When Sam finally discovered the house where his mother lived and died, he thought it would be the end of his search. He little realised that events would soon plunge him into the search for his mother's murderer. Even less did he realise he would have to stand in for her in the re-enactment.

The complete story has been serialised into five parts which will be published at approximately daily intervals.

PART ONE - SUNDAY

Sam was nervous as he rang the doorbell - it had taken him several years to reach this point in his search, and he had a sudden doubt it might all turn into yet another red herring.

The house was called The Vicarage, one of those huge houses built at a time when vicars would have ten children and a few dependent relatives. Nowadays, one vicar probably covered half a dozen churches, and lived in a small house which allowed the church to sell off all the other, much larger ones at considerable profit.

No one answered the door and, with the sound of an organ emanating from the church across the green, Sam wondered whether he had maybe pre-judged the church's desire for profit, and the incumbent vicar was doing what all vicars do on a Sunday - taking a service. He looked across the green to read the church board displaying the times of service; the Sunday afternoon service had started half an hour ago.

Sam shrugged and went to sit on a bench facing the green. He'd waited this long; another half hour or so wasn't going to hurt. Besides, it wasn't as though he had anywhere else to go, except back to an empty flat on a dreary October, Sunday afternoon. The last bus left the village at 6.10, so he had plenty of time before that.

After the service ended, it didn't take long for the vicar to shake the hands of all those leaving - half a dozen people from a church which, Sam guessed, would comfortably seat two hundred. But after completing his duties, the vicar hurried out of the churchyard, got into a car and drove off. So, Sam thought, he had been right all along about the Vicarage.

An elderly woman was heading his way from the church. Still quite sprightly, he guessed she'd be about seventy. In the twenty-five-year old newspaper photograph he'd found on the web, the mother's age was given as forty-five, which would make this lady about the right age. She glanced at him as she approached, and then gave him a closer, more detailed look which made him feel uncomfortable.

Sam sighed. Most people in these twee little villages were highly suspicious of men on their own lurking around their properties. He didn't want to get off on the wrong foot so he stood up and smiled at her, and called across.

"Mrs Lockhart?" he asked. "You don't know me, but I believe that some time ago my mother worked for you. Her name was..."

"Sally Brown!" she declared, her face breaking into a delighted smile. "I recognised you straightaway. You're just like her."

"Really? I... I never knew her. I was adopted, you see, after she died and..."

"Come inside the house," she said, leading the way to the front door. "I knew that someday you would find us. Please call me Emily."

"Sam Crawford," he said, holding out his hand for her to shake.

"Where's your sister?" Emily asked. "Presumably you're still in touch with her."

He pulled a face. "I'm sorry. Samantha, my twin sister, is someone else I never got to know. She died of meningitis when we were six months old."

***

"When I was eighteen, I was allowed to know my real Mother's name," he said, as he followed her into the house. "But they only told me her dates of birth and death, not where she'd been living. With Brown being such a common name, it's taken me years to get this far. Then the Charminster Echo put its back copies on the internet and I found the item about her accident."

"She was such a lovely woman," Emily said. "She'd been working for us for about two years when it occurred."

They had stopped in the Hall, a grand affair large enough to act as a place where the vicar could offer sherry after the Sunday service to selected members of his congregation. They both stared at the Great Staircase which ran up the right-hand side.

"That's where it happened," Emily said. "That's where your mother fell and died."

He walked over to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. They didn't look dangerous. He turned back to face Emily. "Tell me what she was like."

Emily's face lit up. "Lovely. She was absolutely lovely. But come through to the kitchen and I'll make some tea and I can tell you all about her.

***

At one time, the kitchen must have been state of the art - now, like the rest of the house, it looked shoddy and desperately in need of refurbishment.

"We had this kitchen replaced the year before Sally came to us," Emily said, noticing his glance around as she put the kettle on. "Richard, my husband, was vicar in the parish and we lived here at a low rent. Then his father died and his inheritance enabled him to buy the house from the church, giving us somewhere to live after Richard retired - if he'd only lived that long. We had it refurbished throughout, and still had plenty left over for the little luxuries in life. 'Why don't we get a cook/housekeeper?' Richard said. Before Sally came to work for us, we had a couple of other girls in quick succession. They were both quite useless."

Her face lit up again as she thought of Sam's mother. "When Sally came, it was just like Mary Poppins arriving. We had three grown up sons and a daughter-in-law living here and it was a chaotic mess. Then Sally turned up and suddenly everything was in order. To me, she was the daughter I'd always wanted, and to her, we were the family she'd never had - she was an orphan, too, just like you, although she never spoke about it."

She looked again at his face. "You really are quite like her," she said, "although a bit slimmer. To be honest, she was plain, and very overweight, which I saw as an advantage. With all the testosterone in this house, I didn't want anyone living here who was too attractive. We'd had trouble with both the pretty girls who came before her. At that time, Matthew was taking his accountancy finals and engaged to one of those strange girls who wanted to remain a virgin until their wedding night. Mark had given up college in order to hurriedly marry his pregnant girlfriend, and they were living here whilst they waited for their new house to be finished. Meanwhile, Luke was doing his GCSEs, and the last thing he needed - or at least, we thought he needed - was a distraction from his studies.

"It was ironic that we partly chose Sally for her appearance, and yet when she arrived, she proved to be far smarter than either of the other two, who always slouched around in sloppy tee shirts and jeans. After a few days, she said she'd found some servants' uniforms in the attic - I didn't know anything about them and they looked as though they'd been there since the 1950s. She suggested that in a vicarage, a proper servant uniform would be more appropriate and I thought it would be a nice touch.

"As they say, she scrubbed up well. Smart black dress and white frilly apron; her shining face, always smiling, and she even wore one of those white smock caps when she was dispensing sherry or tea to the masses. It certainly impressed the bishop, and it was whilst she was here that Richard took over several of the other parishes as congregations dwindled."

"So was there still a problem with testosterone?" he queried.

"I didn't think so at the time," Emily replied, "but in retrospect, I suspected it was simply that she was more discrete than the others."

He was intrigued. "Oh?"

"When she became pregnant, she told us the father was someone she met in London when she went up there on her Mondays off, but wouldn't give us his name. Fifty years ago, a maid would have been thrown onto the streets if she became pregnant, but in the 1980s, of course, it was perfectly respectable to have a baby without a named father. I've already told you she had become like a daughter to me and I enjoyed helping her through pregnancy, and was absolutely enchanted with you two babies. When Social Services took you away, I was heartbroken."

"So she told you," he said, trying to summarise the meaning behind her words, "that my father was someone she met in London, but you thought that perhaps..."

She shook her head. "Maybe we'll talk about it later. I think we might find some photographs of her and you two babies in the attic. Would you like to see them?"

***

The attic was huge, running the entire length of the house, and absolutely full of decades of discarded junk, much of it under dust sheets. It was easy to see why servant uniforms from the 1950s had remained there unnoticed. Emily led the way to the end, and pointed to a trunk in the angle of the roof.

"I think you'll need to pull it out in order to open it. I packed all of Sally's effects in the trunk, expecting Social Services to take them, but when they realised there was nothing of real value, they simply weren't interested."

He pulled the trunk forward so that he could open the lid without it hitting the sloping roof, and then hesitated before reverently opening it. There were several items lying on the top of the clothes: an order of service for his mother's funeral; a scrapbook; as well as several miscellaneous envelopes such as one marked 'Birth and Death Certificates', some from the Inland Revenue, and letters addressed to Emily from Social Services, presumably about how he was being cared for and his eventual adoption.

"We made up the scrapbook for the funeral," Emily said. "It contained all the photographs and other details we could find about her. Why don't we take it downstairs, then you can read it properly."

For some stupid reason, he had tears in his eyes as he picked up the order of service and the scrapbook. She led the way back downstairs and he followed.

***

He spent an emotional couple of hours looking through everything, acquainting himself with the mother and twin sister he never knew. There were several, rather blurred close-up photographs of his mother with Samantha and him, but there were only three where he could see his mother properly. They'd been cut from the local newspaper of functions held by the vicar - a small, weedy looking man - with Sally serving tea and biscuits or sherry. One of them showed her smiling as she shared a joke with the bishop, and this part of the photograph had been enlarged and used in the newspaper when it reported her death - the photograph he'd seen two weeks ago in the newspaper archives.

There was no doubt she had a striking face - certainly not a face to call pretty - and he supposed it did have some resemblance to his own, though he hadn't noticed it before. He had to smile that Emily had chosen her because she thought her plump - he'd have called her curvy, or even voluptuous, with large breasts, hips and bum, and a reasonably trim waist that, he suspected, was due more to a foundation garment than to her natural lines. If the men in the house had not lusted after her, then they were probably not interested in women.

Emily fed him cups of tea, and filled in the answers to all his questions. All except the question he didn't ask - about his father.

Finally, he got back round to it. "Emily, earlier on you suggested that my father might have been closer to home than London. Please, please could you elaborate on the comment you made about my father's identity?"

Emily paused and then said, "The reason I have so much difficulty with this is that it goes well beyond your father's identity. It's actually about Sally's death."

He shook his head. "Her death? What about it? According to the newspaper article, she tripped and fell from top to bottom of the stairs at a family function, in front of you, your family and the bishop. She was pronounced dead when the doctor arrived ten minutes later."

"Come upstairs again."

She led the way back up the Great Staircase until she was a few steps below the landing. She turned to face him and looked down the stairs. "It was my forty-fifth birthday party. We were all in the Hall, below, drinking sherry as a prelude to dinner. Sally had come upstairs to make certain you two were asleep in the bedroom. It was as she was hurrying back downstairs to serve dinner that she appeared to trip and fall. We all rushed to her and crowded around her body at the bottom of the stairs. She was unconscious, but we didn't know whether she was dead or alive. Richard went to call for an ambulance and the local doctor. Meanwhile, I came running upstairs to bring you both down, thinking she might regain consciousness and would want to see you."

She turned to face up the landing. "I was in such a panic, I didn't notice anything at the time, but in bed that night, I re-lived the whole event in a kind of slow motion replay. I recalled that, as I reached the top of the stairs, there were two little round hooks screwed into the newel posts on either side of the stairs. I got out of bed to investigate. The hooks had disappeared and there were small indents where they'd been screwed in, and the hole later filled. You can't see the marks now, after all this time, but they were just there..." She pointed low down on the newel posts on either side of the stairs. "...and there."

