I am still alive

Contrary to a report that's circulating around the Thieves' Kitchens chain of underworld hang-outs, I haven't been killed by a super-villain, I'm just busy on my vacation with Scruff and Emily. So here's a little something from my inbox.

>Dear Friend,
>
> My name is Mr. Ming Yang, I work with the Hang Seng Bank of Hong Kong. I have a Business Proposal of Twenty-four million, five hundred thousand US dollars for you to handle with me from my bank i work with. Should you be interested, please send me your full names,private phone/fax number to email address (myhk_671@yahoo.com.hk) and finally after that I shall provide you
>with more details of this operation.
>
>Kind Regards,
>
>Mr. Ming Yang.

I replied:

Dear 'Mr. Ming Yang' (which name, combining as it does the names of two Chinese imperial dynasties is highly unlikely to be your real name)

Unfortunately for you, I was not born yesterday. You are a dirty crook attempting to rob me by suggesting that I participate in a slightly shady, if totally fictitious, deal that will be to my advantage. Should I take you up on this offer (which I will not, owing to my age being more than you anticipated), I would in fact find that the only money changing hands will be in the direction of me to you, under the rubric of 'bank charges'.

However, your scheme is doomed to failure, at least in my case, because:
1. I was not born yesterday (as detailed above)
2. I am well read in detective fiction, including the writings of Edgar Wallace and Leslie Charteris, both of whom used scams such as yours as plots for short stories.
3. I am aware that real bank officials do not send out e-mails to people of whom they have never heard requesting help in moving large amounts of money between continents.
4. Your name is an obvious phoney.
5. Your e-mail address is not a bank address at all.
6. The e-mail closely resembles some nine trillion and five that I have already recieved and dealt wsith in surprising ways.
7. I am in fact a costumed crime-fighter whose kid sidekick is a computer whizz and will be able to trace your e-mail back to you. Expect a visit from me very soon.

Yours Sincerely

The Girl in Grey

Horror in Hampstead - 2.

Child-molester Guy Winstead stared in abject terror at the weird black smoky form of the Outsider
"I..." he stammered. This wasn't the girl he'd contacted! "Where's Stephanie?"
"Silly!" the Outsider giggled. "You sent me a picture of you the way you looked years ago. I returned the favour,"
"No! You... You... You look..."
"That was me three years ago, Winstead, before I was transformed into The Outsider. Now this is me!"
Winstead looked down at the photograph of the happy, laughing, pretty redhead, then up at the Outsider's terrifying form. She was small, but she was inhuman, terrible, a dark avenger. EVen her tone was dark and dangerous.
"You abuse little girls, Guy Winstead. You're responsible for two suicides, one of a girl aged thirteen, one of a girl aged sixteen who'd lived with what you did to her for two years before it became too much for her."
"I..."
"Hannah Fairbairn was my cousin, Winstead. You destroyed her. And now I'm going to destroy you. Oh, I ought to introduce myself. You see, like you I used a false name on the chatroom. My name's Emily Fairbairn."
"But you're dead!"
"Am I? Look at me, Guy Winstead. LOOK AT ME!"
Winstead gibbered with fear. Emily laughed.
"What's the matter, Winstead, afraid of a little girl? I'm only thirteen. I thought you liked little girls like me! Or do you only like them when they're helpless in your control, when you can abuse them, hurt them, destroy them?"
He turned to run, but her crossbow-bolt caught him in the back of his right knee, and he fell to the ground screaming in agony. Terrified, he looked up as the Outsider moved forward over the grass.
"What's the matter? You can't face it like a man?" She tore off his tie and began to fashion it into a noose.
"Hannah hanged herself with her school tie. Now you're going to write a full confession and I'll hang you."
"I won't write..."
"Then I'll just hang you."
Gibbering with fear, Winstead wrote, while Emily formed the noose.
The next morning the police found Winstead's corpse hanging from a tree. They had been tipped off by the voice of a little girl on the telephone.

