London seemed a long way away now. He was a young man then, looking to define himself. He was a less young man now and was defined as an average bloke who just wanted an easy life. This disc wasn’t helping.

He tried the disc on the computer at his desk. Same error. He hadn’t expected much else. Time to call Dan.

“Dan, remember that CD that I got from by brother’s mate. The one that wouldn’t open on my computer? You said it was a Mac disc and you copied the contents for me.”

“Yes, I remember. The pictures of Cameron Diaz on the beach. Very nice. Have you got some more?”

“I have no idea, I’ve got this disc and I don’t know who it’s from or what’s on it,” he stopped short of mentioning the money. Dan was a nosey bastard and it would only make the whole thing worse.

“OK, bring it up to my lair.”

Dan’s lair was a huge windowless room on the first floor. It was rammed with rack upon rack of full-on computing hardware. The speccy lad on Roberts stairwell probably came here in his wet dreams for a wank. Despite the presence of some serious heat generating kit the room was freezing, kept at sub-zero temperatures in order to prevent the whole building from melting.

Robert knocked on the door of the lair. Dan’s head appeared at the porthole after a few moments and the red light on the door switched to green with a quiet click. This was fun. He loved going to the lair, it made him feel like James Bond.

In the lair today Dan was playing a selection of the hits of Leo Sayer. Working alone in this cold, locked-down environment had clearly driven him mad. Robert wondered how he might react to this solitary confinement, probably very badly. He certainly couldn’t see how he would ever get any work done without his boss breathing down his neck. Not these days anyway. Mind you, that wasn’t so different from normal. Go figure.

Dan took the disc from Robert and stuck it into a green Imac on his desk. After a few seconds an image of a CD appeared on the desktop. Dan double-clicked it and the contents were displayed.

you got a cute way of talkin’...

The disc contained 3 word documents; Untitled1.doc, Untited2.doc and Untitled3.doc. Not the most inspiring naming convention he thought. He clicked on Untitled1.doc.

...gonna dance the night away...

A blank word document opened up in the word processor. Dan scrolled through it and remarked that there were 7 pages of it. All blank. Not a great start. He tried Untitled2.doc and it was equally blank but this time had only 3 pages. Untitled3.doc had only 1 blank page.

...dancin’, wooh! Dancin’, wooh!...

That’s pretty weird.

Naturally Dan wanted to know what this was all about. Why were they looking at a bunch of empty files? Robert was reluctant to let him in on it. So he didn’t. He wandered off mumbling something about the accounts department.

…ahaaaahhaahhh…

He always thought that the accounts department was a good excuse for pretty much any aimless wandering he did during work hours. If he fancied stretching his legs he’d loudly exclaim that he was going to see “Jackie from accounts about an invoice.” He’d met someone in accounts at a Christmas Party a few years ago and he was sure she was called Jackie. The fact that at the very same Christmas party he threw up in his own top drawer and couldn’t remember a thing about it didn’t make him doubt his memory, just his solvency, all his receipts had been in there for the months expenses.

Robert wandered back to his desk clutching the disc and trying frantically to work out what this was all about. He tried the number again but he had no luck. He left a message along the lines of “What’s this all about?”

It’s not as if £270 was even that much money. He wasn’t exactly skint and he could easily spend that in a week on food, booze and entertainment. It also seemed quite a specific amount, why not £250 or £300?

His phone rang. It was an internal call. He knew this because the ringtone took on an annoying whiny tone. He picked up.

“They were corrupted,” it was Dan.

“Eh?”

“They were corrupted. Those word files you had on the disc. Must be to do with PC files saved on a Mac disc or something. Anyway, I managed to extract something from them. It’s a bit weird. The first one is just full of kisses as far as I can make out, or X’s anyway. The second one says ‘Sally – soon be gone’ at the top and probably had a photo on it but I can’t recover that.”

“What about the third one?” Alarm bells had started to ring in Roberts head.

“The third on says ‘My darkest secret!’ “

...it’s cold out, so hold out, and do like I do...

The last sentence bored into his memory making him dizzy “My darkest secret!” That rang a bell. A big noisy bastard bell. An ugly, noisy, well buried bell which was now ringing so loudly he felt sick. He sat down. He didn’t like bells at the best of times, they just reminded him of school. A ringing bell in those days just meant that it was time to leave the safety of the classroom and get the shit kicked out of him by Paul Forrest. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to have just Paul Forrest and his gang to worry about right now. Right now he had to worry about Sally and her darkest secret.