Chapter 3 - Mad

I don't get much sleep that night, and when I do sleep I get nightmares. But not about Hugo. I dream of Batman coming to me in the night, knowing I've kept a secret from him. He wakes me, a hand over my mouth to stop me screaming, and suddenly starts a hideous transformation. "For you see, Barbara, I am no furshlugginer ordinary Batman," he hisses, "I am a vampire Batman." I wake up in a sweat, vowing nevermore to read dodgy fan fiction directly before going to bed. Still, at least my subconscious managed to get the quote right.


Today's the day that Batman visits Arkham Asylum to question The Joker. I get a chance to listen in since the boss wants me to record everything. He's looking for clues to Hugo's death and doesn't want to miss any, no matter how small.

I've told Batman about the message from the dead that Hugo sent me (although not the exact contents), and that finding his killer now seems slightly redundant. Batman rightly points out that that message could be from anyone, probably The Joker himself, and that he can't be side-tracked. When I first got Hugo's message there was a small part of me that was relieved. At least I hadn't murdered him completely. But now it looks like I'm back to being a murderess, and it's only a matter of time before Batman finds out.

I only hope that if Hugo really is alive, that I've managed to get him out of my computer system successfully. The files we loaded off his computer managed to infect it with all sorts of sneaky original bits of software, and I can't be sure that I've cleaned it all up. If he's still got a route to it, then I'm not the only one that gets to listen to Batman today.

The Joker

I hear Batman enter The Joker's cell, and then I hear The Joker speak, but he doesn't seem quite his abnormal self.

"Listen, Bats, this is urgent. You can't trust the dame. Me and her have a lot in common and ..."

At this point, I hear what sounds like The Joker falling to the floor.

"Sorry about that," says The Joker, trying to sound in control, "Must be something wrong with my medication, today. What can I do for you, Batman?"

"Do you know the man in this picture?" asks Batman, presumably showing him a photograph of Hugo.

"Yes, that's Dr. Gordon. He'd been working here for a couple of months. It wasn't until he died that we realized he was Hugo Strange."

Oh no, Hugo was using my name as an alias. It gets worse and worse.

"You know that his last word was Joker?" asks Batman.

The Joker bursts out laughing, which sends shivers down the part of my spine that's still working. "It wasn't me, I didn't kill him, but then I would say that. What possible motive could I have?"

"I had a quick look at Strange's computer records," begins The Batman, "He had quite a way with the ladies. There was one assistant, a Miss Quinzel ..."

"Stop right there. This isn't funny. I'm just a red herring in all this. I'm supposed to pose you an incredibly complicated riddle that, after hours of head-scratching, will lead you to E. Nigma, but I'm not playing anymore. Out! Out I say."

"Why should I believe you," responds Batman, "you're insane."

"Ha ha ha. Of course I'm not. No-one here is insane. That's just what they tell the people of Gotham to help them sleep easily at night. That's just what we get our lawyers to say to avoid the death penalty. If we were really insane you'd have had us shipped out, off the coast of Paradise Island, long ago and be curing us with a purple ray. We're not insane. Insane people couldn't pull off heists, insane people wouldn't be in it for the money. I'm sure you know what real insanity's like Batman and you know it's a lot scarier than we are. Insanity's ugly, it's not just some cute little red-haired girl."

"Spare me the monologue. If you've lied to me, I'll be back," threatens Batman and exits the cell.

"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" The Joker shouts as Batman leaves, and then in the background I hear him say something else, barely audible.

While Batman's making his way to The Riddler, I use my computer to boost the volume on what The Joker said, but instead I hear a young girl's voice sadly saying, "You didn't really mean that, Joker, did you?"

"No, no, of course not. Happy now?" replies The Joker.

"Delirious. Now, if you don't mind, I'll follow Batman. I think he might need me later."

When I play the conversation again the young girl's voice is gone.

The Riddler

Edward Nigma is silent. Batman asks him questions, but he just stays silent. Finally, Batman asks him the question he was waiting for, "Any idea what the letters OR stand for", and Edward Nigma starts talking:

A boy, injured, is wheeled into the O.R.

The boy's parent, a surgeon, looks down at the boy on the operating table and says "That's not my son."

All further attempts to talk to The Riddler lead to silence and eventually Batman leaves.

On his way out, Edwards shouts to him "Tomorrow. A straight line and the square root of 74,529."


Because I'm still not convinced that Hugo is out of my computer system, I meet Batman that night at the Batcave, face to face. I think that I'll finally get to meet the mystery woman, but he's keeping her in a separate section of the Batcave until he can be sure that he can trust her.

First we go through what I've found from Hugo's computer records.

Hugo, before being a death-prone master criminal, was a psychologist of major repute, and his client list read like a Who's Who. There was one folder on his computer marked SUPERHEROES, and this seemed like a good place to start in tracking down the identity of our mystery woman.

"I'll just go through the list, stop me if you want any further details. The heroes don't give their full names, surprisingly enough, or Hugo purposely left out the details for reasons of confidentiality."

Batman is silent.

"Okay, here goes. There's some kid named Robby with an identity crisis, another kid who says he can see dead people, a guy called Irwin who keeps popping up, a group of heroes with an inferiority complex, ..."

"The Inferior Five? You don't suppose our mystery woman is Dumb Bunny?" Batman says.

"That's what I thought. Making her literally dumb seemed like the warped sort of thing Hugo would do. However, I tried tracking her down through some detective agencies, and this girl Angel at one of them managed to find her straight away."

"Other heroines on the list are Merry, Girl Of A Thousand Gimmicks, who turned out to be not so merry after all. She ended it all when her sea monkeys died."

Batman fails to smile at my attempt at levity, so I continue plodding through the list.

"In the heroes section, there's some guy called Access who seems to have created his own fantasy world. Then there's this S. Knight who had all these weird sexual fantasies about the Freedom Fighters. All that sword swinging and it turns out that the Shining Knight's gay. Who'd have thought it?"

"I think you'll find the S stands for Sandra," interrupts Batman.

"Who was she, a groupie? Anyway, that's about it. There's a few more but they're really obscure."

Hugo also had a file on me. I've still not managed to bring myself to read it. I don't mention anything about this file to Batman.

And then we get to The Riddler's first riddle.

"The surgeon is his mother. The answer's obvious," states Batman, as if his intellect has been insulted.

I know that's not the answer to the riddle, and I know that it's the time for me to share my secret with Bruce. I realize that it could destroy his whole raîson d'être, but I can't keep up the pretence any longer.

"Batman, I need to talk to Bruce."

Batman pulls his cowl back slowly, an unsure look on his face.

"Bruce. Quite a while ago some extra members were added to the JLA, and you asked me to check their backgrounds and run all sorts of medical checks (blood tests, DNA comparisons, etc.) to make sure that they didn't have any criminal affiliations that we didn't know about. I thought this was a bit pointless for most of the members we were adding; Plastic Man was a former criminal, The Huntress came from a mob family, and the less said about Orion's dad the better. Anyway I did those checks, and, trying to impress you, I ran the same checks on the current members. That included you."

"The answer to the riddle is that the surgeon, let's call him Thomas Wayne, isn't the boy's real father."

"The boy's real father is Hugo Strange."

As my words sink in, Batman turns from me, pulls his cowl back over his face, and sits in silence for what seems like an eternity. And then he turns to me and, with an emotionless voice says "All the pieces have fallen into place. I know what OR means and I know who killed Hugo Strange."

"It looks like it's time to call in Nightwing."


The little red-haired girl's journey had been a waste of time. Slowly she set off back to Arkham. At least she was appreciated there.