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P.  
    ‘Mind if I smoke?’ she asked.
    Jack Stiles, Private Detective, leaned back in his chair and tipped his stylish trilby forward over his eyes.  Behind him, the pink neon sign from across the street flickered intermittently through the half closed blinds. It had taken him months to find an office with this peculiarity.  He felt it added the right ambience. In addition to this, he had a large battered looking desk with an old metal fan whirring constantly, even in the coldest weather, which riffled the edges of a stack of papers, held down by a large paperweight in the shape of a nude lady.  Beside this was a large black telephone.  On the edge of the desk was a whisky bottle, again for ambience, it was actually filled with cold tea. Stiles, a reformed alcoholic, did not wish to put temptation in his way.  The office was dark and gloomy; the only light coming through the glass fronted door on which could be read the legend

    The piece de resistance as far as Stiles was concerned was a genuine newspaper clipping attached to a notice board, with the headline: “Detective Chief Inspector Fired from Scotland Yard!” With a grainy picture of himself underneath it, being manhandled drunkenly by two junior officers out of the prestigious offices and on to the street.  Talk about ambience. It was only a shame that his name was not Sam. 
    ‘Go ahead,’ he said, lighting up a cigar and handing her the lighter. 
    ‘I do not need that,’ she said, as the smoke rose from her feet.
    She perched herself on the edge of his desk and leaned seductively over it toward him, and pouted when this did not elicit the response she had been hoping for, or indeed any response at all.  She waved a hand in front of his face. He was frozen.  She glanced at the clock – stopped.  There was only one person on the whole planet that Hecaté knew of, who was capable of stopping time. ‘Tamar!’ she thought.  ‘So it has begun.’  
    Hecaté, being a goddess – the goddess of witches, in fact, was not affected by the spell, and she was capable of breaking it, at least on a small scale, that is she could free Stiles.  She thought that she probably should, but he would, she knew, want to go and help Tamar, it was the policeman in him.  Stiles had been a D.C.I in Scotland Yard until his recent adventures with Tamar when he had gone missing for four months with no word, and had come back to find that he no longer had a job.  He could scarcely explain that he had been kidnapped by vampires, because he was indicated in a prophecy about the end of vampire-kind, and had ended up on a quest to kill a god. 
    Hecaté was also part of the prophecy – probably, and that was how they had met.  Now she just wanted him to herself, at least for a while.  She did not want him going off on some mad adventure and probably getting himself killed.
    She unfroze him anyway.  She tugged on his arm. 
    ‘What just happened?’ he said, his confusion mirroring Denny’s and occurring at much the same moment.
    Hecaté told him what she thought must have happened, and what she thought was behind it.
    ‘Well, we should go and see if we can help,’ said Stiles, predictably.   
    Hecaté sighed.  ‘I thought you would say that,’ she said.
    * * *
    ‘What do you mean, improvise?’ said Denny.
    ‘Well, we already have one archive code.’
    ‘That’s only to a deleted file. It doesn’t lead anywhere. How’s that going to help?’ 
    ‘We can hit “escape” see where it takes us. Maybe, it’ll get us into the mainframe, and …’ 
    ‘ Maybe ?’  Denny was outraged.
    ‘And, if we get into the mainframe, we’re halfway there,’ she continued stubbornly. ‘We should be able to access the history files. It’ll be a bit hit and miss, we could end up anywhere, they’re numbered I think, not named.’
    ‘I am not liking this plan,’ said Denny, obstinately.
    ‘Well, come up with a better one,’ she challenged.
    ‘I don’t even