There it stood, "the Quasimodo". As fresh and new as the day it had left its 15th annual service. It should have been the most punctual train on the planet, travelling from A to B according to such a precise schedule that, it was said, the untouched females of the locality could set their menstrual cycles by it. You knew for sure, if this train were ever late, the maternity clinics would need to start ordering extra beds big time. Only problem was, it hadn’t been late. It had arrived 20 minutes early. The whole thing had turned into a real nasty mess. That’s when I got involved.

By the way, Sid Squid’s with the name. Sid Squid PI (TI), Private investigator (Temporal Issues) and I specialize in nasty messes. Or rather I fix them, other than in my bank account that is. But that’s a whole different kettle of bananas. Let’s just stick to the facts this time round. All I knew was that I had got a call to come down to the train station and now I was here looking at the miscreant arrive.

Snuggled up against the platform, she looked like some kind of smug cat stretched out and awaiting praise after dropping yet another fat mouse on the Mistresses slippers. Only problem was, this cat was 300 m long, hairless and had no legs......, perhaps an Anaconda would be a better comparison..... Anyhow’s none of that mattered much to this offender but then perhaps I shouldn’t judge out of hand. In life there is so often no right or wrong just a thin greasy smear separating satisfaction from one kind of indigestion or another.

I was going to have hitched a lift on this baby. I was going to get on the one train nobody else wanted to get off, at least not for another 3 1/2 minutes, and take a rodeo ride back in time all the way from this premature arrival to the naïve departure. Along the way there was going to be plenty to set straight. It was going to be a dirty job with a whole gang of recriminations along the way but that’s what I specialize in. Well that and, like I said, nasty messes. My job was to get to from the end to the start of this journey with: all my tentacles intact; my notebook full to busting; a thick wad of cash in hand. The latter was, however, the least likely. I had already checked my bank balance on the way down here and had been unsurprised by what I found. From experience I knew that, these messes only ever get deeper, just like my overdraft.

So I got on board and lit a cigarette, smoking wasn’t allowed outside First Class and my expenses budget only stretched as far as tourist but the train and now been standing for 17 minutes so it would be a while till arrival. I had time to kill along with an excess of red blood corpuscles. I drew the smoke in deep and watched the vacant faceless names as they tried to do the one thing that they knew how, get through another day with precise commutation. Eventually, we arrived and began to move away from the platform at B. I took a walk looking, perhaps vainly, to find the solution to all our woes, well to mine at the very least.

"Don’t go in there!" A fellow passenger had stood to bar my way, "it might be really dangerous!" I looked at the sign above the interconnecting door and had to agree. It was the restaurant car. The middle of any story is always the ugliest bit and this train was no exception. I glanced at the menu. Today’s Chefs Special was ’Frutti de Mare’ and, with me wearing my favorite citrus aftershave, if I’d stepped through that doorway things could have got real ugly real quick. So I chose an alternative route in order to avoid any un-pleasantries. I hocked myself through the window and continued my investigations outside, the view was much better and besides I needed to clear my head.

I felt like I wasn’t any closer to solving this one. Nothing seemed to make sense, what had gone wrong? My train of thoughts was interrupted by the end of the train. I had reached the locomotive and I realized that I must have missed something, something big which would illuminate this darkness with something more than UV. I decided to go back to where it had all finished, the last carriage where I had first got on. It was now an upwind struggle so it took me a while to retrace my steps but at last I was there. I snatched a look around and the dirty answer to all my questions smacked me clean in the face. The last carriage wasn’t the last carriage at all. Here we were five minutes away from departing A station and the train was suddenly one wagon longer than when it had arrived at B station.

It slowly dawned on me what I was going to be doing wrong all this time. Instead of looking for a perpetrator I should be looking for a victim. Now I knew what I was going to have to have found, the innocent caught in this web of intrigue. Now, I only had one question and I knew it would supply all the answers.

What the hell had happened to the boxcar between now and then?

