As the year draws to a close, I would like to wish you all a happy and safe Festive Season. I thank all the wonderful writers on this site who have raised my spirits during the year. I hope that 2023 will be better for everyone. My writing had hit a block due to a book project and other things this year. I hope to get back writing in 2023. Before that, though, here is a little story which has a tenuous link to the Christmas story.

Marianne Gregory

Chapter 1

As I started to come awake, I knew something was wrong. It only took a few seconds to realise that I had a clear head. No blinding headache, no ‘morning after’ gut. That had me worried as I’d been well into pizza and a bottle of bourbon last night.

I knew it was Sunday morning and I knew that I’d spent a bit of money Saturday, mainly betting on horses that were quite likely still somewhere out on the back of the course. I’d felt guilty and had bought the bourbon to forget my guilt. This, unfortunately, was a regular occurrence. This weekend, though, the guilt was real. The money I’d spent had been put aside to take Shirley out this afternoon.

It was to be the culmination of our relationship, where I would go down on one knee and propose. The ring was in a nice box on my TV cabinet, waiting for its time in the sun.

The proposal wasn’t a done deal. I still wasn’t sure that Shirley was ready to become Mrs. Matthew Calder, just yet. That was another facet of my anxiety, I was never certain of anything until others gave their approval. It was amazing that I’d made it as far through life as I had. I was a self-employed computer programmer and a part-time writer – yet unpublished. Unless someone had transported me to another place, I was in bed, in my two-room bed-sit in South London, and I should have woken up with a hangover.

That was when I rolled over, and discovered that I had, indeed, been transported. Not to another place, though. The tits I squashed woke me fully. I was in the body of a woman!

Panic was the first thought. Intrigue was the second. I eased the pressure on the tits, forced myself not to start feeling my body, and then started to think. As I did so I had a rush of memories that were not quite the ones I was used to. I now inhabited the body of Matty Calder, only this time the Matty was short for Matilda. My early life at home and at school was similar, only I now remembered the past from my girlish viewpoint.

I was in the same bed-sit as before and was also a computer programmer and some-time writer. Amazingly, today was also the day I had planned to propose to Shirley. The main difference was that this Matty was a lesbian and planned to get some surgical changes made. She was also a moderate cannabis user while the old me never went near the stuff. The more I remembered my new life, the less I remembered of the old. My old personality, however, remained intact. This was good, as the Matty I now remembered was not a very nice, or law-abiding, character.

One thing remained common on a Sunday morning, though, and that was a need to relieve a full bladder. I plucked up the courage to move so that I could get out of bed and stand. I walked to the en-suite and sat on the loo as a matter of urgency, lifting the long tee-shirt that I had slept in.

As I washed my hands, I looked at the person reflected in the mirror. If you discounted the mess that was my hair, and the studs – one in the nose and one on the lower lip – I would say that I wasn’t half-bad. Certainly not ugly, in fact, quite pleasing, and nothing that a bit of make-up couldn’t fix.

While I was examining myself, my tummy rumbled. Back in the bedroom I looked at the clock as I searched for some footwear. I was shocked to see that it was only just after seven. My old self only saw this time of a Sunday morning when he had been out on a pub-crawl and was just getting home.

I found some slippers and went into the only other room in the place. It wasn’t so bad, a large kitchen/diner with a corner for a settee and a TV. I immediately saw the ring box on the TV cabinet and went to have a look. When I opened it I saw that this Matty had better taste. The ring was nice, probably more expensive than the one I’d bought.

This Matty also had a different taste when it came to eating. The kitchen table showed no signs of the pizza box, chip packets and bourbon bottle that I had left on it last night. The chocolate-loaded breakfast cereal I usually ate was nowhere to be seen. Instead, I was forced to eat an organic mix that didn’t taste as bad as it looked. At least we both drank instant coffee.

Before I ate, I pulled my laptop out of its bag. Instead of the silver one I used, this was black, but was the same model I was used to, and the same passwords worked. When I looked at the business file, I found it to be almost identical to my previous one. It looked as if, in this universe, it was only me that was different, so far. When I looked at the news feed I saw the usual stuff-ups being made by the same government, the same bimbos from TV doing the same stupid things, and the weather was going to be, as usual, overcast.

When I had finished my breakfast, I quickly washed and dried the cup and plate. The thought crossed my mind that I had, at least, been saved from clearing up a weeks’ worth of washing up and tidying up. If I had to be Matilda for a day and then went back to being Matthew on Monday, but with the housework done, it may not be a bad idea.

It was that thought that made me stop and think. If I was to stay as I am, I needed to get my head around this whole ‘girl’ thing. I sat on the settee and closed my eyes. I visualised my normal day, starting from now. Weekdays, it wasn’t too far removed from what I was used to. The main difference was that I now went to a café for a healthy sandwich instead of a pub for a liquid lunch.

That caused me to stand and run my hands over my body for the first time. I was fit and shaped as good as any girl I had met before. I thought about my old Shirley and felt no regret about our missed date. I thought about the new Shirley and, oddly, didn’t feel any emotion. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, surely!

As I gazed out of the window, I saw a couple of lads across the road. As I watched them walk by, I found myself admiring their looks and wondering what their equipment might be like. Hold on! The Matty I woke up as had lesbian memories and was going to propose to another girl today. As I stood there, I thought of cocks I had seen and found myself idly rubbing at my groin.

The next ten minutes scared the living daylights out of me. As I lay on the bed with a tissue pressed against my vagina, I wondered how on earth I was going to survive. In my earlier life, masturbation had been quick, fun, and satisfying. Nothing, nowhere near, as good as I had just experienced. It was time to clean up and get dressed. I pulled the tee-shirt over my head and went to the shower.

The water pressure almost made me dive back on the bed and finger myself. I stayed fixed on the task at hand and allowed the new me to draw on her usual activities. I washed and conditioned my shortish hair, properly washed all over and then used an after-shower moisturiser I remembered I had put to the back of the bathroom cabinet. Before I dried my legs, I made sure that the stubble was taken care of, as well as the distinct tufts in my armpits.

Back in the bedroom, I had to stop the new me from bandaging my breasts down. She may have wanted to pass as a lad but the new me was happy to treat my girls like the ladies they were. I found a few bras and panties in the back of a drawer and put a set on. The wardrobe wasn’t exciting, by any means. Jeans and band tee-shirts were the order of the day, but a niggling memory made me pull a case off the top shelf and have a look.

It was a glorious selection of skirts and tops, along with proper women’s shoes, not the bovver boots that lay on the floor of the wardrobe. There was even a small pack of tights. I pulled one pair on and selected a skirt and top that I thought went well together. With a pair of black sling-backs I had discovered, I was ready to face the day. When I looked in the mirror I took that back and went back to working on my appearance.

A half an hour later the new Matty had emerged, after several attempts to apply the minimal make-up that I had found. When I looked in the long mirror, I thought that I looked pretty good, even pretty. Using a hairbrush, I tried to do something with my short hair to make me look less like a guy. Lastly, I selected one pair of studs from the ten pairs I found soaking in a cleaning solution on the bedside cupboard. It took a few goes before I was happy that I had put them in the right holes. There were enough holes in my ears to mount all ten pairs.

I found a jacket that didn’t look like a biker one and put a few supplies into the pockets, adding the wallet that I had found in the bedside drawer. The cards in it were all normal shop cards, and the licence photo showed me scowling. I had money and I had, I discovered, a set of car keys with the Renault logo on.

I let myself out and stood in the street with a light breeze blowing at the hem of my skirt. I shut my eyes and thought about the car. When I turned and opened them, I was looking across the street at a dark blue Renault three-door. When I pressed the button on the key it flashed the indicators so, once again, the process worked.

When I went to sit in the car, I had a sudden flash of memory of my mother telling me how to get in a car without showing the world my panties so took my time to sit and swivel. Starting it up, I let it warm and then pulled out to drive towards my rendezvous with Shirley. I was to meet her at a park, out near Richmond, and she had been a little mysterious when she had told me the time and place.

When I arrived and parked, I realised why she had not told me about the event I was about to see. There was an area roped off with signs proclaiming that this afternoon would see a chamber quartet playing for an hour or so. Seeing the people already there I realised that something was amiss. Had I been dressed as the old Matty, I would have stood out like a sore thumb. Now, however, I fitted right in.

As I wandered towards the café where we were to meet, I dropped the small bag of weed that I had taken from the bedside cupboard into a bin. I saw Shirley and another girl, giggling together. I stood next to a tree and watched them for a while. I then let my gaze wander over the crowd. The security guys were easy to pick in their hi-vis tops. I smiled; this had made things easy. I strolled towards the two of them and was within a couple of yards before Shirley recognised me and almost fell off the stool she was perched on.

“Matty,” she exclaimed, “is that really you in a skirt? I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Shirley, old friend, you’ve not seen anything yet. Just wait until the shops open, tomorrow. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“Ah! Yes, this is Yolande. Yolande, I’d like you to meet Matty, a dear friend since school.”

Yolande looked at me with obvious distaste. “So, Matty, slumming it today, are we? From what I’d been told I expected to see a biker bloke in black. Love the outfit, even if it is a bit retro.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, too, Yolande. The biker look wouldn’t have fitted a chamber recital, would it?”

Shirley gasped. “You’re staying for the music?”

