Monday morning on All Saints Road was quieter than usual, half the shops closed for the day. Despite sitting at the heart of Notting Hill, the street bore no resemblance to the clamour of Portobello Road. A handful of specialist shops for bathroom fittings and sofa reupholstery, a few cafés, a small boutique or two, a pub on the corner. Not the sort of place tourists descended upon in search of the perfect photo. Convenient for an investigation.
Miss Castling — Detective Inspector, Metropolitan Police — turned the corner from Westbourne Park Road and stopped.
Not because she had arrived at her destination. Because there was a shop window.
Today’s ensemble: a pink blazer with shoulders pointed enough to mow down pedestrians. Beneath it, a two-piece in black with gold lightning bolts. Eight-inch platform boots in black leather, encrusted with gold studs. A blonde wig, shoulder-length, not a strand out of place.
AT — Serial Unit AT-01, the third member of Miss Castling’s team. A raven, formerly jet-black, now champagne blonde, wearing a purple Kevlar gilet from Applied Technology. He was perched on a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea residents’ parking sign, and addressed her from there.
“Inspector, you are dressed like a barbarian come to declare war. And the eco tote, if I may say so, is a most elegant touch.”
A canvas tote with Notting Hill printed in an elegant serif. Every tourist buys one. Every local pretends not to own one. Portobello’s signature bag.
She smiled at the champagne-blonde raven through the glass of the shop window.
“Every perfect look needs one flaw.”
In the boutique glass: a barbarian, a raven, and a cat standing on its hind legs.
Sergeant Whiskers — officially Serial Unit 09 of the Metropolitan Police Autonomous Investigation Division, an AI-powered robot cat, though Miss Castling just called him Whisky — stood at her side. A British Shorthair model, ten kilos of dense blue-grey plush covering a titanium-alloy frame, standing just under two feet tall on his hind legs. Bright blue eyes fixed straight ahead. Ears at regulation angle. He wore a matching Notting Hill souvenir tote that Miss Castling had recently bought at Portobello Market, modified with a long strap and slung crossbody. Cats find shoulder bags difficult, after all.
“Miss Castling.”
“Hm?”
“You have passed the address.”
“I know, darling, but look at that.” She was pointing at the shop window. A mannequin in a dress that appeared to have recreated the entire solar system in tulle. “That’s not fashion. That’s astronomy.”
“The crime scene is eight metres behind us. Our arrival is expected.”
“Fashion doesn’t do schedules, Whisky.”
“Crime does. The report was logged at seven a.m. Our arrival is expected.”
She cast one more longing glance at the tulle galaxy, gave the sigh of a woman forced to choose between planets and professionalism, and turned on her heel.
“Fine. But we’re stopping on the way back.”
“Acknowledged.”
Mélinde occupied the ground floor of a Victorian terrace house halfway along All Saints Road. Atelier, boutique, and residence, all behind a single black door. Recently repainted, a glossy black. The gold lettering was understated to the point of whispering. In the window stood two dress forms. One wore a black evening gown sewn with beads. The other, an asymmetric white T-shirt dress, draped with the help of countless safety pins.
Miss Castling pressed the bell. AT sat on her shoulder. The cat on his hind legs stood just behind her.
The door opened.
The woman standing there was tall. A long neck emerging from a rose-pink cropped bob, sculptural cheekbones.
“Inspector?”
“Ms Hale?”
“Melinda, please. Come in.”
The front room was a space for receiving clients. A small velvet sofa. A low table with a stack of thick fashion magazines. A garment rail along the wall holding a few finished pieces, the kind of clothes you wanted to touch before thinking to ask if you were allowed. A single dress form stood in the window light, an azure coat hanging quietly upon it. Unfinished, perhaps. It had no sleeves. Was something still to be added, or taken away?
Miss Castling’s feet stopped.
Melinda smiled and gestured toward the back.
The rear room was the depth of the terrace house turned into a workshop. Narrow frontage, but long. Glass opening onto the back garden drew in light the front room hadn’t had. It grew brighter the deeper you went. A space designed by someone who worked with fabric.
Melinda walked ahead. Had she once stood on the other side of the runway? She had the eyes and the smile of someone who had worked in the clothes of the world’s finest designers. A white silk shirt with ruffled drapes falling from the second button, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and a tape measure hanging from her neck that blended with the frills until it looked like a chic ribbon printed with numbers.
