voice.

"Yes, we’re just making a quick sweep of a few local premises, no cause for concern," I said. If she got wind of our plan to just check the phone line then leave, she could make this a bit tricky, and anyway, if there was a back room that our suspect could have used we needed a few moments to check it out.

"Right. Back this way then," she said, lifting up the fold-over panel in the counter to let Jack and myself through. We followed her into the back of the shop. It wasn’t much to look at, just a dark storeroom area full of boxes. There were two large fridge/freezer units which I guessed were where the food and drinks were kept. Several stacked boxes next to that labelled up as various no-name brand food confirmed that. There was a small tea room as well, a small area with a sink, a chair and the only window in the whole rear of the shop. The radio was perched next to the sink, along with a kettle and some tea and coffee pots. There wasn’t any kind of back room our man could have used here. There was a small payphone, however. Next to the tea room was the kitchen, currently empty but still just as stinky. A pair of swing doors separated it from the room we stood in. I motioned to Jack to go take a look round that to keep up the charade of our investigation. The manageress followed him, gainfully trying to distract him with conversation about ‘the bloody weather,’ ‘them bloody cult people’ and ‘all them bloody powercuts.’ amongst other things.

As the two of them disappeared into the kitchen, I darted over to the payphone and scribbled down it’s number. Comparing that to the number I had for Criddle, it wasn’t a match, and it wasn’t one of the other numbers he’d bounced his call charges off, either. Strike one. Jack reappeared moments later, the manageress still talking incessantly to him.

"Ah, everything seems to be fine here, Miss Jones, let’s move on to the next set of premises," he said, frantically motioning with his eyes to ‘get me the hell out of here!’ I smirked and walked back out. The manageress closed the counter after us as we walked back into the main area.

"Well, thank you for your time, Mrs-"

"Mrs Gorman, yes. No problem, I hope it was all good and clean back there!" She chuckled, and I suddenly felt a little bit sick as I heard all the phlegm shifting in her throat as she did so.

"Right then. Thank you for your co-operation. Goodbye!" And with that, we left. Outside, I turned to Jack once we’d moved along the street out of sight a little.

"Nothing in there, then?" he asked.

"Nope, no matches for the number. We’d best keep trying," I said, "It’s got to be one of these places."

We spent the next half an hour trying each place up the road until we came to the flea-bitten looking bed & breakfast at the end of the road. The outside of it looked like some low-budget version of the Bates Motel, although one that had been built by blindfolded hippies (yep, that darn 60s architecture again. English history books should show the incredible damage that the 60s wrought on buildings in this country!). I was sure inside wasn’t much better. But it looked like the only place left where our man did the other half of his business from, and if so we could use it to track him down.

"Right then, Jack, ready?" I asked.

"Yup, lead on," he said, following me up the steps and into the building.

The place was a typically grotty little bed and breakfast. The inside of it was unnaturally dim, not helped by the fading lightbulbs overhead and the faint smell of burnt bacon that followed us around as Jack and I walked up to the main desk. The portly man behind the desk had the reddened complexion of a high blood pressure sufferer and the dress sense of someone who grew up in the 1970s and then just kind of stayed there. He squinted his piggy little eyes at us through badly-fitted NHS glasses as I stepped up to the desk.

"Yes? C-how may I c-help you?" he rasped in heavily accented English. He sounded a little Polish, or maybe he just had a phlegm problem like that woman back at the diner. I carefully selected a wallet from my pocket and waved the ID in front of him as I spoke.

"Detective Bronte, this is my colleague Officer, er.. Bronte. No relation. We’ve had reports of possible domestic violence from one of your rooms and we’re here to take a look." He sweated visibly at the thought of the police poking around, and straight away my spider sense started buzzing. After a few years as a detective of any description you learn how to spot guilty people a mile away, and the look of dawning horror that crossed this guy’s face told me that this modest little building had plenty of things to hide. Question was, would any of them help us find the missing Mr. Criddle?

"I c-han assure you, officers, there is no violence of any kind here. None whatsoever. I assure you."

"That may be, Mr.." said Jack, stepping up next to me to continue the charade.

"Buchowsky," the sweating man replied.

"Mr. Buchowsky," Jack confirmed. "But we’ve received a report and it is our duty to investigate it, so if you would kindly lead us upstairs I’m sure we can sort all of this out." Buchowsky sighed visibly, and then hauled himself off the stool he was sat on and moved round the desk towards us. To his left there was a small lounge area with a television, and behind the desk there was a flight of stairs. A door at the opposite end of the lobby to us seemed to lead into the kitchen. Buchowsky started to climb the stairs with some difficulty, wheezing and panting arthritically every few steps. Behind him, out of earshot, I whispered to Jack.

"Good cop or bad cop?"

"I’ll be bad, you be good," he answered.

"You always get to be the bad cop!"

"That’s because you’re crap at it. You can’t do bad, Nat, and you know it!"

"Bah. Alright, good cop."