She sensed his incomprehension, and she sighed. "I know it's straight out of Agatha Christie, and I sound like Miss Marple, but it is a very effective way of tripping someone at the top of a flight of stairs. You feed a length of fishing line through the hooks and push the line down out of sight into the stair carpet. You feed the free ends some distance away - in this case down the wall to the Hall below, where you can innocently stand, sherry in hand, waiting for your victim to appear. When the victim is about to cross the line, you pull on the free ends to raise it tight, a few inches above the stair. The victim trips over it and falls down the stairs. In the chaos surrounding the fall, you pull the length of fishing line clear of the hooks and hide it. Later on, you surreptitiously remove the hooks from the stairs and fill the small holes in the newel posts." She finished with a grimace as though to say, "Make what you will of that."

"If that night you remembered seeing the hooks and worked all that out, why didn't you contact the police next morning?"

She climbed the four stairs to the landing before answering, and he was left looking up at her like Romeo staring at Juliet.

"Because apart from the bishop, it could only have been one of my three sons, my daughter-in-law or Matthew's fiancée - now his wife. In fact even the bishop can be ruled out because he was talking to Richard and me."

"So you suspected my mother was murdered?" he gasped, "leaving me an orphan, and you concealed it to save your sons?"

"Your mother was dead; whatever I did wouldn't bring her back, and yes, I protected my sons from a charge of murder. I have no excuse."

"But why would any of them murder her?"

She grimaced. "I told you that, when you were born, I was absolutely enchanted with you both. Once - just once - I said a silly thing in my baby talk, and I murmured to you, 'It's your granny.' I could see Sally's face reflected in the window, and she showed a shocked recognition. Sally never realised I'd seen her face, but I believed then that you two were my grandchildren."

The silence lengthened between them. The evening was beginning to draw in, and they were standing in semi darkness.

"It still doesn't explain why the father should murder his child's mother."

"Because I pushed it, that's why," she said. "Because I was stupid."

She looked down at him as she said, "We recruited Sally because she wasn't a good looker in the hope that our sons wouldn't want to get involved with her. But that certainly didn't mean it was all right to make her pregnant and not take responsibility. I privately challenged all three and they each denied it, so I was forced to take more extreme measures.

"I persuaded Richard to change his will in favour of Sally. After all, since all three of our sons had good careers ahead of them, it seemed only right to leave the house to the mother of our new granddaughter, who was a single mother with nowhere to live. Under the will, after Richard's death, I would live here for life and then it would pass to Sally.

"Whoever killed her realised that with no known father, you and your sister would be taken away and we would have no further contact with you. Richard would have no alternative but to change his will back to our sons."

Sam looked around. "It's a nice house," he said, "but you're still here twenty-five years later. It was a bit of a long term killing."

"Richard was tremendously strong spiritually, but his body was weak. He'd had a number of serious illnesses, and he died the following year. So there was quite a short timeframe in which Richard could have changed his will back again.

"But can't you see?" she added, "By getting Richard to change his will, I'm as responsible for the death of your mother as much as the person who set the trap."

"No," he said. "That's not how responsibility works. In retrospect, you may have done something that was less than wise, but that doesn't make you a killer." He thought some more and added, "Of course, nowadays, it's quite easy with DNA testing to determine whether one of your sons is my father, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he is also the murderer - it could have been anyone who lost out under the new will, including their wives."

"DNA testing is only easy if you get a sample from them. Remember, they're all in their forties now, comfortably off, with teenage children. I'm certain that neither Matthew nor Mark would be willing to give you a DNA sample, since it would prove they were being unfaithful - I suspect even Luke would not want that kind of disruption into his well-ordered life. I think there'd have to be a certain amount of subterfuge."

She thought some more and added, "There'd have to be even more subterfuge to determine the killer."

"You didn't want to do that twenty-five years ago. Do you want to do it now?"

She paused and then said, "Your feelings about your children do change as you get older. I had supposed that when the grandchildren were growing up I'd see a lot of them, but I rarely see them or their parents. They're always too busy to come and see me. Of course, they'll all be coming here for my birthday next Saturday. That might be a good opportunity for you to meet them."

Then she shook her head. "The problem is that until we have proven your paternity, it will be difficult to justify your presence at what is essentially a family occasion, unless..."

"Unless?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Oh, nothing. Just a silly idea I had."

***

"Emily, I need to leave now to catch my bus," he said, sometime later.

"Do you have to get back home, tonight?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "There's nothing to make me go home, but obviously I hadn't planned to stay overnight. I haven't told you this, but I've been out of work for a while and I'm getting no interviews or even much prospect for a new job. Continuing the search for my heritage was a way of taking my mind away from it."

"You could stay in your mother's old room, if you don't mind slumming it," she said. "Or there's no shortage of larger bedrooms you can use."

But he plumped for his mother's bedroom. It wasn't big, but he was closer to his mother than he'd been since those first few weeks of his life. Emily got him fresh bed linen and he made up the bed as she watched.

"You're much better at doing that than my husband or my sons ever were," she said.

He smiled at her. "Your husband and sons had it easy. When you live on your own, you get used to doing everything for yourself. I'm also not a half bad cook."

"Why don't you go up to the attic?" she suggested, "and bring down Sally's chest. You could go through the rest of the contents this evening after dinner. I always retire early, so it will give you a chance to get to know your mother a little more."

***

She suggested that he cook the meal - it wasn't difficult, as she had plenty of food in the fridge and he made one of his speciality omelettes. She opened a bottle of wine and had one glass for herself, and he had a few glasses. They chatted easily together, about nothing in particular, and then Emily went off to her bedroom and he stayed behind to clear the table and fill the dishwasher.

Then, he too went to his bedroom, opened the chest and started to pull out his mother's things. She had several black, uniform dresses, and a few other dresses, skirts and blouses which he hung in the wardrobe. Her shoes he put into the base of it, and her underwear went in the drawers. And that was it - the entire possessions of his mother put into a wardrobe and a few drawers. It made him feel very sad.

He wasn't certain how long he stared at the open wardrobe before there was a knock on his door, and Emily entered, wearing a long dressing-gown.

"Don't be sad," she said, seeing his face. "She gave birth to two lovely children, and you're here to remember her spirit. It's all any of us can hope for."

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

"I was thinking," she said, "that it would be good to bring your mother to life again."

"What?"

"I want to recreate my birthday party in 1986, and re-enact the events surrounding your mother's death. That's the way they solve Agatha Christie murders, and it's a reason to give to my family to explain why you are here at a family event."

"But why should your family agree to it, and who'll play the part of my mother?"

"Why, you will of course!"

***

It was a crazy idea. She thought he could simply put on his mother's dress and he'd look just like her.

"But I've seen the photographs," he said. "She had boobs, for heaven's sake, and hair, and... a big bum." No one could deny that. His mother had an incredibly large bum.

"There are ways around those kinds of things," she said. "But no one could deny that you have your mother's face..."

"Complete with a beard and Adam's apple," he said.

"OK," she said, "let's not worry about the practicalities just now, as most of them can probably be overcome. Let's just look at the idea itself. They will all stay overnight for my birthday next Saturday, and in recent years, it's been quite tiring to look after them. So, I'll tell my family that Sally's daughter, Samantha, has looked me up and I've suggested she do her mother's old job for the next week and help me prepare for the party. The family might privately whinge about it, but there's not much they can really complain about. That gets you into the house, in the ideal position to go cleaning their rooms and extracting a few hairs from a hair brush. Right?"

"I can see the idea," he said, "but I could do that job as a man. Nowadays, you don't have to be female to work as a cook/housekeeper."

"Call me old-fashioned," she said, "but I really believe a cook/housekeeper should be a woman, and I just would not feel comfortable with a man doing it."

"But I'm a man and you want me to do it."

"For the next week, you will be a woman, and that's how I would feel about it. Besides, if we're re-enacting your mother's death, you have to take the part of Sally."

He shrugged acceptance.

"I shall explain that Samantha has asked to find out how the accident happened and I've agreed to re-enact the scene on my birthday - just as it was on the night she died. Again, they might whinge, but there's nothing they can really complain about. Right?"

"Unless they twig that Samantha is a man." He stated the obvious.

"Sam, remember, we're both doing this for your mother. Why don't we give it a go and see if we can disguise you as a woman. If we can't, then clearly it won't work. But if we can, what then? I understand your reticence about wearing women's clothes, but surely, if it exposes your mother's killer then it will be worth it, won't it?"

He hesitated. "Will it, Emily? Remember, this is most likely one of your sons. Do you want to expose him?"

It was Emily's turn to hesitate. "Well, let's do a deal. If you're prepared to give it a go, then we both have to accept the consequences, right?"

He nodded and they shook hands on it.

After she had left the room, he took his mother's uniform dress out of the wardrobe and held it against himself. It was a hypnotic idea, but then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and came to his senses. Oh well, it would all be quickly resolved in the morning.

---

Author's Note: I have turned off comments for this serial, as I don't want readers to second guess who has done what to whom, and give the game away to everyone else. Make your own deductions, but in the normal who-dunnit tradition, please keep them to yourself.

When Sam finally discovered the house where his mother lived and died, he thought it would be the end of his search. He little realised that events would soon plunge him into the search for his mother's murderer. Even less did he realise he would have to stand in for her in the re-enactment.

The complete story has been serialised into five parts which will be published at approximately daily intervals.

PART TWO - MONDAY

Emily had told him that breakfast would be a do it yourself affair, so he spent a while browsing the internet on his phone before going downstairs.

After exchanging their good mornings, he asked, "Emily, how far is Seacombe from here? Only there's a shop there called Big Busts which I think might help us with our project."

Her face brightened. "You're still willing to give it a try? Only I thought you might have changed your mind in the night."

He nodded, not telling her that, after lying awake for a long time, his thoughts twirling around his mind, he had slipped out of bed in which he had been lying naked, pulled open a drawer and put on a silky nightdress. In the dark, it didn't matter what he looked like, but it felt so good sliding over his body. He had got back into bed and quickly gone to asleep.

"It'll take you about an hour and half, including the bus journey to Charminster Station. I'd come with you, only on Mondays, I go to the cathedral in Charminster and change the flowers." She thought for a second and added, "I think I know Big Busts. It's in the pedestrianised bit behind the High St. But they make head and shoulder busts for the tourists, so I don't know what you want from them."

