I Spy

Chapter 2

I like to be at the office early before the phone starts ringing and the emails start pouring in. And when I say office, I mean three doors down my hall in the apartment at the end of the corridor.

'I Spy's' offices are located in the apartment of one Phyllis 'Filly' Clarke. We started working together about a year ago. She does all my admin, accounting and arranges my schedule. Filly is one feisty sixty-eight year old widow, who's become my right hand woman, and probably one of my only real, non-aquatic friends.

We met in the lift. I'd just collected my mail and was on my way back to my apartment. I'd received a letter from the taxman and upon opening the little-sucker, I noted several things; there were a lot of capital letters and words written in red. Although I had no idea what the letter was actually saying, I was pretty sure the gist was, 'You owe us tax. Pay now. Or else.'

Filly had gotten into the lift at the exact moment as I was trying to decipher the Greek tax-talk, and being the excessively nosey creature that she is, I felt a head pop over my shoulder.

"Mmmmm," She made this loud worried sound. I've come to learn that she has a penchant for the dramatic; it's from watching too many soap operas.

"Mmmmmmmm. Ahhhhhh," She mumbled louder this time.

I swung around. "Do you have a problem?"

"No, but you do. A big one." She was pointing at the red writing in the top left hand corner of the note.

"Do you know what all this crap means?"

"Of course I do missy, I wasn't the bookkeeper at my husband's practice for forty- five years for nothing."

"So what does it mean?"

She snatched the paper away from me and started reading it. What followed were a series of very worried sounds, punctuated with some words with rather negative connotations.

"Mmmm. Ooooh. That's bad. I see. Problem. Big, big problem. Ooppps. Mmmmm, Huge mistake. Aaaahh-uuuuhhhh. Illegal."

"Oh for fuck sakes just tell me what it means!" I'd snapped back at her.

She gazed up at me over the letter with a suspicious looking eyeball, framed in purple eye shadow and covered by glasses with such thick lenses that they magnified her eyes ten- fold.

"Put it this way... when Lake deLange discovered that her husband Ryder Wood was actually her long lost brother's evil twin Hyder and that she was pregnant with his child-"

I cut her off, confused. "When, who? What are you talking about?"

She rolled her blue eyes. From 'The Days and Nights of our Bold and Restless Children." She looked at me as if I should know what the hell she was talking about.

She pulled her glasses down her nose and glared, "The world's most popular soapie."

"Aaahh," I said, "Sorry, don't watch it."

She tutted loudly, "Well, it's worse than that!"

My face must have betrayed my terror, because suddenly she looked empathetic. "But don't worry missy, I can help you. Let's do it over tea and cake though. I'm starved."

And that was it. She marched out of the lift, my letter in hand and headed down the corridor and into her apartment. Filly's apartment is a curiosity. Her late husband, Lou, had been a Prosthetist; the guy made limbs and other bodily appendages for amputees. But more than that, he'd considered himself an artist, and after he died, Filly decorated their apartment with some of his best work. So upon entering, you're immediately greeted by a leg, mounted on the wall in a large ornate frame. Start looking a little closer, and you'll begin to notice the madness of it all.