The cook was dead, the pigs were eating his remains. It was I that struck the mortal blow—I ran for my life . Warren traced the barely legible lines with his finger and murmured. “So one of my forebears was a murderer as well as a swashbuckler.” He leaned back in his chair and stared vacantly at the window as the rain made tiny rivulets down the glass. The drizzle wasn’t enough to wash away the London smog far below and it did nothing to raise his spirits. How come I didn’t inherit any of those exciting genes? Thirty I’ll be next month—thirty. Three freaking zero, and what do I have to show for it? The family photo that was almost a fixture on office desks was noticeably absent from his. That went into the trash when Carmen sued him for divorce last July. He knew his days were numbered when Angelo appeared on the scene. Angelo, of the gleaming villa and the shiny yacht. The temptation of endless Spanish summers proved too great and Carmen decided to leave her buttoned-down accountant husband and their small flat in Wood Green and follow the sun. Accountancy. All those wasted nights poring over balance sheets and cash flow projections only to accomplish a degree that made me a glorified book-keeper. I could be coining it as a doctor or even a dentist with a nice home in the suburbs and Wednesday afternoons free to play golf. How did I allow myself to get steered down a career path that would ultimately lead to a lifetime of moving numbers around a computer screen? This wasn’t the first time he had pondered this decision and in the back of his mind, the answer lurked like a malevolent ghost. ‘Fiscally gifted’ one of his tutors once called him. Warren Andrews surveyed his desk and sighed. It was neat and orderly like his life. There was nothing out of place, pens and notepad to the right, an empty in-box away to the left, a relic from a bygone era. All his commands now came via the computer. The screen reflected in his glasses and he stared at it, not really seeing it. Columns and numbers. Nobody really took a blind bit of notice of them; they were anonymous, sterile. Unless you got one wrong then all hell would break loose, like Carlisle last week—what a balls-up. All he had done was transpose two figures, two! And a critical cash flow projection for one of the company’s major clients was out by millions. Charles Percival Carlisle’s promising accountancy career almost ended right there at the thin end of the boardroom table. The computer dominated the desk; the pulsating cursor ticking his life away second by boring insignificant second, teasing him, trying to goad him into action. Whether he added something to the spreadsheet on the display, or not, it cared little. It just sat there winking its cyclopean eye; waiting for him to finish his task so that it could forward the results to the pinstriped gods on the floor above. The computer was a simpleton, its brain only understood zeros and ones. It gave nothing and it expected nothing. The only time it displayed any personality was when he got bored with figures and sneaked a game of Tetris. His thoughts drifted back to last Saturday at his mother’s. He remembered standing in front of the old glass-fronted cabinet turning the pages of one of her prized first editions. Amongst the carefully arranged volumes sat the biography of his great great-great- uncle, Morris Fletcher. He had read it once when he was a child, something about missionary work in Africa. A wooden trunk gathered dust, an heirloom, they called it. His father once told him that this old weathered trunk belonged to Morris’ grandfather. Warren recalled playing with it when he was a child, his father said that it had been owned by a pirate and had treasure inside. The box was heavy. The wad of paper was tied with a thin leather thong. Warren eased open the fragile and barely legible pages and started to read. “To my dear grandson. . .” it began.