We eventually reached the first floor. There were five doors, two on our side of the stairs and three in the opposite wall. The bad striped wallpaper was starting to give me a headache, so I motioned to Jack to check the three farthest doors while I started on the one to the left of the stairs. Buchowsky was hovering behind me like a kitten at feeding time, so before I tried the door handle I turned and spoke quietly to him.

"Mr. Buchowsky, please, I’d advise you stay out of the way for a little while as we carry out our search. If there is any trouble, we don’t want to risk getting a civilian involved."

"Yes, yes, but I c-have my business, you know? I must see what is c-happening to my clientele." I tried to think of a way to distract him.

"Very well, but I must insist you stay over there out of the way." He sighed again, nodded and lumbered over to the small window on the far side of the landing, that was adding a little light in, but as night was fast approaching outside it wasn’t much help.

I tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked, and I slowly pushed the door open. This room was empty, and had been for a while. The curtains were open but the threadbare furnishings didn’t show much sign of any life having been in here recently, as long as you didn’t count the bugs and germs.

Jack emerged from the first of his rooms with a shake of his head. I nodded and moved to the door to the right of the stairs. Again, I carefully opened the door and pushed it open. Nobody in this one, either, and it was in a similar state. Did this place actually have any guests?

Jack reappeared with a blank again. The only door left was the one opposite the stairs. Jack went to try the door, but I put a hand to his to stop him. Placing a finger to my lips to silence him, I placed my ear carefully to the door to listen out for whoever may be inside. I could hear movement, and sounds of breathing. There was someone inside, and chances are they either knew our man or this was our man. Then I heard a click. It took my brain a moment to figure out what specific type of click it was, giving me a fraction of a second to hurl myself against Jack and shove him out of the way before the door exploded in a shower of splinters and chunks of wood, to the tune of a very big and very loud gun shredding it in a hail of automatic fire.

Jack and I collapsed to the floor, as did Mr Buchowsky, who yelled some incomprehensible Eastern European curses as whoever was in that room made a mess of his carefully non-maintained wood panelling. I threw my arms up over my head for protection, but the burst of gunfire stopped as quickly as it had started. Seconds later, someone came racing out of the room, leaping over the prone forms of Jack and myself and barrelling down the stairs. I leapt to my feet and drew my gun. Which was reassuringly big and shiny. Buchowsky’s eyes widened in fear.

"No more guns! No more guns!" he pleaded. I rolled my eyes and yelled at Jack to get up.

"Come on, Jack, he’s getting away!" I started to leap down the stairs three at a time, but by the time I’d hit the floor running n the lobby, the gunman was out the door and down the street. I shoulderbarged the door open and jumped down the B&B’s steps to the street, only to see a tall, well built man leap into a car and start the engine. I started to run towards it, aiming my pistol for a shot at the tires or the rear axle, but he screeched round with an (admittedly impressive) handbrake turn to face me down, hitting his headlights on full beam to dazzle me and make sure I couldn’t see him. I held up my hand to block out the lights, but he gunned the engine and the car bolted towards me. I dived out of the way as it sped down the street and out of sight. I just managed to lift my head up and catch the numberplate as it turned the corner at the end of the road. Jack came running out of the building, gun in hand, and helped me to my feet.

"Are you alright?" he said, dusting me down. I’d thrown myself onto the pavement and picked up a fair bit of litter in so doing.

"I’m fine, he tried to run me down but I got out of the way. I think I got the plate, though. Let’s call Ian and get a match and then get after him."

Jack started running over to the car, when I heard Buchowsky shout over to me from the entrance to his hostel.

"Hey ch-wait! What about my doors? Eh? Who pays for all that, policeman? Eh?"

"Call Midland Police Station and ask for Detective Ian Burton, sir, he’ll sort everything out!" I called back before jogging over to join Jack. I leapt in and started the engine as he strapped himself in, already visibly excited at the prospect of a good old-fashioned car chase.

"You know, one day Ian’s really going to get pissed off with you sending all these collateral damage claimants his way, you know," he said.

"Yep, I’m sure he is," I said, leaving it at that. I reversed the car into the street and jammed the accelerator down, screaming along the road in the direction of our mystery gunman’s car. I caught a glimpse of Buchowsky sadly shaking his head and going back inside before I turned the corner out of view.

"What type of car are we looking for?" shouted Jack over the engine, as the Natmobile’s finely tuned top end power kicked in and I started to weave through the traffic. We were heading towards one of the main roads outside the city centre, with the time now approaching 7pm. Tailing this guy wasn’t impossible, just very tricky.

"A red Vauxhall, couldn’t tell what model for sure, looked like one of the new Vectras, but the registration was definitely MC45 CLK. Want to call Ian before that guy at the hotel does?" I was weaving through the traffic as best as I could, one eye looking out for a red Vauxhall driving suspiciously. Quite how you class ‘suspicious’ driving was another matter, but for now finding whoever tried to shoot us at the B&B was top priority. Jack started to dial in Ian’s number when I thought I spotted something up ahead. I pointed the car out to Jack.

