It was yet another morn­ing, yet another hang­over. I’d been unlucky recently – more than unlucky. To tell the truth, I hadn’t had a client in weeks.

So it was that I woke up to a loud and irri­tat­ing alarm-clock buzz that morn­ing. Eight in the morn­ing. The infer­nal con­trap­tion received the clos­est to a with­er­ing glare as I could man­age at that time, and I rolled over in bed. Clang.

A fry­ing pan. Inex­plic­a­bly, there was a fry­ing pan in my bed, right where I tried to roll over to. I sat up and prod­ded the thing until I was thor­oughly sure it wasn’t going to bite me, and then removed the sticky note from the handle.

“You have a client! 9am!”

Ah. One of those days.

I was still lost in the murky fuzz inside my own head, half-hangover and half-coffee, when the woman arrived. She hung her long brown coat and hat on the hook inside my door, and pro­ceeded up the stairs to the paper-littered room that for the sake of argu­ment I called the office. It was get­ting bet­ter these days. It used to com­plain all the time that it wanted to be called Steve, but now we quar­rel less and it’s rea­son­ably happy with “office”.

So, this woman. Prim, proper, bor­ing. A lost cat, I fig­ured, or a jeal­ous hus­band. How wrong I was.

“A great evil stalks this land,” she said, as if it was the most obvi­ous thing in the world.

“Of course,” I replied. And meant it. You didn’t last long in the pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tion busi­ness with­out hav­ing some idea of who pulled the strings in soci­ety. Demons and the Illu­mi­nati, mainly. Any­way, I digress again.

“Which evil in par­tic­u­lar?” was my ques­tion to her.

“There are tales… Dark tales,” she responded, try­ing to sound mys­te­ri­ous. “About goings-on in the town of Aylesbury.”

“Don’t you mean ‘Duck Tales’?” I asked, but the pun was lost on her. Obvi­ously not a fan of children’s tele­vi­sion. Or not a fan of puns.

Either way, I agreed to work for her. The pay was good – any pay’s good to a man who’s been sur­viv­ing mostly on whisky for a week.

And here I am, in Ayles­bury. Dark­ness is abroad, evil stalks the face of the Earth, and some batty humour­less woman wants me to find out what’s going on. I could fill vol­umes, I really could. Dev­ils plot­ting Armaged­don, secret soci­eties and their even more secret wars, and even the truly despi­ca­ble evil of the Women’s Insti­tute cof­fee morn­ings. But I got the feel­ing she already knew about that. There was some­thing else here. Some­thing even more dark and twisted…