“Why not? It may be time for me to explore the classics. ACDC can get on some people’s nerves, especially after midnight in a tower block. By the way you’re both dressed, I think that you’ll be staying for the music.”

“Um. I only booked two seats. I expected that you may leave after kicking a few seats over. I wanted to tell you that Yolande and I will be flying to Spain tomorrow morning. We are booked into a resort for ten days.”

At that they looked at each other and smiled. If they kissed in public, I thought that I might puke. Luckily, they just held hands and gave out kissy sounds.

I smiled, nicely. “Well, I’m glad for the two of you. I hope that you enjoy the holiday and that you might see fit to invite me to the wedding.” I went up to the two stunned girls and gave them both a hug before turning around and walking away before they noticed the big grin on my face.

I strolled further into the park, thinking about the events of the morning. It was obvious that the time and place had been a set-up to make sure I wouldn’t cause too much trouble.

If the old Matty had been thwarted like that, the proximity of the security guys would have minimised the damage. Now, Shirley had a new girlfriend who was a girly as she was, and I was free as a bird.

As I ambled along, I noticed a few guys give me the once-over. I expect that old Matty would have been angry at that, but the new Matilda was a different girl, liking the attention.

Last time I had been here, there had been a kiosk selling coffee and ice-creams at this end of the park. Now, I saw, it had been renovated and was now a small café with a few tables and chairs scattered under the trees. I looked at the menu and decided that I needed a latte with a cake on the side.

As I waited for the coffee to be made, a voice beside me said, “Matilda, my dear, this is certainly an improvement on yesterdays’ model.”

I looked at the origin of the voice and a feeling of vertigo passed over me. The man reached out and held my arm to steady me. “I sometimes have that effect of people, don’t worry, it will pass. Perhaps you should go and sit, I’ll bring your coffee over.”

I carried my cake to a vacant table and sat, looking at the man waiting at the counter. He was tall, fit, and incredibly handsome. His easy manner made him sexier than if he had been posing like a weightlifter. It made me think about this morning and I felt a sudden dampness between my legs.

He came over to the table with two cups, placed my latte in front of me, and sat opposite.

I took a deep breath. “How do you know my name? How do you know what yesterdays’ model looked like? Who are you? Oh! What the hell’s going on?”

He smiled. “My name is Mark. I’ve seen you before and wondered why a pretty girl tried so hard to hide herself behind the biker look. You’d better drink that latte before it gets any colder. I don’t know why they decided that coffee should be served lukewarm. It was always scolding hot in my younger days.”

I stayed silent as we drained our cups and shared the cake. There was an awful lot to get my head around. Had I been drugged and brainwashed? Was there magic happening? I decided that I would go with the flow and find out more as things progressed.

The sound of chamber music wafted through the trees, and he stood. He held his hand out and I took it, standing beside him. I couldn’t describe the feelings that were flowing through me. I was scared, I was happy, I was tingling in places I didn’t have yesterday. When he smiled, I just wanted to melt. Pulling me by the hand, we walked back to the enclosure where a quartet was playing. He had tickets and guided me into a pair of seats. I saw Shirley and Yolande with their mouths open. I took in their shocked look and felt a sense of satisfaction that seemed almost evil.

We sat and listened for an hour or more, until the last piece ended, and the quartet took their bows. We stood and I went up on tiptoe and kissed Mark on the cheek. “Thank you for that, Mark, it’s allowed me to settle down. What now?”

“Now, sweet Matilda,” he grinned, “I take my leave and you carry on with your life. Today, you should start as you mean to go on. You have an interesting life ahead of you, but I have to leave you to work through the future, as you see it. Thank you for a refreshing experience.”

With that, he kissed me and left me standing. I watched him walk away, feeling abandoned. He passed behind a tree and that was the last I saw of him.

On the way to the car, I was shocked to see Jack, sitting on a wall, his head in his hands, sobbing fit to bust. Jack had been one of my old drinking buddies. Well, he never got as pissed as the rest of us, but he was a good guy and, I thought, happily single. He worked for one of the companies that I did occasional programming for.

I stopped beside him. “Jack, what’s the problem?”

He started at the sound of my voice and lifted his tear-streaked face to look at me. “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

“Jack, we’ve met before, but I looked different, then. I’m Matilda and I’ve done some programming for your boss.”

“Matty! You’re beautiful! Last time we spoke you looked like a biker. Please tell me you’re not still into only girls.”

“Jack, my boy,” I grinned, “I’m so not into girls anymore. Now, what can I do to help?”

“I’m suddenly homeless. I was sharing a house with a couple of guys, and it burned down last light while I was out. I’ve lost everything.”

“Come along with me, then. I can offer you somewhere to get clean and have some sleep. Tomorrow, when the shops open, we can see about you getting some gear. Does your boss know your situation?”

As he went to stand, he answered, “Not yet.”

I put out a hand to steady him and he pulled me into a hug and whispered, “Thank you, Matty. You’ve no idea how much better I feel with your help.”

We walked to the car and got in. I asked, “Are you sure nothing’s left, sometimes things do escape a blaze?”

“I’m not sure, it was night and I just sat on the ground and cried. Then I just wandered until you found me.”

He gave me the directions and we got to where he used to live. The police were there and didn’t want to let us any closer until he said that he used to live here. That’s when we were taken to a van where an inspector asked lots of pointed questions.

Jack was asked where he had been last night and what time he had got back to the house. When he couldn’t remember the pub he had been in, I prompted him with a couple that I knew he used to drink at.

I was asked how I knew Jack and I told them that I had met him at his place of work and that I did casual programming for the company. When asked how I knew about the names of the pubs, I just said that I had sometimes had a few drinks with him and his workmates.

After we had been grilled, we were allowed to pick over part of the smouldering heap. He went to where his bedroom would have been, and it wasn’t as bad as it first looked. The seat of the fire must have been on the other side of the house and a lot of his stuff had been shielded from the flames when the walls and roof had collapsed. With the help of the police, we managed to rescue some of his clothes, a bit smelly and soaking wet. He also found some of his personal keepsakes and a money tin which made him tear-up again. His music collection and laptop were a pile of melted plastic and the bathroom had been totally destroyed, but we had found enough to give him hope.

We dumped everything into the back of the Renault to leave. I gave the police my address and phone number, in case we were needed to be spoken to again. That’s when we found out that the other two guys had been in the house as it burned and the cause of the fire had been a Molotov cocktail, thrown through the front window. We were told not to leave town and make sure that we could be contactable. I wondered if Jack was a suspect, but there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him.

Back at my place, we hung his clothes on the outside line to dry so he could get them cleaned. Up in my room I pointed him at the bathroom and found a pair of old jeans that could fit him. The old ‘whiteys’ that Matty used to wear would cover him until the shops opened and an old band tee-shirt was the final item. When he came out again, clean, shaved and dressed, he looked much better.

To make things easier I phoned for a take-away and we sat at the kitchen table and ate a very late lunch. He opened his money tin and grinned when he saw that his life savings was still intact and spendable. That evening we sat on the settee and watched mindless TV until he dozed off, his head on my shoulder.

I sat there for a while, and then made my decision. I gave him a little shake and, when he opened his eyes, I whispered, “Jack, old son, it’s time you and I were in bed.” Ten minutes later, we were in my bed, starkers, and he was snoring in my ear.

For my first attempt at a sexual encounter, it was a total bust. As we undressed, I was helping him off with his pants and he just fell back on the bed and went to sleep again. The poor dear had been through a lot in twenty-four hours so I couldn’t blame him. That’s when I got naked and slipped in beside him. At least I could get the idea of what it would be sleeping next to a naked guy.

That one went tits up as well, with the snoring keeping me awake. I pulled out the earplugs that I sometimes used when one of the neighbours had a party, found a blanket, and went into the other room to sleep on the couch, making sure Jack was covered before I left.

It was about three in the morning when something woke me. I looked around to see Jack standing at the doorway, with a boner that could win prizes.

“Matilda, will you come back to bed with me, please. I think I may now be able to thank you, properly.”

I needed no second invitation. I stood, naked, and walked towards him to find myself being kissed passionately. I allowed myself to be led back to my bed where we lay down, kissed, explored each other’s body, and then made love. For me, it was the most wonderful thing I had ever experienced. The previous morning was eclipsed by multiple orgasms that left me weak and breathless.

I lay with my head on his shoulder and we both dozed off again. The alarm I had set woke us at six-thirty and took turns in the bathroom after a short kissing session. He redressed in what I had given him last night and, for simplicity, I put on the nicest jeans in the wardrobe and the plainest tee-shirt. I found a pair of desert-boots that weren’t overly macho. We had breakfast and chatted about what we needed to do today.

Down, at the line, we took in his old clothes for inspection. There were a few items that just had to go in the bin but most just needed to be dry-cleaned. We bundled them up in a clean garbage bag to take into town. I rang the body-piercing salon I had been to and made an appointment to get my studs removed.

Jack then rang his workplace on my phone, his own left in his bedroom Saturday.

When the receptionist answered he asked to speak to his manager. When Jack said that he had to take some time off to get himself sorted out, his manager was quiet for a few moments, and then said something that changed everything.

“Jack, if that’s really you calling, I had a call this morning from the lawyers handling the Henderson account. They told me that you had died in a fire last night and nominated one of our other engineers to handle their business.”