Two members of staff were working at a bench. One pressing with an iron, the other sorting beads. Both glanced up at Miss Castling’s entrance, took in her barbarian build, and went straight back to work. People who work in fashion ateliers have a high tolerance for visual impact.
The atelier stirred the glamour and fashion that lived inside Miss Castling. Bolts of silk and organza leaned against the far wall, arranged in a configuration that might have been storage or might have been sculpture. A cutting table took up most of the room, scattered with pattern paper and a single pair of gold-handled shears. Three dress forms stood along the wall, each draped with something in progress. On the shelves above, spools of thread in every colour the human eye could identify, and a few that even Whisky and AT could not.
Miss Castling’s hand reached for a bolt of midnight blue silk.
“Don’t touch that.”
The hand withdrew.
“That’s a client’s. The thread count alone would make you cry.”
“Noted.” Miss Castling clasped her hands behind her back like a child in a museum. Then she looked at the dress on the form in front of her. “Are those hand-beaded?”
“All by hand. Eight weeks.”
“I might cry anyway.”
Whisky cleared his throat. The throat-clearing of a robot cat with no throat sounds exactly like a real cat clearing its throat: a small mechanical click. Applied Technology had a sense of humour.
“We are here about the missing diamond, Miss Castling.”
“Right. The diamond.”
They sat around the cutting table. Whisky stood on a chair. Melinda pushed aside a half-finished bodice and placed both hands on the table.
“Yesterday morning, a client brought in a stone. Ten carats. D colour. Flawless. A loose diamond. Unset, just the stone. For her daughter’s wedding dress. It was to be set into the centre of the bodice. As the centrepiece. I’ve done this kind of work before. Precious stones in couture. It’s what Mélinde does.”
“Valuation?” Whisky asked.
“Three hundred thousand pounds, according to the client’s insurance.”
Miss Castling’s left false eyelash suffered an involuntary spasm.
“I was working alone yesterday. Staff have Sundays off. As soon as the client left, I put it in the studio safe. It locks with a key. This morning, I opened the safe to start work.” Melinda paused. “It was empty.”
“CCTV?”
“One camera. Covers the studio entrance.” Melinda turned the monitor on the cutting table to face them. “I’ve checked the footage. Nothing. Between six p.m. yesterday and seven a.m. this morning, no one entered.”
“Windows?”
“Sealed. Double-glazed. Alarmed.”
“Signs of forced entry?”
“None.”
“Was anyone else in the studio yesterday besides yourself?” Whisky asked.
“The nanny and our staff were off. It was just me and my daughter Lily. She’s only one. My husband’s on a business trip in Switzerland.”
“Mrs Hale, would that safe be the box over there? Bronze, trimmed in gold, with a door carved in the shape of a hand?”
AT asked. Melinda had not expected a near-blonde raven to speak, and was a little startled.
“Yes, I bought it in Italy. It’s terribly heavy, so it lives on the floor.”
A sound came from the back of the studio. Short, wet, analogue. An exhalation through the nose, most likely. The kind of sound that can only be produced by a creature whose respiratory system has been redesigned over centuries of selective breeding to be as inefficient as possible.
From behind a bolt of emerald green chiffon, a French Bulldog emerged.
Small. Round. Steeped in a profound sense of entitlement. Warm slate grey. Bat ears in permanent erect mode. Eyes registering zero per cent interest in the world’s problems.
The French Bulldog looked at Miss Castling with a battered rope toy in its mouth. Its tail began to rotate. Its entire body swayed. Short legs drove off the studio floor and launched toward her, stumbling, skidding, unstoppable. Not a shred of guilt. Not a shadow of regret. Just pure, full-bodied, whole-hearted joy.
Whisky’s ears rotated forward. Three degrees. Then a further two.
“Miss Castling. This individual is identical to the French Bulldog encountered during K9 ScentPro Mark III operations on Portobello Road on a recent occasion. Weight, iris colour, and ear morphology are a match.”
“Oh my God, this one. The little darling who blessed my precious purse with so much luck that time.”
Melinda tilted her head. “That’s our Milo. Oh, it probably doesn’t matter, but he was in the atelier yesterday too. He always is.”
Miss Castling pointed. “Your puppy and I have history.”
