The young woman leant across the end of the bed, tucking the bedclothes into place, totally unaware of the tall, dark-haired man standing in the hallway watching her through a narrow slit in the doorway.

Careful not to make a sound for fear of alerting her, the man eased the door open centimetre by centimetre, until he could just squeeze through into the room.   Then, as the woman started to straighten up again, he quickly crept up behind her.

“Well that’s a job well…” the woman started to say.   Her words turned to a shriek in mid sentence as two long arms wrapped round her chest and waist from behind.

“No!   Please!   Don’t!” she begged.   Struggling furiously, she squirmed round in the powerful grip of her assailant, until she was facing him.

“Paul!   You idiot!” she said, laughing although her heart still pounded wildly, as she recognised her fiancée, Paul Sonneborn.

Still holding her in his arms, Paul began to laugh at her reaction.

Watching him as he laughed, her brow wrinkling with frustration, Anne-Marie wondered why he looked so familiar to her.   She thought, ‘Of course he looks familiar, we’ve been engaged for the last three months!’   But she knew that wasn’t it.   No, she couldn’t get over the nagging conviction that she had known Paul long before that.

Ever since they had started dating eight months ago, Anne-Marie had had the feeling she had known Paul before.   In the time that she now thought of as the Lost Time: time that was still hazy to her.   The time that her memory had tried so hard to block out in a bid to protect her from the horror of what had been done to her:

It had happened more than five years ago, when Anne-Marie had just started working at an office block in Collins Street, Melbourne.   The Great Depression of the early 1990s was in full swing so, like many struggling firms in those days, the company operated permanently short-staffed.   Which meant that to keep to schedule, all their staff were required to work compulsory overtime ten or even fifteen hours every week.   So Anne-Marie often worked from 7:00 a.m. till after 9:00 p.m.

To save time in the evenings, she ducked down a slim alleyway which ran all the way from Collins Street to Flinders Street.   Although the alley was poorly lit, there were neon lights every twenty metres or so, so she had decided it was worth the risk, since it cut nearly ten minutes off her walk to the station.