"Is that it?" I said, motioning towards a fast-moving red Vauxhall about six cars in front of us. We were approaching a busier area and as a result the traffic around us was starting to slow down a little.

"Looks like it," said Jack, "I’ll get a registration check." I continued trying to make ground up on the car to see if I could read the plate or get a look at the driver. Luckily for me, for a change, at that moment a set of lights ahead turned to red, and the cars around us halted up, a sea of red brake lights illuminating around me. Seizing the moment, I threw the door open and leapt out onto the road.

"Where the hell are you going??" Jack shouted out to me, his phone still pressed to one ear.

"I’m going to check that car! Keep calling and drive when the lights change!" I yelled back, hopping up onto the roof of a taxi and locating the Vauxhall I was chasing. The street we’d stopped on was lined by shops and two large hotels, as the road was heading towards one of the main ring roads that led in and around the city centre. Traffic was always bad here so I had a good chance of catching up.

Jumping from car roof to car roof, ignoring the protesting honks of the drivers I was using as stepping stones below me, I closed to within a few vehicles of the offender when he must have spotted me. Although I guess a slightly crazy looking brunette holding a gun and vaulting from car to car through a traffic jam was probably something that drew attention to itself.

The car’s door flew open and my suspect jumped out, firing a few randomly aimed shots over his shoulder as he raced towards the sanctuary of the shops and alleyways leading off the road. Instinctively I threw myself down on the roof of one of the minibus I was on, feeling a bullet ping past me far too close for comfort. Looking up again, I saw the man run down between two sandwich shops. They reminded me that I hadn’t eaten for a while, but I figured if I lost this guy I could always double back and get a bite to eat on the way back to the car.

Leaping heroically to the floor, but tumbling unheroically as I hit it, I was back on my feet and racing after the guy in moments. He was a way in front of me, and was using some classic diversionary tactics. The alley was more like a little street, with other, smaller shops and residences leading out onto it, so at every available opportunity the man tipped something over into my path – boxes, crates full of vegetables, children riding bikes, that kind of thing. I was actually gaining on him when he reached the end of the alley and darted to the left.

I shot out after him but ran straight into a burger kiosk positioned just outside the exit, knocking it to the ground and sending several pounds of uncooked meat scattering across the pavement. I’d also hit my head pretty badly, as stars filled my vision and I felt the uncomfortably familiar fizzy feeling of impending unconsciousness. As I hit the deck, I got a sideways camera angle of the fleeing suspect. He paused and turned as my vision blurred to check I was down before he ran off again. Then everything went pretty black.

When I came to some time later, I was sat up on the kerb by where I’d had my run-in with the kiosk. It was now right way up but dented on the side it had crashed to the ground on. Jack was kneeling by me, supporting my head and holding a tissue to what felt like a cut across my forehead. I reached a hand up to his to show him I was awake, as he was looking around for something. He caught my eyes and smiled, looking relieved.

"You get knocked out cold way more often than is good for you, you know," he said, passing me the tissue so I could keep the pressure up on my cut. "I came after you as soon as I could. No match on the plate as yet, they think it may be a false number or just one that never got registered properly."

"Makes sense," I said, checking with my tongue that all my teeth were still in place. I looked around to see a small crowd of people were gathered around, helping the burger vendor gather his wayward stock and also looking at me with concerned glances. Jack had managed to get the Natmobile round to this side of the street, so once he’d checked I could stand he helped me into it. I looked back up the alley I’d run down to see if I could see where the car our suspect had abandoned was.

"The police have it," said Jack, knowing what I was looking for. "And I already asked everyone down that alley for any witness reports. Helped me build a good profile of our man. Not enough for an identity parade, but enough for us to go on," he continued as I looked at him, my mouth open ready to ask him all the questions he'd just answered.

"Right. Well then. Good work," I said, patting him on the shoulder. He helped me into the car and walked round to drive. "Where to now?" I asked as he started the car up.

"Police station I’m afraid, we have to do that eyewitness report thing. You know, running through traffic is never a good thing to explain away to the police, but the gunfire definitely didn’t help."
"Ah well, maybe they’ll go easy on me because of my head wound," I said as Jack started to head towards the Midland City police station.

"And another thing!" yelled DI Price, slamming his hands down on the table in front of me. "You were told not to go anywhere near this case while you’re still a suspect! How does chasing an armed man through the city constitute ‘not being involved,’ eh?"

I’d been brought in to be questioned and to make a statement, but once Price had spotted me he’d taken charge of things, taking advantage of the fact that Burton was out on a job at the moment. Jack was waiting outside the questioning room, giving price an unfortunately free reign to try and get me to confess to those deaths he was so determined to nail me for.

"How do you know it was related to that case?" I said innocently, knowing full well it was my word against his without the man I was chasing to question, so as long as I didn’t let anything slip I’d be fine.

"Oh come off it, Miss Tyreen," said Price, strolling round the room again like something out of Animal Farm.