Milo sat. Looked at her. Yawned.
“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it. Let’s move on.”
Milo scratched his ear. Then collapsed onto the studio floor with the slow, deliberate descent of a dog who had decided this conversation was beneath him.
“Right.” Miss Castling straightened her spine. “Settling old scores with Mr Milo can wait. For now, Whisky, the detector.”
Whisky reached a front paw into his Notting Hill tote and produced a titanium case clad in carbon fibre. Metropolitan Police standard field kit, regulation size. What he took out of it was decidedly not regulation.
A lipstick.
Specifically, a lipstick-form gemstone detector, developed by Applied Technology for identifying precious stones in concealed environments. In size, shape, and texture, it was indistinguishable from a high-end cosmetic lipstick. Gold case. An enamel red heart where the cap met the barrel. Miniature charms dangling from a chain on the side: a high heel, a tiny crown, and another lipstick. Holographic tape spiralled around it.
Melinda stared.
“Is that… a lipstick?”
“Lipstick-form.” Miss Castling uncapped it.
“The latest model from Applied Technology,” Whisky said. “When the laser strikes a crystal, the light returns with its wavelength shifted by the vibration of that crystal’s lattice. The shift is specific to each mineral. Twisting the barrel changes the mineral it looks for.”
Miss Castling twisted the barrel. Click, click. A small sound, and it stopped.
“Raman scattering, I believe,” AT added. “For diamond, a shift of thirteen hundred and thirty-two kaysers. A gemstone’s fingerprint, one might say.”
Miss Castling pressed the button at the tip.
Light was born.
Seven colours of laser fanned out from the tip like a broom. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Seven beams swept the studio floor, caressed the walls, raced across the ceiling. Every time they traced a bolt of fabric the colours burst, turning the dress forms into rainbow silhouettes. For a moment, the fashion atelier became a planetarium.
The two staff in the back stopped working. The steam from the iron hung motionless.
“It detects the resonance frequency of carbon crystal structures.” Miss Castling held the lipstick aloft with the elegant gesture of someone applying lip colour and began to walk slowly through the studio. “If your diamond is anywhere in this building, darling, I will find it.”
The seven-colour laser swept the floor. Between the bolts of fabric. Around the feet of the dress forms. The safe, already confirmed empty. Under the cutting table. Behind the shelf of thread spools. Along the windows.
Nothing. The seven colours remained seven, fanning faithfully like a broom.
The rainbow broom swept Melinda from head to toe.
“Just to be thorough.”
Miss Castling said this and continued, scanning a narrow bookshelf lined with design books and fashion magazines. The lasers shimmered like an aurora, colours shifting and curving in waves across each surface.
Past the dress forms. Past the rack of finished garments. Past Melinda’s desk, where an open sketchbook held a wedding dress sketch that would make a cathedral jealous.
Nothing.
And then she passed Milo.
The seven colours vanished.
After a beat of darkness, purple. One beam only. The laser collapsed into a single sharp violet line, pointing directly at Milo’s abdomen. A small holographic display materialised at the tip of the lipstick.
LOCK ON
Miss Castling looked down at the lipstick. Looked down at Milo.
Milo looked up at her. Same expression. Zero per cent interest.
She handed the detector to Whisky.
“Running analysis.” Whisky took the lipstick in his mouth. The analysis was over in seconds.
Whisky looked at Milo’s abdomen. Blinked once.
“I have located the diamond.”
“Where?”
“Inside the dog.”
Silence.
Melinda put her hand over her mouth.
“It might have been yesterday evening, when I opened the safe to check the stone before locking up. My phone rang. It was on the table in the same room, so I left the safe door open. Just for a moment.”
Melinda’s face was red. She was trying to make one careless moment match what she could actually remember.
“A moment is sufficient for a French Bulldog,” Whisky said.
Miss Castling crouched. Or attempted to. Crouching in eight-inch platforms and a blazer with weaponised shoulder pads was closer to a controlled descent. “Is Milo — is he all right?”
Whisky’s ears rotated to a precise angle. “The stone measures approximately fourteen millimetres in diameter. Smooth. No sharp edges. It is currently located in the lower digestive tract, mixed, it would appear, with last night’s meal. What did Milo eat last night?”
Melinda hesitated.