"Apparently, they produce far more than head and shoulder busts," he said. "Look, I have to say I still have tremendous doubts about this whole thing. But I can see it's probably the only way we're going to find any answers, so I'll give it my best shot. I think the stuff I can get from Big Busts might help."

"Presumably, you'll need some money," Emily said. "Do you have any?"

He shifted uncomfortably. "I've still got my credit cards."

"But they're probably over the limit," Emily correctly surmised, "and you can't afford to pay them off?"

Sam nodded.

Emily went to the sideboard, opened the top drawer and rummaged through the contents until she located a key. "Here's the key to the safe in the study. You'd better make certain you have plenty. Take a thousand pounds."

"Emily, you can't..."

"Of course I can. Let's call it an advance on your wages as cook/housekeeper. I'd have thought one thousand pounds cash for a week's work with all keep found would be acceptable, wouldn't it?"

Sam confirmed that would be very acceptable indeed.

The safe contained ten bundles of one thousand pounds each! Sam extracted one bundle, and then carefully locked the safe and returned the key to the drawer, showing the bundle he had taken to Emily. Whilst he was delighted that Emily trusted him to that extent, it showed how easy it was to steal from older people.

"Emily, you shouldn't hand over the key of a safe containing all that money to someone you don't really know. I might have walked off with it."

She smiled. "That's just what Sally said when I asked her to get out some money for me. I guess honesty runs in your genes. Anyway, take the money and I hope you get something useful."

Sam nodded. "Thanks Emily. I really appreciate your confidence in me. Let's hope that Big Busts give me a big bust."

***

They certainly did. As he faced the mirror in his bedroom that afternoon, he was staring at a woman with large breasts, wide hips and a huge bottom. He'd taken his mother's photographs from the album with him and had embarrassingly explained what he wanted to do. Without any trace of embarrassment on their part, the staff had been more than helpful, matching his skin colour to two products.

One was called a Bustlet - which was like a high-necked singlet with built in breasts - the other, a Hiplet - a long-legged control brief with padding which, unlike a normal control brief, expanded his dimensions, rather than reducing them. Between the legs, there was all the appearance of a vagina.

Not only the appearance, he realised, as he tentatively explored the slit between his legs with a finger. He wasn't quite certain where his own genitals had been squashed as he fastened the garment but, after a moment's discomfort, they had made no further protest. Big Busts had even produced a wig in a similar style to his mother's.

He pulled on a pair of panties over his new wide bottom, and slipped his breasts into a bra. He fumbled behind his back for ages with the bra clip, before managing to hook the two bits together. He pulled a black uniform dress over his head, but there was no way he could bring the two halves of the back together to button them up. Like his mother, he was too large around the waist.

He'd seen the girdles when he'd put away his mother's clothes the previous evening, and he got one of them out now. Emily said the clothes appeared to have come from the 1950s, and going by the films he'd seen of that period, he now realised how the actresses achieved such tiny waists. It was a long garment, stretching from just beneath the breasts down to the hips, with a back zip. It used elastic rather than laces to draw in the waist, but the downside of that was there no way of adjusting the size it was designed to squeeze a person down to. Emily had said Sally was overweight, but it seemed impossible to believe her waist could have been any larger than Sam's, for as he held it up before him, it had an impossibly tiny waist.

He pulled the girdle over his hips, and then reached behind him and pulled on the zip. Sally had left a piece of cord slipped through the zipper so that she could heave it up really hard. It took all his strength to pull it right up, and then all his strength of character not to immediately pull it back down again. It was only when he again looked in the mirror and saw his figure looked rather like Jane Russell, that he knew why women through the ages have worn foundation garments.

He had no problems buttoning the dress now - except he had to fumble behind his back to do it, and with a final, heart-stopping glance in the mirror, he headed downstairs to where he knew Emily was waiting.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"That's fantastic," she replied. "You're so like her. There's no way anyone is going to think you are not your mother's daughter. From now on, that's the only way I shall talk to you and think of you. Agreed?"

"Agreed," he said. "But I still have some work to do to improve my femininity. They gave me some pills to swallow that will raise my voice in pitch. I'll try those later."

"OK," Emily said with a grin. "And really, Samantha, you do have quite a lot of body hair for a young woman. Has no one told you about waxing?

"After that," she continued with a wicked smile on her face, "you had better start your day's work as housekeeper. There's an awful lot of cleaning to get this house ready for my birthday party at the weekend."

TUESDAY

The following afternoon, Emily had gone out to see one of her friends, whilst Sam was taking the opportunity to sit back and relieve the weight off his shoulders. Emily had not been joking about the amount of cleaning necessary to ready the house for the weekend party, and he'd been working almost non-stop since the previous afternoon. But it wasn't just the work itself which was the problem. He guessed that women with large breasts eventually got used to the constant pull, but he was finding it quite literally a real pain.

The problem was that Big Busts had told him that it was necessary to spread a gel on the skin beneath the garments which prevented perspiration by bonding the garments to the skin and blocking up the sweat pores. The downside was that this was a semi-permanent bonding. The garments would only come off when the outer layer of skin was shed. Until then, his breasts and Hiplet would be a part of him!

Which meant the weight of his breasts gave him a perpetual back ache, and he couldn't even take them off at night. The only way to relieve the pain was by lying back in a soft chair and relaxing. He closed his eyes for a few seconds.

***

He was awoken by the front door opening, which surprised him. Surely, he hadn't been asleep that long. But it wasn't Emily who came through the door into the lounge, but a middle-aged, very angry-looking man.

"Oh," the man said, in a highly sarcastic voice, "I do hope I didn't wake you up."

Sam smiled politely at him and confirmed that was exactly what he had done.

"That's strange," he said, "because Mother told me that she'd employed someone to work here, not to swan about the place."

"You must be Matthew," he guessed, remembering the family photos.

"And you're this person masquerading as Sally Brown's daughter. Well, let's have a close look at you." He came right up to stand closely in front of his chair, towering right over Sam, whilst peering down at his face and, he suspected, down his cleavage as well. "Hmm. There's certainly a resemblance there, but that gives you no right to come in and trick my mother into giving you money. And I suppose next, you'll wheedle your way into getting her to change her will, just like your mother did to my father."

Ah! He thought. That was why Matthew was so sensitive. He thought about trying to stand up, but Matthew was standing so close, Sam's boobs would have pushed against his chest, and he'd have fallen back down again. He wasn't going to give him that pleasure, so he relaxed and leaned back in the seat to address him, a posture which, if done well, gives the seated person the position of power, rather than the person standing over them.

"Firstly, it was your mother who suggested I could work for her and she who suggested the salary. Secondly, she told me that the idea of changing your father's will in favour of my mother also came from her. I have no intention of wheedling my way around your mother, so you can stop being so thoroughly rude and bad mannered."

From the way his face turned a shade of puce, he thought Matthew probably hadn't been spoken to like that since he'd been a child, and he didn't like it.

"I'll stop being rude and bad mannered when the person causing it is thrown out of this house and onto the street where she belongs. That's exactly what I'm going to do."

He bent over and grasped Sam's right arm tightly in both hands, rather hurting him, but he wasn't going to admit it. Instead, he remained relaxed in the seat and Matthew was forced into trying to pull his body up from the reclining position. It's difficult enough with even a small person, but when they're quite large with tits the size and weight of melons, there's simply no way it could be done.

Matthew's face turned an even brighter shade of purple and he grabbed at Sam's hair.

OK, his wig had been taped into place, but there was no way it would resist a violent pull like that. Sam had no choice but to quickly move his head as Matthew tugged at it. Since the rest of his body was attached to his head, he had to stand up straightaway.

As he'd guessed, it pushed his boobs hard into Matthew's chest, throwing him slightly off-balance and as Matthew moved backwards and sideways, so Sam continued to move forward with him, spinning slightly as he did so, and pulling Matthew's body closer to his, and twisting. It only needed the slightest lift of his hip for Matthew's legs to leave contact with the ground, and as Sam continued to spin and twist, so Matthew's own body described an arc through the air until it was dropping like a sack of potatoes onto the floor, with a pleasant thump.

Pleasant, that was, for Sam who'd been on the receiving end of Matthew's aggression, but from the way the wind left Matthew's body and had him gasping for air, clearly not so pleasant for Matthew. At times, Sam was very pleased that he'd kept up his judo after leaving school.

"Well done," a voice said. "I wish you'd been around when we were kids and he was bullying us."

Sam turned and looked in the direction of the voice. Two middle-aged men stood there, clearly Matthew's brothers. The younger of them walked over to Matthew, dropped to his knees, felt his pulse and then started muttering to him about taking slow, deep breaths.

"I'm Mark," the other one said, "and my brother, Luke, is the person tending the injured. He's a doctor by the way. You've clearly already met our other brother, Matthew, and realised the best way of dealing with him."

"Samantha Crawford," Sam said with a smile.

"She assaulted me," Matthew gasped. "You two witnessed it."

"We saw you attacking her," Mark said. "Attempted rape, I'd have said. The poor girl was simply defending herself. Do you want me to tell the police that?"

"She's dividing us, already," Matthew said. "Can't you see that?"

"Matthew," Mark said, "we've been divided ever since you kicked the football through the church window and blamed me. Now if you've finished attempting rape, or at the very least, constructive dismissal against Mother's employee, perhaps we can talk sensibly."

Matthew said nothing, and Mark took that as a sign of assent. He turned towards Sam. "Mother telephoned each of us last night to say she'd taken you on for the week up to her birthday party. I must say, I think you'll brighten up the party. Perhaps I could commit adultery with you, then my wife could use it as grounds for divorce."

"Shut up, Mark," Luke said without animosity. He stood up from tending Matthew and came over to shake Sam's hand. "I'm very pleased to meet Sally's daughter. Don't tell mother, but Sally taught me about sex."

"Then you admit..." Sam started to say, but Luke immediately butted in.

"I admit that Sally was the first naked woman I saw," he said. "I admit a number of other acts with her, but as a doctor I know for a fact that oral sex cannot result in pregnancy, therefore I deny being your father."

"She had some man in London," Matthew said, getting up from the floor, and dusting down his trousers with hateful looks at Sam. "Maybe she had a different man every Monday she went up there. That's what tarts generally do. But her pregnancy was nothing to do with us."

