Archive of Our Own

“Good morning,” said the man with the clipboard, cheerily. “They’re all ready for you now.”

Mandy rose from the low-slung easy chair beside the coffee table. The cold fluttering in her stomach had suddenly become an icicle stabbing at her heart. She murmured an incoherent reply, feeling her legs wobble, tasting her own fear as she tried and failed to slow her breathing. George, smoking nervously in the other chair, got to his feet too in what he probably intended as a gesture of support.

The antechamber was fitted out like a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room; tatty furniture, ancient magazines, and even a dusty potted plant in the corner. And in his white coat, the man with the clipboard might have been a particularly jolly dental hygienist. Except that they were actually in a dank concrete bunker deep beneath a former Army base somewhere near Chelmsford and Mandy was suddenly scared for her life.

“This way,” said the man in white, still cheery, although it was evident that he was reading whatever it was he had clamped to the clipboard rather than paying Mandy more than minimal attention.

“Go on, love,” said George, in his gruff, fatherly sort of way. “I’ll see you again soon.”

You won’t, thought Mandy, blinking back a tear. And if you do, it won’t be me. She would miss George; he wasn’t like most of the people she worked with. You could almost believe he cared.

There was another room beyond the antechamber, white-walled and chilly. The man with the clipboard closed the door behind them, leaving George alone with the magazines and potted plant. There was a desk, onto which the man indicated she should turn out her pockets and bag. She removed her rings and necklace too; the man noted down every item with fussy attention to detail. There was a screen, again just like in a doctor’s surgery, which she went behind to remove her clothing – all of her clothing – and put on a plain white hospital gown.

“We’ll bag all of this stuff up for you,” the cheery man assured her as she placed the folded clothes beside her other effects. “For when you come back,” whenever that might be. He did not, mercifully, examine and catalogue the clothes, not while she was in the room anyway. There were other clothes, other pocket flotsam and jewellery, even other makeup, for her to put on once it was all over. She and Mostyn had spent weeks picking them out, agonising over whether they were authentic and believable. When she came to don those effects, though, in the place where they would take her after they were done here, she would no longer be able to appreciate the care that had gone into selecting them.

“And now,” said the man, placing two plastic vending machine cups on the desk. One contained water; the other had two pills in it, a round white tablet and an oblong blue capsule. He watched her, jovially but carefully, as she downed first the pills and then the water. He seemed pleased when she had done so.

Then the man opened another door, opposite the one that led back into the waiting room. This one was painted steel, with rivets standing out on its battleship grey surface. When she saw what was on the other side of it, she froze on the threshold. In truth, she almost bolted, almost ran back to George. She did not, however. Instead she took a deep breath and stepped into the room beyond.

The other room was much larger than the waiting room or surgery, with a tall vaulted ceiling, but almost empty. Its floor was covered in gleaming white tiles and its walls were lined with the sort of glistening porcelain bricks they had in police cells or public conveniences. And at the centre of the room, there was a chair, surrounded by half a dozen men and women in white coats.

“Here she is,” said the cheery man, leading her to them. “All present and correct.”

“Sit,” said the man who looked to be in charge. He had round spectacles and no hair, and did not appear to feel the need to seem jolly for his patients.

The chair was superficially like a dentist’s too; metal upholstered in black fake leather, with all sorts of pivots and hinges and adjustable parts. A dentist’s chair, however, did not have straps to secure its occupants’ hands and feet, or a nasty looking clamp at the back to keep their head in place. There was a bank of electronic equipment standing behind it, big grey boxes with wires trailing to the chair, bleeping and humming to themselves under the supervision of two of the people in white coats. There was the vague suggestion of even more powerful machinery throbbing and whirring somewhere behind the porcelain bricks.

The chair was actually quite comfortable once Mandy had sunk into it. It cushioned her whole body, especially once the bald man had tilted it back so that she was almost horizontal. It was like lying on a cloud. She wondered whether that was down to the pills starting to make themselves felt.

“It’s important that you are unable to move during the procedure,” the bald man explained as his underlings strapped down her limbs and adjusted the head clamp to the correct width. “Otherwise you could injure yourself once the convulsions begin.”

The icy stab of fear came back again with a vengeance when he said that. Mandy realised that she really was completely immobile, hands and feet restrained. Her own breathing seemed very loud and very fast to her. The bald man moved out of her field of vision and when she tried to turn her head, she could feel the gentle pressure of the clamp through her hair, holding her still.

A few seconds later, the man reappeared, or at least his hand did, holding out something rectangular made of pink rubber with the apparent intention of inserting it into her mouth. “Bite on this,” he ordered, so she did.

“We don’t want anything to happen to your tongue, do we?” said the cheery man, standing somewhere out of sight.

No, we don’t Mandy fervently, if silently, agreed. The rubber smelled and tasted faintly of disinfectant. She clenched it hard between her teeth as she felt somebody behind her place something over her head, in addition to the clamp. Whatever this was, it fitted over her ears like a pair of headphones, but it felt like damp cotton wool against her skin. The hum of the machinery was cut off immediately, as were the voices of the white-coated people. Absurdly, they were replaced by faint music, piped from somewhere via the cotton wool. Even more absurdly, she recognised it:

If you go down to the woods today…

Mandy tried not to be afraid. She tried to think of Sallie. She was doing all of this for Sallie.

You’re sure of a big surprise…

She realised she could not picture Sallie’s face. She told herself that was just a sign of the pills taking hold, but…

If you go down to the woods today…

Then, without warning, the pain started. The loudest sound Mandy had ever heard battered at her eardrums, a wailing, screeching electronic cacophony that blotted out any effort at rational thought. A pinwheel of electric colour exploded before her eyes, bright enough to be painful, like spikes hammering into her brain. Every nerve in her body burned with agony.

You’d better go in disguise…

She tugged at the straps, tried to force her way out of the chair, but to no avail.

For every bear that ever there was…

She screwed her eyes shut, unable to remember a time before the pain.

Will gather there for certain because…

She could not hear anything but the screeching in her ears.

Today’s…

She sank her teeth deep into the rubber.

The day…

She

…

Isobel blinks in the camera flash and curses at herself. It took her by surprise; her thoughts were elsewhere. For a moment she thought the telephone was ringing, and for some reason she does not quite understand her mind just went blank. However, now she realises it was just the doorbell. Probably somebody selling something. She strikes another pose, anticipating the flash this time, trying to look moody like Twiggy. And another, shifting from one foot to the other, positioning her hand just so. Maybe she needs to get her hair cut.

The doorbell rings again, a long drawn-out trill as if somebody is leaning on the button, determined to get in.

Isobel ignores it, dropping the feather boa and pouting at the camera’s glinting eye for another couple of flashes, then quickly moving again, this time planting the other hand on her hip, Jean Shrimpton this time. She’s trying to build a career, she thinks, annoyed. No time for hawkers and pedlars…

Whoever it is, though, is not admitting defeat. The trill sounds yet again, for even longer this time. She finally gives up in disgust:

“If you don't mind, I'm trying to work!” She stamps towards the front door, ready to give the caller a piece of her mind.

“Oh, I'm sorry miss,” says the man standing on the doorstep, “but we wondered whether you could help us?” He is short, and old – must be nearly fifty – and dressed in a dishevelled frockcoat and baggy checked trousers. She sees stranger outfits around London every day. “We wondered if…” he continues, and she is vaguely aware of other figures behind him, but for that instant all she can do is stare at his face; that crumpled, expressive sad clown’s face with its timeless eyes staring out from beneath those heavy brows and that shock of hair. She is sure she has never seen him before in her life, so she wonders why he seems so familiar.

And then the moment passes, and as with the ringing bell she has no idea why his face discomfits her, or why she feels as though somebody is dancing on her grave. A moment later, and her disquiet is forgotten, shrugged off.

She turns away, stamping back to the living room and to her camera, inert upon its tripod. She gives another snort of disgust as she wrenches it from its mounting for closer examination: “Oh look, the stupid thing's gone and jammed!”

…

“So that’s the Gatwick Airport photo from 1966.” Mandy tapped it with her fingernail, memorising the lined face of the man it depicted, that Beatles mop he sported; so 1964. “The same man Chorley photographed in the Tube eighteen months later.” She compared the two snaps, the second acquired from the luckless journalist shortly before his untimely demise. Clearly the same man, she thought, but then so was the man in this grainy photo from the Travers Tibet Expedition, taken more than thirty years earlier… “And he doesn’t appear to age.”

“That’s right.” Mostyn stubbed out his latest cigarette. He wore black-framed NHS spectacles and had grown out his reddish blond hair to a fashionable length. He thought he looked like Michael Caine. Mandy thought Michael Caine probably did not buy his shirts at C&A or have damp patches around his armpits after a long day’s work. “But wait!” He opened another envelope and spread some more photographs across the Formica table top, under the white glare of the naked lightbulb. “Prepare to have your mind blown, baby.”

Mandy magnanimously ignored being called “baby”, instead examining the label attached to the first of the new pictures, the one depicting an old man with long white hair and an astrakhan hat: “So this was taken the same day as the Gatwick one, at the Post Office Tower during the WOTAN incident?”

WOTAN. For a moment, Mandy imagined she was looking at an empty white plastic shoe lying on a road surface, eighteen inches in front of her nose. She shook her head and the image was gone.

She turned to the other two pictures Mostyn had presented, both of which were of a third man, with an intense gaze and a straw hat. One, in oversaturated Kodak colour and clearly the product of a civilian box camera, was labelled “Shoreditch, 1963,” while the other, again in grainy monochrome and this time from an unlikely angle, boasted that it had originated in “North Yorks, 1943.” The man appeared completely identical in both, in spite of the intervening two decades.