Chapter 2

Jack was, thankfully, a fast thinker. “Don’t tell anyone that you’ve spoken to me. The share house I lived in was fire-bombed last night and two of my friends died. I’ll let the police know of this and they may get in touch with you. If you have been told that, I wonder if I was an intended target. The arson seemed so unexpected before.”

Then Jack had to answer a few questions to prove that he was really him. The manager agreed to stay quiet and act as if Jack wasn’t returning to work. He told Jack the name of the nominated replacement and Jack nodded, sagely. When the conversation ended, he immediately called the police inspector to give him the new information. The inspector told him to keep laying low and that this ramped up the investigation into premeditated murder.

When the phone was given back to me, I asked what was going on. Jack put the kettle on and then told me all that he knew.

“The Henderson account is a huge job for us. It’s a planned super-hospital, totally up to the moment and the initial projection puts it at about a billion pounds, although I think that may end up doubled.”

“I’ve heard of it, someone from your company sent me an email asking me to scope out likely software solutions. The brief I was sent was simple but, the more I looked at it, the more complicated it got.”

“That’s pretty much what I started to think. Your programmes in some of the larger buildings we’ve designed have all worked well. The management was impressed with your control software for the integrated air-conditioning and louvre systems last year. I bet they never gave you a bonus, though.”

I laughed. “They never even sent me a thank you when they paid the account. Seriously, this hospital plan is flawed. The likely problems, if tabulated, would run to several pages. I did some groundwork and found a project that was built along the lines of what you’ve been tasked with.”

“Oh, yes. Do tell. My side of it was purely on the structural engineering side and some of the brief I had looked impossible to guarantee that it would even stand up to a strong wind.”

“OK. The hospital was built in one of the Australian states. It was touted as being ultra-modern and able to speed up patient flow-through. The meals were all to be ordered by keyboards in the wards, all medication called up the same way, and everything delivered by autonomous trolleys using GPS positioning. The patient records were supposed to be paperless and linked to a national database of the patient history.”

“So, what went wrong?”

“Everything. The place was built with a proviso that the old, existing hospital would be closed. The new place had the central computer down more than it was up. The national database was ignored by almost half of the population. The internal database quickly became out of date because, although all the doctors could access it, none were prepared to spend their time adding to the records. The autonomous trolleys were never going to work in the precise way it was intended. I think one tried to jump out of a window. The ED area was so small it couldn’t handle normal traffic, let alone the pandemic. That led to ambulances parked nose to tail in the driveways with patients unable to be admitted for hours.”

“I’m sure it couldn’t have been that bad!”

“Believe me, in this place you could get a Big Mac delivered by courier quicker than getting the lunch you ordered, even if you were lucky enough to get the one you wanted. I’m sure that you may have been able to get your operation done quicker if it could be sub-contracted.”

“What about the cost?”

“As you predicted, it doubled and the worst part about the whole deal was that the government agreed to pay for any updates. This left them with a place where the only things that worked were the beds and the lifts. This was all on top of the horrendous lease that they signed. If the place these Henderson guys plan is anything like that, it will be a money-pit for whoever is going to pay for it.”

”That’s where I made my mistake. I spoke up about how impossible their ideas were. I’m sure that the computer problems you talk of haven’t even been thought of. The plan is like the one you’ve told me about. The drop-off area for patients and the ED is only big enough if you can put someone into a ward inside thirty minutes, any longer and the bank-up will be horrendous. They also want autonomous trolley delivery and a paperless record.”

“So why do they want you dead?”

“I did a little digging on the backers. It’s called the Henderson account because the front man is a guy called Garrard Henderson. He’s better known for being a king slumlord some years ago. There are a few well-known medical suppliers in the consortium but there are several more company names listed that are impossible to delve into. I’m sure that they’re fronts for other organisations. Who knows? They could be terrorists or organised crime groups. If that’s the case, a little arson wouldn’t even cause them to think twice.”

“What about the new guy they nominated?”

He laughed. “That’s too easy. Morgan is a gambler, and an unlucky or stupid one at that. I think he’s in deep with one of the bookies in the city. If you could invent someone easy to bribe, you couldn’t do any better than him.”

“What about your manager?”

“He thinks like I do. I took my problems to him, and he wasn’t surprised. His problem is the sneaking suspicion that our upper management could be in with the Henderson group. If there’s big money to be made, they’re likely to be on board.”

“So, he’s likely to be a target if he makes too much noise?”

“Unlikely, he’s almost at retirement age. If it was me as the bad guy, I’d let him see his time out and put in one of my own.”

“Where’s this edifice supposed to be built?”

“That’s the big secret, so far. I’m sure it’s somewhere in the East End and did see a mention of a land-swap. I have the suspicion now that they’re heading towards the Australian model. If they get the site of an old hospital in exchange for building the new one, there’ll be millions to be made in putting up high-rise living. If it follows what you’ve explained, the site will have to be owned by a County Council and currently good for nothing. Probably it’s contaminated or too difficult to access.”

“Then we come back to you, Jack. If they find out that you escaped, they’ll be after you again. We’d better just toss out all the clothes you salvaged. It all screams ‘engineer’. We must re-invent you to keep you alive. After last night, I think I want you around a bit longer.”

That led to a hugging session, which led to going back to bed, which led to needing another wash and to putting the soiled sheets into the small washing machine. When we dressed again, I found him some bovver boots that just about fitted him, along with a glaringly rancid punk band tee that made him look totally radical. I found a skirt and top that worked, and we left the bed-sit. I drove to the piercing parlour where I had my ones removed and we put a couple of simple ones into Jacks’ face, one on an eyebrow and one in the nose.

At the chemists I got some hair dye and lots of make-up. At Marks and Sparks I added to my range of underwear and some tops and skirts. We got him some more jeans and plainer tees, along with underwear and some better-fitting boots. He paid cash for his stuff while I used my card. It wasn’t that his card had been destroyed. It was that he didn’t have one, being suspicious of banks. That was why his life savings ended up as banknotes in a tin box. That was the main positive so far, no paper trail to show that he was still alive. I asked him how he got paid and he said that he had an account which took his salary, but he took most of it out within a couple of days.

“You’re going to have to stay clear of that, for a while, if you really are in danger.”

“Yeah, I think your right. Have you got any ideas?”

“I’ve got a little place next to a beach in Norfolk. It’s just a glorified chalet, really, but we could hide away there if we need to. The locals only ever saw me in tees and jeans so you wouldn’t worry them. I can go girly and wouldn’t look out of place. The local store has everything we’ll need and there’s a pub not far away. It does have a king-size bed and a good bath, no shower, though. I go for a swim to take care of that.”

“Sounds like a plan, thank you for bringing me back from my funk. I was so upset by the fire and the loss of everything I owned, that I stopped thinking for a while. What drove me away from the house was the smell. It was like someone was cooking pork.”

“That’s one bit of information too far. I’m happy to help. I’m even happier that we connect so well. I think that we should arrange a visit with the inspector, tell him everything we suspect, and lose ourselves in the Norfolk hinterland.”

I rang the inspector and said that we may have some information that would lead to a motive. We arranged a meeting at a public park the next day. That done, I got Jack into the bathroom and dyed his hair from the original fair mop to a vivid red with spikes. The way he looked now would never see him working in an office. He reminded me of the singer in Public Enemy.

The next morning, we got him dressed looking suitably shabby. I had to force him not to wash as that was something his new persona would hate. I dressed in a new outfit, denim skirt, colourful top, and a cardigan, seeing that the morning was a little chilly. I drove us to a street near the park and he got out. He shambled away, totally in character, with earbuds playing punk music from my phone. His job was to find a place that overlooked the park bench I had nominated, flop down and pretend to be a lay-about.

I drove around the block a couple of times and then parked just outside the main gate. I just strolled, trying to be uninteresting. That was a bust, every guy was looking at me, some with a smile, some with a leer, and a couple that had dead eyes as I went by. That, I thought, was odd. As I looked, I saw the inspector sitting on the bench with an open newspaper. There was a small kiosk, so I went and bought a latte. I carried over to the bench and sat as far from the inspector as I could. He looked surprised but didn’t make a move.

“There’re a couple of guys between us and the gate. I think they’re watching you. I don’t think they’re yours because they have dead eyes.” I hoped he heard this as it had been said with my cup to my mouth.

A voice from behind the newspaper replied. “I didn’t bring anyone. What do you have to tell me?”

I gave him the details of what Jack now thought was the motive. As I finished Jack sauntered past and said “Hey, there, sweet cheeks, how about you and I go somewhere nice and make-out.”

“Piss off, punk. I wouldn’t go anywhere with you if you were the last guy on earth.”

“I think you should, baby, there’s a few guys here that wouldn’t have second thoughts making sure I was the last guy on earth. If I had a phone, I’d call for the police.”

He gave me the bird and wandered off towards the gates, going straight past the two guys who now appeared more alert. It was now ten minutes before the arranged time. I had made a guess that the inspector would be there early. I opened my bag and checked my face before getting up. Looking further into the park I saw the others Jack had mentioned.

“I think you’d better call for a pick-up once I’m clear. Those guys look serious.”