"Only she didn't go up there on Mondays," Luke said.

"What do you mean?" Mark asked, and Matthew added, "Of course she went to London on Mondays. That was her day off."

Luke shook his head. "Every Monday morning during the school holidays, I used to take extra lessons from one of my teachers who lived in Charminster. I'd often see Sally waiting at the bus stop, and after the bus journey, we'd walk together to Cathedral Way, where he lived. She used to help Mother change the flowers in the cathedral, didn't she?"

"But Mother goes flower arranging on Monday afternoons," Mark said.

Luke shrugged. "Perhaps the time changed. I only know I'm certain it was Monday mornings when I used to see old Mr Lawrence, and I'd often meet Sally on the way."

"Christ!" Matthew said. "You realise what this means. If Sally wasn't going up to London on Mondays, then it really was one of us who was the father of this bastard." He pointed towards Sam, as though anyone was in any doubt as to who he was talking about.

"Shit! You're right," Mark said, suddenly looking very pensive. "But it couldn't have been me. We always used a con..."

"Jesus Christ!" Matthew exploded. "Don't admit you had sex with her. Condoms do go faulty. Keep your mouth shut."

"Well I don't have a problem," Luke said, taking his medical case over to the hall table and opening it. He withdrew four small, cardboard packs and laid them on the table. "These are DNA testing kits," he said to Sam. "One for yourself, and one for each of us. Mother suggested I bring them along."

"We're not taking them," Matthew said. "No way. Sally always said it was someone in London, so there's no reason why we should."

"I agree," Mark said.

"Well I'm quite happy for you to take a sample from me," Luke said, looking towards Sam with a smile. "So that will narrow down your search."

"London's a big place," Mark said. "It doesn't narrow it down at all."

"But guys," Luke said, "the problem we have is that Mother is convinced that Samantha is her granddaughter, and if we're not careful, we're going to have a repetition of the events of twenty-five years ago. If one of you confesses to being the father, it will take the heat out of the situation. If not, I bet things will get awkward again."

"Let's just throw the bitch out," Matthew said. "If we do it together, we'll be able to overpower her."

"You go first," Mark said. "She's bigger than I am."

"No one is going first," Luke said, "otherwise I'll call the police."

"Well done Luke," Emily's voice came from the doorway, and they all turned. "As usual, my youngest son is the most responsible of you all."

"Hello Mother," they each muttered. Clearly, none of them were pleased to see her. Sam was surprised, as he had always been delighted to see his adopted mother.

"I see, Luke, that you brought the kits as I asked," Emily said.

"A DNA test is too intrusive," Matthew said. "Sally always said the father of her child was in London, and there's no reason to believe it was any of us."

"Absolutely right," Mark agreed.

"Then you refuse to take the tests?" she said.

"I've nothing to hide," Luke said. "I'm happy to take the test." He opened one of the packs, broke the seal on a little plastic bottle, took out a swab and pushed it into his mouth. He then put the swab back inside the bottle, screwed on the top, took out his pen, and wrote on the bottle label. "I shall be brother number three," he said. Then he handed the bottle to Sam.

The others said nothing whilst he did so.

"Very well," Emily said. "Is there a reason why you others came to see me, or were you simply trying to bully Sammie into going away?"

"We wanted to see her for ourselves, Mother," Mark said. "See if she was as similar to Sally as you made out." He turned to wink at Sam and added, "Or as sexy."

"And is she?" Emily asked.

Mark smiled. "Oh yes."

***

"Thank heavens they've gone," Emily said.

"You've relaxed, now they have," Sam said.

She considered his words. "One of my sons never admitted to being your father; one murdered your mother. Perhaps they are one and the same, I don't know. I can only tell you the suspicion builds over the years. It intrudes on the relationship."

He could understand that.

"Now you've met them, who do you think are the most likely suspects?"

He considered. Not wishing to make a judgement based upon first impressions, he made a joke of it. "In Agatha Christie, it's always the most unlikely person, so on that basis Luke must be my father, and Mark, who's the most personable, must be the murderer."

She laughed. "I'm glad to see you've at last stopped wondering about your sexuality and are thinking like a woman. All women think Mark is the most personable and I think you'll be having sex with him before long. That Hiplet thing allows you to do that, doesn't it?"

"That's silly, Emily," he said, incredibly embarrassed.

"Maybe," she said.

All the same, he went and checked the instructions for the Hiplet. It did indeed say it was possible to insert a penis inside his vagina and have sex as a woman!

***

As usual, Emily went to bed immediately after dinner, and he stayed up and watched a repeat of a who dunnit on TV, which he'd seen at least twice before.

"The butler did it," said a voice from the doorway, startling him.

Sam turned to see Mark standing there. "Butlers rarely do," he said, "and in any case there isn't one in this house - nor was there in 1986."

"Well, we all make mistakes," Mark said with a smile. "I always try to be careful but sometimes it comes out wrong." He flicked his eyes towards Sam and smiled.

"Damn it!" Sam thought. "Why did that surge of excitement run through me?" He was a bloke, for heaven's sake, and since he wasn't gay, he wasn't interested in men. On the other hand, he reasoned, he was trying to immerse himself into being a woman - to think woman, talk woman, and behave like a woman. What would be more natural than to be attracted to a personable bloke? The more logical side of his brain worked out it would also give him opportunity to get Mark's DNA sample.

"Would you like a coffee?" Sam asked.

Mark looked at him, smiled and said, "Yes please."

***

As Sam came back into the lounge, Mark took the coffee from his hands and placed it on a side table. Then Mark turned and kissed him.

Sam had never been kissed before! Oh yes, he'd done plenty of kissing, but his partner had never pulled him irresistibly forward, pushing their own body against his, lightly planted their lips on his and caused fireworks to explode in Sam's head.

Mark's tongue was jousting with his, and suddenly Sam could feel Mark's hardness rising between them. Sam shamelessly pushed his stomach against Mark and ground his body against his.

"The hearth rug in front of the fire is a wonderful place to make love," Mark said, switching off the lights so the only light in the room was coming from the fire. He led Sam across the room and pulled him down to his knees. Sam could feel Mark fumbling with his zip, then he was pulling Sam's dress down from his shoulders, kissing his neck, his shoulders and his breasts. Sam didn't even feel Mark unclip his bra - Mark was certainly far better at it than he was - but his breasts were free and he was sucking on his nipples.

Then he was pushing Sam backwards. His dress was up around his waist and Mark was pulling down his panties.

"Mustn't forget this," Mark said, holding up a foil wrapping.

"We don't need it," Sam said, quickly grabbing it and pulling it towards him.

"Oh yes we do," Mark said, holding Sam's wrist with one hand, whilst he uncurled his fingers to take the condom off him. "I told you I'm always careful, but I'm going to be more careful than normal not to leave a semen sample behind." He undid the foil and rolled the condom down his prick, which Sam was pleased to see, was considerably smaller than his own.

"Lay back," Mark said, "and enjoy the ride of your life."

Sam did as he was bid, not because he wanted sex with Mark, he told himself, but because he wanted to know his father's identity. The excitement running through him as Mark slid between his legs and moved forward was nothing to do with it.

But any excitement he'd felt before sex was nothing to that which Sam felt as Mark slipped his cock inside. Although they'd told him at Big Busts that his vagina had sensitivity, he'd never been able to feel much when he played about with his fingers. But as Mark's cock tunnelled its way upwards, the most exquisite feelings he'd ever had exploded inside him. Not just once, but each time Mark partly withdrew and then moved upward again, a different part of his vagina screamed pleasure. Mark was incredibly skilled at pleasuring a woman, Sam realised, as he started the longest and best orgasm he'd ever had in his life.

***

Half an hour later, as Mark finally pulled out his penis, he gasped in horror. "Damn! The condom's burst. Shit!" He stared for a second at Sam and then said, "You did it, didn't you, you little bitch, when you grabbed it. You damaged the condom."

Sam felt totally fucked. Mark's fucking had that effect on women, he realised. So he continued to smile at Mark as he said, "I really don't know what you're talking about,"

"It's not funny, you bitch!" Mark slapped Sam hard across the face. It hurt, and pulled Sam out of his reverie. Then he grabbed Sam's wrist rather more fiercely than the way Matthew had, earlier, giving Sam no opportunity to throw Mark off balance. "Come on, we're going to douche you out, whether you like it or not. And don't give me any trouble or you'll regret it..."

"Sammie?" Emily's voice came down from upstairs. "Could you turn the TV down a little, please? It's rather loud."

Sam pulled his wrist free, and stood up. "Of course, Emily. I'm sorry I disturbed you. Did you want me to make you some cocoa?"

"Yes please, dear. That would be lovely."

***

Mark had left by the time Sam took the cocoa up to Emily. She was lying in bed with a big smile on her face. "You got the DNA sample all right then?"

Sam gasped in surprise and then said, "You heard what was going on?"

"Darling, the way you were screaming, they heard it in Charminster. That was a magnificent act. But how did you sabotage the condom?"

Sam didn't like to tell her the screams had been no act, so he said, "When I made his coffee, I got a needle from your sewing kit and threaded it into my dress. When I grabbed the foil, I simply impaled it on the needle."

Emily smiled. "My, you are devious, aren't you? I wonder which of my children you get it from."

When Sam finally discovered the house where his mother lived and died, he thought it would be the end of his search. He little realised that events would soon plunge him into the search for his mother's murderer. Even less did he realise he would have to stand in for her in the re-enactment.

The complete story has been serialised into five parts which will be published at approximately daily intervals.

PART THREE - WEDNESDAY

The next day, Sam was packaging up all three samples for testing, having added his own to it, when his answer to Emily's "most likely suspect" question popped into his mind. Had Luke been rather too helpful in providing the DNA testing kits? It took him just a few minutes on the internet to discover that the name on the packaging, Charminster Laboratories, did not exist, and that the address given for the laboratories was the address of Dr Luke Lockhart's surgery! So perhaps the Agatha Christie logic was correct after all.

Without discussing it with Emily, he went out to a chemist and bought several more off-the-counter DNA testing kits, repackaged the samples, and posted them off. The lab would email the results back to him, and it would take a few days to get the results. A thrill went through him; was he really this close to discovering his father?

***

When he got back to the house, Emily was just going up to bed for her afternoon nap. "You still have plenty of work to be going on with, don't you?"