“He doesn’t age,” Mandy recapped, mainly for her own benefit, “and he can change his face.” The only surprise there, she thought, was that she no longer found herself surprised by this sort of revelation. She had heard all of the office rumours, of course, but to have these points confirmed as security-classified facts, that was something else. It was like being invited into the holy of holies.

Mostyn nodded, rather smugly, as if he were the mysterious otherworldly being with undefined but presumably considerable powers. He wished. “Remember,” he said, offering her the cigarette packet, “he’s the target of this operation, has been for nearly four years now since the Tube business brought things to a head.” She shook her head and he shook the packet, making the end of a cigarette pop out. He spoke to her with it dangling from the corner of his mouth: “And all of the people who we’ve put on this work before you have failed to catch so much of a glimpse of him. I’m sure you’re going to be different, though. You’re going to catch this freak.”

Yes, she thought, very sincerely, ignoring the way that Mostyn, even in conversation, never seemed to raise his gaze above the neckline of her blouse. For Sallie.

“So this Professor Travers and his daughter…” she began, but Mostyn cut her off:

“Helping us with our enquiries. You don’t need to worry about them. However, they are among a handful of people who we think he is likely to make contact with, and the only ones out of those who we currently have in hand. It’s a unique opportunity for us to bait a trap for him. And you’re the…” He waved his lighter around, lost for words: “What do you call that springy bit on the mousetrap that gets the mouse? Well, whatever it is, you’re it.”

“What about…well, my uncle?” she asked.

“Not my op,” Mostyn answered, not really apologetically, as he thumbed the lighter. He lit up, inhaling greedily, then removing the cigarette from his mouth and blowing out a gust of bluish smoke before continuing: “Compartmentalisation, you know? He’s on a different mission, but he’ll be in the same boat as you, in terms of the conditioning. Could be you’ll be required to support him, or you might need him to help you out. Either way, Control will relay instructions via the usual channel and, well…” He shrugged. “You’ll both obey them.”

What he said was literally true; she would obey them, without any conscious thought or any possibility of disobedience. The…procedure she had had been told about would take care of that. She would obey without even knowing why; or even that she was doing it.

Later, they were working on a different part of the painstaking preparation for her debut in Special Ops. Mostyn leered at her from somewhere behind a cannon-like Nikon lens: “Yeah, baby!”

He’d stopped being Michael Caine; for the time being he was David Bailey. Mandy was reclining on a chaise longue in a striking zebra print mini-dress. “Make love to the camera!” Mostyn urged. Snap flash snap flash snap snap. Snap snap flash snap.

“You could do this for a living,” she told him between poses, with complete insincerity. That made him grin. She made him turn his back while she changed dresses and then he shot off another roll of film with amateurish gusto. Snap snap flash snap snap flash snap. The white bedsheets they had hung up as a makeshift backcloth blazed with pulses of reflected light.

On the last night of her preparation, she and Mostyn sat up in the safe house’s barely-furnished back bedroom, playing cards. Sleep was almost unimaginable. There was no clock, and all of the conversation was deliberately light and superficial. She imagined this was what waiting to be hanged must be like.

There was an old lady who minded the place out of hours and who that night kept bringing mugs of hot sweet tea. If Mandy wasn’t mistaken, she was carrying a .45 revolver in the pocket of her housecoat, and also vaguely disapproved of her fashionable young houseguests. On her third or fourth visit, however, she brought a visitor with her.

“I was just passing,” said George.

Mostyn laughed. “No you weren’t. This place is a secure location.”

“Well, anyway, I’m here now.” George placed two shopping bags on the card table without regard for their game. One clinked as it was set down and the other steamed; it smelled fantastic, to be truthful. “I came past the chip shop and the off licence on my way up,” he said. The condemned woman ate a hearty meal, thought Mandy.

“If there’s a saveloy in there, you can stay,” said Mostyn. “If not, I’ll get the old dear to shoot you.”

“I’m in luck, then,” George replied, producing a bottle of brown ale from the first bag. “Is there a glass around here?”

“It’s good to see you,” Mandy eventually managed to say when they were all eating and drinking. She thought she might cry, which was a fairly absurd prospect because she didn’t miss George that much; the special training and her anxiety about tomorrow were clearly getting to her. “How did you find this place?” she asked.

“Well, even if they did disband General Duties and move me to Registry, I’ve still got a few strings I can pull.” George gave Mostyn a shifty glance. “I thought I could go with her in the van tomorrow,” he said. “You know, to wave her off?”

“I’m her case officer,” said Mostyn, mouth full of saveloy.

“Yeah, you’re my case officer,” Mandy pointed out, between chips. “You can sign off on it if you want to.”

Mostyn took a long swallow of ale before replying: “The question is, do I want to?”

“Go on,” said Mandy. “Please.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” Mostyn told her, sarcastically, before glancing back at George: “Be my guest, mate.”

It was for George, really, thought Mandy, although to be honest he did seem a much more appealing designated hand-holder than Mostyn. She saw him almost relax for the first time since he had entered the room, as if he derived some sort of peace from being allowed to escort her to her fate. Again, she thought she might cry.

…

Snap flash snap snap flash snap snap.

“Hold it now,” says Isobel, aiming her camera from an awkward position on the floor at Zoe’s feet.

Flash snap flash flash snap flash flash.

Zoe holds the pose, boa wrapped around her head, pixie face framed by fluff and feathers.

“Last one,” Isobel tells her, amazed by how natural the girl is, but also unnerved. Like her friend the Doctor and that pretty Scottish boy, there is something about Zoe’s dark eyes and dimples that gives Isobel a creepy feeling of déjà vu. She can’t put her finger on it; she certainly isn’t going to tell her about it. She would look like some sort of crank. It’s more than that, though. Again, she is not sure why. Something makes the thought slide out of mind almost as soon as she is able to frame it.

“Okay,” she tells Zoe, “you can relax.”

“Oh good.” Her visitor seems genuinely relieved. “I didn't know standing still could be so exhausting!”

Isobel replaces the lens cap on the camera. “Would you like some coffee?” Zoe would, as it turns out.

“I hope that you're going to stick around for a bit,” she tells Zoe a little later. “I get sick of photographing myself.” Really, she’s thinking that she could stare at that face for hours, and can’t bring herself to imagine never seeing it again. Once more, she has the eerie sensation of motives and emotions welling from within her that she can neither account for nor explain.

“Why don't you always use a model?” Zoe asks, going over to look at the framed prints hanging on the wall.

“Can't afford it,” Isobel explains with a shrug. “I've only got just about enough cash to buy the junk I need for the camera. It's an expensive business and I'm not good enough to be a professional yet.”

“Well, I think you're very good,” Zoe announces as she continues to examine the pictures, as if handing down an official verdict. “These photographs of you are splendid!”

Isobel feels inexplicably pleased. “Yeah, they're great,” she confesses, “but I didn't take them. I was just the model…”

“Make love to the camera!” Snap flash snap flash snap snap. Snap snap flash snap.

Isobel shudders, thinking that there must be a draught in here. Zoe has turned away from the photos, serious all of a sudden, face betraying her unease. Isobel worries that she has missed her visitor saying something; for a second there, she was miles away.

“You're still worried about your two friends, aren't you?” she guesses.

Zoe nods unhappily: “Yes, a bit.”

Isobel tries to look on the bright side: “They can't have got themselves into any sort of trouble, can they?”

“You wouldn't say that if you knew them,” Zoe retorts. “If there's trouble to be found, the Doctor and Jamie can't miss it!”

“There’s no need to worry,” she insists, moving over towards the other young woman. “I never worry about anything, and I’m always all right.”

Zoe gives her a sceptical look and seems on the point of a cutting reply, instead contenting herself with: “I don’t know, if you’d been in some of the situations I’ve been in with the Doctor…”

Isobel smiles, edging closer still: “Honestly, I just…do what I feel like. I don’t put much thought into things, or so my uncle’s always saying, but it seems to work out okay in the end.” She has a powerful urge to reach out and touch one of those dimples.

“You sound a bit like the Doctor,” Zoe tells her. “I wish I could share your optim…” Isobel traces a finger lightly over her cheek, and she falls silent, but otherwise does not react. Even when Isobel kisses her, she does not speak or move other than to turn her head slightly, for their mouths to meet at a more convenient angle.

More kissing follows, in the same breathless hush, as if they are both afraid that a single word would be enough to break the spell, to shatter the moment. Instead, they proceed in a sort of mutual hypnosis, acting on pure instinct. When Isobel speaks again, it is some time later, when they are in the back upstairs room with the curtains drawn against the dreary sunlight, bodies moving in concert on the narrow bed.

“Sallie,” she murmurs. And she was right, it does break the spell. Reality snaps back like a bucket of water to the face. She pulls the sheet up to cover herself as Zoe rolls aside to catch her breath.

“Who’s Sallie?” she asks, propping herself on one pink elbow, nonplussed more than annoyed.

“I don’t know,” Isobel tells her, truthfully, turning her face away to look at the horrible geometric wallpaper. “I don’t know anybody called Sallie.”

…

The second that George walked into the office, Mandy knew he was not a happy man. It wasn’t anything he said, because he didn’t say anything at all, just the air of gloom he radiated as he clumped his way from the outer door to the portal of his own little sanctum, closing it sharply behind him.