“Ribeye steak. And cauliflower mac and cheese. Well, not exactly mac and cheese. Cauliflower instead of pasta. With buffalo mozzarella. No salt.”
Miss Castling looked at Whisky. Whisky looked at Miss Castling.
“He eats better than I do.”
“He eats better than the majority of Metropolitan Police personnel.”
“So the diamond went down with the ribeye.”
“Most likely coated in mozzarella.”
“A fourteen-millimetre flawless carbon, coated in buffalo mozzarella, swallowed by a French Bulldog who dines on cauliflower mac and cheese. This is my life, Whisky. This is my job.”
“Yes.” Whisky nodded.
Melinda stood. “I’m calling the vet!”
“One moment, please,” Whisky said. “I am currently devising a method of retrieval that is rational, appropriate to the canine anatomy, and natural.”
Silence. Ears rotated forward. Two degrees. Three. Stopped.
“Milo! Come here. Mrs Hale, we shall need your garden. Everyone, please come along.”
Milo woke up and followed the cat walking on his hind legs.
Everyone went out into the garden. A neatly mown lawn. Olive and lemon trees. A large pot of English roses in full red bloom. Standing on the flagstones in the middle of the garden, Whisky raised his voice slightly.
“Miss Castling, please lend me your purse.”
“…What?”
For a moment, she could not work out what causal connection her name and her belongings might have in this particular place.
“Please lend me the Peach Martini NA Queen purse.”
Miss Castling hesitated. What was this precision-engineered robot cat about to suggest? She made an educated guess, and asked with a calm laced with a thin current of fury.
“Darling, lend you what? It’s… it’s like ordering a matcha latte with marshmallows and having a katsu curry land in it instead. That’s the sensation currently hitting my frontal lobe head-on. You are not about to give me a nightmare déjà vu, are you?”
“The amygdala, to be precise.”
AT corrected her.
“The purse.”
Partnership teaches you things. When Whisky used that voice, he had a plan. The plan was always logical, always correct, and always skipped the explanation.
Miss Castling reached into her Notting Hill tote.
Lipstick. Compact. Warrant card. Emergency false eyelash adhesive. A leopard-print drawstring pouch. Three sample perfumes. And at the very bottom, tucked into a quilted silk case and much treasured, her purse.
Pink. The serene smile of the Peach Martini NA Queen. On the reverse, the golden pineapple of the North Pineapple Island flag. Number 07. Limited edition. Only ten thousand ever made. After the Portobello Road incident, it had been cleaned, moisturised, and restored to its former glory.
“Listen,” she said, clutching the purse. “I queued from the night before for this!”
“I am aware.”
“Outside Liberty. In January. In the rain.”
Whisky’s front paws did not move.
She sighed. Handed over the purse.
Whisky took it with care.
He walked over to Milo. Pad, pad. Ten kilos of titanium and plush crossing the shadow of the lemon tree.
He placed the purse sixteen centimetres from Milo’s nose, eight degrees off centre.
The Peach Martini NA Queen’s serene smile gazed up at Milo. The golden pineapple gleamed.
Miss Castling frowned.
Whisky stepped back. Waited.
Milo’s nose twitched.
He looked at the purse.
Something stirred. Deep within the privileged digestive system of Notting Hill’s most pampered dog, something ancient and irresistible began to move.
Milo’s eyes widened. He circled the purse three times, stepped over it, and moved two and a half paces forward.
His front legs splayed.
His back arched.
Miss Castling’s eyes went wide. “Katsu curry!”
Milo’s gaze drifted to some distant, personal middle ground. The unmistakable posture of absolute commitment.
“Oh no,” Melinda said.
Miss Castling put both hands on her head. “MY PURSE!”
Whisky had already produced forensic gloves and an evidence bag from the titanium case, with the quiet efficiency of a professional who had been preparing for this outcome since stepping through the door.
Nature ran its course.
What emerged was the unmistakable biological consequence of ribeye steak, cauliflower, and buffalo mozzarella metabolised through the privileged digestive system of a French Bulldog. And with it, the faintest flash.
Ten carats. D colour. Flawless. Its surface was coated in something it had not been designed for, but structurally, as is the way with diamonds, completely intact.
“THERE IT IS!” Miss Castling pointed.
Whisky moved. Gloves on. Evidence bag open. Three seconds. The stone was recovered, sealed, and logged.