I stood and tossed my cup into the nearby bin before forcing myself to walk slowly back towards the gates. As I pulled away a police car pulled up and a couple of uniformed went into the park. Right behind them was another police car and a van. A little way down the road I pulled over next to Jack. He got in and we got away from the area as soon as we could.

That evening we were watching the evening news when there was a story about a guy who had been killed in a hit-and-run. The announcer gave the age and profession and there was a picture of a body covered in a blanket. The shoes that poked out from the blanket made Jack gasp.

“They’re exactly the ones my manager wore. The age and profession are right as well. I think we’d better head north as soon as we can.”

That evening the inspector rang me.

“You’re not safe. Those guys in the park were gangsters. We closed the place after you’d gone and interrogated everyone. All four that you pointed out were carrying and are now in our cells. They won’t be there for long and will be trying hard to remember everyone who came close to me. With a good lawyer, they’ll be out tomorrow. They’ll be on the warpath. Get out of town. Don’t tell me where you’re going. In the meantime, I’m going to look for the leak in my squad. Good luck. Write down this number and call it every now and then. You’re my niece Clara, talking about your sisters’ wedding plans.”

I didn’t have time to say anything as he reeled off the number. All I could do was recite it back to him and tell him to watch out for himself. That evening we packed a couple of bags with everything we could carry, loaded the car in darkness, set the alarm for the early hours and went to bed to hold each other close. So close, in fact, that we eventually overlapped.

Morning came too quickly as we showered and dressed the early morning twilight. I only took my girly stuff and computer. We had already packed all the tins and dry food so just emptied the fridge after breakfast, dumping the spoilable stuff into the bin on the way out. With everything turned off there was nothing left to do but head to my bolthole.

It was eerie travelling so early in the day. We were out before a lot of the commuters but there were still a lot of vehicles on the road. I took us as far as Woodford, where we stopped for a loo break and a hot drink. Then Jack drove us onto the M11 north. We didn’t stop again until we were in Newmarket. I went and bought some fish and chips, and we sat in a park to eat. Back on the road we kept on the A11 until we hit the ring road around Norwich.

At Wroxham, I took the wheel again and we were on smaller and smaller roads until we arrived at my bolthole. It didn’t look much, just a between-wars bungalow among several others, out on the edge of nowhere.

The original village of Eccles by the Sea was now under water, claimed by the relentless tides. All that was left was what started as a holiday camp but was now a group of privately owned chalets, protected from the sea by dunes and a decent sea wall. It was called Bush Estate and was a permanent home to a few and a holiday get-away to most of the property owners. My own property was separated by some empty blocks. This was a fortunate thing today as it would add to our feeling if security.

I got out of the car and unlocked the front door. I remembered to stay in the open air as the musty aroma of too-old carpet, and stale air from being closed too long, wafted out. I held my breath and went through to the back door and opened it to get some airflow. One thing about this place was the almost constant breeze.

Jack came in and raised an eyebrow. “Bolthole? Chalet? This place is three times bigger that the bed-sit. It just needs a clean. The Matty I knew before wouldn’t have been house-proud.”

“No. The Matilda that’s here is now ashamed to have someone else seeing the squalor. It’s too late today to get stuck in but I’ll work on it tomorrow. Let’s get the car unloaded and we’ll head for the nearest good pub. The Hill House is just a couple of miles away and stays open late. We can get a meal and have a couple of drinks.”

As we took our luggage in, I pointed out the bedroom, bathroom, the original outside toilet, the places where things were in the kitchen, and my ‘office.’ That was where my older computer lived. It was a desktop case but internally upgraded with more power and memory than the laptop. The previous Matilda, in her teenage years, used it to work through complex systems as well as exploring the internet. Some call it ‘hacking.’

I hung away my new outfits, passed the boy-shorts in the drawers to Jack and we decided to look for more things for him tomorrow. We made up the bed, one each side and looking at each other with silly grins. That done, we went to Hill House for a meal and a few drinks. He drank what I would normally have drunk, and I had something I used to buy for Shirley. When we got back to the chalet, we christened our freshly made bed.

Over breakfast, we spoke about plans for the day. My first thought was a morning of cleaning while we mulled over what we knew, followed by an afternoon on the computer, to see what else we could find about this Henderson Group.

We just dressed, knowing we would need a bath when we’d finished. We wiped, we mopped, we vacuumed, and we washed until the place looked, and smelt, good enough to live in. We then stopped for lunch, followed by a bath. We had sex before the bath, why waste good water by getting smelly again?

In my office I powered up the computer. Jack wasn’t a software buff, just using programs to design buildings. He was savvy enough to notice things, though. Like the uninterruptable power supply that the computer was hooked to and the speed that it opened programs. I explained that I had spent a fair bit of money on the system, which led to the one question I wasn’t happy answering but would have to if we were to stay alive.

“How can you have all this; I can’t see you earning enough through the contract software writing?”

“Jack, I’ve been into computers since I was in primary school. I had a simple laptop for schoolwork but discovered other things I could do with it. I developed into a serious hacker in my teens. Through ways I won’t even try to explain, I amassed a bit of money and opened a bank account in another name. I hacked into another school, far away, and found a student who had left before the final exams. I was able to get hold of her birth certificate and family history which made opening the account easy. As I got older, I upgraded her history, adding her to the records of a good school and getting good results.”

He was looking at me as if I had grown another head.

“It was so easy to create another person I did it another two times. I have the full paperwork of three fictitious girls, with school history, certificates, and it’s all there in various records should someone want to look them up. I can drive as me and one other person as I also took my driving test as the other person. You can see that, if you want to stay alive, there’s no one more suited to keeping you that way.”

He thought about that and nodded before kissing me. “Thank you, whoever you are.”

“Now, this computer will allow us to search for the companies involved in the criminal activities. I have five overseas sites that I can go through so that it would be impossible to track the queries back to here. I also pay rent on ten sites in this country that have servers I can route through. We can delve deep from this room and, hopefully, find out just who it is that wants you dead.”

“How on earth do you pay for all this, the contracts would not be dropping into your lap every day?”

I took his hand and led him to the back door.

“You see that large shed out there? That used to be the original bathroom and laundry when the place was built. I used the spare bedroom when I had the new bathroom and laundry put into the main house. If you look closely, you’ll notice that there’s a reverse cycle cooling system unit under that shelter. That’s needed to make sure that what’s inside stays at a reasonable temperature.”

I led him to the doorway, set in what was otherwise a plain wall, and unlocked it. I opened it and led him inside. He gasped at what he saw.

“On the right are eight servers in that rack, with another eight in this one on the left. They run all the time because they are literally making me money. I found out about Bitcoin when it was in its infancy and bought five hundred of them as a speculative investment. That only cost me a few thousand pounds. They are each worth around twenty thousand pounds, depending on how things are going. The server rack on the left is a Bitcoin mine and is adding to my stash, a little at a time.”

“The rack on the right is churning out Mattinium, something I launched myself a few years ago. It’s not widely known because it’s only used by the hackers but has started to gain traction on the dark web. I know that it may be being used for illegal purposes, but Bank of England notes are used the same way.”

A smile was appearing on his face as he calculated my apparent worth.

“As you can see, this creates a bit of heat, therefore the cooling system. All of these are fed by an uninterruptable power supply and, if the power does go off, there is an automatic small diesel generator that will kick in. That would power this room for six hours.”

“What about the power? From what I’ve read, these Bitcoin mines use a lot of it. Surely someone would query the electricity bill of a chalet that’s hardly used?”

I led him back outside.

“What do you see around us? There’s nothing but empty blocks on one side, and the back of the house. Roads on the other two sides. I bought the three blocks years ago to create a little peace and quiet. All three have working power, which is fed into here. The house uses its own meter. The roof is insulated and gives off no more heat than a laundry, should someone fly over with a heat sensor. The police do tour around, sometimes, looking for drug labs. The property was originally owned by my parents, as their holiday shack. I inherited it on their deaths, a few years ago. I did a lot of the work myself, just having a plumber in to do the new bathroom.”

I locked up again and we went inside. Back on the office computer we started with what we knew, the company he worked for. He looked on, aghast, as I drilled into the HR system and printed off the names and addresses of all the employees, his name now noticeably absent. When he looked, his manager was not on the list, either.

He took the list to go through it while I investigated the world of Garrard Henderson. That took me the rest of the afternoon, and, by the time I finished, I had a lot of printouts of his exploits, his personal life, and the myriad of companies he was involved with. Finally, before we went off to the pub, I checked the news sites. The hit and run that killed Jacks’ manager was now considered murder. More worryingly, there was a short piece about a road accident today. An unmarked police car had been hit in the side by a speeding SUV. The driver had run off, leaving a badly injured police Inspector and his driver at the scene.

It was our police Inspector.

I showed the item to Jack, and he frowned.

“That makes things difficult. We can’t report what we find to the police, now. What are we going to do?

“Look, even with my skills, it’s going to take weeks to work through all these companies that Henderson is involved in. If they think you’re dead, it will be easy to give you another name and history. If they’re still looking, we’ll have to make it foolproof. If we do find what we need to crack the case, we can always send it out to the media as a complete story. I write a bit so I can put together something they can print if we include verifiable facts. In the meantime, we just sit tight until we need to break cover.”

That evening, when we were at the pub, someone I had known before came in and went up to Jack.

“Hello, Matty, long time, no see.”