She concentrated on her typing while waiting for him to resurface, losing herself in the heavy rhythmic clatter of the keys. With Perry gone and Terry on medical leave, there was a stillness about the office, a literally funereal hush that amplified the typewriter’s staccato racket until it sounded like a factory production line. Her workload had tripled overnight due to the sudden losses, most of it brain-numbing paperwork. She welcomed it; the busier she was, the less time she had to think about how the section had been halved in size as the result of a single op. Nor did she have to remember what had happened afterwards in Terry’s flat. She cursed as she made an error, reaching for the bottle of correction fluid. She had not slept in two days. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Perry’s face, heard him groaning.

George was trying to arrange replacements. For some reason, Mandy found herself dreading meeting them, whoever they turned out to be. She wondered whether George would still be around: he had been up on Sixth for most of the morning, locked in yet another meeting with the Director Ops. The disaster the other day seemed about to be laid firmly at his door. They were General Duties, not Spec Ops: he should not have allowed them to walk into that situation. He should have waited for support from the grownups. That was the lie that was being crafted, to make the Sixth Floor feel better about the whole thing. It didn’t matter a damn that if George and his section hadn’t thrown themselves in the way of those…things the situation could have escalated into another Tube-level event.

She slid the typewriter’s carriage back with a resounding metallic zing, just as George came out of his office again. She felt him standing behind her, but kept typing for the moment, deciding to let him speak before she turned around.

“Er, Mandy, love,” he began weakly, before stopping and clearing his throat. He began again, louder and more confident: “Er, Mandy, do you have a moment? You’ve been summoned.”

The typewriter clacked to a halt. She swivelled in her office chair to look up at him: “Summoned?”

“The Sixth Floor,” he answered, sounding sick, sweat standing out on his pale forehead. She caught a faint whiff of whisky on his breath. It must be bad if the desk drawer bottle had come out. “D-Ops would like a word.”

She felt her eyebrows trying to climb into her hairline: “D-Ops?”

The Director Operations occupied one of the hallowed upstairs corner offices inhabited by the Institute’s elite, his huge dark oak desk standing in a sort of alcove-cum-turret with an impressive window view of London’s theatre-land and framed portraits of two Queens – Elizabeth II and Victoria – behind him. He was a grey-haired man wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit, gold half-moon glasses perched on his nose as he read the file laid out on the blotter in front of him. When he looked up at Mandy’s entrance, as if he had not heard his secretary buzz them in, his eyes behind the slim lenses were like steel ball bearings. She filed in, George following behind, and sat in the chair indicated, knees pressed together.

There was another dark-suited man sitting off to her left, with a round face and very short dark hair. She recognised Major Black, current chief of Special Operations.

“Miss Dawlish,” the Director drawled. That was her work name; all Institute staff used such pseudonyms for internal purposes, assigned when they were recruited, changed as required. Her real name was in her personnel file, somewhere, but not many people were cleared to see it. There was supposed to be a complete disconnect between their work life and what still weakly passed for their life outside these hallowed walls. “You’ve worked for the Institute for,” he glanced down at the page, “more than three years now. Has it really been that long?” He spoke as if he had actually sat down and talked to her before today.

“I don’t know where the time goes, sir,” she replied, bright as a button, or trying to be. The right attitude could be like armour, she had found. She was aware of George hovering dispiritedly on the very edge of her field of vision.

The Director almost managed a smile in response: “Quite.” He and Major Black – that was not his real name either – exchanged what might have been a significant glance. “I hear you’ve done very well, and even within the past few days I believe you’ve excelled yourself in the field.” If you could call it that. She had a sudden flash of Perry’s face, blood-rimmed eyes rolling back into their sockets. “Just the sort of person we’re looking for,” the Director said.

Mandy did not know what to say. “Thank you sir,” she managed eventually.

D-Ops frowned slightly. “If I may ask, however…what led a young lady like you into this…line of work in the first place?”

Mandy felt her hackles rise at his tone, but managed to keep the smile in place: “To make a difference.” She decided the truth couldn’t hurt: “To save the world.” For Sallie.

“And would you be prepared to do anything to achieve that?” D-Ops wanted to know. “To obey any order you were given? To make any personal sacrifice, no matter how extreme?”

Perry did, she thought. Terry might have. Sacrifice did not come into it; she had already lost everything she valued most in the world, before George had ever thought of recruiting her. However, to D-Ops she said: “Of course.” She heard George sigh and wondered whether the others in the room had too.

They moved fast in Special Operations. Before the afternoon was over, she was in their exclusive little bullpen on Fifth, signing various items of paperwork that Major Black placed before her. George stood behind him, watching her over his shoulder, sweating like a malaria patient by now.

Major Black’s acolytes Mostyn and Norris were loitering near the doorway trying surreptitiously to get a look at her while pretending to chat up the secretary in her vestibule (unlike General Duties, Spec Ops did not deign to do their own typing). Mandy gave them a smile between signatures. Mostyn, who Major Black had said would be her case officer for the duration of her attachment to the section, practically leered in response. Bloody hell. And she had thought Terry was bad.

She instantly regretted that thought. From what she had last seen of Terry, silent and glassy-eyed in the Institute’s private clinic, it would be a very long time before he managed to summon a leer again.

“Last chance,” Major Black told her. “As was explained upstairs, the process of…conditioning you will be required to go through for this operation is not going to be easy for you. It is going to be…transformative and, being an experimental procedure, there’s no guarantee it can be fully reversed when the operation is over. If you back out now, we can give you the white pill and send you back to General section, no hard feelings. If you commit, though, you’re committed. We’ll be counting on you. So what will it be?”

George, looming over Major Black’s shoulder, said nothing, but his eyes almost screamed at her to ask for the white pill.

She swallowed hard, thinking of her losses and the memories that went with them, of Perry’s broken ankle and Terry’s West Ham poster and a white plastic shoe lying in the road. She thought of how, when she had signed up for this job, she had told herself she was going to give her all, to hold nothing back.

“I’m in,” she said.

…

A million miles away, a telephone is ringing.

Isobel sits up in bed and looks at the clock. Less than half an hour has passed since they came upstairs; it seems like a lot longer.

“Is that…mmm…the Doctor?” Zoe asks, sleepily raising her head from the pillow.

“Shush, love,” Isobel tells her, already swinging her feet onto the floor, moving with marionette-like precision. “I’ll answer it.” She picks up her clothes from beside the bed and starts to dress even as she heads for the bedroom door, the long, regular peals of the phone’s bell calling to her, summoning her.

Isobel pads down the stairs on bare feet, pulling her dress on over her head and smoothing it down, realising that she has been unconsciously counting the rings. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. She picks up the telephone.

“What do you want?” asks Isobel.

“Mandy,” says the voice on the other end. “Mandy, remember.”

“Contact made at 1130 hours today,” says Mandy. “The Gatwick Doctor. Two companions confirmed. The Scottish youth and one other. A girl, late teens; name is Zoe Heriot.”

For a second, Control seems too excited to speak. The Doctor; the Institute’s Public Enemy and Holy Grail combined into one. When the reply comes, she can just picture Mostyn trying to keep calm, his voice wavering on the line: “And where are they now?”

“The girl is with me,” Mandy tells him. “The Doctor and the youth are en route to International Electromatics at Millbank Tower. They’re trying to make contact with Watkins.”

“Watkins?” Mostyn does not seem to like the sound of that. “Watkins is out of contact. He didn’t check in yesterday; we’re concerned his operational security may have been compromised. If he makes contact with you, you are to refer him back to Control immediately.”

“Understood.”

“Continue to observe and report for now,” he advises her. “Don’t let the girl out of your sight. There are certain…operational difficulties preventing an immediate attempt on the Doctor, but you may be called on to assist at short notice.”

“Understood,” she repeats.

“Now Mandy,” says Mostyn. “Mandy, forget.”

She puts the receiver down and finishes dressing, slipping on her shoes as she examines the wall behind the telephone. There are scribblings there, phone numbers and messages scrawled on the plasterboard. Some of them are codes; some of them remind her of what she must do next. She performs her next actions almost automatically, by muscle memory; she turns and walks into the kitchen, then crouches beside the rickety wooden table and runs her hand over its underside. She makes sure the chunky metal shape is taped securely out of sight beneath the wood. Her fingers trace the hard curve of its trigger guard and the diamond pattern etched into its grip. She straightens up and returns to the living room, selecting an old 78 disc in a tattered sleeve from the selection beside the gramophone.

Mandy places the record on the timetable and moves the needle into place. With a crackle and pop, scratchy music starts to waft around the room:

If you go down to the woods today…

“Here you are,” says Zoe, coming up behind her as stealthily as a ghost. She is dressed again too, rubbing a sleepy eye. “Who was that on the communications device?”

You’re sure of a big surprise…

“Nobody important,” Isobel answers. She indicates the spinning record: “Great, isn't it? I got it off a barrow in the Portobello Road.”

If you go down to the woods today…

“Oh, yes,” says Zoe, without enthusiasm, clearly anxious for her friends again. Isobel sympathises. She knows what it is like to have friends and to lose them, even if right now she can no longer remember precisely who and how.

You’d better go in disguise…

…

“Jesus Christ,” said Terry.

Mandy came around the corner of the warehouse, pistol first, in time to see the thing that had been Perry lurch out of the side door halfway down the alley. It staggered towards Terry, gore-encrusted fingers crooked like claws, dragging one foot behind it on the end of a broken ankle. So Mandy’s earlier wild shot had connected.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Terry whimpered, taking aim at Perry’s dead face. Terry lowered his gun again, backing away, but the thing just kept coming after him. Its eyes were rolled back into white orbs, oozing blood around their edges. The thing that was controlling Perry’s corpse did not need eyes to find its way, to hunt, to kill.

Mandy advanced, the ground hard and wet against her stocking feet; she had long since kicked off her shoes for extra mobility in the fight. She trained her pistol on the walking cadaver only for Terry to back into her line of fire, still brandishing his weapon ineffectually, unable to bring himself to shoot. “Terry, get down!” she yelled, not budging from her two-handed shooting stance, legs braced wide for stability.

