She read a name and the address of Alpha Security, and a telephone number. '… I'm sorry that I can do so little." He was walking away. She said after him, soft, "And women with obsessions are always tiresome, correct?" "God, what's happened to you?" Deirdre stared up at him from her desk behind the typewriter. Not that he had interrupted her typing, and her magazine of knitting patterns lay across the keys. Penn said, "Just, the chummy didn't want to take it…" He tried to grin, and that hurt his lower lip, but his pride was hurt more than his lower lip. He was learning the business of 'skip-tracing', the trade's vernacular for the locating of debtors, and learning also that not everyone enjoyed being pitched out of bed at dawn and greeted at the front door with the Service of Legal Process. Chummy was a little taller than average, a little heavier than Penn, and had stood in his doorway, his belly bulging his singlet, and swung a mean right jab from nowhere. The pride was hurt because Penn was trained to hit where it mattered and to hit so that a man stayed down, but to hit now was to invite a counter charge of assault. So he had dropped the Legal Process on the front mat and beetled it back to his car. The split lower lip was not bad enough for stitches in casualty, but blood had run down onto his shirt front. "You look a right mess, Mr. Penn…" And he felt a right mess… and he felt a right wimp… and a toe rag who was behind on the payments to the finance company for a four-year-old Vauxhall had stuck one on him. "Does it show?" Deirdre was secretary to Alpha Security. She ruled the outer office, and she probably had a thing going with Basil, one-time CID, who had founded the private investigation agency nineteen years back along with Jim, one-time Fraud Squad, and Henry who had once been with Telecom as an engineer. He definitely thought she was an item with Basil, and that anything that crossed her laser vision would go back, pretty damned fast, to Basil. It would go back to Basil that the new boy, young Penn, had come back from Service of Legal Process with a split lower lip… Good for his battle honours, another medal to set alongside the kick down the flight of stairs from the boot of the man who was wanted as a defence witness, filling up the trophy cabinet.