Jack was quick-witted enough to say, “Oh, hi. I’m just here with my girlfriend for a break. I may be around for a while; I just don’t know how long.”

“Well, it’s good to see you. Is this the much talked about Shirley?”

“No, I’m not,” I snarled, “I’m Rosemary, a much better person than that Shirley could ever be, the bitch!”

He recoiled slightly, smiled carefully, and made his escape.

“Well, my friend, I guess that answers the question of who you will be in future. Rosemary is one of my alter-egos, we already have a complete, and real, history for you as Matilda, a lesbian who wants to be a guy. Who would have thought it would be so easy?”

Chapter 3

The next morning, we worked on making Jack appear as Matilda. He already had the build, and all the old biker gear fitted him. He was already wearing the underpants I used to wear, so it was just a matter of looking up on the internet to find out how to hide his beautiful cock during the day.

He didn’t like it when we tried it first time but got used to it as the day wore on. We didn’t have to give him tits because they were already being hidden. We just wrapped the usual bandage around his chest to look like I used to. In fact, when he scowled like I had done on my license, he looked just like me with a different hairstyle.

While I worked on the computer, he worked on copying my voice with me working on moving my own voice back towards being more girly. We talked a lot during that day, calling each other darling and using the assumed names until we did it automatically. That evening we went to a ‘pink’ place near Norwich to eat and dance.

The next day, Matilda drove the Renault to a car yard and sold it, for cash, way below the trade-in valuation. We then went to another yard, where Rosemary Mears bought a used Defender and paid for it with her own credit card.

We invented a story that Jack could recite, as Matilda, should anyone come looking, seeing that the Inspectors report would have that name, with the London address. In the meantime, I showed my ‘girlfriend’ something I had held back.

In the outhouse there was a locked, metal, cupboard. In it were two over and under shotguns. I had gone through a period where I had thought that firing a gun was a ‘manly’ occupation. One fine day, Matty and Rose took the Defender to the Shooting Ground, near Taverham, just past Norwich. Matty was on their computer system as a previous shooter, so it was easy to add Rosemary to the list.

We went out to the skeet shooting range and expended about a hundred rounds on clay targets. I was already good, and my partner started off missing everything but soon got the hang of it. With about the last twenty shots Matty was hitting the clay about half the time. That’s not bad for a rank novice.

So, we settled into a rhythm. Some days searching records on the computer, usually eating at a range of places, but mainly Hill House, as neither of us were great cooks. We were making love at night after freeing him from the hidden position in the gaffes that he now wore as a better protection from being found out. Matty grew her hair out a bit and I tried my best to return it to its previous style and colour.

We shopped in clothing stores, Matty becoming slightly less menacing with some better styles and me becoming a total girl. Make that a total babe, as I embraced the beauty salon and more feminine outfits. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t see much of the old Matilda, let alone the Matty. I knew that when Roses’ licence renewal came up, I’d need a new photo.

The research into companies was slow but did winnow out some of the legit ones he had dealings with. We finally ended up with two that had no records in the Company House. Before I went looking for them, we then went through the same procedure with companies that the owners of Jacks’ previous employer were involved with. After ten days of searching, it came down to those same two company names. Everything, except for those two company names, was shredded and burned in the big drum in the back garden. The paper with the names went into a small safe in the outside shed.

We were now part of the Bush Estate permanents and were now on speaking terms with those neighbours who were open minded enough to talk to a couple of dykes. I was now drawing attention in the hotels we ate at, having to disregard leering looks that I had never been subjected to before.

Inevitably, there came the day when we were approached by a couple of guys who had dead eyes.

“Excuse me, ladies. Is one of you Matilda Calder?”

Matty was now good enough, and confident enough, to look totally believable when she answered that she was.

“Miss Calder, I believe that you had a run-in with the police some weeks ago. Something about an arson attack. We work with the house insurers and are trying to track down a person who used to live there, a guy called John Anderson. I believe that you were with him after the fire?”

“Oh, that time. Yes, I had met Jack several times at the business where he worked and was surprised when I met him near Richmond, looking as if he had lost everything. He told me that he had, indeed, lost everything. He told me about the fire, and I took him to where he used to live, and he recovered some of his possessions. We spoke to the police, and I gave them my name and London address in case they wanted to contact him.”

“Can you tell me where he went, then?”

“I don’t know. I took him back to my place. We dried out the few clothes he had recovered. He slept on my couch and left the next day. A few of his things were tidy enough for him to wear and he had recovered his life savings that he kept in a tin box.”

“Are you sure you didn’t sleep with him?”

“What kind of girl do you take me for? I’m a lesbian, for Gods’ sake, anyone will tell you that. I’m here, with my girlfriend, Rose, trying to create a family lifestyle in the place my parents left me. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve felt ready to settle down and I’ve found a wonderful girl who also thinks I’m the girl for her.”

“So, when did you last see him?”

“At the railway station as he got out of my old car. He told me that he had friends in Scotland and wanted to get away for a while. Oh! He did use my phone to ring his boss, but I don’t know what was said. I do know that he was keen to be gone after that, so I drove him into the city. He looked quite a sorry sight when he walked away from the car.”

“Thank you for that, Miss Calder. If you do hear from him again, could you let us know? Here, this is my card, just call that number and someone will pass the message on.”

“Why on earth would he call me? More to the point, why would I want to speak to him? He’s a guy, and I’ve got no time for guys.”

“Sorry to suggest that you have, Miss Calder. You certainly have a good-looking girlfriend there, I’m sure that there are a lot of guys around here who would like to be in her panties, instead of you. But, sorry to say, we all have our own ways of living. Sorry to have bothered you, have a nice meal.”

As he walked away, I could tell that Matty wanted to say something, so I reached over and held her wrist.

“Matty, sweetheart, hush. Let’s not let those men spoil our meal. Did you notice the size of the ears on his friend, I’m sure they could be used to warn of approaching bombers. Let me have that card, I’ll put it in my bag, and it can go out with the rubbish, tomorrow.”

“I was going to say how rude he was, suggesting that you would want a man in your panties.”

“Never mind, darling, it made me think that we haven’t used old ‘Double Ended Harry’ for a while. I think that I’d like us both to get some enjoyment tonight. It almost makes me want to race home and slide it into both of us.”

Our meal came out and we ate, made small talk and she described what I was going to get when she got me into bed. After a couple of drinks, we strolled, arm in arm, away from the hotel and I told her that I had seen the other guy reach under the table. I was sure that he’d stuck a bug there to catch what we spoke about after they left.

“If they’re as good as we think they are, there would have been a team at the house to plant bugs there. I think the car may be all right, for now, as they’ve not seen the Defender before. When we get home, I’ll get on the computer and find a place where I can buy a bug finder. Act normal when we go to bed, keep the gaffe on and give me one of your nice lickings. We don’t know if they’ve put cameras around so don’t take off the bandages either.”

When we got home, we acted as if someone was watching, and it made everything erotic. I helped Matty undress and got her into bed after rummaging in a bottom drawer and coming up with a strap-on, which she put on while I took off my clothes, in a striptease. I got into bed and pulled the blankets over us after putting the light out. Matty used the dildo on me once, and then I went under the blankets and relived her of the gaffe so that she could get satisfaction as well.

In the morning, I pretended to be giving her a licking, under the covers, while I rearranged the gaffe for her. It was not quite dawn and we dressed in track pants and tops and went for a walk. I took a big bag with a thermos of hot tea, as well as my laptop. Down by the beach I turned it on and found a place in Norwich that sold security equipment and noted the address.

We ate and I drew a bath, making sure that the window was shut. Steam would fog any lens that they might have put there. Matty went first and I rewound the bandage before she went to get dressed. I had my bath and then opened the window as I dried. If they had put a camera here, I wanted them to be certain that I was a girl.

In Norwich, we went to the security place and discussed what we wanted. We ended up with a small device that would pick up any camera in operation, and a wand that we could use to pinpoint audio and tracking bugs. We then went to a locksmith where we stocked up on new deadlocks. In the carpark, I used the wand to check over the Defender. There was a tracking bug under the back bumper, so I prised it off and we went home, via a scenic route that had an old, and very bumpy, lane, tossing the bug out of the window at the biggest bump.

In the house we used the one to find cameras first, coming up empty. Then we searched for audio bugs, finding one in a hole drilled in the edge of the window frame. They hadn’t come into the house but must have left that one as a ‘just in case’ job. We didn’t do anything about it for a week until Matty exclaimed, “We’ve got woodworm!” and we got some putty and pushed it into the hole, dropping the bug into the garden outside. We left it there to rust.

We then changed all the locks; in case they came back. We hadn’t said or done anything that could be taken as admitting that we knew anything. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be back. But, if they did, it would mean that they were sure that we had been involved.

Life carried on and I investigated the two companies we had identified. On top of that I started a program to search for tracts of land which were big enough for the project, but still unused for whatever reason. Another program looked for hospitals that were over a hundred years old.

The more time went on, the more Jack became Matty, and slowly, Matilda. She wore softer clothes, even taking to wearing a nightie when we went to bed. She had looked up other things on the internet, and, one day, asked me if I could organise birth-control pills for her as she had read that these can accelerate transformation of a male to female body.

I did a bit of doctor-hopping and ended up with an extra supply of my own.

About a month later, we had a breakthrough on our searches.

