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.