Sam told her he'd had, rather looking forward to having some time on his own. Emily was lovely, but he found her rather overpowering as she supervised his work. But she'd only been upstairs for a few minutes when the doorbell rang.

"You're Samantha, aren't you?" The woman was looking extremely cross, and she pushed past Sam and went into the Hall.

"I'm sorry, I don't know who you..."

"I'm Rachel, Mark's wife."

Sam had already suspected as much, and had just a few seconds to decide how to handle it. "I'm pleased to meet you Rachel. I met Mark yesterday with his brothers..."

"Don't give me that innocent shit! You shagged him, didn't you?"

"I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about. Mark left here the same time as Matthew and Luke; I think he'd given Luke a lift down here."

"But Luke came back with Matthew. Mark stayed on."

"Have you spoken to Mark? What did he say?"

"Oh, the same as always. He stopped for a drink somewhere - which is his way of saying he had sex with some tart."

"Well, in that case..."

"You're just like that slag of a mother. Well you'd better watch out. You shag my husband again and you might find the same thing happening to you!"

With that, she stormed out of the house, slamming the door after her with a loud bang.

***

Sam was still trying to decide whether that made Rachel a murderer, or simply the wife of a wayward husband, when a voice interrupted his thoughts.

"Hello, you must be Samantha."

Sam turned to see a slim, blonde woman facing him, who added, "I'm Fiona, Matthew's wife."

"Hello," Sam greeted her. "It's nice to meet you." It seemed they were all coming to take a look - or perhaps size him up as a victim for murder!

"Matthew told me how similar you were to your mother, so I thought I'd come and see for myself."

Sam smiled at her. He found it quite easy to smile at her, particularly if you like your blondes slim, as he did. "I never knew my mother, so you'll have to be the judge of that."

"Oh, I got to know her very well," Fiona said. "Very well indeed. I found I was coming over here most days."

"I'm glad my mother had a good friend," Sam said, wondering just slightly whether there was any inuendo in her words.

"Oh, we were more than good friends," Fiona said. "We were lovers."

"Oh," Sam said. "I didn't realise..."

"Sally was always discrete," Fiona said. "It wasn't that I was ashamed of what we were doing, but I do so hate being the subject of vicious gossip."

"I guess most of us do," Sam said.

"It was to cover my abhorrence of sex with men that I invented a story about wanting to stay a virgin until I was married. I thought that would put all males off. But I was in the choir and suddenly the vicar's son, Matthew, was being thrust upon me. He wasn't bad looking then and was training to be an accountant. I thought that in exchange for very occasional sex he could provide me with a life of comfort, whilst I seduced every woman in the congregation."

"And did you?" Sam asked with a smile.

"Oh no! Most were far too indoctrinated by male society to consider letting their female urges roam freely. But it was great when Sally arrived, and we had some fantastic times together. In fact, I think I'd better show you what we got up. Now, come over here and kiss me."

***

"You must have missed Sally when she was killed," Sam said, afterwards. Fiona had reached a very satisfactory orgasm, but frustratingly, he had not. It was weird; he'd had sex with Mark and had the most incredible orgasm of his life, but sex with a woman had been flat. Was he really turning into a woman?

"We'd had a tiff by then," Fiona said. "She'd said I was rather a selfish lover, and I rarely gave any pleasure to her. I mean, I know she was your mother, but she was only a maid. It was hardly my job to give her earth-shattering orgasms."

"So how did you feel about that?" Sam asked, feeling rather better about his own predicament.

"How did I feel about Sally calling a halt to the best sex I'd ever had? I thought she was an absolute bitch and I danced on her grave when she was dead."

THURSDAY

"Hi Sam," Luke said as he came into the kitchen.

Sam looked up and smiled. "Hi, Luke. I heard Emily talking to someone and I thought it might be you."

He shrugged. "I occasionally come over here to see her on a Thursday, but it was you I wanted to see more than Mother."

He grinned rather sheepishly. "The thing is, you look so much like your mother. As soon as I saw you, it was as though I'd immediately gone back twenty five years. You see... I was so much in love with Sally, when she died, I wished that I could die too."

"You were in love with my mother? You didn't say before."

He shrugged. "Sally said we had to keep it our secret, especially with our age difference. She said that if we told the other two, they'd only get jealous. After she died, I wanted to keep it our special secret."

Sam nodded. "I can understand that."

"The reason I arranged to see Mr Lawrence specifically on a Monday was because I knew Sally went to the cathedral that day. We'd go on the bus together into Charminster, and walk to Cathedral Lane."

Sam smiled. "Was she your first love?"

"My first and my only love, to be honest. Oh, Sharon was fine when I first met her, but after we got married, I realised I never loved her at all - not in the way I loved Sally. We've separated now and the divorce is going through, and all my life, I've thought about how it would have been if only Sally was still alive."

"You must have been young then."

"That was the problem. I was only fifteen, and Sally wouldn't have sex with me. Like I said, she'd do everything else, but we never had sex." He paused awkwardly. "The thing is... Well, the thing is..."

"You want to have sex with me!" Sam pretended to be shocked, but underneath his facade, the excitement ran through him. It couldn't be as good as it had been with Mark, could it? After the debacle with Fiona, he felt desperately in need of relief, but been unable to find it on his own.

"I need to exorcise Sally's ghost. Put her to rest in my mind in a way I've never been able to do in the last twenty-five years. Does that make sense?"

Sam nodded. "I guess so, but you need to understand that I don't have my mother's sexual experience, or even her body. I may look similar to her, but I am a different person beneath the skin." And he'd never said a truer word, Sam privately thought.

Luke smiled. "Of course, but you are just as beautiful." He suddenly moved very quickly across to Sam, and clumsily grabbed him and pushed his lips onto Sam's. Sam smiled, opened his mouth a little, and let his tongue flick forward into Luke's mouth.

"Oh God!" Luke said after some time, withdrawing his mouth from Sam's. "You are more like Sally than you can possibly imagine. Please, can we make love?"

Luke had pushed Sam backwards as far as the kitchen table, and now he fumbled beneath Sam's dress and pulled down his panties. He let a finger slide down against Sam's slit, and Sam let a moan escape his lips as he reached forward and unzipped Luke's trousers. He helped Luke shrug them off to fall to the floor around his knees. Then he slipped his hand beneath Luke's underpants and... he almost had to stop himself from laughing - he'd never felt such a small, fully erect penis.

Sam giggled openly then. The only other penis he'd felt apart from his own had been Mark's, and somehow he thought this was going to be a less experienced penis, but all the nicer for it.

As he rested his buttocks on the kitchen table, spread his legs wide and let Luke slip his prick inside, Sam thought he was going to have an even better orgasm than Mark had given him.

***

"You don't know how good it's made me feel," Luke said. "Thank you."

"I'm sure it wasn't as good as your dreams," Sam said. He'd had been right, he realised. He'd had a much nicer orgasm with Luke than with Mark - not in terms of the strength of his climax, but simply because Luke was not quite as mercenary about getting a shag with every woman he met.

"Of course it wasn't," Luke said, in a rather more brutal way than Sam was prepared for. "In fact really, it was a lousy screw, but that's why it was so good for me. All these years I've been fantasising about it, and now I realise that it was just childhood imagination."

Luke shook his head. "In fact, I think after that, I might go and be nice to Sharon again, and see if we can't make it up."

"Oh, right," Sam said, feeling more hurt than he had reason to be. After all, he was deceiving Luke in a quite abysmal way, but Luke didn't know that so he could have been nicer than he was.

But Luke was already moving onto the next subject. "I wondered whether you'd sent off the DNA samples, yet?"

Of course, Sam realised, trying to stop himself from crying, Luke would have been expecting the samples to be arrive at his surgery. Perhaps that was the main reason why he'd come over to his mother's house and shagged him.

"Yes," Sam said. "Only I had a problem after I'd packaged them all up. I had the envelope here and I accidentally dropped it into a sink full of water. The samples were all sealed so they were fine, but I had to go out and buy some new kits from the chemist, as all the paperwork was ruined."

"What!" Luke almost hissed through his teeth. "You stupid idiot. How could you be so careless?"

"Well it didn't really matter," Sam said. "There was only a nominal charge for the packs and both laboratories charge about the same price.

"Or perhaps you're cross," he added, "because I didn't think it ethical to ask your surgery to check your DNA?"

"How dare you! Are you suggesting I'm lying about not having sex with Sally?"

Sam paused for a second, thinking. No, he really believed Luke's story about his mother not doing it with a minor. "I'm wondering," Sam said, "whether there's any way that you could be my father without actually having sex with my mother."

Luke's reaction astonished him. He began to cry. A few seconds ago, Sam would have comforted him, but now he simply let him blub to a halt.

"The DNA will tell the truth," Sam said, "whether or not you do. I take it from your attempt to falsify the result that you could be my father, and I have just had sex with you."

Luke shook his head. "I wouldn't have had sex with you if I thought you really could be my daughter, only..."

"Only what?"

"Sally would let me masturbate over her."

"And you squirted between her legs?"

"I squirted everywhere. When you're fifteen, you have so much semen. But Sally complained when I squirted in her hair because it was so difficult to wash it out, whereas squirting at her vagina was all right - all she had to do was to drop her skirt over it and no one would be the wiser."

"So that's why you wanted the DNA samples to be sent to your surgery. Presumably, you were going to do the 'testing'?"

Luke didn't answer. Instead, he turned on his heel with a growl and left the kitchen.

Sam really hoped that neither Mark nor Luke were his father - and not just because he'd had sex with both of them!

When Sam finally discovered the house where his mother lived and died, he thought it would be the end of his search. He little realised that events would soon plunge him into the search for his mother's murderer. Even less did he realise he would have to stand in for her in the re-enactment.

The complete story has been serialised into five parts which will be published at approximately daily intervals.

PART FOUR - FRIDAY

Sam's hopes of learning who his father was were demolished early Friday morning, when the email came. It gave him the answer he didn't want to know:

More than 90% confidence that Samples B2 and B3 are full brothers (ie both parents common).
100% confident that neither B2 nor B3 is the father of Sample SAM.

In response to your additional question, a lineage test shows there is a greater than 98% confidence that sample SAM does not share male lineage with samples B2 and B3 (thus the father of B2 and B3, or any of the father's other sons, cannot be the father of SAM).