“Perry,” said Terry. “Perry, mate, we’re going to try to get you some help. Just…just…”

The thing made a strange groaning, gurgling sound through Perry’s dead throat and made another grab for Terry, missing by inches.

Mandy decided this was no time for half measures. She ran forward and grabbed Terry by the sleeve of his jacket, shoving him aside: “For fuck’s sake, Terry, get down!” And then she shot Perry in the face, and then again, and again. The half dozen deafening reports overlapped, bouncing off the walls of the alley like rolling thunder. She kept shooting until her gun clicked, empty, and the last echoes faded with a tinkle of cartridge cases, leaving only ringing silence in their wake.

Mandy watched, panting, blinking, as Perry’s mostly-decapitated mortal remains fell backwards, wreathed in gun smoke and red mist, sprawling full-length on the wet tarmac. Good God. Instinctively, she ejected the empty magazine from her pistol, found another in her jacket pocket and shoved it into place.

“Terry,” she said, not taking her eyes off the corpse in case it lurched upright again, keeping her gun pointed at the ruined head. “Are you all right?”

“Bloody hell,” he sobbed. “Bloody hell…” She chanced a glance in his direction and found him sitting on the nearest kerb, trembling, his pistol lying uselessly beside him. He reached for a smoke, dropping the packet from shaking fingers, then succeeding in scattering matches on the ground when he tried to light one. Eventually he gave up and let the cigarette fall, putting his head in his hands and weeping gently.

Mandy scanned her surroundings, looking for another target. She almost took aim at George when he emerged from around the corner, lowering her gun again as he walked towards them along the alleyway. His tie and hair were askew and there was blood on his face. The Browning in his hand smoked in the cold air.

“All clear down here?” he asked, taking in Terry with an expression of quiet dismay.

“All clear,” said Mandy.

George took a long look at Perry’s corpse and slowly shook his head, then holstered his pistol underneath his jacket. “All right,” he said. “I’ll call for a clean-up crew. There’s a phone back there in the office.” He pointed at Terry. “You look after him.”

“Right, boss,” said Mandy. As George disappeared again, she put away her gun and gingerly sank down beside Terry. “It’s all right,” she told him, putting a hand on his back. “It’s all right.”

“Perry,” said Terry, sniffing. “Is he…?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, he is.”

Terry gave another sob. “Oh Christ…”

“It’s all right.”

They went to the pub when the clean-up crew arrived. George said the paperwork would keep until the morning and he was buying. He and Terry necked pints and shots in grim succession while Mandy guzzled port and lemon. Eventually, the shaking even stopped. “Look af’er ‘im, love,” George ordered as they parted ways, reeling off in separate directions. “I don’ow what’d do if anythin’ ‘appened t’you two…”

Mandy and Terry made it back to his flat, eventually. They breathed each other’s alcohol fumes; they tore at each other’s clothes. She tasted his beer and whisky and tobacco as she straddled him on the hard mattress, rusty springs squealing in protest. The current West Ham team stared down at their fumbling from the wall above; Bobby Moore, Trevor Brooking, Harry Redknapp getting a right eyeful, as Terry might have observed had he been capable of coherent speech.

It was all over quickly enough. She lay there, catching her breath in the dark, listening to Terry’s drunken snores. He murmured occasionally in his sleep; he sounded scared. Mandy couldn’t sleep. Every time she tried, she thought of Perry, dead but staggering, groaning and moaning with human flesh stuck in his teeth. Eventually she got up, standing naked at the window as she smoked one of Terry’s last remaining Benson & Hedges. It was a frosty night and she could feel the tiny hairs standing out on her skin. Up above the stars twinkled brightly in the black sky, even through the electric orange haze of the city lights.

There had been a time, when she’d been younger and more ignorant, when she had looked up at the stars in wonder. Now, knowing what she knew, when she looked up at those shimmering points of light she felt nothing but dread.

…

Isobel pounds upon the locked door until her hands are throbbing. Nobody out there seems to give a fig.

She tries shouting instead: “Oh, let us out of here, you stupid, idiotic…!” Their decision to try to follow the Doctor and Jamie on their investigations has not, it is fair to say, gone strictly to plan. She turns to Sallie – no, Zoe – who is now her impromptu cell mate in the disused office at International Electromatics: “Why have they brought us here?”

Zoe’s dark eyes flash with annoyance: “I suppose because I ruined that stupid computer of theirs.” And she did; how they laughed as that silly machine gave up the ghost under her cross-examination. “Well, I'm sorry.” She doesn’t seem very sorry from where Isobel is standing.

The fact that nobody at IE seems to have called the police yet indicates that perhaps they are not the sort of people one really wants to be locked up by. Something lurking at the back of Isobel’s mind tells her that she needs to get out of here right now. Danger, it whispers urgently.

She crosses to the window, to see whether that might offer an escape route. “We can't get out this way,” she reports to Sal…Zoe. “Look, it's a sheer drop.” She is still contemplating this a moment later when she sees the shabby little man and the kilted youth on the fire escape below: “Hey, Zoe, look!”

Zoe excitedly rushes to her side, calling down to them: “Doctor! Jamie! We’re up here!”

“So that’s the Gatwick Airport photo…”

The little man waves them back inside the window, but Isobel is wondering where that thought came from. What is the connection between the Doctor and Gatwick Airport? She has never been to Gatwick Airport. She has never flown on an aeroplane, for that matter.

“Just try and act as though nothing has happened,” says Sallie, the way she used to when they looked at the stars together.

Isobel turns in shock, but it is Zoe standing there. She doesn’t know anybody called Sallie, she tells herself. Isobel follows her gaze and sees the camera positioned unobtrusively high on the wall of the room. And then she understands why the Doctor wanted them to stop looking out of the window like a pair of overexcited ninnies.

Isobel seriously wonders whether she is going mad. It might have been those pills Lucy’s boyfriend was selling in the club the other night; they were pretty wild. She has heard about things like this happening to people. Just try and act as though nothing has happened. For the moment, that seems like excellent advice.

“Don't look now,” says Zoe, “but we're being spied on.”

…

It had not taken long for Mandy to realise that working for the Institute maybe wasn’t going to be as exciting as her training might have led her to believe.

In fact, it had taken about as long as it had taken George to show her around the office on her first day working on the General Duties section at Torchwood House. That was the other Torchwood House, not the crumbling Scottish pile but the equally dishevelled turn of the century office building lurking off Cambridge Circus in west London. There was even a brass plaque next to the front entrance announcing the name of the place to the world. Not that anybody outside of the Institute had any idea what the name signified. Hiding in plain sight, she was given to believe, had been the Institute’s way for a long time now.

“And this is your desk,” said George. “Look, the chair swivels. Good, eh?” The chair looked as if it should be in an antiques shop, and not the reputable kind either.

And that was life on the Fourth Floor for the next couple of years. General Duties. The core of Torchwood One, as the London office was designated, was Special Ops, the boys (and they were all boys) up on Fifth who handled the heavy stuff, the shooting and car chases. General Duties did everything else; surveillance, investigation work, the occasional clean-up detail, the occasional op spent holding the coats of Major Black and his boys while they took care of the important business. Mandy had even missed the Tube crisis due to her training, although apparently the section had been evacuated when the Web came down on London and spent the whole time hiding out in Cardiff anyway.

George had been doing this for ten years now, his right hand man Terry for nearly as long. The rumour was that they had seen the Doctor once, without knowing who or what he was, and let him get away. Their penance for that was General Duties forevermore.

Sometimes the Special Ops men passed through the floor on their way to somewhere more important, too busy to stop and talk. They were all relatively young and fit, and they fell into two categories; the strong, silent hard men with a vague air of danger on the one hand, and the swaggering devil may care types on the other. Terry wanted to be one of the latter when he grew up; in Mandy’s estimation he had no chance.

One day, though, Mandy thought. One day they won’t be able to ignore me any more…

Mainly, though, she typed. And made tea. And went out to buy biscuits with the petty cash, even though she was an officer, not a bloody secretary. George didn’t even mean anything by it; it wasn’t actually as if the rest of the section were doing anything more interesting. When they were not in the field, George was in his office doing paperwork, while Terry wandered about doing whatever Terry did; flirting ineffectively with Mandy and mercilessly teasing Perry, for the most part.

Perry was an odd one. He was blind without his glasses, stammered on and off, and wore his scarf indoors. He had a doctorate from Cambridge in astrophysics and was the next Einstein on the quiet to hear George talk him up. Mostly, he just drank tea and read the Beano and feuded with Terry; Perry and Terry, Terry and Perry. Mandy got the impression that they were actually good friends, the two of them, even if neither of them fully realised it. Other than that, it was hard to see what Perry’s qualifications for the job were. A bit like Mandy, he had fallen into it by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by seeing the wrong things. Mandy wondered sometimes whether Perry had lost anybody at that wrong time, but the chances of him discussing his personal life with his work colleagues were somewhat more remote than the chances of him spontaneously sprouting wings and taking flight.

And so their little routine continued, week after week, month after month, with the occasional bit of mild adventure when they were called into what they laughingly called action. Unlike the Special Ops boys, who always had new faces in their ranks, nobody died. Mandy considered that it was a steady job, and she had grown used to the people she worked with, even if it was not particularly exciting or fulfilling work, even if she had not yet actually seen any bug-eyed monsters from Outer Space.

Until that morning.

George threw open his door and walked into the main office. Mandy looked up from her typewriter and saw how pale he was.

