A Brief Recap.....

Iris woke up, she had forgotten the previous 3 months, either that or she had been reprogrammed.

"Damn it, not again", she muttered. Her head hurt.

Thankfully she had made copious handwritten notes, so all she had to do was read them. She pondered for a moment. Did she really want to know? Couldn't she just make up something new? Would anyone notice?
Maybe if she flicked through her notebook she could pick out pertinent clues, and characters, and piece it all together. She sighed, it felt like a momentous task, but it had to be done, and so she began to make short notes from her extensive notes.

In the beginning there is a man called Douglas Manning who Iris was spying on. He has a wife called Annie, who is blonde. A short man with a large gun wearing a pink rabbit onesie kidnaps Annie.

Douglas Manning tries to make off with a suitcase of used banknotes to rendezvous with the mysterious Mr Short [who is not the man with the large gun] in Harwich.

Rennie Hightower lives in a mid-sized city in the Pacific Northwest, he is a janitor at a strip club and is a little bit in love with Iris, although they have only met online via a Facebook group for fans of author P.G. Wodehouse. Iris sends Rennie an email asking for his help.

Iris was once a Go-Go dancer in London and has links with espionage. She believes Douglas Manning is watching her. Have they met before?

Douglas tries to wake Iris. They are in her bedroom. Douglas discovers Iris's notebooks under her bed. Douglas and Iris confirmed to have a historical connection. Iris is wide eyed yet unconscious.

Rennie recieves an email from Iris, which activates a dormant area of his brain. Yes! Rennie is also some kind of spy! Or is he? He recovers a lock-box from beneath his floorboards that contains an array of passports and credit cards so that he can assume a variety of identities. The box also contains a genuinely smart Smart-phone that connects to an exclusive network, operated by a super-computer. He heads to the airport.

Douglas is with Iris. He is deciding how best to wake her from her open-eyed coma. He also really fancies a banana. Douglas notices a faint, blinking light behind Iris's right ear - a light that was flashing under her skin! Douglas discovers that Iris was made in Taiwan.

Rennie has a microscopic speaker implanted in his ear canal and the voice of SpodeChode69 notifies him that the Iris unit has been compromised. Rennie uses a banana to stun an Uber driver by using the tip of the banana on a pressure point behind the driver's left ear. Rennie drives to the airport and then takes a super-stealth plane to England. Rennie reminisces on how he met Iris in London when she was a go-go dancer. He lied to her about being a spy. Iris was a robot even then, but she didn't know it. He recalls how his body and mind were modified and enhanced to serve a powerful master. He eats a banana.

Annie overpowers the short man with the large gun who wears a pink rabbit onesie. Annie was not kidnapped! She takes the gun from the short man and locks him in her attic with a plate of fish fingers and a large colouring book. Annie is furious for a variety of reasons, but mainly because she is not the central character in this fiction. Annie has a plan and a loaded gun.

Recently widowed Tina Cruet visits her neighbours Aubrey and Martharine Stoad in Frigwell Crescent. She has ideas above her station. Cheryl Stoad, 28, is the daughter of Aubrey and Matherine. Cheryl hopes to find fame on Britain's got Talent by playing Go and Tell Aunt Nancy on the recorder. The Stoads have a Golden Retriever called Scarlet [ahem]. Tina has designs on Aubrey - It was Aubrey who helped Tina cope with the isolation and despair the complex feelings that grief brings, after a while they found themselves being drawn together and by the time the police and forensics had been to take away Percy's body, Aubrey had already given her one over the arm of the chair. Did Tina murder her husband, Percy?

Cheryl has an inner ear problem. What could this mean? Iris sneaks up on Cheryl in the Stoads back garden. There appears to be a real Iris, and an Irisbot. The real Iris asks Cheryl for her help. Cheryl eventually agrees to help the real Iris. They go to Douglas and Annie's house with the intention of rescuing Annie from the large gun with a small man. Annie has saved herself. They then go to Iris's house. Iris wants her boxes but Douglas is still in the bedroom with the Irisbot. As they hear Douglas descend the stairs, Iris leads Cheryl into the Inglenook fireplace, which conceals a secret entrance to a long corridor lined with ornately carved wooden chairs - a row on either side facing inwards, with a gap of about three metres between each chair - every chair had something on it - most contained books.