Horror in Hampstead -1

Guy Winstead liked little girls. And not in a nice way. He befriended them in internet chatrooms and lured them out to meet him so that he could abuse them. Yet he was also cunning. No-one knew that he, a respectable city businessman, was a secret child-abuser. He thought he was safe, that he was too clever for the police. A dozen little girls were afraid of him, and of other men. They'd lost their innocence early, and some were too terrified to leave the house. But Guy Winstead didn't care. He was happy, and that was all that mattered to the callous and evil man.
He had been speaking to the little girl called Stephanie for two months on the internet, and he had won her trust. He'd sent her a picture of him as a boy, and she'd sent a picture back. He looked at it. It showed a pretty girl with flame-red hair, a girl of about ten, barefoot, in a garden in India. She had just come back from there, her parents were missionaries. He'd pretended his father was a vicar, and she'd opened her heart to him.
Now he was waiting for her on ampstead Heath as the night fell, waiting to take her and abuse her.
Guy let the night fall as he fantasised about what he would do to this trusting little daughter of missionaries. He closed his eyes and laughed to himself as he dreamed up the most revolting thoughts. All of them involved the redheaded girl in the snapshot he held - and all of them would have got him sent to prison if he'd acted them out.

"Is Timmy Henderson around here?"
The abuser opened his eyes at the sound of the little girl's voice speaking the false name he'd given on the chatroom. It came from behind him.
"Yes," he turned.
The smile dropped from his face at once. What he faced was not the pretty redhead he had expected to see, but a weird black smoky figure the size and shape of a little girl. Its only discernable features were two red eyes that blazed like live coals in a black smoky face.
"Hello Guy Winstead," The Outsider said. " I am the Outsider, and this evening you're going to die"

Evolve or Die! 13.

I ran from where Mick was fast dying. Not that I'm callous, but there was no way I could keep him alive. I had to stop his killer. But how? The dart had been fired either from a blow-gun or, more likely, some sort of air-gun device. If the killer had used telescopic sights and a high-powered airgun, he might have been on a rooftop, far enough from the scene to have made good his escape before either Emily or Scruff could have reached him.
I rejoined them on a rooftop. They had found nothing.
"I got the name of his supplier," I told them. "It's 'Spiv' Barrick."
"West End mobster," Scruff supplied the information. "But he makes millions from drugs. Why would he poison his customers?"
"I have no idea," I confessed. "I just hope the mystery resolves itself as we follow the trail."
"Me too," Scruff agreed. "It's starting to give me a headache."
That's serious. Scruff's a genius, despite her appearance and normal behaviour, if something gives her a headache, then it's difficult.
We made our way to Barrick's penthouse headquaters at the top of a modern West End block. It was an impressive place - but I'm not easily impressed. Mind you, it was also pretty easy for the three of us to get onto the roof. Looked good, lousy security (as an American friend of mine says).
The drawing-room, with its ultra-modern glass roof, was easy to find, and it was easy for an invisible Emily to creep onto the roof and listen.
I could see from my place in the shadows that Barrick was there. He was speaking on the telephone, and one of my gadgets allowed me to hear every word.
"...Killed a dealer?" he was angry.
"What do you mean the Girl in Grey was trying to pump him for information? So you used that poison on him? Why did you kill the others?"
What I'd have given to hear the other side of the conversation!
"So they knew more than was good for them? Okay. How did they know?"
He was angry. That meant his partnership with the unknow wasn't an equal one. It was still dangerous!
Then I felt a revolver being pressed to the back of my head.
Maybe the security wasn't so bad after all.

Evolve or Die! 12.

The Grey Car's useful, but sometimes nothing beats running across the rooftops with the wind in your cowl. Emily's superhuman strength allowed her to keep up with me and Scruff (we're taller than her, you may have noticed). Part of me said this was silly. I was trying to fight crime in London with the help of my sixteen-year-old sister (dressed as Robin of Batman and...) and a thirteen-year-old girl who looks like a cloud of black smoke with glowing red eyes. It's not the sort of hobby you can talk about at parties, is it?
The rest of me was just loving it. The night, my city under threat. What was there not to enjoy?
I leaped from a rooftop and swung my whip. It caught, and I swung.
I landed in front of a seedy-looking man who gasped in horror at me appearance.
"Hello, Mick, long time no see," I said with a smile.
"The girl in Grey! You..."
"Oh, that's right, I got you sent to jail. Mick, you're out, and you're selling drugs. Now, there are drug-users dying in this city, and I need to know why."
"I don't..."
"I know. You use drugs yourself, and you sell to other users to get the money to support your own habit. Just think, YOU might have..."
Mick yelled in pain and clapped his hand to his cheek. It came away with a tiny blow-dart in it. I knew at once what had happened.
"Outsider! Robin! The killer's here!"
Mick gasped in pain. I wanted to help, to do something, but I had no idea what to do. No antidote, no way even to stop the poison's effects.
"Mick!" I cried. The drug-dealer gasped.
"I... I'm gonna die!"
"Yes, you're going to die. I'm sorry. But it proves the link. Who's your supplier!"
"'Spiv' Barrick!" Mick coughed up blood. "Oh my... I'm burning up!"
"I'm sorry! But you'll help us stop the killer. I swear I'll stop him!"
There was nothing I could do to save Mick's life, so I didn't even try. He'd been a good boy once, corrupted by a gang culture, hooked on drugs - and now this.
Whoever was behind this was going to pay!