“We’re up,” he said simply. “Draw sidearms from the armoury downstairs; briefing in fifteen minutes.” And then he strode off, heading for the stairs.

“What is it?” Terry called after him.

“What do you think?” George replied over his shoulder. “Little green sodding men; we’re going to sodding fight them.”

“Where are Spec Ops?” Terry asked, clearly trying not to sound horrified at the very idea.

George was already halfway out the door. “The Brecon sodding Beacons,” he answered. “On a joint training exercise with Three and the SAS, would you bloody believe?” And with that, he was gone.

“We’re not trained for this,” Terry protested, helplessly.

Yes we bloody are, thought Mandy, gleefully, as she ran to get a gun.

…

“Well,” says Captain Turner, when they are back aboard UNIT’s fab flying headquarters, “it's not really a military matter now.”

“You'll simply hand this over to the police?” Isobel feels put out, after getting locked up and shot at and having to climb up a ladder into a moving helicopter with Jamie looking up at her knickers, and everything.

Turner shrugs: “More or less.” He isn’t bad looking, she supposes, and there’s definitely something about him. Even better, he doesn’t remind her of any people she doesn’t know.

“I could have got some great pictures,” she tells him, “and made a bomb selling them to the papers.”

He smiles. She’s spent enough time hanging around with men to know when one is about to try his luck. “Look, perhaps I can compensate by buying you dinner,” he offhandedly suggests, as if it’s not really important. His eyes tell a different story.

She smiles back, although she thinks of this afternoon with Zoe and wonders whether the Captain could ever be as good as that. “That’d be nice.” Important questions first, though: “Hey, are you stinking rich?”

Unfortunately not, as it turns out. Even worse, although Turner’s boss the Brigadier is a bit of all right too – a bit, anyway – he’s a Neanderthal male chauvinist pig of the first water.

“This is hardly a job for you,” he tells her, when she suggests she should go and take some pictures of these Cyberthingies the Doctor’s getting all het up about. The smug manner that goes with his twitching moustache suggests that he’s a devil with the ladies when he’s out of uniform, and he knows it.

“Why ever not?” asks Isobel, wanting the answer from him, even though she already knows what it’s going to be.

The Brigadier reacts as if it should be obvious: “Well, you're a young woman.” Of course she is, and he’s noticed that too. She can tell that look; the same one Turner had when he asked her to dinner, but if anything fiercer, buoyed up by a tremendous ego. Not a chance, granddad, she thinks, even though she suspects him of perhaps actually being stinking rich. He must be at least forty.

Zoe, of course, her heroine, isn’t having any of the Brigadier’s bigotry, and neither is she. Naturally, they end up sneaking into London anyway, driven by the rather dolly in his own right but unfortunately terminally gullible Corporal Benton. And with Jamie tagging along too, of course; in spite of his protests and his own burgeoning side line in male chauvinism, he just can’t stay behind when Zoe is tearing off on a reckless adventure. Isobel finds she knows exactly how he feels on that point, not that men are generally much good in situations like this.

Isobel makes Benton stop the Land Rover outside the house in St James' Gardens on their way to IE, leaving her companions in the vehicle as she runs inside. “I’m just going to grab a camera,” she tells them.

“Well, hurry!” Zoe urges, practically glowing with excitement. Isobel could kiss her, right there and then. She wonders what Jamie would make of that.

“Won’t be a sec!” She opens the front door with her key and closes it behind her again. Somehow she is not surprised that the hall telephone is already ringing off the hook.

Camera blotted from her mind for the moment, Isobel picks it up: “What do you want?”

“Mandy,” says the voice. “Mandy, remember.”

“Doctor is at UNIT headquarters,” Mandy tells it. “Impossible to take direct action against him. Currently, I am in company with his two companions, heading towards IE headquarters. Contact with extraterrestial entities designation Cybermen; do we have a file? Whereabouts agent codenamed Watkins unknown. Please advise. Repeat, please advise.”

“The operation is in jeopardy,” Mostyn confesses, sounding harried. “Watkins’ cover is blown; he is currently in custody of enemy agents. All International Electromatics staff are to be treated as hostile. We had a snatch squad ready to move on the Doctor and the other two, but UNIT are all over the area of operations; we had to abort. Remain in contact with targets, do not engage directly but await further instructions. Repeat, await further instructions.”

“Understood,” says Mandy.

“Now Mandy,” says Mostyn. “Mandy, forget.”

She puts the phone down and spends a few moments reading the writing on the wall above it. Even as her consciousness fades and Isobel starts to take over again, she still has a lingering memory, a dreamlike awareness of who she really is, why she is here and what she must do next. She goes and checks that the pistol is still taped to the underside of the kitchen table, for emergencies. She goes to the gramophone in the living room and finds the disc where she left it earlier. She is about to put it on the turntable when she hears hammering coming from the front door.

“Are you still in there?” Zoe presses the bell too for good measure. The ringing, so similar to the phone, makes Mandy flinch. “Come on! Hurry up!”

My camera, thinks Isobel. Pictures of Cyberwhatsits. The record, thinks Mandy. The little ritual must be completed, or…she isn’t sure what. She just knows that Mostyn impressed on her how important it was during her training. Camera...! Isobel insists. She can’t leave Zoe waiting, now can she? She picks up the first one she can see, and a selection of lenses and other paraphernalia, stuffing them into a bag along with as many rolls of film as she can lay hands on.

“Come on!” Zoe urges.

“Coming!” Isobel finishes packing her things and runs back to her friends. “Be there in a jiffy!” The record remains where she left it, unspun. Mandy worries dully about it all the way to their destination, without really impinging upon Isobel’s thoughts; like a daydream. A daydream with a name, that’s all she is now. That is what the Institute has made her.

…

Mandy ran up the last slope, boots digging into the mud, lungs burning as she forced every ounce of energy from her muscles, flinging herself to the ground as she reached the top and moving forward on knees and elbows, through the concrete sewer pipe set in the earth bank, dragging herself towards the circle of daylight at the far end.

Mandy crawled under the camouflage net, slithering on her belly in the gelatinous filth, while instructors in berets fired round after round of live ammo two feet above her head. She finally freed herself, regaining her feet and racing for the eight foot wall of logs. She reached it ahead of about half of her fellow trainees, seizing the knotted rope dangling from it and starting to scramble up the vertical surface. An instructor sitting astride the wall’s apex screamed abuse a foot from her face as she swung one leg over the top, then the other. She could feel his spittle on her skin. She jumped down the other side, hitting the ground hard, tucking and rolling like a parachutist.

Mandy cleared the trees, still managing a respectable pace, mud drying on her sweaty tracksuit. She continued across the open ground towards the firing range. Torchwood House loomed before her, a ramshackle pile of red-grey sandstone against a backdrop of mist-shrouded Scottish hills, studded with black windows, piled high with roofs and turrets. The Birdcage, it was called in the modern day Institute, for some unfathomable reason. It was a training school, mostly, now; although there was a wing the cadets were not allowed inside where somebody claimed they had heard screaming and whimpering late one night.

Mandy stopped at the long trestle table set up near the house’s rear veranda; there were loaded revolvers laid out there, along with loose ammunition and sets of ear protectors. She donned a pair of the latter, and picked up the nearest gun, trying to get her breathing under control as she scanned the row of human-shaped paper targets ranged along the thick wall of sandbags thirty yards away.

Mandy took double-handed aim at a paper man’s heart and squeezed the trigger: crack. She smelled fireworks and a neat little hole appeared near the centre of the target. Crack. A second, identical hole materialised an inch above and half an inch to the right of the first. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

“Very good,” said a voice near her right elbow when she took off the protectors. “You’re coming along nicely, they tell me.”

She turned and saw George, standing with his hands in his pockets, a tweed-jacketed senior instructor with a clipboard loitering a few yards behind him. “Thank you, sir,” she said, smartly, still a little out of breath. Her brisk, efficient answer was intended mainly for the instructor’s ears.

“They wanted to send you to Registry,” he told her when her assault course time and shooting score had been officially logged and she was free to walk in the grounds with him for a while. “A woman’s work, you know? That old bollocks.”

“I see.” She tried not to bristle, although it chimed with what she had seen of the Institute so far. And it frustrated her all the more, because she knew that she was good at this. She had drifted through life up to now, but having been given the chance to stretch herself, she realised she was bloody good at it. Registry! She tried not to be discouraged, thinking her keenness and ability had to count for something, but…

“But look at you.” George smiled, almost proudly. “I knew I was right. The second I first spoke to you, the way you reported what you’d seen even though you were hurting and still scared stiff…”

Sallie. Bloody right she had been hurting.

“I thought, ‘I can use this girl,’” he told her. “Not like that, but you know, that you’d be an asset. So I’ve told them. They can’t send a trainee with your scores to bloody Registry, to do filing all bloody day. When you pass out here, come and work for me in London; General Duties, at first, with the rest of us deadbeats, but a girl like you… Honestly, the sky’s the limit. You’ll be D-Ops before you’re through.”

She would have liked to think that was true. She would have liked to think that George was right about her prospects, but she knew better. Still, he seemed sincere in wanting her to do well.

“I’d love to work for you in London,” she told him. “Love” was probably a bit strong, but it wasn’t as if she had anything else she needed to be doing.

…

Isobel plays hostess, making tea for her guests. They’re all back at St James' Gardens now, the Doctor and UNIT and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. And after all of that, dead policemen and foil-wrapped giants and grenades exploding all around, that infuriating Brigadier is saying that her photos look like fakes. She doesn’t know why she bothers sometimes.

She thinks about that policeman, and the dead soldier; bad luck, she supposes, but if she hadn’t….