He held the bag to the light. Inside, the diamond caught the weak sunlight falling on the garden and split it into a hundred colours, a sparkle clouded with something like London’s gloomiest weather.
“An ultrasonic cleaner would be advisable for the diamond, I should think.”
AT said this, regarding the clouded stone.
Miss Castling was not looking at the diamond. She was looking at Whisky.
“You… the Portobello Road thing… you learned from that?”
Whisky blinked. Once. A short one.
“Deductive reasoning based on prior behavioural data. The subject canine demonstrated an immediate and involuntary gastrointestinal response upon visual contact with the Peach Martini NA Queen purse on a prior occasion. By reapplying the same stimulus—”
“I could imagine it. A gut feeling. A bad gut feeling. And there you go, darling, laying out the structure in that perfectly flat way of yours.”
“The probability of inducing an identical physiological response is—”
“I get it, Whisky.”
Whisky’s ears moved half a degree.
“Three hundred thousand pounds,” Miss Castling said. “Recovered from the rear end of a French Bulldog.”
“Strictly speaking,” Whisky said, “this is the highest-value bowel movement in the history of the Metropolitan Police.”
“Don’t put that in the report.”
“Already filed.”
Beneath a thin film of murky filth, a fourteen-year-old girl was beaming up at her.
Miss Castling picked the purse up by its corner. The Queen, humiliated for the second time. Her Majesty, in her castle on a faraway island, seemed to be smiling and saying, “It’s all right, don’t worry. It’ll be good as new before you know it.”
She looked at Milo. Milo looked at her. Same expression. Same zero per cent remorse. Same magnificent, unshakeable self-satisfaction.
“Milo, you’d like to meet the Peach Martini NA Queen too, wouldn’t you? So would I.”
Milo yawned.
“…Lucky me, twice over.”
“Literally.”
She looked at Whisky.
“There will be no third time.”
“Milo’s remorse stands at zero per cent. The probability of a third time is one hundred and twenty-eight per cent.”
“I shouldn’t have asked. That’s the probability of despair and regret.”
She wiped the soiled purse carefully with a wet wipe, sealed it in a plastic bag, and returned it to the Notting Hill tote. The tote that had begun its life as a reconnaissance prop on Portobello Road was now an evidence transport container for a purse that had been defecated on by the same French Bulldog. Twice.
“I need a drink.”
“It is nine forty-five a.m.”
“I need a matcha latte. No marshmallows! I don’t want anything added.”
Three days later.
A package arrived at the reception desk of the Metropolitan Police station. A courier in a black uniform carried a rectangular black luxury box horizontally in both white-gloved hands. In the centre, a white logo: Mélinde. From Melinda to Miss Castling. Tied with a gold ribbon. The bow had been tied by someone who understood knots at a molecular level.
Miss Castling opened it at her desk.
Inside, a silky garment bag, folded in two. She lifted it by the thick padded hanger. The zipper alone felt like it cost more than her monthly Oyster card.
She unzipped it.
“Oh.”
A coat. Full-length. Structured shoulders. A fabric that shifted between midnight blue and deep violet depending on the angle. The kind of textile that whispers secrets to the light. Hand-beaded cuffs. Silk lining so delicate it barely existed. On the inner collar, a label embroidered in gold thread: Mélinde.
Miss Castling lifted the coat. Midnight blue billowed softly, and the desk, the fluorescent lights, and the coffee-stained reports of the office were gone.
“No way.”
Whisky looked up from his terminal.
“Miss Castling. Under Metropolitan Police Gifts, Hospitality, and Gratuities policy, gifts exceeding twenty pounds in value require prior approval from the Professional Standards Department.”
“Whisky.”
The spell broke.
“Just now, all I could see was the coat! I was under a spell, in some gorgeous boutique on Sloane Street. Don’t drag me back to reality. Presents are for receiving.”
“All gifts must be declared, whether accepted or refused.”
“Whisky, look at this.”
“I have analysed the fabric. Based on thread count, beading density, and an estimated one hundred and twenty-eight hours of production, the retail value of this garment exceeds sixteen thousand pounds.”
She pressed the coat to her chest.
“Just for one second, one second! Can you not be a regulation?”
“I am not a regulation. I am a sergeant obligated to declare.”
Inside the box was an envelope. Inside the envelope, a note in ink on fine paper.