Evolve or Die! 11.

"How was the Natural history Museum?" a rather bored-looking Emily asked as we entered the flat on our return.
"Full of weird people," Scruff replied. "We spoke with a lady who believed that human evolution had stopped and that was a bad thing."
"Weird people," Emily agreed. "You think I could scare them by turning up sometime and being black and smoky?"
"Yeah," Scruff grinned and went into the kitchen to fix herself something to eat."
"Right now we have more serious things to do," I said, going into my bedroom to change. Emily followed me. "That poison's being administered to drug addicts, and that means a drug dealer's involved. And not just a small street-level dealer, I mean one of the big boys, someone with plenty of little rats working under him. It means he could poison thousands of people, but there is one good thing about it - it'll make him easier to find. At least it will for the Girl in Grey." I took my costume out of my wardrobe. and held it up.
"I'll get some more crossbow bolts," Emily left me, and I smiled. It was good to see her so enthusiastic. She'd been fairly sulky in the morning, and I have NO idea how to handle a sulky teenage Outsider.
"Sis?" Scruff entered. I smiled at her.
"Hi. Has Alice found anything useful yet?"
"No," she replied. "Look, there's not a lot I can do here, and nothing I could do here that Alice isn't better at..."
"Then grab the Robin costume - or whatever costume you want to grab - and come on. We could do with your help on the streets."
"You mean it?"
"Of course! You're as useful at my side in a fight as you are with that laptop of yours - and I mean that."
"Great! I'll dress!"
"And get a list of the drug-dealers we know who operated in the areas the dead people lived in."
"Okay!" Scruff ran from the room. I smiled.
Alice may have her computer-brain, but I have my team, and sometimes a team is far better than one person -however good that person is.

Evolve or Die! 10.

We were in the Natural History Museum talking with a Professor Coral Williams, a rather flashy supporter of Richard Dawkins, and a Dr. Andrew Lansdale, an old friend of my Dad's and a biochemist. Coral called over a young woman in a better-looking (though cheaper) suit than hers.
"Cynthia, this is Jane Hill. She's a Christian."
"Really? Do you believe in evolution?"
"That we come from monkeys? Frankly, no. And I did a biology course at university, so I'm not ignorant. You see, I majored in genetics, and I could never find a source for the new genetic information necessary for Darwin's theory to be possible. Natural selection needs something to select, it can't create new information, it can only eliminate existing information. Random mutations aren't sufficient. And tell me, why isn't the human race evolving?"
"Like in 'X-Men'," Scruff added unnecessarily.
"Simple," Cynthia said. "We control our environment to a great extent. We can build cities in the deserts, transport water great distances, create climate-controlled environments. By technology we have overcome evolutionary pressures. Haven't we, Coral?"
"Exactly," Professor Williams nodded. "Oh, this is Cynthia Woodforde, one of my research assistants."
"I'm Scruff," Scruff introduced herself.
"You read comic books?"
"I'm sixteen! And you can learn a lot from comic books!"
Mercifully no-one asked what.
"It's a tragedy," Coral Williams said quietly. "We are the pinnacle of evolution so far, and we have ruined our future chances by our own errors!"
"What?" I asked.
"We have practically destroyed evolutionary pressure. For centuries, intead of allowing the weak and the unfit to die, we have preserved their lives. Thankfully now modern reproductive science has allowed us to practically eliminate certain unfitnesses such as Down's Syndrome and the cleft pallette, but still some families choose to have children with genetic disorders born, and they keep those children alive! It is an offence..."
"Coral!" Dr. Lansdale cried. "Please!"
I looked at Scruff and saw she looked a little scared by Professor Williams' rant. I don't mind saying I was as well.
If only I had been able to make the connection then!

Evolve or Die! 9.