So, he surmised, he was back to his father being some pick up in London on his mother's day off! But then, that didn't line up with Luke's statement that Sally went to Charminster Cathedral on her Mondays off to arrange the flowers.

The thought came from nowhere and hit him in the stomach.

The photograph of some gathering which included a shot of Sally, laughing with the bishop. He went upstairs and found out the photograph, and stared carefully at the pair of them. Were they simply sharing a small joke, or were they really lovers?

***

"Your husband obviously got on very well with the bishop."

Emily turned towards him, rather surprised. "Why do you say that?"

"The bishop must have been invited here a lot," Sam said. "He was in all three photographs where my mother was serving. You also told me your husband was the person the bishop chose to take over all the other churches when congregations dwindled."

Emily shrugged. "You need to look at it the other way round. The photographs were from the newspaper archives - the press only came when Bishop Michael visited. Remember at that time, Archbishop Runcie was making such a mess of things, it seemed only a matter of months before he resigned. Michael was being tipped as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. However, you're probably right that if Michael had become Archbishop of Canterbury, there'd have been a role for Richard somewhere."

"It was obviously all before my time," Sam said. "I didn't realise Bishop Michael was in such a powerful position within the church. But surely, the fact that he came here a lot meant he must have got on well with Richard."

Emily shrugged. "We all got to know each other in our final year at university - Cambridge in 1962." Her eyes lit up as she thought back almost fifty years. "It was the most marvellous time of my life. Richard, Michael and I were a threesome - we were always together. After we'd completed our finals, both Richard and Michael proposed to me, and I had to choose one or the other."

Her eyes twinkled as she looked at Michael again. "There's no doubt Michael was the more handsome and personable. But he was so relaxed, it seemed he'd never get any job. Richard was the worker, who held strong opinions and spoke in the university debates - and often persuaded opinion. And physically, he may have been shorter than Michael, but he made up for it in other areas. When he got a Double First, compared with Michael's Lower Second, my mind was settled. We married and Richard got an almost immediate posting here." Emily shrugged and sheepishly smiled. "Within a few months, Michael got a better parish than this, and eventually became Bishop of Charminster. I guess that's the luck of the draw."

"I've never seen Charminster Cathedral," Sam said, "but I've been thinking I might go over and have a look at it. Why don't you come and show me around?"

Emily shook her head. "There are voluntary guides there on Friday mornings, and I might put their noses out of joint if I went with you. Incidentally, there's a good pub just up the road from the cathedral which does excellent lunches. So you go and enjoy yourself - you can work your hours off tonight."

Sam sheepishly had to admit he'd thought working for Emily would be money for old rope. Instead, he was earning every penny of his one thousand pound salary.

***

The cathedral was not one of the classic cathedrals that draw in thousands of visitors every day. In fact, that Friday morning, there were no other visitors and Sam had to wonder around looking for anyone. He found a woman changing the flower displays, and he asked her where he would find the guide.

She smiled at him. "That's me," she said. "Jack of all trades. We don't get many volunteers nowadays and we all have to fill in as and when we can." She wiped her hands on a cloth, and then went into her guide monologue.

"OK, if you like to come over to the entrance vestibule, I'll show you..."

"There is a question I'd like to ask..."

"If you don't mind, I'll take questions at the end. Now, the entrance vestibule was built in..."

***

"...Now, do you have any questions?" she asked him, forty minutes later.

"Is Bishop Michael still here, or has he retired?" Sam asked the one question he'd been unsuccessfully trying to put since the tour started.

"Bishop Michael?" She gave him a strange look which he had trouble interpreting. "He became ill - to be honest, he went rather doolalley. He was retired about five years ago, which was just before I began here. Several other volunteers who had known him decided to go at the same time, and the new bishop was desperate for replacements, so here I am."

"Do you know where Bishop Michael lives now?"

"He's in a nursing home the other side of Charminster. Sunny Pines, it's called."

***

"He's in Room 66," the nurse said, and added with a wry smile, "Mind, it should be 666, with him. He may have been a bishop when he was compos, but he's a real devil now. I guess he suppressed it for too long."

"Oh?" Sam said.

She smiled cheerfully. "Don't sit too close to him or he'll have his hand up your skirt. Even if you keep three feet away, he'll probably get out his dongle and wave it at you."

"Well no one's done that for several days," Sam said, "so it'll make a nice change."

The nurse laughed. "That's the only way you can deal with it, because it's almost the only part of his body that still functions - and his mind has only one track. Don't say you haven't been warned."

Sam found the room without problem, and knocked gently on it before entering. It would have been hard to recognise the old man from the photograph taken all those years ago. But the bishop knew her, or he thought he did.

"Sally!" he said. "Sally Brown. I wondered if you'd come to see me today."

Clearly, Sam thought, he had more of a mind than the nurse gave him credit for. He could still remember Sam's mother from twenty-five years ago, enough to confuse her with Sam.

"That's right, my Lord," Sam shamelessly said. "What can I do for you?"

Twenty minutes later, Sam left Room 66 with a plastic bag containing a semen-soaked tissue.

***

As Sam took his first sips from his large glass of Sauvignon Blanc, which he felt he thoroughly deserved, he couldn't help grinning. He had calmly walked into a nursing home, wanked off a retired bishop, and just as calmly, walked out again. And not only that, but...

"You're looking very pleased with yourself."

Sam looked up and was surprised to see Matthew standing above him. "Oh! Er..."

"It's all right," Matthew actually looked embarrassed. "Mother told me I would probably find you here. She also told me to apologise to you. I'm not here to make more trouble."

"Er, right," Sam said. He waved to a seat. "Would you like to sit down?"

"Thank you." He sat down and then paused a little before continuing. "My problem is that I'm a terrible coward. I've never been able to face up to the consequences of my own actions. Mark was right: I kicked the football through the church window and blamed him for doing it."

"And you think I'm another consequence of one of your actions you haven't been able to face up to?"

Matthew didn't answer for several seconds, before he said, "It's possible. Yes.

"You see it was because I was the oldest child," he continued. "It was always me who was to blame if the other's misbehaved, and I couldn't control them. Mother and Father were so strict, I had to do everything they told me, and Mark took no notice."

"Emily doesn't appear strict to me."

"That's because you're only seeing one side of her, and she's trying to be nice to you to make up for one of her sons making Sally pregnant. And I think it might be me."

"You're wrong," Sam said. He had been considering keeping quiet about the DNA results, but he simply wasn't that mean.

"Wrong?"

"I sent DNA samples from Mark and Luke to the laboratory for testing. They told me that neither of them was my father, and that my DNA was so different to theirs that their brother could not be my father."

His face lifted. "I can't? But... you see, the condom burst several times when I... and Sally's doctor had told her to go off the pill. I was convinced it had to be me, but was too terrified to admit it when Mother grilled me."

"The DNA proves you didn't make my mother pregnant," Sam said, "but what did you do?"

He shrugged. "I might as well tell you everything, I suppose. I mean, it all happened because Mark had got Rachel pregnant and he had to marry her. Mother and Father were so ashamed, they insisted on me getting engaged to Fiona, as she had quite openly made such a thing about remaining a virgin until she was married."

"And you did as your parents told you?" Sam couldn't believe Matthew could be such a wimp.

"Of course. I've told you, I have no courage."

"But how did that lead to... later events?" Sam phrased it carefully, not wishing to break the mood that seemed to have grown between them.

"I was a young man. I was desperate for sex. Sally could see my predicament and she came to my aid. She was so wonderful and... she never refused me. It wasn't just in bed, we'd have sex in the garden, or in the kitchen whilst she was cooking a meal. When she got pregnant, I immediately proposed to her and didn't care about Fiona - my one act of bravery in my life. But she told me the baby wasn't mine - that the timing was all wrong. I never believed her, of course, I thought it was just an excuse not to marry me. Afterwards, I felt relieved. Then, I felt guilty that I had felt relieved."

"Yes but, apart from having sex with my mother," Sam broke in, "what else did you do? Like when your father changed his will."

"Oh, you mean that." He shook his head. "I was so ashamed of my greed. I tried to get Father to change his will back to us, even though he was absolutely right; Sally did have nothing except two small babies, and nowhere to live if she stopped working for us."

"And when she wouldn't change her will?" Sam asked.

Matthew looked puzzled. "Well, there was nothing I could do, was there? Secretly, I still hoped she might marry me before I got married to Fiona. But she was killed and my dream along with it."

"And that was it?" Sam said.

"Isn't that enough?" Matthew replied. "The one woman I ever loved was dead."

***

They both had a pub lunch, and then Matthew gave Sam a lift home.

"Do you want to come in for a coffee?" Sam asked him.

"Really?" Matthew replied, his eyes wide with astonishment at the offer.

Too late, Sam realised the ambiguity of his offer. He knew he should have explained he really had meant just coffee, but Matthew had been more than generous in the pub, and had listened carefully to the rigours of Sam(antha) growing up. They had gone into the pub as enemies and had come out as friends.

So Sam smiled back and said, "Like mother, like daughter."

***

"You put that inside my mother," Sam gasped, staring at the monster which lurched up from Matthew's groin. He'd been rather proud of his own tackle until he saw what lurked down Matthew's trouser leg.

"I know it's obscene," Matthew said, "but Sally loved it. Right from the first time she saw it, she simply couldn't get enough of it."

"Christ!" Sam said. "Did it er... did it... all go in?"

"Oh yes," Matthew said. "All the way."

"Bloody hell! Look, er... well it's..."

"You don't want to have sex with me," Matthew said, biting back his frustration. "That's all right. I mean I understand."

"How does your wife manage?" Sam could not help but wonder.

"We don't have sex."

"No." Knowing Fiona, Sam could understand that. "But you must have had it sometime. I mean, you have children, don't you?"

"She would milk me and then squirt it up her vagina. Hers was the second virgin birth."

"You mean that you haven't had proper sex since my mother..."

"No," Matthew said. "It's... frustrating."

"Frustrating! It's enough to drive anyone insane." Sam eyed the monster, trying to assess its size. It actually was not that wide - not like some of the huge cocks he didn't look at on the internet - it was just the length that was so terrifying - a good twelve inches long. "Look, I have a very small vagina so there's no way much of it will go inside, but I'm prepared to give it a go, for the sake of family goodwill, OK?"