I wasn’t a clever guy by any means. In fact to connect me with genius was too big a stretch and, believe you me, I had learned to stretch a good ways in my time. In my experience genius only counted for so much. I’d seen all those intellectual types come and go. Doctor Who?, or Dr Why? as I jokingly like to call him, all those Professors and even Mr Einstein himself. None of them had been able to handle it and old Albert had been the worst of all. It was ironic how the guy who had realized the real value of time had never kicked back a while and spent it.

Na, clever only ever got you partway on this temporal plane. You had to be tough to survive around here. You had to take the knocks and still come back if you wanted any chance to make the distance and tickle that trout clear out of the water. Yeh, in the end it all came down to shoe leather and stubbornness, a refusal to let it grind you down and the flexibility to be able to squeeze your boneless rubbery body through impossibly small openings. Mind you, there were exceptions, Agent Jane for instance. Now there was a broad who could handle the heat. My mind drifted back to our first meeting. She had even looked me up and down a couple of times. It had all been kinda emotional for me. So much so I had begun to swim, hardly surprising really, considering the fish tank I had been in.

But who was I kidding? I’d known it was hopeless right from the start. What would a class act like her want with a bottom dweller like me? She took her oxygen in gaseous form and I preferred it dissolved in a saline solution. Which reminded me, my hip flask was empty and I needed a drink. Luckily, the cocktail bar was in the next wagon so I sidled up onto a stool and ordered an anchovy screw ball and I told the guy behind the counter to go heavy on the brine. I dropped in some salted nuts for good measure and threw it back. It tasted foul but at least I could breathe again. To help me think, I lit another smoke and, as I set to reversing all the good work I had just achieved with the drink, I took a look around at the other passengers in this sleazy joint.

It was at this point that I heard the dull thud of my brain giving itself a face palm for being so stupid. There it was right in front of me. As plain as a pimple on a stripper’s buttock and I wasn’t talking paint. From my elevated position the whole thing was now so clear that I could have kicked myself, and I would have if I’d had the legs to do it. There they sat like Mr and Mrs Little Lord Fauntleroy, they should have been the most obvious suspects right from the very end. Priscilla Patridge and her ridiculous husband. Instead of sticking to the facts I had let my sight get clouded. I should curse my ambition or better still the smoke from my cheap cigarettes. I was going to have to move my brand up market in future. But back to the case and the facts, as they presented themselves, indicated a very particular case indeed. Not exactly of pure Jack Daniels but something almost as neat.

It had started out so pleasantly. The happy couple beaming with pride at their new acquisition. Only those two could afford such a devastatingly expensive possession. A matched pair of caged singularities bought, no-doubt from some dodgy backstreet black-market physicist. I don’t know how scientists like that can avoid the cops. It’s not as if a particle accelerator slips into your pocket. But the rich and influential are always the first to buck the law and go to an unlicensed dealer, especially if they can save some money at the same time. But such things can go wrong, so easily. And so it was going to be with the case in this case. With the snag of a cufflink the latch was going to be thrown and at the first opportunity those holes, one Black and the other one White, were going to fly. Scared of their new found freedom, at first they were going to hang around for a while, cause some mischief, but then those birds were going to blow the coop and take the box car with them. The reduced weight was going to mean that the final long climb into B station shall be easier for the locomotive and it was going to stretch its legs like a young kid gone wild after the bell rings on the last day of school term. It might not sound like much but for the most punctual train on the planet arriving 20 minutes early is a real hippy event.

By this time we had just departed from A station and I watched sullenly as we rolled up to the platform. I had both solved the case and realized that my own situation was now even more hopeless than afterwards. We came to a halt and I slipped off the train unnoticed. I could only laugh at myself whilst thermally recycling the last of my tobacco. Was it like this for all heroes? I had fixed everybody else’s problems whilst doing myself out of any credit or possibility of remuneration. What was I going to be able to put on my bill when I had solved the crime and apprehended the culprits some 1 1/2 hour’s before anything had even been committed? I flicked my butt onto the tracks before dragging it with the rest of my body to the exit turnstiles. Yet another typical day for Sid Squid PI(TI) gone and come.