Sloppy, thinks Mandy. This bloody conditioning made her sloppy; how did they ever expect her to handle herself in a crisis, when she’s not even armed and half the time she’s…?

Isobel reels for a moment, spilling water in the sink, wondering who on Earth Mandy is. It’s like the other strange names that she has been thinking of lately, the sudden thoughts about Gatwick Airport and the Post Office Tower that make no sense to her. Mandy is fretting about Watkins, still in custody, about how she is going to answer the telephone if it rings with them all there without blowing her cover. She worries about the Doctor sniffing her out somehow. He certainly seems as formidable as they all say, although from what she sees of him, she doesn’t know how much of a threat he really is…

Isobel clutches the edge of the kitchen table, heart pounding, trying not to fall over and telling herself that she is never taking any pills, not ever again. Not even if Lucy’s would-be villain boyfriend says he’s got a student connection up in Oxford who makes them himself. Not even aspirins.

In her uncle’s laboratory, Isobel hands the Doctor a steaming mug, seeing how he smiles absentmindedly as he takes a sip. Monster, says the thing crawling at the back of her skull. Freak. Invader. Killer. The one who… The one who what? He doesn’t seem like any of those things when she looks at him. He just seems like a wise, funny, silly, ancient man, by turns a hundred year old wizard or a sad clown, sometimes both at once.

She leaves another cuppa next to Jamie, who is stretched out snoring in a chair. “I'm forgiven, then?” she asks Jimmy Turner as she hands him the last mug.

The Captain seems confused: “What?”

“For being a twit,” she explains, “going down those sewers.”

Jimmy, however, seems very understanding about it all. “It's all right,” he says. “You weren't to know what you were letting yourself in for.” She senses he’s a little shocked too by just how formidable, how unrelenting, those Cyberthings turned out to be, worse even than Zoe’s description beforehand. He has had his eyes opened a little.

Bloody fool. Mandy thinks that if he doesn’t open his eyes even wider, and quickly, he and the rest of his comrades are going to end up dead.

Isobel hurriedly pushes this thought to the back of her mind, edging a little closer to the Captain as she does, but then the moment is broken by the Doctor in full eccentric scientist mode: “No, no, no, no!”

Suddenly Jamie’s awake, and there are comings and goings, radios squawking. Isobel runs off to get the Brigadier and nearly collides with him in the doorway. There is talk of Professor Watkins having been sighted, and of going to get him back from wherever he is. Isobel approves, Mandy wonders whether he knows anything that could blow her cover, and whether IE have got it out of him under torture. Before long, Jimmy is volunteering to lead some sort of silly rescue mission.

“Good luck!” Isobel calls after him, noticing that the Brigadier doesn’t exactly elbow him aside in order to lead the mission himself.

And then she’s left kicking her heels in the kitchen while the Doctor and Zoe are being all scientific in the lab. She wishes she knew enough to help out in there, but developing photos is about as technical as she gets. And on top of everything, the phone starts ringing again.

“Mandy,” says the voice. “Mandy, remember.”

“Who’s this?” asks Isobel, frowning.

The man on the other end sounds thrown off his stride by that: “Mandy?” He tries again: “Mandy. Mandy, remember.”

“Can’t talk,” Mandy gabbles, starting to perspire. “I may be compromised.”

“What’s happened?” Mostyn wants to know. “Is it UNIT?”

“I think you’ve got the wrong number,” Isobel says.

“Mandy,” says the man, audibly rattled.

“There’s no Mandy at this address,” Isobel answers. “Now buzz off.”

“What…?” She slams the phone down on him before he can complete this remark and retreats back to the kitchen, wondering where the Brigadier has got to. She wouldn’t want him coming up behind her while she was making more tea. She suspects him of possibly having wandering hands under the right circumstances.

Thirty seconds later, the phone starts ringing again.

“Now, I don’t know what your game is,” Isobel snaps once she has answered it. “Are you one of those perverts who phone up young women so they can pant at them? Because if you are, I’ll have you know I’m friends with the Army. Yes, that’s right, and they’ll…”

“Mandy,” says Mostyn, sounding desperate. “Mandy, remember.”

“Something’s wrong,” says Mandy, forcing herself to stop babbling about the Army. “The last time, I checked in…something went wrong. I…my mind. I…”

“It’s all right,” says Mostyn, sounding less like her case officer and more like the man with sweaty C&A armpits. “Now, what happened?”

“The record,” she realises, aloud. “Teddy Bears’ Picnic. I didn’t get a chance to play it after we spoke. I think…”

“Oh, bloody hell…” Mostyn groans. “All right, then. Go and play it. Now! I’ll reactivate you in half an hour, and hopefully…”

“I told you to stop calling me!” Isobel yells and smashes the receiver against its cradle. She is still sitting on the stairs hugging her knees and trying not to listen to the resumed ringing when Zoe appears.

“The Doctor says he needs biscuits,” she explains, sceptically, and then seems to notice the racket. “Why aren’t you answering that?”

“Oh, it’s just some crank,” Isobel replies. “Keeps ringing me up to talk nonsense at me. I think it might be this modelling agent who wanted me to pose for this grotty bikini mag and I said no. Sweaty old letch; the sort who tells you to make love to the camera.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound very pleasant,” Zoe tells her. “Or hygienic, for that matter.”

“Hey,” says Isobel, “do you think that Brigadier can be trusted around girls?”

“I think so.” Zoe seems puzzled about something. She picks up the telephone: “Who is this?” She puts it down again: “Oh, they rang off, whoever they were.”

“That Captain Turner’s more my speed,” Isobel says. “Jimmy. He looks like a Jimmy, doesn’t he?”

“Does he?” Sallie – Zoe – does it make any difference? – slowly approaches her along the hallway, the ghost of a smile making her dimples stand out. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Jimmy or not, Isobel thinks a few seconds later, I bet he can’t kiss like this…

He can’t, she discovers later that night when he comes back from his rescue mission. Her uncle is in one piece, apparently, sequestered now with the Doctor and the Brig and Zoe discussing Cyberdoodads and the end of the world. Jimmy finds her looking out of her bedroom window into the gathering dusk.

“What are you doing up here?” he asks, wearing that chancer’s expression again.

“Are you all right?” she asks, smiling insolently back at him. “No bullet holes?”

“No.” He grins. “It all went according to plan for a change. Did you know that some giant silver robot-men are going to invade the Earth in the morning and take over everybody’s minds?”

She shrugs. “I’d heard. It’s all a bit boring if you ask me.”

“Well, yes,” he agrees. “You can’t help but think, though…”

“What if this is our last night alive?” she muses.

“Exactly.” And so she gets her umpteenth session of kissing and canoodling in the space of a few hours. Jimmy isn’t as good as Zoe, she soon satisfies herself, but he’s good enough to be going on with. If Isobel had known she’d get this much action, she would have started hanging around with space invaders and the like ages ago.

“Penny for them?” Jimmy asks as the dawn spreads slowly across the sky. London is completely still in the last hour before the storm. The only sound Mandy can hear as she finishes dressing by the window is the tweeting of the birds lining the roof opposite.

“It's all so peaceful,” she says, thinking that it’s the sort of thing she would expect Isobel to say.

“Do you think the Doctor could be wrong this time?” Jimmy asks, fastening the last button on his uniform.

Mandy shakes her head: “He's been right up to now.” She thinks about that, thinking about the stories she knows about him, although she does not remember where she heard them. The tales of terror and blood. Could they really be mistaken? She thinks that today, one way or another, she is likely to find out.

“Yes, true,” Turner concedes, “but…well, I don't know.” He indicates the view outside, but also the feel of this morning, the blanket of hushed contentment that seems to lie over the city: “Look!”

Mandy sighs almost silently, blinks her eyes. When they open, she is Isobel again and her uncertainties have vanished. She vaguely recalls them, but only as something somebody might have told her once, not as anything she’s ever felt herself. Isobel knows what Jimmy means.

“It's just incredible, isn't it?” she asks him. “Looking at all that peace out there, it's so difficult to imagine…”

And then, without warning, with a screech and a wail of electronic noise, the invasion begins.

…

Mandy sat in the open back door of the ambulance, shivering, a blanket clutched around her shoulders. Somewhere, a radio was wittering about a terrorist attack at the Post Office Tower, lives lost. There were reports coming in of other outbreaks all over London…

She shook. She tried to cry but found no tears. Sallie. Oh God, Sallie. The loss was too big to feel, she thought in some isolated, detached corner of her brain. It would hit her later, she thought. Later, the pain would destroy her, she told herself. For now, she felt nothing but emptiness.

That thing she had seen had not been a terrorist.

Police and firemen and ambulance crews milled about, some carrying stretchers, others shepherding the walking wounded to safety. The road was full of debris; broken glass, uprooted signs, pieces of wrecked cars. Some of the stretchers were completely covered with blankets, showing nothing of the people lying upon them. She wondered which one…

“Er, excuse me, Miss.” A shadow fell across her and she looked up to see two men in suits and macs, looming over her. “Are you all right to talk to us for a few minutes?” asked the older one on the left. He held out what seemed like identification, a rectangle of card with some sort of crest printed upon it. The younger one standing at his elbow remained silent for now.

“A-a-a…” She made an effort to control herself, forced herself to shape the words properly: “Are you p-police?”

“No, Miss,” said the older man. “We represent, er, another department. My name is George and this is my colleague Terry, and we just want to hear about what you saw today, what happened to you.”

“W-well, George,” she said, voice wavering with barely contained emotion. “My name is Mandy. And I’ve just watched a…some sort of w-war machine kill my best friend.”

