Текст книги "Doctor Who- Beautiful Chaos"

Автор книги: Gary Russell

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Donna was horrified. She’d somehow, without meaning to, without quite knowing why, she’d made her mum cry!

For all the wrong reasons! Like there were right ones…

You’re not supposed to make your mum cry…

‘I’m not gonna die, Mum! No policeman’s gonna ring the doorbell and say I’m dead.’

‘Why not?’ Sylvia was almost screaming now, not in an angry way, but tears were rolling down her cheeks – no, they were actually throwing themselves down her face, like wet lemmings. ‘Why not? It’s what happened when your dad died!’

The sudden silence was gut-wrenchingly terrible.

Then Donna was across the room, hugging her sobbing mother, holding her, squeezing her, mumbling apologies and soothing words, telling her that it was all right, that she was there.

But one thought ran through her mind. Tomorrow, she’d be gone again. With the Doctor. Because that’s what she wanted.

But did she have the right to? Had she really earned the right to go off again if this was what her mum thought?

All those times she and Sylvia had fought, argued, yelled. As a teenager (and frankly, most of her spoilt twenties), Donna had just put it down to ‘that’s my mum’.

But Donna wasn’t that person now, and she could see that her widowed mum, one year on, needed her daughter more than ever before.

 

And Donna was crying too now.

Crying for her mum’s pain, her dad’s loss, remembering that knock on the door. The policeman standing there.

‘He was supposed to die here, in my arms, with his family,’ Sylvia was saying. ‘Not in a bloody filling station.

Alone.’

At which point, with timing for which both the words ‘impeccable’ and ‘inconvenient’ were invented, the doorbell rang.

Wordlessly, Wilf went to answer it, and Donna heard him say ‘Ah, not a good time.’ Donna knew, without hearing the response, exactly who was on the doorstep.

And so did Sylvia.

She looked with red, teary eyes at her daughter.

And, for the first time that Donna could remember, Sylvia Noble stroked Donna’s face, a soft caress of pure maternal love. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ Then she called, ‘Come in, Doctor.’

A moment later, the Doctor’s face popped round the sitting room door, brainy specs in place, hair madder than normal.

‘Hullo,’ he said to all of them. ‘Do you know the Carnes family by any chance? I think they’ve got aliens in the family.’

The tourist trade in Moscatelli was mainly based around olive groves, orangeries, a nice vineyard and the annual motorcycle race that started thirteen miles away in Florence and ended up the other side of the mountains in

this small but oft-visited little town.

The people who lived in Moscatelli were mostly Italians who had been there for thirty or so generations.

Everyone knew everyone and it was friendly, welcoming and cheerful.

It was also, in the middle of May, the recipient of stunningly good weather, and Jayne Greene thought it brought out the best in the locals. Not least of which was that Tonio was spending most of the day during the dig wearing nothing but a pair of tight denim cut-offs that left very little to the imagination (and Jayne could imagine quite a lot). The Professor had employed Tonio and his family to help them set up the dig a week or so back.

Jayne and her two fellow students, Sean and Ben, had agreed to accompany the Professor there for the summer because it would give them really good marks in the end-of-course assessments, it’d be an adventure to travel to a nice part of Italy and it was a great way to get a tan.

‘Got it!’ Sean yelled excitedly.

‘How much?’ asked Ben, sifting soil a couple of feet away from where the laptop was set up by the food tent.

‘Seventy-eight euro.’

‘Sixty-something quid. Not bad.’ Ben nodded. ‘Well done.’

‘I bloody love eBay,’ Sean smiled at Jayne. ‘Yaay me!’

‘Was it the Egyptian pot?’

Sean looked at her and shook his head, slowly.

‘Not the Iron Age spade?’

More head shaking.

Jayne dropped her own tools and wandered over to the

laptop and looked at what Sean had just committed sixty pounds to.

‘That?’

‘That.’

‘It’s a toy.’

‘Course it’s a toy,’ Ben yelled as Tonio poured some more earth into his sieve. ‘What else does Sean ever buy off eBay?’

Jayne couldn’t understand it. ‘You mean, you spent all that money, and seven days’ frustrated watching the auction, for a mass-produced toy?’

‘Action figure,’ Sean corrected her. ‘Limited edition.