Meanwhile, on a back road near Harwich... Douglas is preparing to take a ferry to Hoek. On arrival he travels to small, nondescript shop on a back street and asks the shopkeeper for some sticky-backed dildo. This appears to be some sort of code.

A time-jump back to Frigwell Crescent. Rennie arrives outside Iris's house just as Douglas is leaving for Harwich. Rennie is dressed as a woman having accidentally selected the wrong passport and credit card from his lock-box. Douglas steals Rennie's car with all his documents; his jacket; his phone; and most importantly, his connection to SpodeChode. Annie 'rescues' Rennie whilst holding the large gun.

Back in the Pacific Northwest, Detective Lieutenant Milton Frobisher studies the autopsy report of an Uber driver - the driver that Rennie had compromised with the tip of a banana. Frobisher goes in pursuit of Rennie in connection with the death. At Rennie's apartment block he meets the very disturbing Svetlana, who is probably Russian. She shows Frobisher Rennie's empty room. Frobisher gets a call from a lab technician re the death of the Uber driver - it seems he was killed by a substance from a banana. Frobisher is familiar with similar deaths.

Annie and Rennie [now Nina] have a fight. The large gun goes off in Rennie's direction but he is protected by the Dolly Parton bra. Iris and Cheryl appear from nowhere and save Rennie from Annie.

Hazel????!! OH - Tina's sister Hazel!! Hazel is from Blackpool and has gone to stay with her sister Tina in Frigwell Crescent. Aubrey meets Hazel at Poobury station - they have a romantic interlude in the back of the car. Hazel still hasn't told Tina that their mother is dead and rolled up in an old carpet in the loft and that Hazel had been collecting their mother's pension for the last 5 years.

Back in the chair lined corridor. Cheryl is bored and takes a detour up a rusty ladder and pushes past a man cover to find herself in a copse. She is hit on the head by a flying object, and then another, which makes her fall back down into the endless corrider filled with chairs and more ladders. Cheryl tries another ladder and pushes past another manhole cover, this time she is hit by a banana. Cheryl gives up and follows Iris instead.

An interview with Matherine Stoad - where we discover that Cheryl has made two appearances on The Undateables. Cheryl has a brother called Allardyce who collects ornamental thimbles and mints his peas. 

Flashback to 1990 - A reference to a series of banana-tip deaths. Milton Frobisher was a humble patrolman. He was partnered with a senior detective called Torvik. Sadly, Torvik was killed in the line of duty by a shadowy figure wielding a banana. Frobisher had his mind wiped by a mystery figure and told that if he wanted to make detective, he would forget what he had seen the night of Torvik's death, and he shouldn’t pursue the banana case any more. 30 years later and Frobisher is revisited by a wave of memories whilst working on the case of the dead Uber driver. Finally, Frobisher is arrested for the murder of the disturbing Svetlana [probably Russian]. She has been found dead with Frobisher's pen sticking out of her neck.

Iris sighed. It had only taken her 5 hours to write a brief recap of the last three months. She felt that she ought to be declared a hero. Anyhow, it was time to press publish and be damned. She hoped that blogger wouldn't mess her formatting up like it did five minutes ago....

Interlude: Headache

 Cheryl was bored.  They'd been trudging through the chair-lined tunnel for what seemed like eternity, or at the very least fifteen minutes.  She was bored of walking, bored of all the songs on her Walkman, bored of Iris's back and bum, bored of non-chocolate Easter eggs masquerading as exquisite objets d'art on chairs.  Bored, bored, BORED!
 As the third ladder appeared out of the gloom ahead of her, Cheryl stopped her trudging and looked up to see where it went.  The rusty old metal ladder disappeared into a dark tube in the curved ceiling of the tunnel.
 "What's up there?" she asked.
 "Nothing" Iris called back.  "Come along, Cheryl."
 "There must be something" Cheryl mumbled and started to climb the ladder.
 "No good will come of it!" Iris called to Cheryl's sturdy legs as they disappeared above her.
 After a minute of climbing, a metal manhole cover blocked any further progress.  Cheryl pushed on it and the cover creaked open, daylight almost blinding her.  With a grunt, Cheryl pushed it all the way back and crawled halfway out into what appeared to be a scruffy copse surrounded by an even scruffier hedge.  Just as she was about to hawl herself all the way out, something came flying over the hedge and clonked her right in the head, cushioned slightly by her thick, bowl-cut hair.

