And so I sat with a half-heard conversation assailing my ears and the faint smell of burnt hair and cigar smoke wafting into my nasal passages. For around a minute. And then it all came back, my leg twitched and the golf cart jerked forward knocking me back to full consciousness and causing everyone to stare.

“Clint! Is that you?” Mitch Van Doren stood over the body, the expensive shoes that matched his expensive suit being slowly ruined by a malfunctioning sprinkler that intermittently squirted a jet of water at him like some sort of evil underground clown.

“No.”

“Haha,” he actually laughed. “Good one.”

Good one? Who says that? No-one, that’s who.

“They told me there were two dead bodies. Glad to see it’s just the one.”

“They? Who’s they?”

“Well, that’s to say, erm, well I’m not glad there’s a dead body obviously.”

“Mitch what are you doing here are you drunk?”

“It’s just that, well, what with your condition. Erm, you can see why they made the mistake can’t you. Drunk? What, er, no. Just had the one.”

“Well then,” I said, climbing out of the golf cart and coming a little closer to him. “If you’re not drunk and you aren’t here for me why are you here?”

His brow furrowed and he stared back.

“Because I’m pretty sure,” I said as I stepped a little further towards the body, careful to stay out of the radius of the sprinkler. “There are rules around when there are dead folks involved.”

He stared the stare of a man with little intelligence and no sense of humour. I waited for his brain to re-engage and, momentarily, it did.

“Ah, right, yes. Thing is that I can. I’m a private detective, the dead person clearly isn’t you and, erm, I’ve been asked to look into it by the Agency.”

“Right. Very good.”