But for the lazy or retarded amongst you I shall sum up:

• Her brother got involved in a gang.
• They decided to stash drugs in her room.
• We burgled their house (and caught massive flack for that)
• She almost got killed.
• He got the crap beaten out of him by the gang.

Fortunately we were able to pull sufficient strings (or apply enough guilt to enough consciences) to make sure they didn’t kill him.

Since then, he’s very clearly seen the error of his ways, and she’s continued to be an unalloyed delight, her parents have finally re-married (other people, natch) and everything’s ticking along nicely. In fact, such is the success of our little fracas with the burglary that the case has been taken off my hands. Although there’s an excellent chance that that’s more to ensure I don’t kill her prematurely.

All of which means I’m out of her life, and on to some other troublesome case. Yay me!

I’ll probably have some other cases to talk about soon. But for now I thought it best to tidy up the loose ends first. Next week staff performance rating systems! You lucky lucky things.

No?

Marvellous, take your time and retrace the entire silly tale should you feel like it. If you don’t feel like it I’m not going to recap it here. That may sound lazy, but frankly it wouldn’t take you that long to read the damn thing. I’ll be buggered if I’m going to quite a lot of effort to pander to you. It’s why these blog things have categories after all.

Anyway, it turns out the photo he’d had left on him by a gang of assailants wasn’t anyone he’d ever known. It was, however, a girl who’d been beaten and raped a few years before. He only discovered this because they found the gang who’d done it, and it had made the local news. So he was left wondering whether it was a case of mistaken identity (as they’d found the gang after he got out of hospital). But it also turns out there’s a vigilante gang going around kicking the crap out of everyone they decide is up to no good, and they’ve adopted the poor girl as some kind of symbol.

Glad I don’t have them on my books.

Regardless, our Asshole’s reaction to this “was this karma, or just co-incidence” situation has been of the decidedly FuckIt ^TM school of reasoning and he’s actually made a serious effort to build himself a new life. He’s moved house, because the commute to the only company who would employ (i.e. hadn’t heard of) him was murderous. So it’s all new life and re-invention, with just a small dose of moral sense this time. He’s even going out with a girl, just one; seriously he’s a slightly changed man.

He’s still an Asshole though.

His business has evaporated, as both employees and clients have left him at the earliest opportunity. His savings have been wiped out, so he’s had to take a job as a labourer for a large building firm. He had to find someone he’d not had any dealings with, because he’s realised too late that the people you meet as you build a life may come in handy when you need to rebuild one.

Meanwhile he’s had plenty of time to think about why he lied to the police about the beating. Normally he’d be happily set the long arm of the law on anyone he could, but this time he held back, and he’d not sure why.

He’s also been trying to figure out the picture that was left on him when he woke up in hospital. It’s a picture of a girl he doesn’t recognise, which makes it all the more curious. He’s sure it’s a message; he’d assumed that it was a picture of someone he’d screwed over, screwed up, or perhaps simply screwed. He’s stared at the face for hours, and drawn a complete blank. He simply doesn’t recognise her.

It is fortunate then, that the news is on, and something has happened today that he may just be interested in.

This is where things start to go terribly wrong. They come up with a plan to gag Cassandra by tying a pillow to her face. This they do, and turn to make their escape out the window. Unfortunately, the pillow is hopelessly ineffective, which is just as well as, had it been effective, it may also have proven fatal. Cassandra collapses to the ground the moment they stop holding her and her knees land in the broken glass that has been liberally scattered across the floor.

She screams as she suffers a hundred cuts on her knees, shins and feet. In the next room, her brother wakes up. He’s just been having a nightmare and it takes him a second to realise the screaming isn’t his best friend being tortured for not telling the dinner lady he wanted custard on his apple crumble. He grabs the knife that he’s taken to sleeping with under his pillow and runs to his sister’s room.

He opens the door just as one of the burglars has dragged Cassandra to her feet, while the other one is halfway out the window. He makes a move to grab the burglar who – having nothing at hand to counter this – does the only thing he can. He shoves Cassandra at her brother and dives for the window.

There’s a sickening moment as Cassandra’s brother realises that he’s trying to catch her with the wrong hand; everything seems to skip for a heartbeat; and then – like a DVD stuck on whatever that not-really-fast-forward mode is that’s just watching the film a shade faster with no sound – everything plays out exactly as everyone is afraid it would.

Cassandra’s parents are woken up by the horrible tortured noise of a young man who thinks he’s killed the only person in the entire world he really loves. They have dialled the emergency services before they’ve even reached their daughter’s bedroom door.

And two days later Cassandra wakes up in a brightly lit hospital bedroom, the only person in the room is her brother – sporting a fresh black eye, and a couple of broken ribs that he wouldn’t let the doctors look at until his sister woke up.

