In The Domain of Arnheim

© 1996 Stephen Hunt (UK)


We were a three-man team, and seated in the train's first class compartment. Or more accurately we were a one clinical psychopath, one grandmother and me team.

The clinical psychopath was Penny Black, my sometimes partner. She was a unique direction in human resource management. I suspect someone in the DAIRY's personnel division was secretly rather proud they had introduced her brand of proactive savagery into the agency.

Before political correctness, I might have described her tastes as running to violence that was sexy and sex that was violent. These days I just settle for physically beautiful: smoky voice, long brunette hair and spanish eyes which glinted like sahara light off an Uzi.

Penny had picked up a tan on her last mission; she had been helping Agent Silver track down a missing Russian nuclear attack submarine.

It turned out the crew had discovered, then been possessed by the malign spirit of Calico Jack Rackham and his shipmates (the British had hanged the privateers in 1720 before burying them at sea). They had been floating off Port Royal, planning to turn Jamaica into first rate atomic sludge when Penny found them. I hadn't asked any more; knowing Penny, the buccaneers had departed our earthly plane with no small excess of brutality.

Her tense hands fiddled with a British Rail plastic spoon. She was edgy. The only thing she had killed today was a fly which had recklessly tried to land on her BR burger bun ­ that and the conversation. We really were ill-matched as partners. She thought Zen was 'une bonne boite de nuit' nightclub in Essex.

My other companion was Mrs White, bless her cotton socks. Hatchet face, hooked nose, and more wrinkles than a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. I wasn't sure of her exact age.

One of my friends in the DAIRY's Brussels base was convinced that she was really Marion De'Courcy ­ Robin Hood's original lover. I had my doubts about that. We had first met in the Swiss Alps in 1832; when Mrs Green was hunting the Duke of Wellington's insane nephew, Sir Clarence; his Lordship having invented an ingenious steam-driven earthquake machine with the intention of bringing the Ottoman Empire to a short end.

Having taken a Club Med holiday in Turkey in the summer of 1992, I had an extra reason for being glad we had stopped him pulling an Atlantis on the country.

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