Something rotten

'Is cheese still overpriced?' I asked my mother.

'Criminal!' she muttered. 'Over five hundred per cent duty. And it's not just cheese, either. They've extended the duty to cover all dairy products � even yogurt.'

I sighed. I would probably have to go into SpecOps and explain myself. I could beg forgiveness, go to the stressperts and plead post-traumatic stress disorder or Xplkqulkiccasia or something and ask for my old job back. Perhaps if I were to get handy with a nine iron it might swing things with my golf-mad boss. Outside SpecOps was not a good place to be if I wanted to hunt Yorrick Kaine or lobby the ChronoGuard for my husband back; it would help to have access to all the SpecOps and police databases.

I looked through the papers. I had apparently been found guilty of the cheese transgression and fined �5,000 plus costs.

'Did you pay this?' I asked my mother, showing her the court demand.

'Yes.'

'Then I should pay you back.'

'No need,' she replied, adding before I could thank her: 'I paid it out of your overdraft � which is quite big, now.'

'How . . . thoughtful of you.'

'Don't mention it. Bacon and eggs?'

'Please.'

'Coming up. Would you get the milk?'

I went to the front door to fetch the milk and as I bent down to pick it up there was a whang-thop noise as a bullet zipped past my ear and thudded into the door frame next to me. I was about to slam the door and grab my automatic when an unaccountable stillness took hold, like a sudden becalming. Above me a pigeon hung frozen in the air, its wingtip feathers splayed as it reached the bottom of a downstroke. A motorcyclist on the road was balancing, impossibly still, and passers-by were now as stiff and unmoving as statues � even Pickwick had stopped in mid-waddle. Time, for the moment at least, had frozen. I knew only one person who had a face that could stop the clock like this � my father. The question was � where was he?

I looked up and down the road. Nothing. Since I was about to be assassinated I thought it might help to know who was doing the assassinating, so I walked down the garden path and across the road to the alley where de Floss had hidden himself so badly the previous day. It was here that I found my father looking at a small and very pretty blonde woman no more than five foot high who was time-frozen halfway through the process of disassembling a sniper's rifle. She was probably in her late twenties and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail held tight with a flower hair tie. I noted with a certain detached amusement that there was a lucky gonk attached to the trigger guard and that the stock was covered with pink fur. Dad looked younger than me but he was instantly recognisable. The odd nature of the time business tended to make operatives live nonlinear lives � every time I met him he was a different age.

'Hello, Dad.'

'You were correct,' he said, comparing the woman's frozen features with those on a series of photographs, 'it's an assassin all right.'

'Never mind that for the moment!' I cried happily. 'How are you? I haven't seen you for years!'

He turned and stared at me.

'My dear girl, we spoke only a few hours ago!'

'No we didn't.'

'We did, actually.'

'We did not.'

He stared at me for a moment and looked at his watch, shook it and listened to it, then shook it again.

'Here,' I said, handing him the chronograph I was wearing, 'take mine.'

'Very nice � thank you. Ah! I stand corrected. Three hours from now. It's an easy mistake to make. Did you have any thoughts about that matter we discussed?'

'No, Dad,' I said in an exasperated tone, 'it hasn't happened yet, remember?'

'You're always so linear,' he muttered, returning to comparing the pictures with the assassin. 'I think you ought to try and expand your horizons a bit � bingo!'

He had found a picture that matched my assassin and read the label on the back.

'Expensive hit-woman working in the Wiltshire�Oxford area. Looks petite and bijou but is as deadly as the best of them. She trades under the name the Windowmaker.' He paused. 'Should be Widowmaker, shouldn't it?'

'But I heard the Windowmaker was lethal,' I pointed out. 'A contract with her and you're deader than corduroy.'

'I heard that too,' replied my father thoughtfully. 'Sixty-seven victims; sixty-eight if she was the one that did Samuel Pring. She must have meant to miss. It's the only explanation. In any event, her real name is Cindy Stoker.'

This was unexpected. Cindy was married to Spike Stoker, an operative over at SO-17 whom I had worked with a couple of times. I had even given him advice on how best to tell Cindy that he hunted down werewolves for a living � not the choicest profession for a potential husband.

'Cindy is my assassin? Cindy is the Windowmaker?'

'You know her?'

'Of her. Wife of a good friend.'

'Well, don't get too chummy. She tries and fails to kill you three times. The second time with a bomb under your car on Monday, then next Friday at eleven in the morning � but she fails and you, ultimately, choose for her to die. I shouldn't really be telling you this, but as we discussed, we've got bigger fish to fry.'

'What bigger fish to fry?'

'Sweetpea,' he said, giving me his stern 'father knows best' voice, 'I'm really not going to go through it all again. Now I have to get back to work � there's a TimePhoon brewing in the Dark Ages and if we don't sort it out we'll be picking anachronisms out of the timeline for a century.'

'Wait � you're working at the ChronoGuard?'

'I've told you all about this already! Do try and keep up � you're going to need all your wits about you over the next week. Now, get back to the house and I'll start the world up again.'

He wasn't in a very chatty mood, but since I would be seeing him later and would find out then what we had just discussed, there didn't seem a lot of point in talking anyway, so I bade him goodbye, and as I walked up the garden path time returned to normal with a snap. The pigeon flew on, the traffic continued to move and everything carried on as usual. Time had stopped so completely that everything my father and I had talked about occupied no time at all. Still, at least this meant I wouldn't have to be constantly looking over my shoulder as I knew when she would try to get rid of me. Mind you, I wasn't looking forward to her death at my hands. Spike would be severely pissed off.

I returned to the kitchen, where Mum was still hard at work cooking my bacon and eggs. To her and Friday I had been gone less than twenty seconds.

'What was that noise when you were at the door, Thursday?'

'Probably a car backfiring.'

'Funny,' she said, 'I could have sworn it was a high-velocity bullet striking wood. Two eggs or one?'

'Two, please.'

1 picked up the newspaper, which was running a five-page expose revealing that 'Danish pastries' were actually brought to Denmark by displaced Viennese bakers in the sixteenth century. 'In what other ways,' thundered the article, 'have the dishonest Danes made fools of us?' I shook my head sadly and turned to another page.

Mum said she could look after Friday until teatime, something I got her to promise before she had fully realised the implications of nappy changing and saw just how bad his manners were at breakfast. He yelled, 'Ut enim ad veniam!', which might have meant: 'Look how far I can throw my porridge!' as a spoonful of oatmeal flew across the kitchen, much to the delight of DH82, who had learned pretty quickly that hanging around messy toddlers at mealtimes was an extremely productive pastime.

Hamlet came down to breakfast, followed, after a prudent gap, by Emma. They bade each other good morning in such an obvious way that only their serious demeanour kept me from laughing out loud.