Zam didn't sleep well that night. There were just too many thoughts rushing around his head for him to settle properly. How had his footprints shown up at the scene of a murder? Who had killed the woman and why were they trying to frame him? There was something about the crime that didn't quite add up, like something obvious he'd missed but he couldn't quite piece it together; he was just too tired and confused.

Then there was the matter of the Monetary Policy Committee suing him. Crawford was a fierce adversary and an exceptional lawyer but could he really lose to her? She didn't have a case against him and he knew that in theory, he should be able to defend himself and yet yesterday's preliminary hearing was a very even affair. With Zam in a somewhat distracted state, he hadn't made his points quite as firmly as he would've liked and everything Crawford seemed to say was just... perfect. Even so, he knew that it was very early on in the trial and he was still in a very good position. If Crawford was going to win, she'd need to pull out some more tricks.

It was a pretty rough night. He tossed and turned in his sleep, constantly waking up and then drifting back to sleep again. At one point during the night, he suddenly found himself sitting bolt upright, as if he'd been disturbed by something. He'd felt groggy and tired but something must have awoken him. He glanced around the bedroom but in the total darkness, he couldn't see anything that would have woken him up.

"Taylor?" he whispered. She was asleep. After a few seconds, he guessed that maybe she'd accidentally brushed against his arm in her sleep. Come to think of it, his arm did feel a bit unusual, so perhaps she'd rolled over on it, causing some numbness. Without thinking about it anymore, Zam slumped back down onto his pillow, when he finally managed to get a decent night's sleep.

*

He woke up the next morning feeling awful. He laid on the bed for a while trying to let the feeling pass. Probably due to his less than ideal sleep, he was still extremely tired and every time he tried to open his eyes, they resisted like they didn't want to see the light of day. Zam forced them open, blinking several times to try and rid his vision of the usual morning blurriness. It didn't pass. Slightly confused, he rolled out of bed and stood up.

"Oof!" he yelped as he immediately fell to the ground, his legs seeming surprised at having to hold weight. His head spun horribly with a dizziness that was so strong it was sickening which was odd as he hadn't had anything to drink last night so he shouldn't have been hungover. He brought his hands up to his head, to try and nurse the headache but he was met with a grim sight. His arms were green.

He shook his head and blinked, thinking he was seeing things. No, he wasn't mistaken. Even with his slightly blurred vision there was no doubt in his mind. His right forearm was almost completely numb, his palms were clammy, his entire body was drenched in sweat and he felt as though he could throw up at any moment. He focused his eyes on his right arm, scanning it for any sign of—there! There it was! The nail in the coffin that confirmed the symptoms. Halfway up his forearm was an angry red mark and two tiny holes roughly a centimetre apart. He needed medical attention and he needed it quickly.

Using his left arm to grab the bed, he pulled himself up on his feet, supporting himself so that his knees wouldn't buckle once again. He steadied himself, trying desperately to keep down the vomit that was eagerly attempting to escape his body. When he was ready, he began to move his feet but he, unfortunately, was losing control with his head spinning so much. He soon abandoned being careful and tried charging forwards instead, forcing his way out of the bedroom and stumbling wildly into the kitchen.

"Morning!" Taylor chirped with an enthusiasm that Zam didn't currently share as he crashed to the floor once again.

"Urgh..." he moaned as he was helped back to his feet.

"Are you ok?" she asked, with panic in her voice.

"No," he groaned. "I've been poisoned! I need a cup of tea!"

"Poisoned!" she cried. "But how? When? And tea? Is that the cure?"

"No, I'm just really thirsty. Priorities woman!" Zam stumbled into the kitchen counter and set about making himself a nice brew using the instant hot water tap. He'd need a clear head to survive this and a good cup of tea was always a good start to any problem. He took a good sip of the steaming hot liquid as he slumped down into a chair, exhausted by his recent efforts. The tea lifted his spirits. "Taylor, look at this."

"Some kind of bite?" she said as she examined his poisoned arm.

"Judging by the distance between the teeth marks and the depth of the bite, I'd say this was... not Ekans... not Arbok... must be Seviper!" Zam cried out. "Only trouble is, I don't know how the venom works. It's killing me and I don't know how."

"So... can you fix it?" Taylor asked, with a quiver in her voice.

"I'll probably think of something," Zam shrugged. "But that's not the real question we should be asking ourselves. The real question is: who's trying to kill me and who's trying to frame me for murder?" Could the two events possibly be a coincidence? Surely not. And if it wasn't a coincidence and someone was so desperate to bring him down then maybe if he solved the murder of Amelia Humphries, he'd find out who'd poisoned him. Unfortunately, to do that he needed to be alive so this whole Seviper bite thing was really putting the pressure on.

"Zam!" Taylor said, snapping him out of his thoughts. "We have to think of something! You can't die, not when I'm... not... what do you want me to do?"

"Ok, all I need to do is figure out how I'm dying and as long it's not an irreversible process I should be fine," Zam stated. Of course, it wasn't nearly that simple and with how long he felt like he had left to live he would more than likely die before figuring out anything.

"So, you want me to take you to the doctor's?"

"The nearest A and E is at least a twenty-minute drive away on a good day and they'll take about three hours just to give a diagnosis that I already know by which point I'll be dead. So, no, let's not do that."

"Can I do anything?" Taylor asked. He thought for a moment or two before having a brainwave. Seviper had a move that they used called Acid. What if that meant their venom was acidic?

"Yes, you can do something for me, something very important," Zam said, his tone deadly serious. "In the medical cupboard, up on the right, there's a needle and a syringe. I'll need those as well as some oven cleaner." Looking slightly confused, Taylor set about her little task as quickly as she could, bringing him all of his desired items.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Blood test," he replied as he readied the needle and syringe, fixing the two together, before carefully inserting the thin, metallic needle into one of the holes in his forearm. There was a sharp sting of pain and then dark red liquid oozed into the syringe, filling it completely before Zam took the needle out of his arm.

He took his almost empty mug of tea and waved it around carelessly, throwing the remnants across the room. Then, he emptied his poisoned blood out into the mug and grabbed the oven cleaner that Taylor had placed on the floor. He carefully sprayed the liquid into the cup and watched with an eager anticipation, not even so much as blinking as the critical chemical reaction took place.

"Do you see that!" Zam cried with excitement when the effervescence died down and he was able to examine the cup.

"Some kind of white powder?"

"It's a salt!" Zam grinned. "A sodium salt formed from the acid-base reaction between my blood and the sodium hydroxide oven cleaner! Taylor, it's turning my blood acidic!"

"And that's a good thing?"

"Well, it's going to kill me in approximately twenty-nine minutes but other than that it's bloody fantastic!"

"So, you can cure it? You know what to do?" Taylor asked, a smile beginning to spread on her beautiful face.

"Eh, maybe, but there's definitely a chance," Zam admitted. "I need to get my blood back to its normal pH of roughly seven point four which is very slightly alkaline so all I need to do in theory is insert the correct amount of alkaline substances into my bloodstream to balance out the acidic venom and then over time my body should do the rest."

"Ok, so alkaline... that's like oven cleaner, right?"

"Well, yeah but that's corrosive, that'd just kill me a different way," Zam responded. He thought for a moment before he loudly exclaimed the solution. "Cucumber! Cucumber is almost entirely made of water and yet is highly alkaline! Taylor, I need you to go to the nearest shop and buy as many cucumbers as you can!"

"What if the shopkeeper just thinks I'm really horny?"

"I'm dying woman!"

"Ok, ok!" Taylor cried out. "I'm going. Please don't die while I'm gone."

"I'll try my best but no promises," Zam smiled. Taylor gave him one last worried look before she bolted out the door. "Right then, now that that's all sorted, let's solve this murder, shall we?"

"Zam?" said the voice of Emily down the phone once he had finished dialling her number.

"Yes, Emily it's me. How's everything going?"

"Not great," she admitted. "We talked to the victim's husband as well as a few others to get their stories and basically, we've just got no suspects. From the looks of things, the only people who would have wished harm upon her were people who were on the wrong end of a court case that she wrapped up but as far as we know, none of those people knew her personally."

"Ok, so what are all of the people's stories then?" Zam asked. "Start with what the husband said."

"He was apparently on the toilet when Amelia called him," Emily began. "He says that as soon as he was done, he picked up the phone, heard the message then he called us and rushed to her office immediately. From the timings of the phone calls, it all checks out and it means that our killer was in that room and then out again in less than eight minutes as that's how long it took the first police officers to arrive."

"Eight minutes?" Zam wondered. Something still didn't quite add up, but he couldn't figure out what it was and it was frustrating.

"Yeah, and it's that small timescale that gives all of Amelia's closest friends and colleagues alibis," Emily continued. "Abbie Hughes had recently fallen out with Amelia but she was at a doctor's appointment at the time of the murder so it can't be her. Rose Johnson was at a restaurant, Max Jones was at the cinema, Patricia McAllister was robbing a bank; doesn't exactly make her innocent but it's a pretty decent alibi for murder. And now one of my colleagues has just confirmed Susan Crawford's alibi, great."

