About 11pmthe phone rings and I hear moaning on the phone and see that it is Mary?s phonenumber. I listen and the phone went dead. I tried calling her...back but get abusy signal. I go to the restaurant that the girls are to be at and I see Vickiand her date. I don?t see her sister and I call her over to me and ask herwhere her sister is at. She tries not to answer but I tell her that if sheknows to let me know now. She tells me that her and date went up to lover?scircle. I tell her that she. Charlie. Then we went into business together. With us both in the same office together, it happened and I found out he felt the same way. As time went on, we spent more time together. Your mother and Betty had you kids to keep them occupied and they never noticed. A few years later Sharon spent more time with you and I had a feeling that she was falling in love with you as she had with me all those years ago. So I let her.Betty was the same way, but was slowly falling in love with you also, and. But then the thought of having to rely on nothing more than women who pretended to be younger than they were and frequently made unreasonable demands on his virility persuaded Alex that maybe what Gabby wanted wasn't so bad really.Most of the time he spent in Virtual Reality—togged up in bizarre equipment that simulated muscular movement and presented a 360 degrees vista of an imagined world in front of his eyes—wasn't so much for sex or entertainment but for work. And most of that was to scan. Then he burst into tears. ‘Please don’t hit me again,’ he blubbed. ‘I won’t if you tell me where Cathy is,’ I snapped back. ‘I don’t know,’ he whimpered. ‘Do you want another smack?’ I asked him. ‘No, honestly, I don’t know where she is. She left my flat a week ago and I haven’t seen her since.’ ‘Did you give her any of your pills?’ I asked, dearly tempted to kick the shit out of him. ‘She’s a big girl,’ he sobbed. ‘Yeah she had some uppers and downers and a few lines. But I tell you she was.