 "Oof!" said Cheryl, her grip loosening.  And then a second object hurtled after it.  "Ow!" she said as it too made painful contact with her skull.
 Cheryl half slid, half tumbled down the ladder, the manhole cover clanging shut above her.
 "Owch" she grumbled as she landed heavily on the tunnel floor.  Then, not getting any sympathy from Iris, she struggled to her feet and lumbered after her.

 The fourth ladder appeared after another five minutes or so.  Cheryl climbed it as Iris tutted and shook her head.  At the top of the tube, Cheryl pushed open another manhole cover and was summarily hit in the head by a half-eaten banana.
 Cheryl sighed and made her way back down again.
 "I told you no good would come of it" Iris said matter-of-factly with her hands on her hips, and then she turned and strode off down the tunnel.  "Not far now."
 "Hummph" said Cheryl.

floccinaucinihilipilification

Rennie tried to understand, were his dreams just shit hitting the fan. He staggered toward the doorway. The tight skirt resisting his movement.

As he reached the door, the buxom blonde’s long nails violently seized his arm and thrusted him against the wall. The cold metal gun barrel pushed on the back of his ear.

“Hand over your passport Nina” demanded Annie.

Momentarily confused Rennie thought, who the fuck is Nina. The pressure of the gun quickly cleared his thoughts. “Back off, it’s in the travel pouch tucked in the skirt.”

As Annie released her hold, Rennie kicked out her legs and lunged for the gun.

Rennie’s quick action failed much like his whole day.

A round exploded as he tumbled on top of Annie.

A burning flash across his chest stunned him. He was shocked but ok. The Dolly Parton bra and padding lie shredded across the floor. He looked up. Annie stood with the gun pointing down at him. “Now you know it’s loaded,” she shouted.

Iris ran to Rennie and pulled him to his feet. “Don’t shoot,” she pleaded.

“Yes Iris this will go easier without a dead body to dump. Just open his passport. It has information in it to decipher the code.”

Another odd thought floated in Rennie mind. Why do I smell dog shit?

Things on Chairs

 Cheryl cut some half-hearted shapes on the patio as she listened to "Smooth Criminal" for the umpteenth time on her ancient Walkman.  Michael Jackson she most definitely was not.  Neil Armstrong could have done better on the actual Moon in his full astronaut get-up!  But after squeezing Scarlet's glands, she wasn't convinced she could execute a proper Moonwalk without throwing up.  Besides, the tape was crinkled and distorted after having to be painstakingly unravelled from the Walkman's innards on more than one occasion, and the resulting sound distortion played havok with her inner ear which only made things worse.
 So intent was she on not vomming as she awkwardly stumbled around on the faux Yorkstone slabs, all the while trying to avoid the stinkeye from Scarlet at the far end of the garden, that she didn't notice the figure sidling up to her from behind the laurel...

 Iris took off her glasses with one hand, unpinned her severe bun with the other, then shook her head to release her long, dark hair.  It tumbled in waves around her shoulders and halfway down her back as, almost in slow motion, she stepped forward towards the lurching, zombie-like figure.
 "Oof!" she grunted as she recoiled from the impact with the whirligig washing line.  Iris put her glasses back on and flinched.
 "Hullo, Iris."  Cheryl had turned around and was facing Iris with a look on her face that, despite her slightly narrowed eyes, could only be described as gormless.  "Why are there two of you?"
 "What?"  Iris was momentarily flummoxed.  Had Cheryl been at Martharine's cooking sherry again?  The girl was so weird.
 "You're so weird, Iris" Cheryl said matter-of-factly.  "Are you the robot one?"
 "I...  Well...  You see..."  How did she know about the Irisbot?  No one knew about the Irisbot.  Well, except for all the people who knew about it, that is.  And Cheryl was most definitely not people!  Although, the fact that she did know made what Iris was about to say next easier.  "Cheryl, I need your help."
 "Um, no."
 "No?  What?"  The flummox came back to taunt Iris.
 "I've got to show Auntie Tina out.  Bye" Cheryl said, then turned and lumbered across the patio and back into the house.
 "But..."  Iris stood in the middle of the patio for a while before realising that she was on full view should Aubrey or Martharine look out of their dining room window.  Or if Douglas Manning decided to stop doing whatever it was he was doing with the Irisbot and look out of her bedroom window which overlooked the Stoads back garden.  She moved to the side of the house and lurked near the rubbish bins while she pondered her next move.  Who else could she get to help her who was weird enough not to be believed if they blabbed about it?  Her train of thought was derailed by Cheryl's voice coming from the front.  She was saying something about cat biscuits before the front door was slammed and Tina Cruet's distinctive harsh laugh rang out.
 "Hullo, Iris."
 "Eeep!"  Iris jumped, her heart in her mouth, along with a kidney and part of her small intestines.  How had Cheryl managed to sneak up on her?
 "I can help you now."