The first thing that happened was that my program to find odd spaces finished and we studied the list it had generated. We concentrated on the north-east London area and came up with seven that looked promising.

Using Google Maps, we looked at the sites from the air, and then opened the view to see if there were any hospitals in close proximity. Two sites had close hospitals, but only one had already shown up on my other search program. Further searches showed that both sites were under the control of the same council. A search of the council members brought up a council member who had links to one of the suspect companies.

Another thing that had happened was due to the business card we had been given. As expected, the number on the card didn’t exist. I’m sure that, if you rang it, there would be a short moment when it was transferred to another number altogether. The Insurance Company, however, ended up being owned by one of our two suspect companies. This narrowed the focus onto a single rotten apple.

Matty took the Defender to London to look at the suspect sites on the ground. She had the keys to the London bedsit. I stayed at home to redouble my search. Living on sandwiches and coffee for a couple of uninterrupted days, I concentrated on the one company, finally finding a link to it on the database of the Italian police. It was a front for the Mafia.

Further research into the police database brought up the name of the head of the gang, as well as a list of known gang members, and their criminal records. On a hunch, I went into the police records in Richmond, to see if any of them had been apprehended in the park, that day. Two of the four names matched, and, looking back in the Italian records, one of these had a history of arson.

On another hunch, I looked at the known links that the gang had and then worked on the other suspect company, finding the name as a business run by another gang. Looking at the records of the other gang, there were two names of gang members who matched the other two in the park. So, Henderson was in bed with the Mafia, not just with a single gang, but two gangs working together. This must mean that the project is more lucrative than we first thought.

I thought about the project and realised that building the hospital would take a couple of years, followed by reworking the other site. This would mean a constant stream of supplies coming in by truck, perhaps by truck from Europe. What a wonderful way to transport drugs, almost part of the furniture for a good five years.

I looked further into the Italian companies and found that both had a transport arm. I had enough to start writing a story, starting with the arson attempt to kill Jack, and then leading to the project and my speculation about the reasons behind the attempted and actual murders.

When Matty came home again, I knew that something had happened. It took a bit of cuddling and coaxing before she would tell me her story. Now, over the past few weeks, we had been making love less often and it took her a while before she could get an erection. This was expected because of the birth-control pills she was taking. It wasn’t a surprise that her story included a guy. Not just any guy, but one she had worked with who had also met me, when I was Matty.

The story was straight forward. Boy meets girl, takes girl out for drink. Girl is losing her desire for other girls and goes back with boy to his flat. Girl declares it’s time of the month and gives boy a blow job. Boy asks girl to stay the night and girl sleeps in her bra and pants. Boy takes girl from behind during night and girl relieves him of his morning glory next day. It was something I had been thinking about, a lot, lately.

However, during the intervals between sex, boy was quite voluble in his disgust over the way his company was going. Matty, having known all the employees, could steer him along the path which gave her a lot of information. It crystallised the links that the company owners had with the project. When I outlined what I had found out, the two stories became much easier to visualise.

It allowed me to fill out a lot more of the story. All the names, places, companies, and gangs were checkable. Matty had photos of both the project and the swap property. The project had once been a battery factory, next to a canal. Their plan was to remediate the site by bulldozing the topsoil into the old canal and that would provide access to the main road that ran along the other bank. Of course, no thought had been given to future flood events.

Another thing that had come home with Matty was her increased femininity. She had gone shopping and was now wearing skirts. It paralleled my own transformation in many ways, and I understood what she was going through.

One Saturday night we dressed to kill and went into Norwich to a nightclub. There we were picked up by a couple of handsome lads. As two couples we strolled in the dark of the park and Matty gave her guy a slow blow while mine gave me a welcome kneetrembler against a handy tree trunk. After that we went into a pub for a few drinks and then, back in the park, the boys swapped places and I had my second, or was it the third, orgasm that evening.

It was after that when Matty declared that she wanted to go all the way with the transition, having had so much more fun as a girl, and loving the whole concept with the clothes. I told her that there was nothing stopping her having the operations. We had the money. I could pay for everything with Bitcoin in Thailand. She was now so much more Matilda and there was no barrier to using my old passport to fly out to Asia.

I was able to get in touch with an old hacking contact in Thailand and he promised to look after her, when she arrived. We booked the operations, allowing two weeks for her to be tested before and to recuperate for a month after. Two weeks later, I drove her to Stansted to catch her flight.

She was excited, a little afraid of the operations and told me that she would really miss me while she was away. I thought that it was good for her to be out of the country when the story hit the media. She had Matildas’ credit card, well cashed up, and I expected her to shop well once she was truly female.

Back at home I put the final touches to the story and sealed it in several addressed mailing bags for the media outlets. I did one special one for the Inspector, having found out that he was still off-duty while he was recuperating from the crash.

I had hacked into his station HR and looked at the banking details of his squad, finding two of them whose lifestyle, and bank accounts, were way beyond their pay. I sent this directly to him from a post office in Lincolnshire, making sure that I had touched none of the pages unless I was wearing gloves.

I added a note, telling him who had sent the package and that Jack was no longer able to be found. I asked that he destroy the note as soon as he had read it.

On the day I went for a long drive, dropping the other packages off at post offices as I passed them, the news was on the radio, announcing several arrests. All were names that I now knew. On my way around, I stopped at a place that sold security systems. My needs were simple.

Back home, I worked at night and laid out detector beams. There was one across the road to the front of the house, as far away on the spare block as I could. Then there was a series across the blocks, from front to back, and another across the road that ran behind the back spare blocks. Lastly, another set across the back blocks and another across the road that runs down the side of the house. These were all set with slightly different tones so I could tell, immediately, which one had been interrupted.

I then made sure I had enough provisions to last a few weeks and hunkered down at home. The two shotguns were brought into the house, loaded, and placed with one next to the window at the front of the house, the other at the window overlooking the side road. I slept with both sash windows pushed up a few inches.

As the days passed, the arrests continued and then the media broke the whole story with lurid headlines. I didn’t expect the police would catch everyone and three of the four in the park stayed free. One was the arson specialist.

I was spending a lot of my days sleeping as I expected any visit would be in the dark. I wasn’t surprised when the beam on the road in front of the house warbled its alarm. I had become used to them being broken during the day so knew exactly where I should go. I crouched down by the front widow, hefted the shotgun and just poked the barrel through the gap.

A car slid to a stop outside my front gate, no lights showing. Then the two front doors and one back door opened, and three bulky guys got out, going to the boot. This was opened and one guy reached in and lifted out a bottle. They looked around then and whispered, while one pointing down one side of the house and then pointing down the other. So, the plan was to toss the Molotov cocktail into the front of the house and shoot anyone trying to escape the blaze.

The two guys pulled out long-barrelled pistols and the third put a lighter to the cloth hanging out of the bottle. That’s when I put two shotgun barrels of birdshot their way. The effect was immediate.

The guy dropped the shattered bottle as the pellets hit him and then the three of them were enveloped in burning petrol. Two were rolling around on the ground and screaming, while one leaned into the boot, possibly to pull out a blanket. That was a mistake. There must have been a crate of cocktails in the boot, and he must have lit one, or more fuses with his actions. As he stood, the back of the car blew in a huge ball of flame, followed by another when the fuel tank ignited.

I closed the window, collected the other gun, and closed the other window. The guns were taken to the back shed, and both unloaded before being put away, the one I had fired getting a quick pull-through for both barrels. I locked up and the called the Inspector on the number he had given me. I told him who, and where, I was, reported what had transpired and that I expected that my neighbours had already called the local fire brigade. I told him that there were three spare blocks around the house and that there was room to put a helicopter down.

After that, I filled the kettle and made a pot of tea. No doubt there won’t be much sleep tonight. I opened the front door to look at the burning car. Jack had been spot-on when he described the smell. I doubt that I would be eating pork for a while.

When the fire brigade arrived, I went out and watched them douse the flames with foam. The chief spoke to me and said that it had been phoned in as a stolen car being torched, not an uncommon occurrence in these out-of-the-way places. The three bodies had made it a whole different situation. The local police turned up, two lads I knew in a van, already well out of their depth.

One asked me what I knew, and I told him to just keep the scene roped off until the cavalry arrived. Sure enough, just before dawn, a police helicopter came over, circled once, and put down in the spare block. The inspector, in civvies, and three armed ‘Specials’ got out and came over, followed by what looked like a commander, judging by his shoulder tabs.

The Inspector came up to me and gave me a long hug, whispering his thanks as he did. I invited him and his boss into the house for a drink while the others stood guard over the scene, sending the locals home. No doubt telling them to keep their mouths shut. Another two helicopters arrived and a bunch of guys in hazmat suits got out.

I was introduced to the commander as, ‘Matty, the girl who broke the case wide open’ and I had to tell them that I was now Rosemary, with the paperwork to prove it, and that Matilda was overseas having a sex-change operation now. I could see that the Inspector caught on that Jack really was no longer around.

The locals were kept at a distance as the suited guys did their business, bagged the bodies, and put them in a helicopter.

Chapter 4

I told the senior officer everything, holding nothing back, and he looked quite worried by the time I’d finished. It turned out that he was worried about my state of mind, having killed three guys, and told me that I could get some quiet counselling if I needed it.