"You will?" He was like a little boy - and no wonder.

"Only I have to be in control," Sam said. "I'm not going to let you see how far you can force it in."

"Of course not. That's just what your mother insisted - at first anyway."

"What position did you use?"

"The first few times, we did it in Father's study," Matthew said. "She'd sit on the chair at his desk - she never wore panties so she could keep all her clothes on. I lay on the floor beneath the chair and she simply lowered herself down onto me. Once, Father came in and I had to pull myself right under the desk whilst she pretended she was dusting the desk." He smiled. "If only he'd known the debauchery that was going on at the very desk at which he wrote his sermons. He'd have died of shame."

***

So that's exactly what they did. Michael lay on the floor, slid his legs beneath the desk and then slipped his trousers right down so that his monster lurched upwards. Sam was surprised to see he had a condom ready - so he'd obviously been hopeful of more than a coffee when they left the pub. After he pulled it over his knob, Sam took over rolling it down the length of his shaft, making Matthew grunt with excitement.

Matthew was quite slim so Sam was able to pull the chair right over his torso, the chair legs fitting astride him. Sam took off his panties and sat in the chair.

Such was the length of Matthew's prick that it wasn't so much a case of lowering himself down, as sliding forward to meet the monster. All the same, Sam kept a careful hold of one arm of the chair as he manipulated the cock towards his own opening. He had a sudden vision of slipping off the chair and being impaled on that enormous prick - except of course that in his case, his artificial cunt would probably get torn to shreds!

As the prick slid inside, once again Sam felt wonderful feelings sweep through him. He managed to get a good four inches inside whilst Matthew continued to make little grunting noises, which Sam felt incredibly arousing.

"It's funny," Matthew said, after a few minutes, "but your vagina runs at a different angle to Sally's. I get the impression I'm going to come bursting out your bum if it goes in much more."

Of course, Sam realised, with this position, Matthew had a unique vantage point and he was in danger of twigging that Sam's cunt was not real. Sam couldn't take the risk of exposure - he had to call a halt.

"All vaginas are unique," Sam said, "but you're right, this is very uncomfortable and I'm going to have to find another way."

He could sense Matthew's disappointment, as he knew what Sam also realised - there would be no easier way of being poked by this monster.

Unless... Sam shuddered at the very idea, even though it was incredibly exciting. No! There was no way he was going to do that. It was a repulsive idea - or did he mean compulsive.

"Why don't we try it a different way," he said, pulling his vagina off Matthew's cock and then moving forward until it was nuzzling against another aperture - a real aperture in Sam's body.

"I'm not sure..." Matthew started to say, but then Sam was wriggling around, trying to work his cock inside him. When it went in, it was with the pain of a knife wound. But like a Samurai warrior committing hari Kari, Sam bravely slid down on his sword.

***
Afterwards, Matthew said, a big smile on his face, "I'd never done it that way before."

"You gave me the most incredible orgasm of my life," Sam said, his grin even wider than Matthew's, "and now you tell me you've never done it that way before!"

"Does that mean we're friends, now?"

Sam nodded. "I guess so. It's rather good being friends with a man with such a big cock."

Matthew gave a wry grin. "When you have a cock the size of mine, you don't get many friends. The other boys at school all jeered at me, and the girls all ran away from me. I guess I am what I am as a defence mechanism for not being liked. Even my brothers hated me because I behaved so abysmally. I think the only person apart from Sally who didn't hate me was my father, but hating would have been against his religion."

"Tell me, what was he like, your father?"

"He was one of those old-fashioned vicars who preach hell and damnation. I was always terrified of him, but as I got older, I did respect him more. You always knew where you were with him, and as long as you pretended to follow the Bible, he left you alone. Mark and Luke openly rebelled and there were always rows with those two, but I simply conformed."

And took the easy way out as always, Sam reasoned.

SATURDAY EVENING - PARTY

"Thank you all for coming to my seventieth birthday party." Emily looked around at the people assembled before her: her three sons, Matthew, Mark and Luke, with wives, Fiona and Rachel. Luke's wife was not there, and all the grandchildren had found excuses not to attend. Bishop Michael had been brought over from the nursing home. He'd clearly been sedated so that he didn't keep showing off his erect penis, and he was asleep in his wheelchair, so it was almost exactly the same group as had been there twenty-five years before.

Then there was Samantha, looking just as Sally had done, all those years ago. Just like Sally, Sammie had 'scrubbed up well', and today she could feel for her exactly the same emotions as she'd had for Sally, all those years ago. She beamed at her now, and Sammie grinned back.

"As you know, this is rather a special event because of Samantha's appearance on the scene just a week ago. She had recently discovered that her mother had died at my birthday party, twenty-five years previously and needed closure. We are here tonight to ensure she gets that closure.

"Of course," she continued, "one of the big mysteries surrounding Samantha's life is the identity of her father. When her mother was pregnant, I suspected that one of my three sons had been involved, but with the wonders of DNA testing and samples provided by my sons - admittedly, some of them rather belatedly (and she grimaced at Matthew and Mark) - Samantha told me just before this party began that I am not her grandmother. That is rather a disappointment for me, as I would have loved to have Samantha as a granddaughter, and it means that she must continue to live her life, like many other people, never knowing the identity of her father. I would like..."

"But I do," Sam interrupted.

There was suddenly a deathly silence and all eyes turned to Sam.

"The DNA results confirmed it. I got the final samples delivered express to the laboratory this morning and they were able to run some quick tests. I now know who my father is, and it's really rather a surprise. Sorry, do you think you could all wait here whilst I go and get the results? They're in my room."

Sam went running up the stairs and when he got halfway up, he turned around to smile at all those staring open-mouthed at him and added, "Of course, this is exactly what happened at the party twenty-five years ago, when my mother went to check on us two children." He proceeded quickly up the stairs.

It only took him a couple of minutes to get the folder of DNA results which he'd kept hidden under the mattress. Then he ran back along the corridor to the top of the stairs. Of course, he wasn't so stupid not to check for a fishing line across the top of the stairs before he commenced down.

But as he looked down at the assembled party below in the Hall, all waiting his return, he didn't notice the third stair down, and the line suddenly tautening across it. Not until his right foot suddenly caught in something, and he felt himself tripping forwards, unable to prevent himself falling headlong down the stairs.

PART FIVE - DENOUEMENT

One of the first things one learns in judo is how to break your fall. As he lurched head-first downwards, he was tucking his head into his shoulder and lifting his arm to form an arc, and it was his arm and shoulder which took the initial impact. But even the brunt of that was absorbed, as he curled his entire body into a ball and rolled down a couple more steps.

When he was a kid, he'd learnt it as a show off at judo. It had always impressed people then, but it was even more impressive now. As the calves of his legs came in contact with the steps, he straightened his entire body, and his momentum was just right to bring him back up to a standing position halfway down the stairs, with a simple grasp on the banisters to steady himself.

He could stare at the astonished faces looking on, initially in shocked horror at a repetition of the events twenty-five years ago, then their faces had rapidly turned to amusement at the way he had recovered. Except that one of the party below was not looking at him but facing the rear wall of the Hall and appeared to be reeling in something which was too fine to be seen.

"You can stop that now," he said. "It's too late to hide what you've done."

All eyes turned towards the person at the wall, who only belatedly became aware of their scrutiny. No one spoke as the person turned to face the others.

It was Matthew who eventually broke the silence which filled the room. "Mother! What on earth are you doing?"

"Don't ask such silly questions," Emily said. "I'm trying to kill her. It's in all our best interest. Now can someone help me finish her off?"

***

"I came here knowing absolutely nothing about my mother," Sam started, "and quickly realised she was a lovely person who enjoyed sex, and had absolutely no inhibitions about dispensing it freely."

Emily snorted. She was seated at the dining table, flanked by Matthew on one side and Luke on the other. They'd been 'caring' for her since Emily had suggested cutting Sam's throat with a carving knife.

"But I quickly had to face two important questions," Sam continued. "Who was my father, and who murdered my mother?"

There was a gasp from around the table as Sam put the second question.

"I, too, was shocked when Emily told me how she had seen evidence of a tripwire across the stairs after my mother's fall. She convinced me the best way of discovering the murderer was to re-enact the scene, with me taking on the role of my mother.

"Emily said she believed that one of her sons was my father, which seemed to be borne out by their reluctance to give me a DNA sample. But she was being economical with the truth. There was someone else she thought was more likely to be the father, whom she wished to protect."

He couldn't prevent his eyes flicking towards Michael, asleep in his wheelchair, and everyone else followed his gaze.

"A person who," Sam continued, "was posturing to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, so there had to be no hint of scandal."

Emily again snorted and shook her head, which disconcerted him.

"However," he said, deciding to change tack, "the story really started a long time before - fifty years ago, at Cambridge when Richard, Michael and Emily were at university together. Emily gave me part of the tale yesterday, but she withheld the more personal bits." He stared at Emily and said, "I think it's time to tell us about the actual relationship between you all."

Emily's eyes lit up, just as they had before when she spoke of Cambridge. "It was the 1960s and free love was everywhere. Richard, Michael and I were a threesome - not so much a love triangle as a love sandwich - with me as the filling. For heaven's sake, Matthew, don't look so shocked. After we'd completed our finals, both Richard and Michael proposed to me, and I had to choose. In spite of Michael's superior skills in bed, I chose Richard and we married. Richard got an almost immediate posting here, and we decided to start a family straightaway.

"But twelve months went by without me missing a single period, and I decided that perhaps Richard needed a little help. I asked Michael to assist and Matthew was born almost nine months to the day afterwards."

"Mother!" Matthew was aghast. "You mean all these years you haven't told me who my father really was. That's horrible."

"Calm down Matthew," Mark said. "I suspect that Mother hasn't finished, yet, and she's going to give us all news of our real father."

Emily smiled. "It's true. A year later, when we decided to go for another baby, I immediately involved Michael, and Mark promptly came along. A year after that, Michael helped bring Luke into being."

"But it didn't end with impregnating you, did it Emily?" Sam asked. "I realised when I went to the cathedral yesterday that the flower displays were far older than a few days. Even now, you still see Michael under the cloak of flower arranging, and you've been doing so throughout your married life."

Emily looked at Michael who was still asleep. "I promised Michael I would always protect his reputation, but I guess nothing I say now will harm him. So, yes, we've continued our affair ever since. Do you know why I specifically employed your mother?"

Sam shook his head.

"Because," Emily said, "I was looking for someone to distract Richard from continually pestering me for sex. There were several applicants for the job, but one of your mother's previous employers gave her an excellent reference: they said that she had the morals of a prostitute without the business sense."

She accompanied her words with an offensive smirk. Sam should have been upset; instead, he felt dispassionate.

"I knew Richard would be totally engrossed with her," Emily continued, "but I thought he was sterile so I was astonished when Sally became pregnant. I interrogated the boys, thinking it would be one of them, but although I was surprised to discover they'd all been having some kind of relationship with the ugly bitch, they all denied being the father of her child. To cap it all, Richard changed his will in her favour, cutting out the boys."

"And then my mother told you," Sam said, at last beginning to understand, "that Michael was going to marry her. And you were bitterly jealous."

"You found out!" Emily said, clearly surprised.

"When I went to see Michael," Sam said, "he mistook me for Sally. As I was leaving, he said: 'You will marry me, won't you Sally?' At the time, I thought his mind had been simply wandering."

"Just before my birthday party, Sally said that she'd been having sex with Michael and had told him he was the father of the twins. He dearly wanted to become Archbishop of Canterbury and couldn't afford the scandal, so he'd agreed to marry her. I was absolutely livid."

"Which is why you murdered her," Sam said, "using the trick you just pulled on me."

"Precisely. I was already thinking about it because of Richard's will, but it was the final straw when she manipulated Michael and was going to take him away from me.

Her admission put the room into total silence.

Emily suddenly laughed. "The ironic thing is that it was all a mistake, because afterwards Michael told me Sally had made it all up - he'd never had sex with her and had never discussed marriage with her."

Of course he told you that, Sam thought, but he said, "What is more of a mystery is why you had to try to murder me. In fact, why did you tell me about my mother being murdered, and convince me to stand in for her in this charade? If you hadn't, I'd simply have done my nostalgia trip and then gone home and not bothered you again."

Emily looked confused, as though it was obvious. "Why, it was Richard's will, of course. I had the right to live here with a reasonable annuity until I died, but then Richard specified the estate would be divided equally between his natural children. All of my sons were Michael's, so you were obviously Richard's only child." She had a sudden thought. "You are Richard's child, aren't you?"

All eyes were riveted on Sam as he considered how he should answer - with the truth or a lie. He was not to know that just a few minutes later he would bitterly regret his decision.

"Yes," he said. "I am Richard's child."

Emily nodded. "I knew Michael would never betray me like that with your slut of a mother. Of course, twenty-five years ago, no one could have proved a thing, but now they can, and I'm sure Richard realised that would be the case. Remember, we were at Cambridge in 1962, the year that Crick and Watson were up for the Nobel Prize for finding DNA - and they subsequently got it. Everyone was talking about the possibilities. So, with you being Richard's only natural child, you had to be got out of the way."

"But I didn't know anything about the will," Sam protested. "I never even thought about it. Even if..."

"But you wondered about your father," Emily said. "Whether or not I helped you, you'd have been finding a way to DNA test the boys, and when they proved negative, you'd have been thinking about the only other man in the house. You'd have found Richard's brother and proved you were related, and then you'd be demanding the estate. Especially when you found out about the shares."

"Shares?" Virtually everyone said it together.

"Richard was an excellent theologian; he even embraced the theory of DNA, but technology simply turned him off. When he inherited some IBM shares from his father, he wasn't interested - he didn't even mention them to me or anyone else. They're worth just over four million pounds today." Emily smiled at the open mouths of all around her, but spoke specifically to Sam. "You can see why I tried to buy you off."

"Buy me off?" Sam was puzzled. "When did you do that?"

"I asked you to get some money from the safe. Do you remember? If you'd only stolen the contents of the safe, you could have walked away with ten thousand pounds in your pocket. Then I'd have been sure you would never return. As it was, you were simply too honest for your own good. That's why you have to die."

Sam shook his head at the insanity Emily had concealed within her.

"I'd been expecting you for years, of course," Emily continued, "except I thought there'd be the two of you, and I'd done all my planning around that. I'd decided to let you both stay in the little flat above the coach house, with the defective gas heater. As it was, I had to think on my feet a little. In the end, it seemed a repetition of Sally's demise would be more poetic.

"I also needed to know that you were the same kind of tart as your mother. That would be the final justification I needed to kill you. It all worked like a dream. You let each of my sons screw you within hours of me telling them you were a little slut who'd have sex with anyone."

Which explained, Sam realised, why Emily had originally come up with the idea of him changing sex and becoming her housekeeper. Clearly, in her mind, she now completely believed he was a woman, and had forgotten who he really was. His exposure as a man, which he'd been expecting at any moment, had never come.

"So," Emily spoke to the rest of them, "do you all see why Samantha has to die? With her dead, there'll be no one to question who was really the father of my three sons, and you will all inherit the estate. Let her live, and you can kiss goodbye to everything."

"I'm in," Mark said, standing up and quickly moving to lock the door and pocket the key. "But we have to make it look good. Luke, you'll need to sign the death certificate."

"Oh shit!" Luke said. "It's too dangerous. Any kind of accidental death and the coroner would be involved."

"Then give her a fatal injection," Mark said, "and call it a heart attack. What was used in that hospital to murder those patients?"

"Insulin," Luke said, "I have some in my bag. But we could be found out..."

"Not if we all stick together," Rachel said. "Remember, we've been counting on getting a share in the house. It's even more important now, with the four million in shares."

That's right," Fiona said. "This little slut is cheating us out of our rightful inheritance."

"Matthew," Mark said. "Help me hold her whilst Luke gets his medical bag."

"You want me to kill her?" Matthew asked.

"Oh shit!" Sam thought. It was not meant to be like this. The other members of the denouement were supposed to be shocked and horrified when the murderer was identified, not gang up with her to kill the detective. Even the women were ready to give him the chop. And whilst with his judo, he was an even match for any one of them, he was no Bruce Lee; he couldn't take them all on and win. What the hell was he going to do?

***

"You really want me to kill her?" Matthew repeated.

"It's probably best if you just help me hold her down," Mark said, "whilst Luke injects her."

"If you kill Sam," Matthew said, "then you have to kill me as well. I'm not going to murder anyone, or cover up a murder."

"For fuck's sake," Mark said. "She's going to steal our inheritance."

"And you'd all kill, just for money?" Matthew said. "You all disgust me."

"You obviously have something of your father in you." Sam said, suddenly remembering he hadn't played his master card. "Your mother said he was always outspoken."

"Father was a good man," Matthew said, "and I don't care about my biological..." He paused for a second and then added, "What exactly do you mean?"

"Everyone has assumed," Sam replied, "that in order to prove that Richard was my father, I took a DNA sample from his brother, but I didn't even know about him until now. The proof actually comes from another route entirely - because the DNA shows I am Matthew's half-brother, and our common father is not Bishop Michael. We are both the children of Richard."

"Fuck!" "Shit!" and, from Emily, "We can still kill her.

"But now we're better off than we were before," Fiona's face cleared as she spoke directly to Matthew. "You and Samantha will split the estate between you, rather than you only getting a third if you share it with your brothers."

"But what about us?" Rachel indignantly declared. "We'll end up with nothing."

"Winners and losers," Fiona shouted at her. "We win and you lose."

Rachel turned to Mark. "Do something. We have to kill them all."

Mark looked around, but he knew it was hopeless. He smiled and said, "That was, of course, a rather silly joke we were playing on you, Sam. I hope you'll consider it as such."

"Yes, of course," Luke said, relief flooding his voice. "It was a joke."

"A joke?" Bishop Michael had suddenly come to life. "Apart from Matthew, you were all going to kill this lovely young lady." He turned to Emily. "And I blame you for the way you have brought up my sons. It's all your fault. If only I'd married Sally. She was a lovely girl, and she fucked like rabbit."

With a horrific scream, Emily leapt up from the table and threw herself at Michael, punching him and kicking him, and trying to gouge out his eyes.

***

"I think Father knew that Sally had been murdered," Matthew said later that evening.

After Emily's total breakdown, Mark and Rachel had helped Luke take her to a mental hospital and have her committed. Sam had agreed there was little point in reporting Emily to the police, since she was clearly mad. Where she was going, she would pose no further danger to Sam, Michael or anyone else.

Shortly after that, an ambulance had arrived to take Michael back to his nursing home.

Finally, Fiona had started to rant at Matthew for having sex with Sam, and Matthew had calmly told her he wasn't prepared to live with someone who would commit murder for money, so she could get the fuck out and he never wanted to see her again.

Which left Matthew and Sam on their own, with Matthew pondering over events. "The day after Sally was killed," he continued, "Father quite pointedly asked us all what had caused her to trip, and he stared at us as though one of us knew the answer. He made me feel guilty, and I hadn't done anything."

"Do you think he realised it was Emily?" Sam asked.

"I don't think much got past him, actually. He was incredibly pious, but that didn't mean he didn't have a good sense of judgement. Clearly, he suspected we weren't all his children. It was obviously bitter jealousy which made Mother kill Sally. I'm sure she regretted it later, but you can imagine how having that on your conscience for twenty-five years would prey on your mind."

"Especially knowing that eventually Sally's children would come looking, poking, prying and demanding their fair shares," Sam added. "She must have been on tenterhooks in the months leading up our eighteenth birthday, with our right to find out about our biological parents, and it would get worse as another seven years went by, knowing that finally they would come. You can see why it tipped her mind."

Matthew nodded. "Smart detective work, Miss Marple."

"No way," Sam said, shaking his head. "I should have used the Agatha Christie principle to give me the answer straightaway. Who was the person least likely to have done it? Why, Emily, of course!"

"What I don't understand," Matthew said, "is why you bothered to get a DNA test done on me, when you'd already told me that I couldn't be your father."

"It was something your mother said," Sam replied, "about when she was deciding whether to marry Richard or Michael. She said that Richard was shorter than Michael, but he made up for it in other areas. At the time, I wondered whether it was a roundabout way of saying Richard had a big plonker. After seeing you and knowing that..."

Sam had been about to say that he, too, had a big penis, but realised Matthew still thought he was Samantha. "So I linked a family by putting two big pricks together."

"Talking of big pricks," Matthew said, "do you fancy..."

Sam simply nodded.