Lemon Juice

"Darling?" My wife's voice came from downstairs, echoing a little through the stairwell.
"Coming, dear!" I called. I pulled my tie from round my neck and tossed it onto the bed, and looked down at my shirt. The blood spatter had pretty much ruined all the bits of it that hadn't been under the tie or my jacket, and though it made an interesting Rorschach pattern, I couldn't see cleaning it being more than a waste of time. I picked up the stiletto from the nightstand and slipped it down the front of the shirt, cutting the buttons off. They pinged onto the bed, with only one escaping to the floor somewhere, and I shrugged the shirt off, discarding it in the third laundry bin – clothes to be burned.
"Coming when?" called my wife. I put the knife back down and hurried down the stairs.
She was in the study, frowning at the computer screen. On it was the text of a document, something academic judging by the number of footnotes I could already see. Next to the computer screen was the ink-jet printer, its little data light flashing, and I could see a couple of sheets of paper sitting on top of it, obviously a recent print-out.
"Were you using this last?" she said, and now there was a tone of accusation in her voice. "Only it doesn't seem to be working."
"Well, I think I might have printed something out." I was hedging, buying myself a little time to try and find out what I might have done before confessing to it. "It's been a bit of a busy day though...."
"I saw you come in," she said. "Jacket buttoned up tightly on a day as hot as today? That means it got messy, doesn't it?"
"A little," I said, realising I'd rather talk about whatever I'd done to the printer than work. "What's not working, it looks like the printer was printing."
"The printer is printing," she said, reaching out and picking up the pages. "But, as you can see, it's not printing anything other than blank pages." She passed me the pages. "And I really need this document for this afternoon, I'm teaching a class on it and – well, students these days. They'll all turn up with a pdf of it on their iPads, marked up and annotated, and I hate having to ask them if I can share."
"Didn't I get you an iPad last Christmas?"
"Yes, but if I take that into a seminar they expect me to network the pdf, and then all of my notes are visible to them, which makes it very hard to set homework."
"I think I can fix that," I said, "when work calms down a little." I sniffed the pages in my hand.
"Ah, yes, I think this is my fault."
"What did you change this time? Is it the printer driver again? I told you, put the new ones in a sensible directory, even if you have to email me where it is."
"I changed the ink cartridge," I said. "There are fresh ones in the desk drawer."
My wife stared at me as though I'd gone mad.
"You changed it for an empty one?" she asked.
"No, one full of concentrated lemon juice," I said. "Your document's here, you just need to iron the pages."
She stared at me again for a long moment, and then smiled. "What if I held a soldering iron near the page? Would that work?"
"Should do," I said. It was my turn to look puzzled now.
"That should make the seminar a little more interesting then," she said. "Let's see how this iPad generation cope with documents you have to cook in order to read! And it'll bring me on to methods of forgery, which is useful."
She took the pages from my hand and gave me a kiss. "You'll have to burn your own clothes this afternoon," she said. "I have a seminar to host."