'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.'