Only five hundred produced, and that was eight years ago.

It’s a variant paint job, y’see, she’s wearing her red Dark Period costume instead of the traditional green one.’

Jayne just looked at Sean. ‘You are an adult. You are a grown man getting excited about a plastic toy. A figure for kids. A…’

‘Don’t say “dolly”,’ Ben muttered to himself.

‘… a dolly?’

Sean slammed the laptop shut. ‘My money, my choice.

You get excited about Roman pins and earthenware.’

‘So do you!’

‘Yeah, cos that’s a job. That’s what I do here and at uni.

But in my spare time, I have other hobbies. I have…’

‘Don’t say “a life”,’ Ben muttered to himself again.

‘… a life,’ Sean finished. ‘You should try getting one before you criticise everyone else.’

Jayne stared at Sean, then across at Ben, who made sure he caught no one’s eye and started to run his finger

pointlessly through the dirt, in an effort to pretend he had something to distract him.

The tension was broken by little Professor Rossi, stumbling back around the tents after a trip to the town for some milk and teabags.

‘Now, now, I could hear you up on the main road.

What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ Sean grunted. ‘Sorry Prof.’

Rossi shook his head, scratching the scar that created a small slash across his cheek. At uni, everyone joked it was a duelling scar he’d got fighting for a woman he loved, but one day someone discovered the truth – that ten years earlier he’d been cut in the car accident that had killed his wife. Everyone lost interest in imagining romantic things about the scar after that.

‘What am I going to do with you three? I bring you out here from university for the mid-term break, to visit the family home, and to give you all the chance to improve your frankly dodgy archaeology marks. And all you do is play with the broadband, flirt with poor Tonio there and embarrass him, or drink too much orange wine. You are here to work, you know. Being sociable is a pleasant side effect but not essential. What is essential, however, is teamwork. Sean and Jayne, I don’t care if you can’t get on, but you will work together. Jayne and Ben, I don’t care if you want to fight over Tonio’s attention, you will work together. Sean and Ben I don’t care if you can drink one another under the table at night, provided you turn up fresh and able the next day. Is all that understood? I am not your parents but I am the man who will mark your

end-of-term papers, and you would do well to remember that keeping me sweet is a positive move.’ Rossi put some cartons of milk on the table next to the laptop. ‘So, whose turn is it to make tea?’

Sean volunteered as Rossi scooped up the laptop.

‘Hopefully the Bursar has forwarded some more funds to us so we can try and trace those tunnels through the hills across to the lake.’

‘How far do your family go back here, Professor?’

Jayne asked.

Rossi shrugged. ‘I’m in the process of finding that out at the library. Certainly my paternal great-grandparents were the ones who moved to Ipswich, but I suspect their roots are here right back to the fifteenth century.’

Ben headed over with his sieve. ‘So we are looking for more than fifteenth-century Italian pots and pans then? I said so! Come on, Professor, what’s the big secret?’

‘Ah,’ Rossi grinned. ‘Well, you see, somewhere in this area an entire Dukedom vanished. A whole town with a castle and everything was based around here, or in the hills or somewhere in the vicinity of that lake beyond the orange groves. I’m trying to find its borders.’

‘How do we know?’ Sean asked as the kettle boiled.

‘It’s in the records in the library,’ Tonio said in good but heavily accented English.

Jayne and Ben stared at Tonio in mute shock – and slight horror.

He grinned. ‘Oh right, you both thought I didn’t understand English,’ he laughed, a deep bellowing laugh.

So did Professor Rossi. ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is funny.

 

Did neither of you realise?’

Dumbly, they both shook their heads as Sean busied himself with the tea, determined not to catch their eyes.

‘But that means…’ Jayne started.

‘Everything we’ve said…’ added Ben.

‘About you…’ Jayne again.

‘You… you heard… Oh God… kill me now…’ Ben put his sieve down and sat hard on the ground.

Tonio tousled Ben’s dark hair and winked at him, before throwing a look to Jayne. ‘Sorry, you lose.’

‘Course I do,’ Jayne said. ‘When does life ever go Jayne Greene’s way?’