He said that the report would show that the three guys had been about to fire-bomb my house and had dropped a lit Molotov cocktail on the road. Any pellet damage to their bodies would be hidden by the effects of the fire and explosions.

I made everyone breakfast, taking my stocks down to almost nothing, and then, finally, a truck came by to take the car away and the three helicopters left. By the time a newspaper reporter arrived, there was just a scorched spot in the road. He spoke to the locals and the police and was told that the big turn-out was because someone had claimed that it was the beginning of a terrorist bombing attack but just turned out to be a stolen car, torched by louts who had got away. It barely got four lines in the paper.

I got the Defender out and took myself into London that afternoon. I had the keys to the bedsit, as well as all the paperwork. I took two days tidying the place and loading the Defender with all the things I was going to take away. I took the keys and the paperwork to an agent and asked them to put the place on the market, signing all the paperwork as Matilda. I stayed in a local hotel, did a little more shopping and then drove back to Bush Estate.

Before Matty came home I started looking for somewhere secluded, but close to a decent town, where I could take my mines. I found a small farm in the northern edges of the Cotswolds that fitted the bill, inspected it, and put down a deposit, all in the name of Rosemary Mears. Matty took a lot longer coming home than I had expected. When she finally got out of the immigration at London Airport I was staggered at the changes.

Jack had totally disappeared. The old Matty look-alike had gone as well. The pretty woman who came over to me to give me a hug was not what I had expected. She was all total girl, flowing dresses, sheer hose, high heels, a full head of lustrous hair, a wonderful smile, a gloriously sultry voice - and a husband!

He was a suave, urbane hunk who made my groin feel damp. I was looking at Henry and Matilda Garcia, who had met in a bar in Bangkok just three weeks after the operations. She later whispered that he made those dilators seem so boring! He was into real estate in the USA, and I was told that they would be staying in London for a few days, before going on to his home in California. He admitted that it would have been easier to fly there direct from Thailand, but that Matilda had been insistent about coming back to England.

I took them to their hotel and Henry organized a room there for me as well. It allowed me some time to bring Matty up to date on the events that had happened. I left out the attempted murder at home. She was so glad that she had been a part of it all but even gladder that it had all blown over without Jack being searched for.

I told her that her new identity only followed on from the previous one as Matilda and that I would continue my life as Rosemary. I said that I had the bedsit for sale and that she could have the proceeds, but she shook her head, saying that her husband had enough money already. He had organized a credit card for her with a ridiculous balance and that she had no need of any more from me.

She thanked me for helping her in her time of need and I was reminded of the morning I woke up, in the bedsit, and found out I had been transported. Was I just here to help someone, and then leave again? Will I wake up in the morning, back as Martin, with a ring I intended to give to Shirley when I proposed? I could now see her side of things with much more clarity, now. The more I thought about it, the more revulsion I felt. I was so happy the way I was, now.

That night I left the newly-weds and took myself to Soho, where I had a few drinks and allowed myself to be taken home by a nice guy who turned out to be the stallion I needed. I left before dawn and got a taxi to take me back to the hotel, where I hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and slept until lunch.

When I waved goodbye to the happy couple, Matilda took my previous life with her. I was now totally a female and looking for a life partner with the sort of tackle I had enjoyed a few nights before. I needed to finalise the purchase of the farm, get an outbuilding restored to take the racks and move there as soon as I could. I was over the Bush Estate, mainly because it was now someone else’s history.

I beavered away on the computer, creating another Matilda Calder identity so that I could work through all the hoops that would be coming up. It was, of course, my old life with a few changes at the end. I just needed to apply for a new licence to replace a lost one, so allowing me to get a new photo taken. That would give me enough proof of identity to complete my movement of assets to Rosemary.

Over the next three months I moved everything west, cleaned out the house, removed all the security things and put the house, and the three spare blocks, onto the market. I thought they would take forever to sell but a property developer fell in love with the huge site, just ripe for a cluster development, and he gave me a very nice offer. Two days later I packed my sleeping bag into the Defender and left my bolthole for good.

The cryptocurrency was owned by whoever had the codes, so that was easy to hold on to. I slowly transferred all the money in the Matilda account to the Rosemary one. Every day I went to sleep with a little prayer that I would still be here in the morning.

This time, I didn’t hold back on the property, living in the barn while I had workmen in to bring the farmhouse into the current age. I had all new surfaces, appliances, plumbing, electrical, heating and insulation. It was a comfortable home once I had finished.

Although I set up the crypto mines again, powered by a big solar array, I started to convert the Bitcoins into real money at a pace that didn’t upset the taxman too much.

I made sure that I frequented the nearest village, as well as the nearest town. But it wasn’t at either place where I met another man. He was found, strangely enough, under a gooseberry bush. My land was only a couple of acres left over from the original farm. At the farthest boundary was a farm track, bordered by the biggest gooseberry and bramble bushes you have ever seen.

One day, I decided that they needed trimming, and I took a small, electric chainsaw to give them a good seeing to. I had gone about twenty feet along when I noticed a pair of legs poking out from under the bush. I put the saw down and investigated, finding a guy, either unconscious or dead. I called the emergency services, and they sent out a paramedic. The paramedic had a look, and then called an ambulance. I used the saw to clear the space around the man so that he was easy to get onto a stretcher.

Two days later I went to visit the man in hospital. He looked a lot better but still had drips and other tubes attached to him. He was sleeping when I got there, so I left the small bunch of flowers for his room, but took the chocolate I had back home again, to bring next time, should it last that long. The hospital told me that he hadn’t been able to tell them much, but he had suffered a blow to the head and had likely been under the bush for several days.

Every couple of days I would drop into the hospital to see how he was going. I was told that he had suffered a severe concussion, not helped by prolonged exposure and dehydration. He couldn’t tell them anything about himself and seemed to have a problem even knowing why he had ended up under my gooseberry bush.

In ten days, he was able to walk around and eat normally so they wanted him out of his bed. As he had nowhere to go, I offered to look after him for a while. I took him home and settled him into the spare bedroom. He seemed, to me, more scared than anything else and I was able, after a few more days, to crack his shell of defence.

One morning, at breakfast, I asked, “Would you like porridge or toast this morning, Joe?” and he answered, ‘Toast, please,” before his face went ashen and he started sweating.

I put the toast in front of him and, beside it, a print-out of his identity. “Joe, I know this will come as a shock, but it is entirely between you and me. I wanted to make sure you were all right during the night so there’s a baby monitor in your bedroom. You may not realise it, but you talk in your sleep. A phrase that you’ve used often is, “Joe Jamieson, you’ve gone and done it, now!”

“I’m an expert on tracing people on the computer and it really didn’t take long to get that life history. I can see why you’re scared, I would be too, if I had those guys after me. Perhaps you can tell me your side of it and then we can make old Joe really disappear.”

He shuddered, took a drink of his tea, and then told me why he was in the bush. The story was simple, a normal upbringing, moderate school success, and apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic and his last job in a trucking yard which worked on trucks from a range of companies.

“I was too involved in my work,” he explained, “There was one company, based in Italy, that we did the odd job for. One day, I was working on one of their trucks and I needed to work under the engine. These guys fitted a bash-plate under their engines. I can’t see why as we don’t have big boulders in the middle of our roads. I took it off and it was far too thick and heavy. I finished working on the truck, put the plate back and spoke about it to my foreman when I gave him the paperwork. Two days later, I was getting out of my car when I was hit. I didn’t know where I was when I woke up in that hospital. When I found out I had been left to die, I decided to say nothing.”

“That was the best thing you could have done. Now, tell me the name of the Italian company and we’ll go and see if they’re linked to some others I know of.”

I took him through to my office where I powered up the computer.

“Did you read about the big scandal with that hospital project? Well, two of the transport companies that would have brought in supplies from Europe were owned by the Mafia.”

He had to sit down and stayed silent as I worked through the links which, naturally, came back to the two Italian gangs. The truck he had worked on had previously been in the livery of one of the firms I had found. Those firms had been closed and liquidated, no doubt the old owners buying back the assets under another name.

“Now, Joe, let’s find you another identity.”

As he watched, in wonder, I looked at his birth record and found another baby, stillborn on the same day but with the birth registered so that the unhappy parents had closure. I started looking at schools that Joseph Jamieson had attended, hacking into their student records, and adding a Lucas Adam Wilson as a student, giving him a record as a good student.

“Now, Joe, or should I say Luke, now, other than being a mechanic, what do you like to do?”

“I’ve always liked photography, I have a couple of good cameras at home, or I should say that I had.”

I input his address and we found out that, not only were his cameras gone, so was his home in a fire that was deemed ‘suspicious’. The police case was still open, and they were still looking for Joseph Jamieson.

I then found a secondary school where he could have attended and added him to their student body, with a history that led him to the arts. I then found a photographic studio, long closed, and added him to their archived employee list as a trainee.

“After that,” I told him, “You’ve been freelanced and renting a home, moving around as the mood took you. You don’t have to have an excuse for being under the bush, as that can be lost because of the blow.”

I printed off his history, from his parents’ names to where they lived. Both were now dead, taken by the covid. Then he had his new school history and list of qualifications.

“We can get you some equipment and put it in a room we can rent. That way we can discover it, along with your old clothes and personal possessions later. We can rent under your new name once I’ve created some legal paperwork.”

“What about me?” he asked, “What do we do with me?”

I smiled, “That’s the easy bit. As far as the hospital is concerned, you aren’t any interest to them any longer. The police may come around, in a year or so, to ask me about you and I can tell them that you recovered a lot of your memory but couldn’t remember how you came to be in the bush. You then borrowed some money and left.”

“By then we could have rented the room as Lucas, filled it with stuff and then ‘found’ it again and ended the lease. They’re not going to spend any more time delving into dates because, as far as they’re concerned, the case will have resolved itself.”

“With the body in the bush, there was a small item in the paper and in their web issue. Because you were living and taken some way from here, I expect that the bad guys will only be checking the on-line version in case you wake up. What I can do is create a small item which I’ll slip into the on-line copy in the next edition to say that the ‘Mystery Man’ had died without waking and his body had been sent to the county centre for cremation. I can put it under the by-line of the original piece. Reporters write the stories, they only read them if they’ve written a blockbuster story on the front page.”

He shook his head in wonder. “What about other important things?”

“Well, you’ll have to take some driving lessons as Lucas and then take the test. That will clear out any old bad habits you have. I’ll apply for a copy of your birth certificate for you, and then we can open a bank account in your name. We can do that in a company name, seeing that you’re a freelancer. We can get that organised quickly.”

“The first thing is to get you to a big city and an op-shop to buy you a range of clothes, along with a case. Then we can get some second-hand camera gear to take to the digs that we’ll rent. We can leave everything there for a month or two and then, when you’ve remembered, we’ll go and collect everything. If we pay a bond and a month rent, you can go to the agent and collect your things from them, seeing that they would have cleared the room once your rent payment ran out.”

“While we’re in the city, we’ll get you some new clothes that are more like a photographer would wear, as well as a good camera for you to build up a portfolio.”

“You’d do all that for me, we’ve only just met?”

“Luke, I was the one that broke that hospital scam case. I know who you’re running from, and it will take all of this, and more, to keep you alive. I know of three that they killed and another three that they tried to kill, including a police inspector and me. If they have any inkling that you’re alive and talking, they’d stop at nothing to shut you up. One of the guys they tried to kill ended up getting a sex-change and a rich husband to ensure his safety. I really don’t want you to go that far!”

He laughed until he could see, from my face, that I wasn’t joking. After that he got serious about the changes he needed to make, firstly memorising his new identity. I never called him Joe again. The next day I took his sizes and went into the nearest city to get him some underwear and socks, sneakers, jeans and slacks, shirts, and a jacket with a lot of pockets. The last came from a camera shop where I got him a decent camera and accessories. I told the salesman that it was a birthday present for a very special man.

While in the city, I called the Inspector from a public phone. When he answered he was now Chief Inspector and I congratulated him on his promotion. I explained that I couldn’t tell him the source of what I was going to tell him and then explained how a new transport company was using the trucks from the company we had smashed. I said that I thought that there must be police in Italy on the take, considering that they allowed gang members to buy the liquidated business without reporting that nothing changed hands.

I told him about the thicker bash plates under the engine and suggested that he get on to customs to start looking at these, perhaps following the trucks to their destinations before making any arrests. I said that a persons’ life depended on customs not hitting the gang too quickly.

The day after that, with Luke in his new gear, we went to a bigger city and started with a second-hand suitcase which we filled with a range of clothes that a price-conscious self-employed freelancer may wear. Then we looked for somewhere to leave them from the real estate ads on the web.

As he used to live in Kent, we found a place that fitted the bill in the Scottish lowlands. It was a secluded cottage, and he was excited because he particularly liked taking nature pictures. We arranged the rent by email and paid for a month on-line. I then took him, now in his older clothes, up to Scotland and dropped him off to stay for a couple of weeks so that the locals would remember him.

Back home, I realised that the farm seemed very quiet without him around. He had helped with the gardening and general maintenance, and I had become used to having someone to talk to. There had not been anything remotely sexual between us, but it suddenly struck me that we had been living like a long-married couple, at ease with each other. It had only been a few weeks since I had found him, but I felt that I knew him forever.

A week after I dropped him off, he called me on my mobile.

“Rose, I just had to speak to you. It’s wonderful here and I’ve got a lot of great pictures but it’s not the same if I can’t show them to you. I’ve been accepted by the locals, but I feel lonely.”

We spoke for a while, and I said that I would be in a certain pub in Glasgow on Wednesday night if he wanted to see me. I said it may be a good time for him to disappear, again.

That Wednesday I packed a bag with his new clothes and a bag of mine for an overnight stay. I drove to Glasgow and checked in to a room I’d pre-booked on-line. At the agreed hour, he walked into the pub where I was having a drink. When he saw me, he came over and hugged me. The hug became a kiss. I didn’t finish my drink as I picked up my bag and pulled him out of the pub, back to my hotel and up to my room where we spent the night making up for lost time.

A month later, he drove us up to Scotland on his ‘L’ plates, now taking lessons. We went to the agent and retrieved his old belongings, telling them that he had met me in Glasgow and fell madly in love. The deposit was forfeit but that was already expected. He checked the case and found the camera and chips, so was happy at that. The clothes and the case were left in roadside bins as we went south again. The camera bag and bathroom items were the only things he kept.

In that month, we had become a genuine couple. We slept in the main bedroom and half the wardrobe space was taken up with his new clothes. I had shown him the cryptocurrency mines and had explained how I was able to live here, without needing to work.

He joined the photo club in the next town, and I went along with him until he was able to legally drive himself. He was very good and the laptop we had bought, with all the software for playing with pictures, had a lot of pictures of me in it. As the photo club already had two Roses, I became known as Mary.

We would both go wandering in the countryside and I started taking pictures of my own. No-one came looking for the mystery man in the bush. No-one questioned Luke as being anyone else, other than a guy I had met in a pub. Before he had gone to Scotland he had never ventured into the local village or town, so no-one linked him to the body in the bush. The police did come around, one day, to ask me about the guy that I had taken from the hospital. I told them that he had regained his health, and a little bit of his memory, but hadn’t told me who he was before leaving, a few weeks after he had arrived.

They spoke to Luke, who simply told them who he was and that we had met, in Glasgow, in a pub, and here he was with the love of his life. When he passed the driving test he gave the farm as his address, so ended up with his identity set in stone, photo as well, on his new licence. We bought a new, upmarket, Defender, but kept the old one as a farm vehicle. The new one was run-in with a trip up the east coast, into Scotland, stopping off at all the nature reserves, on the way. We both had laptops to download our pictures as we went.

I had told Luke that I was stopping my birth-control pills and missed my period in the month after we got back. I saw the local doctor, who confirmed the situation. We married, in the village church, a month later. Most of the village turned out and we had an open reception in the local pub. Luke had a friend from the photo club as Best Man and I had a couple of the wives as bridesmaids.

We had applied for, and got, a passport for him, so our honeymoon was in the Greek Islands, where we lazed around and made love most of the time. Back home we started putting together a showing of our photos. We originally put a few into the local library and a studio owner from the next town saw them. After that, we had a regular showing, usually selling about three-quarters of the pictures.

Mary and Luke Wilson had a baby boy who was called John Joseph, me insisting on the John part in memory of Jack who started the ball rolling. I started taking lots of pictures of him to put in an album of his growing up. We set up one of the cameras to take a time-lapse picture of the three of us, looking happy.

Luke became quite well-known for his bird studies, as well as his portrait work, getting a lot of business. Oddly enough, he was also a pretty good diesel mechanic for a photographer, looking after the two Defenders and the back-up generator for the mines.

One day, I was looking through some of my recent pictures while Luke was out. He had been commissioned to do a portrait for one of the rich and famous that lived in the area south of us. I brought up the picture that we had taken of the two of us and young John, an enlargement that now graced our lounge. I was staggered to see, standing beside me with a big smile, the Mark I had met in the park, all that time ago. It made me blink, and, when I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

I had been female for so long I had totally forgotten waking up after a night of bourbon and pizza. It made me wonder, had I fulfilled the task that I had been sent to do? I had certainly had the interesting life as that Mark told me I would. I now had my Luke and my son John. I suppose that I had saved Jack from a fate worse than death and had given him a totally new life. I had helped crack open the case which had put him in danger. When I thought about it, that case would have put me in danger as well, considering that Matty had been given information as well.

Then I realised that I had saved another life, mine. I had taken Matilda and given her a good life, exciting and dangerous, but fulfilling all the same. I had brought a new person into the world, something that would never have happened as her old self.

On top of that, I had found my husband under a gooseberry bush and given him a new life, as well as a new family. I closed my eyes and wished that it didn’t end here. As before, I wondered if I would be waking up in the old bedsit, hung-over. I wished that I could go on with my life as Rosemary, mother, wife, and happy. When I opened my eyes, the Mark was back in the picture, shaking his head and giving me the thumbs up.

It brought tears to my eyes with happiness, and I had to get a tissue to dry them. When I looked at the picture again, Mark had gone but there was a faint image of three babies in front of the two of us.

It took a while, but as the two extra images faded, I cried tears of relief. I now knew what to expect in my life and was so happy that when my husband got home, I dragged him into bed, and we made the second baby. One who will have the name of Mark, of that, I was certain. I hadn’t started thinking about a name for our third child yet.

Marianne Gregory © 2022