…

And that, as they say, is that. The Cyberthingamabobs lost. Tobias Vaughan died. Missiles and space rockets were involved. The Doctor saved the world and the Institute (Isobel doesn’t know what that is, and Mandy doesn’t remember all the details, but she remembers one thing)…the Institute didn’t.

She feels more Mandy and less Isobel all the time, thinking that she might eventually find some sort of equilibrium in the middle, but when she’s one she doesn’t really remember being the other, only at a sort of remove, like music heard coming from another room. All she knows is that the telephone keeps ringing, on and off, and she keeps ignoring it, even if it is all she can do not to pick it up. Isobel has her self-constructed story about lecherous modelling agents to stay her hand; it is amazing how the mind adapts to circumstances like that. Mandy knows the voice on the other end would ask her to…do something to the Doctor before he manages to escape again, and that if it did she might not be able to disobey. So she ignores it, because she’s beginning to realise that whatever reasons she might have had for volunteering for this, she was all wrong about the Doctor. She owes him her life, both of her lives; maybe everybody on the planet does too.

Their job done, the Doctor and his friends are going to move on now. She gets the impression that they do that a lot. Maybe it is time she did too. That last night with Zoe back at the house, the last night they might ever have together, Isobel (or Mandy, or both of them) almost asks Zoe if she can come along, to travel with them, but something makes her hold her tongue.

She does not know if she is ready for that yet. She needs to sort herself out first. Her selves out. Her mind is a kaleidoscope of conflicting ideas and memories and emotions. She is not even completely sure yet whether she was Isobel first or Mandy, which of them had this thing done to them, whatever this thing is.

They make the most of their time together. The Brigadier is at headquarters and Jamie is in the hospital with his flesh wound. Jimmy, incredibly, is flying back from Russia aboard a hypersonic spy plane or some nonsense like that. The Doctor…the Doctor, Isobel or Mandy thinks, knows to allow his companions room to breathe. They move together on the narrow bed, Zoe and her, murmuring softly to each other between kisses, sharing their hopes and fears, their dreams. Even Zoe has those, and she’s a girl genius from the future unless she’s completely potty and makes things up. Who is Isobel/Mandy to accuse anybody of that, though?

She lies on the edge of sleep, Zoe’s head nestled on her shoulder, and thinks that if this was all there was, if it all ended right now, she could almost be content with it. Only almost, though. She wants to know who Sallie was, why Zoe reminds her of her so much. She wants to know a lot of things. She wants to find out who did this to her and look them in the eye.

The next morning, before it is time to leave, she takes Zoe through another photoshoot, for old times’ sake. She knows that when this is over she will treasure every last frame.

Snap snap snap flash snap snap snap. Flash snap snap snap.

“Tired?” Isobel asks delightedly when they are just about finished (when she has a camera in her hands, she feels like Isobel).

“No, exhausted!” Zoe declares. It is true that neither of them ended up getting much sleep last night.

“Okay,” Isobel tells her, generously. “You can take a breather.”

“What is this new job of yours, then?” Zoe asks as they are relaxing together a few moments later. Isobel takes a second to remember the lie she murmured last night.

“Well, because of my photographs of the Cybermen in action, I've got an exclusive contract with a publishing group,” she tells Zoe. The Brigadier has actually made it clear that none of her pictures will be seen by the general public. A policy decision, he called it. “So I'll be travelling all over the world,” she claims, airily, “snapping away with my little black box…”

It is a necessary lie, she thinks. She may not be leaving with the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie, but she is not staying here, waiting for her uncle who is not really her uncle to return, waiting for the phone to ring again. She doesn’t know where she will go, yet, but Jimmy might feature in her plans. If nothing else, he has a nice smile and hanging around with a UNIT officer can’t hurt in terms of her personal safety once the man on the phone realises she is not going to answer it again.

Speaking of the handsome devil: “Hello!” For a man who has flown halfway around the world and back in the last few hours, Jimmy seems very bright-eyed and bushy tailed as he appears from the hallway.

Isobel grins back at him: “Here comes my dolly soldier!”

Shortly afterwards, Jimmy is dropping the travellers off at the place where they say they left their vehicle. It looks like an empty field, apart from the cows, but the Doctor insists and Zoe seems to agree with him. They all say their heartfelt farewells and then the Doctor and Zoe set off among the unperturbed cattle with Jamie, picked up from the hospital on the way, in tow. Jimmy and Isobel watch sceptically from beside the Land Rover.

“Now then,” says the Doctor, “where exactly did we leave it?” He and his friends spread out, arms agape, as they continue across the field.

“What's he doing?” Isobel asks, aghast.

Jimmy shrugs: “Search me.”

And then the Doctor’s arm disappears. A moment later the rest of him does too, and then…the vehicle appears, if that is what it is. Isobel closes her eyes. Mandy opens hers. “Bye!” Zoe and Jamie call out as they follow him inside it.

“A police box?” Mandy exclaims to Jimmy as the light on top flashes rhythmically and they watch it wheeze and groan before fading into invisibility once more. “I don't believe it…”

And she really isn’t sure whether or not she does. One thing Mandy does know, however, is that she remembers. For the first time in a long time, she remembers everything. Even the date on which it happened.

…

Wednesday, July the 20th, 1966.

“That’s Ursa Major.” Sallie pointed up at the dusty skylight above them and Mandy followed the line of her slim white arm, her pointing finger. It just looked like a lot of stars to her, but Sallie knew their names. She knew the patterns they made and the way they moved across the heavens.

Mandy learned fast, though, at least when Sallie was doing the teaching. “The Great Bear,” she translated. It was after midnight, but neither of them was ready for sleep yet.

Sallie smiled brightly at her, dimples creasing her pixie cheeks: “That’s right!” She pointed again: “And that’s Ursa Minor.”

“The Little Bear,” Mandy said. “Great bear, little bear; it’s Yogi and Boo-Boo.”

Sallie laughed at that. She laughed easily, and beautifully, like a musical instrument. Her whole face lit up when she laughed, her whole body shook. This was especially noteworthy when she was naked, as they both were right now. She leaned halfway across Mandy and pointed at another constellation through the skylight: “And that’s Boötes.” She pronounced it “bo-ot-ez,” as if she had been to school and everything.

“The…” Mandy played daft: “The…boot-maker?”

“No, silly!” Sallie rolled over on top of her and Mandy caught her up in her arms. “It’s the herdsman, or the ploughman. The name actually means somebody who drives oxen.“ Sallie’s body was made of velvet and soft, warm curves. Her hair was a torrent of black silk, her eyes were dark, flashing jewels. Mandy kissed her again and again, on the mouth, on the shoulder, in the hollow of her neck, feeling her shiver and shudder and cling tight in response.

Sallie had an uncle who was an astronomer; that was how she knew about stars, why she liked to lie here in bed – their bed – and look up at the night sky. Really, she was an artist, or studying to be one. They had met in a life drawing class, where Mandy was the one being drawn. That was one of the things Mandy did to make money, along with waiting tables and pulling pints, now and then posing for photographers up West in Soho. She had a good body, if she said so herself; she did not mind showing it off. A steady job sounded like a good idea to her. One of these days she might even want one.

Sallie wasn’t going to have a job, though. She was going to have a career. She had it all planned out. She was already selling the odd painting, not for much, but she was starting to be known by the various dealers and gallery owners. She had an exhibition coming up at the art school where she studied. Apparently some famous critic was expected to attend; Sallie was beside herself with excitement every time the subject came up.

For now, they were stony broke half the time, scraping to find the rent. Money wasn’t everything, though, not as long as they had each other. They were not that much alike, really; Sallie was dark and petite and sharp as a tack; Mandy was tall and fair and, she would be the first to admit, kind of flaky. They had one thing in common, though. They were both in love. Their landlady thought they were just good chums sharing a flat, which was sweet really.

Later that morning, once the sun was up, they got up and washed and dressed and ready to go out. Sallie made toast while Mandy made the bed. They ate it with the last of their strawberry jam, looking about at the various paintings Sallie had hanging around the room and the other pieces of art they had managed to accumulate. They had a huge photographic poster of Terence Stamp hanging on the wall opposite the door, a print of a Bailey portrait. Even if you weren’t into men (and Mandy could take them or leave them), you had to admit that he was painfully beautiful. Eyes like laser beams.

“What are you doing, today?” asked Sallie as she pulled on her white plastic shoes. She had a lecture to go to, something about some old masters or something.

Old masters, young masters; it was all the same to Mandy: “Oh, I’ve got a shift up the Dog and Duck when it opens,” she replied.

“That boozer down by the Embankment?”

“Yes,” said Mandy. “With any luck, I’ll make enough bread to buy…well, some bread.”

“Walk me to the bus stop?” asked Sallie.

“All right, then.”

They locked the front door on their way out, made sure to close the gate at the end of the garden path as they stepped out onto the pavement. Just another summer’s morning in Vauxhall; there were England flags flying on some of the nearby houses, red crosses on white. Neither Mandy nor Sallie followed football, but you would have to have been in a coma not to know that the World Cup was on. Were England playing France tonight? Mandy neither knew nor cared, but she was sure the punters in the pub would educate her on the finer details.

They were halfway to the bus stop, just passing that weathered old blue police box on the next corner down, when the first man ran past them. Shortly after, another followed, and another. Men and women and children, a few at first, then a dozen, then more than a dozen, all running in the opposite direction to them.

Sallie frowned: “What’s all the–?”

There was a great deal of noise and activity going on further down the road. Mandy strained her eyes to see what it was, but all she could make out was roiling smoke and dust, distant but getting ever closer. And then a parked car exploded, about a hundred yards away. A puff of black smoke shot with orange flame climbed into the sky; the dull booming sound reached them an instant later. Mandy heard screams.