 Ten minutes later Iris and Cheryl stood in Douglas and Annie Manning's small but spotless study.  Well, it was spotless before Cheryl had walked flakes of dried mud - and possibly dog shit -  from her green, frog-eyed Wellington boots into the pale carpet.
 "She's not here" Cheryl pointed out.
 "She must have rescued herself"  Iris muttered, mainly to herself.  Annie Manning had always struck her as a resourceful, if brassy, woman. "She's not long gone though, as her computer is still warm to the touch."
 "Is it?"  Cheryl reached out impulsively for the computer and knocked over a small vase of past-their-prime flowers with her inelegant sausage-fingers instead.  "Oops."
 "Come on.  Let's go" urged Iris.  "I need to get something from my house before we can move to stage two."
 "Okay."
 Cheryl slammed the door shut after them as they left the Mannings' house.  Neither of them heard the Geordie-accented male voice pleading for HP sauce and a new red felt-tip pen floating down from the attic...

 Five minutes after that in Iris's spacious but dark living room, made darker and more oppressive by the heavy wood beams that crossed the ceiling, Cheryl picked her nose as she slowly turned on the spot as if in a trance.
 "He's still upstairs!"  Iris hissed appearing from the hall.
 "Huh?"  Cheryl continued to turn with her finger up her lightly freckled, round nose.
 "I can't get to my boxes - Douglas Manning is still in my bedroom with the Irisbot!"
 "Huh?"  Cheryl finally withdrew her finger and, after examining the blob on the end, rolled it between her finger and thumb then flicked it off into the darkness.  Iris winced.
 Suddenly, the sound of car tyres aggressively driven on gravel cut through their whispering.  Iris narrowed her eyes in annoyance - Whoever they were had better not be churning up her driveway!  Then rapid footsteps filtered down from above their heads.  Douglas Manning was on the move.  And he was coming down the stairs!
 "Cheryl!  We've got to go!"  Iris bundled Cheryl towards the inglenook fireplace at the far end of the room.  A dull glint of gold amongst the dust on the wine-red carpet in the corner caught Iris's eye as she made a complicated gesture with her right hand.  At the side of the inglenook, an opening appeared.
 "Huh?" said Cheryl.
 "Go!" Iris pushed Cheryl into the door-sized hole and followed her through, the hole closing behind them.  "And wipe your feet."
 Inside, a long corridor stretched off into the distance - far too long to fit within the confines of the mansion, even though it was the largest house on Frigwell Crescent.  Iris began to walk briskly down it.
 Cheryl absentmindedly wiped her wellies on the roughly bristled doormat that lay beneath her as she looked at her surroundings.  The low-lit corridor was lined with ornately carved wooden chairs - a row on either side facing inwards, with a gap of about three metres between each chair.  As Cheryl slowly followed Iris, she noticed that every chair had something on it.  Most contained books of various descriptions: The Visitors by Sally Beauman, neue möbel 6 by Gerd Hatje, The Days Are Just Packed by Bill Watterson, Fucked-up Fondues by Delilah Smythe, to name but a few.  However, as she progessed, she also saw things other than books: a neatly folded towel, a small collection of sea glass, a spindle-shaped vial of irridescent blue liquid impossibly balanced on its tip, a pink fondant fancy, an old clay pot with mould growing inside it, a universe, a bottle of greed, and the most perfect, golden Ferrero Rocher she had ever seen.  Cheryl stopped to gawp at it.  It glimmered and sparkled with every slight turn of her head.  In fact, it practically glowed.
 "Come on, Cheryl!" Iris sounded quite stern.
 The Rocher spell broken, Cheryl trudged after Iris.

Whatever Happened To Annie Manning?