"What did you say?" Zam said, stunned. Maybe he'd misheard. Maybe he'd died and in the afterlife, he'd made up some kind of alternate reality in which everything was his weird deranged fan fiction.

"Amelia had this old friend, Susan Crawford who used to work at her law firm," Emily explained. "Recently, they'd been catching up. Going to the office together, going out for coffees, you know, normal catching up stuff. I wondered if there was more to it and maybe there is but she's not our killer. She said she was at home at the time of the murder and she lives right on the outskirts of Goldenrod in this big mansion, it's a good forty-minute drive away and we just found images of her car driving to the scene of the crime long after it happened."

"But..." Zam breathed, trying to get his head around the situation. It had to be her. It couldn't be a coincidence. The pieces should've been easy to put together but he couldn't seem to do it, they were all just swimming around his head. No actually, it was his head that was swimming, his body literally swaying from side to side as the dizziness took a hold of him, the poison finally taking its fatal course as he fell out of his chair to the floor, losing consciousness as his life slipped away.

*

"Zam!" a voice cried out. He felt something swipe across his face, hard. He raised a hand to his cheek, as pain began to spread. Pain? If he could feel pain... if he could feel anything at all then surely... surely, he was alive!

"Yes?" he asked, opening his eyes to the sight of Taylor and Tristan on their knees looking at his once lifeless body on the floor of his kitchen. "Did I miss something?"

"You were dying," Taylor whispered. A wide smile spread across her face and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes before she leapt at him, crushing him in a hug so tight it probably punctured his lungs whilst she bombarded his face with kisses.

"Well, I'm always dying," Zam breathed. He wasn't entirely sure anyone had heard him. "Right then, am I completely poison free?"

"I don't know," Taylor admitted. "I got back from the shop with all of the cucumbers and you were just lying on the floor and, and your mouth was foaming and I thought you were dead. So, I did what you wanted. I stuck all of the cucumbers in the blender and then injected the juice into you until you stopped spasming."

"An' then she came ta me," Tristan interjected. "An' I say don' worry love, it's awight innit? All 'e needs is good ol' bit o' booze! Forced a pint down ya and now everyfinks fan-facking-tastic!"

"Thanks, you two," Zam nodded in appreciation when he was eventually released from Taylor's arms and was allowed to sit up. "You saved my life."

"It was nothing."

"It was everyfink."

"Right then, must crack on, got a case to solve," Zam grinned as he jumped back to his feet, being his usual animated, eccentric self. "The question remains, how did Crawford manage to kill someone whilst at the same time being forty minutes away from the crime scene and why did she do it?"

"I'm sorry, what?" Taylor spluttered. "You think Crawford killed that woman?"

"Oh yeah, you missed a pretty crucial development when you were gone and now I'm positive that Crawford killed her. Trouble is, she's got a cast iron alibi; she was absolutely nowhere near the crime scene when..." His voice tailed off as something in his brain clicked. His mouth hung open for a moment as the gears begun to work, finally starting to piece things together as he remembered the most important detail of all. Something so small he'd completely glossed over it at first and almost forgotten about it completely but now it was there, staring him in the face and now everything made perfect sense.

"What?" Taylor asked. "What is it? Have you solved it?"

"Oh, that is brilliant," Zam sighed, a huge grin appearing on his face. He started jumping up and down, dancing around the room, ecstatic with his own genius. "That is absolutely brilliant! I mean it's also completely horrible but wow is it clever!"

"What are you talking about?" Taylor demanded. He stopped dancing for one moment to look her in the eye, his face the expression of pure joy.

"This whole time, I've been looking at this case completely the wrong way around," he explained. "We were given a lot of information at the start of this case; a direct extract from Amelia's murder. But it's like getting just one page from a book. You think it makes sense and you can't see it any other way than how it's presented but here that's exactly the point! We're only seeing the information we're meant to see and thus, are interpreting it how it was intended to be interpreted!"

"Ok?" Taylor said, looking utterly confused.

"What if we allow our perspective to shift," Zam grinned. "What if for one moment, we forget about the conclusions we drew instantly from the information and try and think outside the box. What if we try and write in our own versions of the pages either side of the one we were given? And then, everything starts to become clear and all of a sudden an absolute impossibility becomes an absolute certainty."

"Yeah, sorry I'm still completely lost," Taylor admitted. Tristan too looked as though he had no idea what was going on. "Have you solved it?"

"I believe I have," Zam nodded. "I think I know who, why and how Amelia Humphries was killed and all I need to confirm my theory is to see one picture and if my hunch is correct then I should have already seen it."