“Mandy!” Sallie sounded scared, clinging to Mandy’s arm as they stopped in their tracks. Another explosion followed shortly afterwards, and another. There was something down there, in among all the smoke. Mandy could not quite make out what it was, except that it was big and square, and coming their way.

“Run!” It was a uniformed policeman, sprinting towards them out of the chaos, waving his arms. He stopped by the police box, fumbling with his key chain and finally managing to get the little hatch on the door open, pulling out the telephone within.

“We should go back,” said Mandy, tugging Sallie with her as she started to back towards the house. “We should –”

The police box vanished, along with the policeman. Suddenly Mandy was no longer holding onto Sallie’s arm. She found herself sprawled in the street, pieces of shattered glass and wood, broken concrete and twisted metal clattering to the ground all around her. She stared at the blue sky. She could taste blood in her mouth.

She rolled over, trying to get to her hands and knees. Her left knee throbbed with pain. Something big and boxy and pale rolled past her on clattering caterpillar tracks, buzzing and humming to itself like a mechanical beehive. It continued along the road, ignoring her, spreading chaos and destruction as it went.

Mandy was not paying attention to the something. She was staring at the empty white plastic shoe that lay on the road eighteen inches in front of her nose. Next to it there was a foot in a white stocking speckled with red, and next to the foot a leg bent at a very strange angle, and next to the leg…

Sallie…

For a second, Mandy wondered who was screaming, so loudly and hysterically, but then she realised it was her.

…

Jimmy still claims not to be stinking rich, but he admits that he has an Aston Martin, a convertible, apparently. He also has two weeks’ leave coming up and he has asked her if she’d like to come down to Cornwall with him, to see some scenery. She thinks that she will. She isn’t sure that there is much future in whatever it is she and Jimmy may have between them, but right now she needs to be somewhere else, with someone else, for all sorts of reasons.

One condition, though, says Jimmy. She can’t call him her dolly soldier in front of the Brigadier. She will, of course, now that he has said that, at every opportunity.

She gets him to stop the Land Rover at the end of the street. All of the UNIT troops have moved out again already. She says she is going to pack some clothes, some other belongings, and then they’ll hit the road. Ten, fifteen minutes, she tells him.

The telephone is ringing again when she enters the house.

She almost picks it up; the compulsion to do so is still so strong. The writing on the wall is calling to her, but she manages to resist.

She turns away, and as she does so a figure appears in the kitchen doorway, blocking out the light.

“Hadn’t you better answer that?” asks Mostyn. In spite of the lightness of his tone, he is not smiling. He is definitely not smiling.

“I don’t think so,” says Mandy, or maybe Isobel. She isn’t too sure at the moment. “It’ll just be that creep who keeps phoning me all the time. A real heavy breather, you know?”

“Come into the kitchen,” Mostyn orders. He has one hand in the pocket of his belted mac. Mandy sees the distinctive bulge of a gun. Isobel just wonders whether he’s one of those sorts of men in macs.

“Have you come to kill me?” she asks. “For not answering the phone? That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

“Nobody’s here to kill you, Mandy,” Mostyn insists, eyes unreadable behind his Michael Caine specs. “I just want to bring you in, to take you home. Come into the kitchen,” he says again, standing aside to let her pass. “You won’t believe who’s here.”

“All right, love,” says George, when she walks through the door, Mostyn following close behind.

“Oh, George,” she says, sadly. Anyone but him… He is sitting at the kitchen table, hands folded in front of him, looking like a wreck.

There is a third man there, the bald man who presided over the “procedure”, what seems like a lifetime or two ago. He has a black medical bag open on the kitchen table and is in the act of filling a syringe from a small glass phial.

“Mostyn here asked me to come and talk to you,” George says. “You know, to talk you down.”

Of course. That’s typical Mostyn. Always, he spots the weakness in others and exploits it ruthlessly to get what he wants. The weakness in her; the weakness in George…

“You lied to me,” she says, looking at George but talking to Mostyn.

“How did I lie to you, Mandy?” asks Mostyn, colder than she has ever heard him. “You volunteered for this mission. You knew exactly what you were getting yourself in for. And you wanted it. You wanted revenge on that xeno bastard, for what he did to…”

She jumps on his hesitation: “For what he did to Sallie? You can’t even remember her fucking name, Mostyn! And he didn’t do anything to Sallie!”

“Post Office Tower,” says Mostyn, insistently. “July the twentieth, 1966.”

“Yes, and he shot JFK!” Mandy yells. “And he sank the Titanic, and he started World War Two and all of that other bollocks you said he did, and…and I’ve seen him, Mostyn. I’ve spoken to him. I don’t think he did any of those things. If he was there, he probably stopped those things from turning out even worse. WOTAN killed Sallie, not the Doctor.”

“Mandy, love,” says George. “It’s going to be all right. This…whatever they did to your mind, it obviously didn’t work out very well, but we’re going to sort you out. They’ve already recovered Professor Watkins, you know. He’s lost his leg, poor bugger, after those IE guards shot him, but he’s himself again now. You’re going to be okay again too. We know now that the process really can be reversed. You’re going to come back and work with me, back at old Torchwood House, with Terry too when he’s better. Just like old times. Mostyn’s promised.”

She knows what Mostyn’s promises are worth.

“You just need to remember,” George tells her. “Remember what you used to be like before they started mucking about with your brain.”

“I remember, George,” she replies, very quietly. “I remember it all. I remember being Mandy and I remember being Isobel, at the same time now. And we’ve been comparing notes, the two of us inside this head. I know who I am now, George. I know where I’m going, and it’s not back to Torchwood bloody House.”

“You can forget Isobel,” Mostyn interjects. “Isobel is fiction; she never existed. In fact, you will forget her, and everything that’s happened these past days. This is the sort of thing they invented the white pill for.”

“I’m ready,” says the bald doctor, impatiently, raising his syringe to the light and squeezing a thin stream of shining diamonds from its tip. “Shall we begin?”

“Don’t fight, love,” says George. “Just let it happen. This is all going to be over in a minute.”

“He’s just going to give you a little injection,” Mostyn chimes in, behind her. “To help you remember. And I’m just going to put a record on while we’re here.” She turns, and sees that he has the old 78 out of its tattered sleeve, has brought the gramophone in here and set it up on the kitchen sideboard. She watches in slow motion as he puts the disc on the turntable and places the needle in its groove: snap, crackle, pop.

If you go down to the woods today…

“It’s just a post-hypnotic trigger,” says the bald man as he approaches her with the needle poised in his hand. “The tune. It’s supposed to reset your conditioning, to make you Isobel again. And when we have Isobel again, we can set about wiping her out and restoring Mandy.”

You’re sure of a big surprise…

“No,” she says, even as she finds herself moving involuntarily, crouching beside the kitchen table.

If you go down to the woods today…

“It’s all right,” says George again. “Don’t fight, now.”

You’d better go in disguise…

“Good response,” the bald man comments as she begins to run her hand along the underside of the kitchen table. “She’s reacting to the hypnotic cues, following the programmed actions.” She finds a chunky metal shape.

For every bear that ever there was…

“Just bloody well shoot her up with that shit and get her in the van before the UNIT blokes come back,” says Mostyn, nervily.

Will gather there for certain because…

She runs her finger along a hard metal curve, across an etched diamond pattern…

Today’s…

“Well, go on, then,” Mostyn urges, in the same moment that she seizes the gun and wrenches its enclosing tape loose from the woodwork.

The day…

She straightens up, turns, shoots in one action. One lens of Mostyn’s glasses shatters and turns red. He goes over like a tree, his own weapon still only halfway out of his mac pocket, hitting the gramophone with his flailing arm on the way past. The record screeches in protest.

The day…

She turns back towards the bald doctor, who is staring at her in something like amazement. She shoots him twice, in the stomach, in the chest. He bounces off the edge of the table slumps to the floor, twitching, the syringe skittering across the kitchen tiles.

The day…

George rises from his chair.

“No,” she says, pointing the gun at him. “Please, George, please don’t…”

The day…

He’s an Institute man through and through. He goes for the pistol concealed inside his jacket. She shoots him before he can draw it. He falls back into the chair and it tips over, leaving him wedged between floor and wall.

The day…

She brings the butt of the revolver down hard upon the turntable, ending the music. She pulls the disc off and strikes it against the edge of the table until shards of shiny black shellac fly everywhere. Then she drops the gun with a thud and runs to George’s side.

“Christ,” he says. He is bleeding profusely, she thinks from his arm or shoulder. She hopes it isn’t a fatal wound, but with guns you can never really tell. It’s not like the movies.

“I’m sorry, George,” she says. She hopes he believes her, because it’s true. “I really am sorry.” She wads up a tea towel and slides it under his jacket, taking hold of his hand and forcing him to hold it pressed tightly in place, in an effort to stem the flow of blood.

She steps over Mostyn’s corpse and heads for the telephone. All this while, it has continued to ring unheeded. She picks up the receiver without putting it to her ear, stabs the button to cut off the call and dials “999”.

“Hello?” She speaks quickly, giving the operator her instructions: “I need an ambulance at 18, St James' Gardens, as quick as you can. There’s a man here, very badly hurt. Please don’t let him die. Please don’t.”

And with that, she puts the phone down again and makes for the door, not trusting herself to look back.

“What happened?” Jimmy asks when she gets back to the Land Rover. He is wild-eyed, pistol in hand, clearly having heard the shots and on the point of rushing to her rescue. She is glad that he did not; anything might have happened to him.

“Nothing important,” says Isobel as she climbs in beside him. “Come on, then, dolly soldier. Let’s go.”

END?