The bunglers managed to make it all of three feet before one of them stabbed themselves in the foot, and collapsed on the floor. The noise of this woke Cass up, and it was only sheer terror that stopped her screaming. This was fortunate all round as the panicking burglars would probably have done something monumentally stupid if she had screamed. The burglars grabbed Cassandra, and forced her into the corner of the room. One of them watched her, and kept her facing the wall while the other searched for the drugs.

It took thirty minutes of searching the room for the burglars to find the stash of drugs, the one watching Cass had to keep her face pushed into the corner so she wouldn’t see anything. If they’d had any sense they would have found something to blindfold her with, but that didn’t occur to them at this point.

When it came time to leave, the burglars were seriously stressed. They needed to ensure Cassandra didn’t see their faces, and they needed to get back out the window without lacerating their poorly protected feet.

Let’s just say their first plan wasn’t their best one.

These people I find slightly alarming, they blunder through their lives causing mayhem to others, and are frequently so utterly oblivious that they never notice the harm they cause. I’ve made a list of jobs that incompetent people really shouldn’t be allowed to do.

I’ve had to add incompetent burglars to the list of people who endanger others with their incompetence.

The two who burgled Cassandra’s bedroom gave me great cause for alarm.

We’ve got about 48 hours before someone raids the house. That means I’ve got about 48 hours to find someone in that gang who has something left of their conscience. Which means I’ve been spending the night searching through page after page of reports on the current members of the gang. Once I’ve found a member or two who would be suitable, I’ve got to dig up their old case workers (thank god none of them are mine), and find out how to influence them into doing the burglary.

We’ve got to push these guys into performing the burglary so that someone more ruthless doesn’t do it. It’s a dangerous strategy, but it’s the only one we’ve got.

Like I said, we’ve got 48 hours, and that’s precious little time to work out a plan that will perform the joint tasks of protecting the moral standards of our clients, ensuring that no-one who is good comes to much harm and giving key actors a moral education.

No-one ever claimed this was an easy job, but this is ridiculous.

It couldn’t last; it couldn’t bloody last. It had to happen eventually; something had to go wrong with Cassandra. Well now, it has, big time. Slices of shit pie for everybody.

I’ve just come back from a meeting with the caseworker for Cassandra’s brother. He’s going down the pan fast, incredibly fast. There’s a good chance he’ll take the whole family down with him. Which is bad news for me, it’s bad news for Cassandra, it’s bad news for a whole stack of people.

Turns out the gang he wants to hang out with have some drugs, they need moving around the place. He’s volunteered. The drugs are currently being stashed under Cassandra’s bed, and it’s 3 to 1 odds she’ll be asked to move them. This is not good for me, and we need to find some way out of this fast. Usually in this situation, we’d opt for the “easy opportunity to rat someone out” escape route. But Cassandra is just too nice to her brother to drop him in deep shit. This means we’ll have to find some other way out, and we have precious little time.

I have a great deal of faith in Cassandra, but without an escape route, she could be in serious trouble.

We really really need an escape route.

Shit in a pie.

It was to this smell that our Asshole woke up, and to the fact that someone had requested the hospital radio be playing REM.

It was also to the face of a man he hadn’t seen in a few years, quite a few years. In fact, he hadn’t seen the man since he’d screwed the man’s wife, and the man out of quite a lot of money.

The police visited him a couple of days later; they had a stack of questions about the men who’d beaten him up. They asked him about possible motives, he said he couldn’t think of any. They asked him about the photo they’d found in his hand. He said he didn’t recognise the girl in it. They asked him about the evening he was beaten up.

He lied to them constantly, throughout the entire interview. In this sense, he didn’t deviate from his normal character. But the analysts who set up this chain of events intended this beating as a catalyst, not an epiphany.

Over the next few weeks, he continued to lie to the police, and be treated by a man who had every reason to hate him.

When our Asshole makes the wrong turn down an alleyway the crowd close ranks, the man who seemed so perturbed by our Asshole’s presence in the bar last night is at the front. The Asshole realises he’s in a dead end, but he never even sees the first punch. It’s not a pretty sight; the crowd work him over in a fairly routine manner. Except the one guy, who seems to be taking it personally.

By the time they’ve finished he’s a bloody mess on the floor, he vomited during the beating and he’s lying in a puddle of his own blood and sick. In his hand is a screwed up ball of paper.

The ringleader of the thugs put the paper there, and he’d been carrying it around for the last four years.

By the time the police find him in the morning his world has just got a serious amount worse.

It turns out he’s been a little ruthless on his books, and the accountants at the tax office have just become wise. The fines aren’t too much, but given that our ringleader went and burned down his house after leaving him on the street – the fines are just another problem that he may not be able to recover from.

By the time he’ll get out of hospital, rival companies will have picked up on all his work. It turns out the short contracts he’s been keeping all his staff on will mean that when they are offered positions doing the same thing with a little more security, they’ll all jumped ship in various directions. He’ll be left with no business to run, and no work to do.

But that’s all been arranged to happen in a few weeks. At this moment, our Asshole is only just about to come round.