The laptop bleeped and, leaving the students to sort out the tea and Tonio’s confession, Professor Rossi accessed his emails in response. Nothing from the Bursar, but there was one message:

From: Madam Delphi

To: [email protected] Subject: SAN MARTINO

Professor Rossi

My congratulations, you have rediscovered your heritage, and you are indeed in San Martino, just as you hoped. Click on this link to be taken to my site for more information about this delightful Italianate kingdom and its secrets.

The Professor was about to call the students over, but thought it would be better to check that this wasn’t a hoax.

(Although how did anyone know they were searching for

San Martino? He hadn’t even told the students the name of the kingdom). So he clicked the hotlink.

Instead of a new webpage, the screen was instantly filled with a pulsating ball of bright white light, highlighted with lilac edges and spirals.

Instinctively he let his hand reach forward to touch the screen… to go into the screen, to go through the screen…

as if his right hand was being consumed by the transfixing ball of energy.

Then he withdrew his hand, and looked at it.

Crackling around the fingertips were the vestiges of purple pulses of energy, like tiny flickers of raw electrical power. He turned his hand over, studying the little pulses until they seemed to vanish for good, absorbed into his skin. He rubbed his fingers together, and then looked back at the screen. It just displayed Sean’s eBay victory again.

The Professor stood up and turned to face his students and held his arms out, hands flat. ‘We’ve done it,’ he breathed.

Instantly distracted from their own petty concerns, the four young people walked over, Jayne and Sean taking an offered hand each, excitedly returning the gesture, if unsure what they were celebrating.

After a second, they wordlessly released the Professor’s hands, and Rossi then grabbed Ben and Tonio’s hands. And they in turn took Sean and Jayne’s, the five now forming a circle.

In unison, they all raised their linked hands into the air, purple electricity building and crackling around them.

The others followed the direction of his gaze as the

Professor looked up into the sky.

‘Welcome back,’ he said quietly.

Dinner was subdued in the Noble household.

Sylvia silently put food on plates. Donna silently passed the plates from the work surface to the dining table. Wilf silently poured water into tumblers – three matching ones from a petrol station, and a larger one with Donald Duck on it. The Doctor had that.

The Doctor sat there, uncomfortable with domesticity at the best of times, utterly ill at ease right now.

‘Dubai?’ Sylvia said, suddenly sitting up.

The Doctor shot a look at Donna – what was he supposed to say?

‘With the horses,’ Wilf helpfully prodded.

‘Horses?’ The Doctor was like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘Horses. Yes, marvellous things.’

‘The Sheikh of Dubai put us up for a couple of weeks,’

Donna interjected. ‘ Didn’t he?’

Sylvia started eating. Something cheese-y and macaroni-y the Doctor had guessed, but he wasn’t quite sure. Something that looked like this had once tried to bite off his toes on the coast of Kal-Durunt in the Keripedes Cluster.

He gently eased his fork into it.

‘I’m sorry it’s not as posh as what you get in Dubai, with horses and sheikhs,’ Sylvia said. ‘But I had no notice from either of you that you were coming.’

‘Oh, well, we couldn’t have Donna missing today,’ the Doctor said brightly. Too brightly. Wrong occasion for

Tigger-Doctor, better to be Eeyore-Doctor tonight.

‘I thought the Emirates were run by emirs, not sheikhs,’

Sylvia said, pouring herself more water. ‘But what do I know? I just sit here every day, waiting for people to turn up out of the blue, expecting to be fed.’

The Doctor just threw a look at Donna that he thought said ‘help’ but Donna clearly took to mean ‘no, it’s OK, ignore me, oh and right now would be the time to pick a really good fight with your mum’.

So Donna did.

‘What is your problem, Mum? Most people would kill to have family around them.’

Wilf tried to intervene, but Donna was going off on one now.

‘I mean, Mooky goes away for two weeks, her parents throw a bloody party to celebrate her return. And all she’s done is go shopping in Glasgow. I get to see the gala-well, to see the world, things I never thought I’d get the chance to do, and all I get is moans.’

Sylvia didn’t look up from her food. ‘Yeah, but they probably knew where Mooky was. All I know is when your granddad there bothers to say he had a postcard. And I’m never allowed to read them, oh no.’

Donna was going to chastise Wilf for that when she remembered that said postcards were usually sent from another star system entirely.

‘OK, Mum, I’ll start sending you postcards too.

Promise.’