I got some sleep while Scruff and the Sparrow were doing their networking, googling, and whatever it is the Sparrow does. Emily went out on the prowl, looking for clues. So I was up bright and early, while Scruff and Emily were tired and irritable.
Which is particularly scary with a thirteen-year-old Outsider, believe me.
My big event that day was the re-scheduled Natural History Museum event. Me and Scruff, keeping our eyes and ears open.
My first stop was Diana Dickson. She knows people, and I wanted introductions.
Diana was pleased to see me (she usually is, except for the time with the cursed Egyptian scarab, but that's another story).
"Jane! Do you want to meet some more of my friends?"
"I need introductions, yes."
First up was a white-bearded man called Andrew Lansdale, a biochemist. He shook my hand warmly and smiled.
"Miss Jane Hill! I remember your father when he was a lad. I was so sorry when he died. And you're his eldest daughter..."
"I'm his youngest," Scruff said. Trust her to do that.
"Lilian Hill!" Scruff blushed.
"I prefer to be called Scruff."
"I see. It certainly suits you. So, Jane, what are you doing now?"
"Being very rich. I'm sort of a patron of Diana's, which is why I'm here."
"Ah. Professor Williams!"
I was hardly prepared for the attractive redhead in the expensive suit who hurried over. I say 'in', I mean it in the loosest possible sense (I can be catty if I want to be, I'd have looked horrible in the thing).
"Andrew?"
"This is Miss Jane Hill. Her father was at school with me - in a lower form."
"I'm Scruff," Scruff introduced herself. "I'm Jane's younger sister."
"Professor Coral Williams. I'm a zoologist. I'm glad to see you here."
"I support some of Diana's work," I explained. "Collecting specimens, preserving species."
"So you're not just one of the idle rich?"
"No, I'm very much one of the world's useful people," I smiled. I can be nice when I want to, even to women wearing clothes I disapprove of. "What do you do?"
"All sorts of things, Miss Hill. I'm an admirer of Professor Richard Dawkins. Evolution is such an important subject, and for ignorant religious people..."
"Not all religious people are ignorant," Lansdale interrupted her. "Jane's grandparents were very intelligent people and members of a Baptist Church..."
"Really? And you, Jane?"
"I'm a member in the same Church, despite Scruff," I joked.
"Oh, well. Dr. Flagg says she's certain religion's a delusion. Magic, religion, it's all the same sort of thing. There's no more truth to the Bible's stories of Jesus' rising from the dead than there is to the claims of Egyptian and Indian magicians!"
Diana and I exchanged significant glances. Diana's very open to belief in things beyond our reason. Ever since a mummified cat came to life and attacked her. As for me, I have a black smoky Emily at home to prove that Ghul's magic was real.
I hoped we were getting somewhere.

Evolve or Die! 8.

Emily and I left the Sparrow's lab feeling less than happy about what was going on. The killer had access to some pretty advanced technology, and probably chemical knowledge. He or she also had access to the drugs market. The question was, how much access?
The radio of the Grey Car buzzed, and Scruff's voice came over the airwaves.
"Sis, there's been another death, a beggar in Leicester Square. Same symptoms. Just listening to the police scanner made me want to throw up again."
That I could understand.
"The Sparrow came up with an identification for the poison that killed the victims. Some sort of exotic poison popular in Italy in the 16th century. Which figures, really."
"Not one used in India today," Emily added. "Or I'd know about it."
And she would. That girl knows a lot about nasty ways to kill people - which is quite handy, really.
"Where to, then?" she asked me.
"Home. There's nothing we can do at Leicester Square - too many police officers. I just have to think outside the box, as it were. Who's behind this?"
The question bothered me all the way home. I mean, this was nasty. REALLY nasty. Jack-the-Ripper nasty, but with poison rather than with knives.
Of course!
"Scruff, I think I have some sort of a lead! I was thinking about Jack the Ripper. There's a similarity here. Jack the Ripper targetted prostitutes. The way he dissected the bodies indicated that he had some surgical skill. Well, this killer has quite advanced chemical knowledge, and it seems he or she hates drug addicts."
"Jack the Ripper was never caught." Scruff pointed out.
"Jack the Ripper didn't have us and the Sparrow after him. Contact Alice, and the two of you can draw up a list of scientists in London who have the skill to make the poison that was used. Then you can find out if any of them have the underworld contacts to get the stuff 'cut' with drugs."
At last, I thought, we were getting somewhere. Perhaps.