"Come with me if you want to live, pet", he had said. Annie had not gone with him. Her brain had worked swiftly and she had rationalised that if he wanted her to live then it was unlikely that he was going to shoot her, so she had simply picked him up by the ears of the pink rabbit onesie, and shaken him until he dropped the gun. She had then locked him in her attic with a plate of fish fingers and a large colouring book.

Annie Manning was now glaring at her computer screen. How could they do this to her?? How could they leave her to be taken by a small man with a large gun wearing a pink rabbit onesie, and never refer to her again?? Weren't they worried that she had been taken captive by a wee Geordie? Did nobody want to save her? Did nobody care? Had she made a bad impression by slapping flat footed up the tiled path? It was a disgrace, an outrage.

All the attention seemed to be on Iris Green, the brogue loving woman from across the road who liked to spy on everyone. Even Douglas had a thing for her, and Douglas was supposed to be Annie's husband. Annie was furious. After all, Annie was the blonde, busty, attention grabbing female around here, NOT robotic Iris, who was flat-chested, wore her hair in a prim little bun, and looked like a stereotypical school teacher from the 1940s.

Annie was jealous and she didn't care who knew it. First she frowned a bit, though her pretty eyebrows remained arched above her milky blue eyes due to botox, and did not aspire to making random items of knitwear, and then she pouted. Annie had a plan. A big plan that would change EVERYTHING. She also had a loaded gun.

Rennie Takes Flight

At that very moment, Rennie received a message via the microscopic speaker implanted in his ear canal.

“The Iris unit has been compromised. Make haste.” 


It was the voice of SpodeChode69, the self-applied nickname of Super Computer 6900. After all, what good was artificial intelligence without a sense of humor? The earlier text message from Iris had actually come from SpodeChode. Its highly evolved algorithms had detected the imminent breakdown in Iris’ relatively crude system (the early models always were a bit twitchy, as the movie quote goes). Its summations were proved by Douglas’ tugging at Iris’ tag. Why had they left that there, anyway? Oh, well, that decision had been made before SpodeChode’s time. Now it was up to SpodeChode to fix the problem. Typical.


Rennie said to the Uber driver, “I’m going to need to take over.” As the driver turned a wondering look toward him, Rennie snatched up a banana that the driver had been intending to eat for lunch from the cup holder in the center console and rammed it into the pressure point behind the driver’s left ear, momentarily stunning him. In practically the same fluid movement, Rennie unbuckled the driver’s seat belt, opened his door and shoved him out, then slipped behind the wheel and sped away.


The driver came too as he was doing a fast barrel roll right into the path of an oncoming light rail vehicle. “Oh, well”, he thought, “that job sucked anyway”.


Rennie made great time to the airport. His speeding and the many incongruously placed vegetable stands and stacks of cardboard boxes that he smashed through failed to initiate a police chase, thanks in large part to SpodeChode’s ability to control many human systems and activities, such as 911 calls, traffic cameras, police bulletins and even to issue “do not pursue” orders anywhere in the world.


When Rennie arrived at the airport, he didn’t bother with such mundane affairs as ticket counters and boarding gates. Instead, he took a service road to a seemingly disused hangar in a remote corner of the complex, where a super-fast stealth plane waited to whisk him to England.


During the flight, Rennie had time to reflect upon his relationship with Iris. He had seen her dancing at a go-go club, and had taken her to dinner at St. Ermin’s Hotel. He was trying to impress her, so he told her fantastic tales of espionage, when in reality he was only a private in the army, with dreams of one day being a spy. Be careful what you wish for.


He didn’t know then that Iris wasn’t a human. Even Iris didn’t know her true nature. By the time he found out, it was already too late for both of them. He had already gone down a dark path, one lined with laboratories where his body and mind were modified and enhanced to serve a powerful master.


He realized he was still holding the banana. He ate it. Mmmm, banana.

Beauty (and Bananas) are only Skin Deep...

 Douglas squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to concentrate on the many questions brought into being from the situation he found himself in.  He had to whittle them down to just the three important ones, but Iris's staring eyes were putting him off.  How was he supposed to think?!