‘Oh it’s not just that,’ Sylvia said. ‘It’s the whole life I have. Your dad’s gone, you’ve gone, and I’m stuck here as

nursemaid for your granddad’s bit on the side.’

Donna opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again.

Then, as that comment sank in, her mouth opened again, but still no sound came out.

‘Bit on the side?’ the Doctor asked Wilf.

Wilf glowered at Sylvia. ‘She’s a friend,’ he said. ‘I’m not gonna marry her.’

‘I should hope not,’ Sylvia said. ‘Mum would turn in her grave.’

‘Ahhh, so that’s what it’s all about,’ Wilf sighed. ‘You think Eileen wouldn’t approve. You think somehow me seeing a poor, sick old lady would make Eileen sad. Well, you’re wrong. She was your mother, but she was my wife.

I knew her better than that.’

The Doctor remembered why he didn’t ‘do’ families.

‘Lovely macaroni cheese, Mrs Noble,’ he said, stuffing his mouth. ‘Mmmmm…’

‘It’s mushroom raclette,’ she snapped.

‘Not macaroni?’

‘Mushroom.’

‘It’s… great… very cheesy. And…’

‘So, who is this lady, Gramps?’ Donna asked.

Wilf smiled. ‘She’s a lady astronomer I know, from Greenwich. Helps out at the observatory there, has done for years. But about three years ago she was… well, she fell ill and had to stop working. We chatted on the phone a couple of times, met up, had dinner. You’d think I’d started dating a teenage married pregnant cousin the way Sylvia goes on about her.’

The Doctor was looking at Sylvia Noble, however.

 

Spotting what made her flush angrily when Wilf spoke. It had been the word ‘ill’.

He looked back at the old paratrooper. ‘Why’d she give up at the Observatory then?’

‘Ask her yourself,’ Sylvia said. ‘She’ll be here any minute. Even on Geoff’s day, my daughter brings you round, and he brings her round.’

And Sylvia was up and out of the kitchen.

Donna sighed and went after her mum. Wilf made to follow, but the Doctor caught his arm.

‘I’m no expert, Wilfred, but I reckon best leave the ladies to it.’

Wilf nodded.

‘And your friend?’

‘Netty. Henrietta Goodhart.’

He smiled. ‘Most appropriate name I think she could have. But she was diagnosed with… She has Alzheimer’s, Doctor. And it’s not getting any better.’

‘It wouldn’t,’ the Doctor said quietly, just as the doorbell rang. ‘That her?’

Wilf nodded and went to let her in.

A moment later and the Doctor was grinning at a vision of eccentricity, charm and humour that only certain English women of a particular age and bearing could carry off.

She was dressed from head to foot in brown – knee-length corduroy skirt, tan blouse, chocolate-coloured jacket – and carried a tan handbag. On her head was an amazing hat with at least half a dozen brown feathers of different shapes and sizes. Wilf was removing her long

dark overcoat, and Netty offered her hand to the Doctor before Wilf had got the coat off her, meaning one sleeve, the handshaking sleeve, was still on.

‘Doctor, how marvellous to meet you. Hooray and huzzah, it’s a real pleasure.’

‘Mrs Goodhart.’

‘Miss, please. Better still, just Netty. Never been married and, despite what Wilfred’s daughter believes, have no intention to ever be married.’

Wilf finally got the coat off her, and Netty slid neatly into a chair, grabbing a glass of water in an obviously well-rehearsed manoeuvre.

‘I never married,’ she went on. ‘Seemed such an alarming waste of time. I live in Greenwich you know, bit of a trek out here, but my local cab firm, they know me and my little ways, so it’s never a problem if I forget to have money. Or where I’m going.’

The Doctor had taken to this gregarious lady instantly.

‘You can’t beat a reliable taxi firm, Netty,’ he said, managing to get a sentence in before she blithely carried on.

‘Are they rowing yet? It’s all they ever do. And it’s about me. I was so ashamed to start with, now I just treat it as a ritual, and in ten minutes Sylvia’s back to her normal charming self, full of tea and crackers.’

The Doctor smiled. ‘Sylvia Noble? Charming? Words not often in the same sentence.’

The look he got from Netty showed him how he’d misjudged the situation between the two women.

‘Oh, don’t disappoint me, Doctor. Not after all I’ve

been told about you. That woman out there is a saint.

