Do you know that Elvis song “Do you ever get one of those days when nothing goes right from morning to night.” I won’t bore you with the details, but they include a broken iPad screen, a dead phone battery and wearing the wrong jacket among other things. One way or another fate conspired to put me in this second-hand shop buying a pen.

I was supposed to be taking notes at a trial; I’m a reporter for a no account small city newspaper. Humble beginnings and you don’t need to know where, but everyone has to start somewhere. The courthouse is in the wrong part of town, all offices and no retail. In a side street was a pokey little second-hand shop and I only tried it in desperation, but you can’t take notes without a pen if all your other kit has died. The character running the place was... well let's just say it was good that it was dark.

I think he must have been a bodyguard or a bouncer until he got too old for it and someone flattened his face. It was hard to tell exactly what the damage had been, but I could see why the lights were off.

He had some pens, ancient second-hand things that in their day were probably premier writing instruments. I picked one.

“I don’t suppose you have any ink that works with this?”

He made a noise somewhere between a giggle and a snivel; a sniggle maybe. I guess a flattened face will do that for you.

“Of courthe snir, of courthe,” he said in a sort of hoodlum version of obsequiousness.

He rummaged around under the sales desk and came up with a little bottle and carefully placed it beside the pen.

“How much?”

“Five pounds exactly.”

I have no idea if that was cheap or expensive, I wasn’t going to haggle, his face might be wrecked, but his fists still looked huge.

I made it to the trial I was covering; sat at the back took out my new pen and opened the ink bottle. It was one of those old-fashioned fountain pens where you have to unscrew the barrel and squeeze a bulb to get the ink into the thing.

Two weird things happened. First, when I squeezed the bulb to get the air out, a drop of clear liquid fell on the desk in front of me.

“Odd that it’s clear,” I thought. Even more odd that the table started to dissolve.

There was no one near me, so I got my water bottle out of my bag and dripped some on the patch of smoking wood in front of me. There was more vapour. I slid sideways into my seat just in time for some of the now dilute solution to miss my legs. I looked at the floor where it landed and was relieved to see no more smoke. I poured a bit more water on the desk and everything calmed down.

“Lucky it’s an old desk,” I thought, “one more hole in it is no big deal.”

I poured some water into the cap from my bottle and sucked it up into the pen, had a quick look around the room and squirted that on the floor as well.

I did a couple more rinses and then risked drawing up some ink. Before reassembling the barrel, I tried writing. Brilliant, the ink flowed at a perfect pace, I don’t think I’ve ever written so neatly.

“Why didn’t I have a pen like this at school?” I thought. I had a close look at the nib, and it really looked like good quality gold.

“So that’s why the acid didn’t dissolve it,” I thought.

I couldn’t get the ink bulb to go back into the barrel. I had a quick squint inside, and there seemed to be something there. I tried shaking it to no avail. After a minute’s thought, I straightened a paper clip and probed inside the barrel. Another few seconds fishing around and a rolled up scrap of paper slid out. I carefully straightened it to find a series of numbers on the inside. There was no mistaking a bank sort code and an account number.

“This pen has a history I thought, but whose history?”

I turned the paper over somehow expecting to see a name. No such luck.

“Oh well,” I thought, “there must be some way to track it down.” I screwed the barrel back on the pen, and as I did, I felt a roughness under my fingers. In the dark of the shop I hadn’t noticed it. The gold lettering was almost worn away so that at first sight it just seemed like a scratch but once I had my eyes focused I could just make out 007.