 After a minute or two of fruitless reasoning, Douglas still hadn't decided if "Should he play Iris's favourite Beatles tune?" was an important question or not - and he really fancied a banana which didn't help matters.  He was dithering between including the question or not because a) he wasn't sure if he knew for definite which Beatles tune was her favourite - despite her singing "Hey Jude" somewhat incessantly in that underwater cave to take her mind off not having a toaster, and b) the fact that the question had cropped up surely meant that it was a plot point to be remembered at a later time, so it had to be important.  Right?  He didn't know so he opened his eyes.  Iris seemed to be staring even more intently, even though, from her recumbent position on the bed, her line of sight was directed at the ceiling.  He looked at his watch - time was escaping him.  All thoughts of bananas evaporated.

 "Sorry, Iris" Douglas muttered as he stooped down, brushed an errant chocolate raisin off the bed, then slid his forearms between Iris's unconscious form and the rather old fashioned candlewick bedspread, and turned her on to her side to face the wall.  "What the hells...?"

 A faint, blinking light behind Iris's right ear caught his attention.  He gently brushed aside a lock of her dark hair to get a better look.  It was probably a bluetooth earpiece, he told himself as he moved closer.  Or a hearing aid?  Although, Iris never had any hearing problems as far as he knew?  But there was nothing there.  No audio technology, no medical devices, nothing.  Except for the light that continued to blink once every second or so.  A light that was flashing under her skin!

 Douglas was momentarily stunned.  After a second or two that felt like hours, he gathered his wits and looked as his watch again.  Then at Iris.  The light was still blinking and, from his new position amongst the shoeboxes and notebooks, he noticed that the light was reflecting off a small, white triangle jutting out from her skin next to her hairline.  He moved in for a closer look.  The triangle looked like the corner of a label.  There was even something printed on it - a letter, by the look of it, but only part of it was showing above the skin's surface.  Gingerly (Douglas was proud of being a red-head), he gripped the label betwixt finger and thumb and gently pulled it out.  One centimetre, two, three, then it stopped - clearly fixed to something within Iris.

 Douglas read the fine, block-cap text: MADE IN TAIWAN

Magical Mystery Tour.... [Chapter two-ish]

"Iris, what are you doing? Can you hear me?"

Douglas shook Iris's shoulder in an effort to wake her.

"What did you see? It's really important that you wake up now."

Iris lay on her bed, her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, but she wasn't dead.

"Iris, FOR PITY'S SAKE WOMAN, what did you see? And when did you see it?"

Douglas thumped his fist against the wall and as he did so a framed print of Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory fell to the floor. Douglas bent to pick it up [if nothing else he was always tidy] and as he did so he noticed that stored under Iris's bed was an impressive array of shoeboxes.

'Wow', thought Douglas, 'this is an impressive array of shoeboxes, but Iris always wears battered old brogues, how peculiar.'

Douglas stopped thinking and pulled out one of the shoeboxes, he opened it, and gasped for dramatic effect. The shoebox did not contain leopard print mules, as suggested by the picture on the lid of the box, but three bulging scrapbooks and 10 used notebooks of the school variety.

He opened a notebook, this was exactly the information Douglas was looking for. He looked up fondly towards the slender, brogue wearing woman still laying unconscious, yet wide eyed on the bed, "I knew I could rely on you Iris, I'm so sorry I referred to you as a wretched curtain twitcher in a previous post, you were always such a meticulous record keeper, even when we were trapped together in that underwater cavern for days on end without food, water, a cuddly toy, a toaster, or your favourite Beatles album, you still found a way to keep meticulous records. What a woman."

Douglas began to read Iris's last entry, as he read his eyebrows began knitting together like two hairy caterpillars trying to make a sweater. When Douglas had finished reading he had three important questions:-

1) WHO IS THE SHORT MAN IN THE PINK RABBIT ONSIE WITH THE BIG GUN? [Clue: He isn't Mr Short]
2) WHO IS THIS RENNIE CHARACTER? AND WHY DID IRIS NEED HIS HELP?
3) WHERE IS ANNIE?
4) WOULD HE GET TO HARWICH IN TIME?
5) SHOULD HE PLAY IRIS'S FAVOURITE BEATLES TUNE?
6) WOULD IRIS'S FAVOURITE BEATLES TUNE WAKE HER FROM HER OPEN-EYED SLUMBER?

So many questions...but, as in every good epic, only three are important...

Chapter Two - Continued

Iris returned the scrapbook to its hidden spot. Glancing down at her ankles, she questioned her mental abilities for remembering daily tasks. Why can’t I remember to moisturize my legs, she mumbled to herself.

As Iris applied lotion on her long legs, memories of past adventures flashed before her. Life in London was fast and fun long ago. She was sure it was those shapely legs that landed her a dancing gig in the London go-go cages at an early age.

Her mind’s eye had stored images of a luxurious dinner at St. Ermin’s Hotel. Lamb shanks roasted with pomegranate. Her handsome young host sitting across from her. The man whose mysterious life she would come to know through their shared adventures. Distracted by his eyes, she recalled difficulty in keeping track of his espionage story’s connection to the hotel.

The exciting thrilling trips with him were a joy to remember. However, it didn’t take long before the scary memories engulfed her mood. A rich fast world she never had known shock her with its dark dangerous side. She escaped from it but now she feared that some part, some secret was back looking for her.

Why did Douglas Manning appear so strange. Was he watching her?

Chapter Two

Meanwhile, in a mid-sized city in the Pacific Northwest, Rennie Hightower looked up from his Chromebook to check the time on the digital clock on the gas range, barely three feet from his “desk”, which also served as dining table and kitchen counter in his tiny efficiency apartment. 3:15...in the morning! Jesus! He’d been staring at the damned internet since he’d gotten home around 7 the night before. He hadn’t even stopped scrolling long enough to eat.

“I’ve got to get up in 4 hours,” Rennie thought reproachfully to himself, “What is wrong with me?” Not that his job as a janitor at a strip club required much mental alertness or peak physical conditioning. In his self-induced guilt, he thought he’d better throw himself headlong into the bed. It wouldn’t even be hard to do, even from a sitting position. After all, the bed was only about two feet to his right and back a bit. Efficient, indeed.

But having broken the spell held upon him by the siren song of social media, he realized he was too hungry to sleep. Now that he was again aware that he had a body (such as it was), all he could think about was sustenance. As he began the difficult process of prying his carcass from the wooden chair with a foam cushion in which he had been sitting for the past 8 hours, he spied a notification that he had a message from his friend Iris in the UK.

Thoughts of food were immediately pushed from his mind as he settled back onto the chair. Rennie was a little bit in love with Iris. More than a little, if he was honest about it. He was not well acquainted with any females “in real life”. He had “met” Iris on-line in a Facebook group for fans of author P.G. Wodehouse. While they of course loved Bertie and Jeeves, their shared favorite character was Psmith (“the P is silent, as in ‘pshrimp’”). Iris and Rennie would often type this “Psmith-ism” to each other whenever chatting about the character. Rennie laughed every time Iris did it, and he liked to imagine that Iris was laughing when he did it. It would have done his lonely heart no end of good if he could have known that she did laugh. But only we know that, and we mustn’t tell.

He hadn’t heard from Iris for a few weeks. She seemed to have developed some sort of obsession with the doings of her next door neighbors - David or something, and his wife...Angela? No. That couldn’t be it. Oh, well. Nevermind! He rather feverishly clicked onto Iris’ message, and what to his wondering eyes should he see but “Rennie - I need your help!”

Iris had never asked for his help before. His heart skipped a beat, both out of concern for his friend, and the excitement of possible romantic adventure. He began to type to ask how he could be of assistance.

Chapter One....

07.16hrs.

Iris Green peers through the white net curtains, through a carefully cut hole, about one centimetre square, and spies Douglas heading out for work. A soft brown leather satchel containing his laptop, lunch, and paperwork, is slung over his shoulder. She watches him as he carelessly throws the satchel onto the back seat of his Range Rover. She blinks as the sunlight reflects from his wing mirror and glances her eye. Iris looks at her watch, thumbs open a school exercise book and jots down the following:- ‘07.16hrs, Douglas Manning leaves for work,’ beneath an entry that reads ‘20.16hrs, Douglas Manning returns from work.’ She takes a photograph with her camera as Douglas drives off up the road and out of focus. She will print it off later. She will then stick it, with Pritt Stick, into a scrapbook filled with similar images, and items of sentiment. Iris looks back at the red panelled front door where moments earlier Douglas had stood. Even though he isn’t there she takes another photograph anyway. The red panelled front door opens, and Annie Manning, in a pink dressing robe and bare feet, slaps flat footed up the tiled path and stuffs a black sack of rubbish into a wheelie bin. The sack is torn and a chocolate wrapper drops onto the path.