She’s just lost her husband, she’s got a daughter you drag halfway to God knows where on a whim, and has to tolerate that marvellous Wilfred, who can be just as stubborn and cantankerous as her. More so in fact. I like her a lot. Besides which, and I know she complains, but that’s just her way of letting off steam, she’s bloody terrific with my… you know…’ Netty tapped the side of her head. ‘My condition. Bless her, last weekend she drove Wilf all the way to Charlton. Apparently I was found in someone’s back garden, trying to convince them I used to live there when I was six!’

‘And did you?’

‘Good gracious, no. I was brought up in Hampshire.’

She dived into her handbag and brought out an A5-sized red notebook and showed it to him. ‘My life,’ she said simply. ‘So I can remember things.’

The Doctor looked her straight in the eye and saw, briefly, a very scared but very proud old lady. And he liked her even more than before.

‘Without that book, without the likes of Sylvia Noble, I’m nothing. I’d left my bag in a shop on Greenwich High Street, so I’m in this garden, unable to know who I am, where I’m from. Sylvia found a receipt in my pocket, found the shop, got my bag back where I’d left it, sorted it all out with the police. She wants to put me in a home, you know. The brochures are in that drawer next to the cooker.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Wilf won’t hear of it. Says he’ll have me move in

here first. Daft old fool, as if I’m going to go from one house I can barely cope with to another. But a lovely nursing home, where I’ll be looked after? How marvellous is that?’

The kitchen door opened. Donna and Sylvia trooped in, and Donna immediately introduced herself.

As Sylvia put the kettle on, the Doctor crossed and stood behind her. ‘Does Wilf know all you do for his friend?’

‘Does Donna know you’re poking your nose into her family’s business?’ Sylvia responded.

‘I’m not your enemy, Mrs Noble,’ the Doctor said.

Sylvia turned and smiled at him. The most insincere smile possible. ‘For my daughter’s sake, Doctor, I tolerate you in this house. But that’s all. For my dad’s sake, I’ll do the best I can for Netty Goodhart. I don’t think I’m a selfish woman, Doctor. I’ve worked hard, I built a life, I never had much money, and I tried to give Donna a decent life. But then one day, I lost my husband. My rock. And since then I’ve tried to do what both of us did, but with a daughter who one minute won’t get a job, the next can afford to be in a different hemisphere, but can’t afford a stamp, and an old dad who seems to have decided it’s time to replace my mum once and for all.’

‘Are you sure you’re not worried he’s replacing you? I imagine he let your mum go a long time ago.’

The silence that followed the slap around the face he received seemed to go on for a few hours, but was probably only a few seconds.

‘I didn’t mean it like that…’ the Doctor started. ‘I

genuinely wondered—’

Sylvia ignored him. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you take the Doctor up to the allotment, eh? Donna and I can catch up with Netty while you two have an hour or… a few hours up there, yes?’

Wilf took the hint and was all but dragging the Doctor out of the kitchen as the women watched.

The last thing the Doctor heard was ‘Tea, everyone’

from Sylvia, before Wilf had thrust them both out into the night air.

‘Allotment. This way,’ the old man said.

Babis Takis hoiked the largest bale of hay onto the back of the station wagon and stopped to rest. He wasn’t getting any younger, and this was really Nikos’s job.

But Nikos wasn’t here, he was probably around the back of the farm, messing with that Spiros girl. Typical.

There was work to be done – they had to get this consignment over to Faliraki, where so much building work was still going on. Hotels, apartments, shopping malls, everything the whole Dodecanese would benefit from because of the continued tourism it would bring.

Babis yelled out Nikos’s name a couple of times as he hauled up more bales of hay. He glanced at his watch. It would take an hour or so to drive across the island to the Petaloudes, where they would collect Kris, before going on to Lindos and along the coast to Faliraki. They’d drop off the hay at the depot, then it was off to Erik’s Taverna for the night.

Still no sign of Nikos.

 

With a sigh, Babis walked away from the station wagon. ‘I am an old man, Nikos,’ he called out. ‘I fought in the war, you know, so people like you could be independent and have your luxuries. Just once, it’d be nice if you could pull your weight.’

He had reached the rear of the farm, when he heard a noise from inside one of the stables – a short female gasp of surprise, almost fear. