'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.