In Melinda’s handwriting:
Hi Miss Castling,
Hope the size is right. A thank-you from Milo and me. Don’t worry about the rules. I asked an AI about police gift regulations. Check the pockets. — M
Miss Castling put her hand into the coat pocket.
A small card. One more.
On one side, in Melinda’s handwriting:
£10 + smile
And beside the words, pressed in something that was neither quite ink nor quite not-ink, a French Bulldog paw print. Small. Round. Pressed with the careful, slightly off-centre pressure of a dog who had been asked a favour and, for once, cooperated.
Miss Castling looked at the price tag. Looked at Whisky.
“Ten pounds, it says.”
“Plus a smile.”
Whisky’s ears cycled through three positions at high speed. Forward. Sideways. Back to centre.
“Under current Metropolitan Police guidelines, gifts valued at twenty pounds or below may be accepted at the recipient’s discretion without prior PSD approval.”
“Meaning?”
“The declared value is ten pounds.”
“A smile has no monetary value and therefore does not affect the threshold.”
“So I can keep it.”
Whisky blinked. Once. A long one. Translated from the emotional lexicon of Sergeant Whiskers, Serial Unit 09, it amounted to roughly this: a designer had outmanoeuvred the Metropolitan Police Professional Standards Department using a price tag and a paw print. No applicable subsection presented itself for rebuttal.
“…You may accept it.”
Miss Castling smiled. The spell was back.
She put on the coat.
It fitted perfectly.
“The azure coat from the salon, unfinished on its form. To make a garment fit so precisely without taking a single measurement is the work of a true master. Splendidly done.”
AT said this from his perch on her desk chair.
Whisky looked at her. Midnight blue and violet in carefully woven fabric. Beaded cuffs. Whatever she was wearing underneath, the coat unified everything.
Blink. Once. A short one.
“…Mission-capable.”
Miss Castling laughed.
She picked up the small card from her desk. Looked once more at the paw print. Milo’s signature. The very paw that had twice inflicted biological catastrophe upon the face of the Peach Martini NA Queen.
She slipped the card gently inside the Peach Martini NA Queen purse.
“Come on, Whisky. Work to do.”
She walked out of the station, the blue shifting with every step, the Notting Hill tote over one shoulder, striding out in style. AT settled on her shoulder.
Whisky padded alongside her. Ten kilos of titanium and plush. Ears forward. Tail at regulation height.
Behind the three of them, on the desk: an empty garment bag. A gold ribbon. Black tissue paper. And the Professional Standards Department gift register receipt. Declared, recorded, approved.
Declared value: £10.
TO BE CONTINUED
Next Episode: “Saving the Fool: The Presumed Innocence of Zarathustra”
Today’s Miss Castling
- Blazer: Pink, pointed shoulders (weaponised)
- Two-piece: Black with gold lightning bolts
- Boots: Eight-inch platforms, black leather, gold studs (punk)
- Wig: Blonde, shoulder-length, not a strand out of place
- Bag: Notting Hill tote (formerly “reconnaissance prop”)
- Equipment: Lipstick-form gemstone detector (Applied Technology)
- Recovered: Diamond, 10 carats, D colour, flawless
- Milo: French Bulldog, zero per cent remorse
- Casualty: Peach Martini NA Queen purse (second time, same dog)
- Gift: Mélinde coat, midnight blue/violet (declared value: £10 + smile)
Whisky’s Log
Mission record, Serial Unit 09.
Retrieval target: one diamond. Retrieved. This concludes the official record.
Regarding the retrieval route. The target passed through the digestive tract of one French Bulldog. The final point of retrieval was the Peach Martini NA Queen purse. This is the second incident of damage to said purse. The offending individual is the same. No preventive measures will be proposed.
Declaration record of the same date: one gift. A coat. Declared value, £10. Plus a smile.
This unit is aware of the difference between the declared value and the market value. The guidelines contain no clause requiring that difference to be declared. The absence of such a clause has been confirmed four times.
A smile has no monetary value. It therefore does not affect the threshold. It therefore falls outside the scope of the declaration record.
The operational lead left the station wearing the coat. Her smile at that moment is likewise designated out of scope.
Out of scope and unrecorded are not synonymous.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organisations and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons or entities is coincidental. Real place names, brands and products appear in a fictitious manner.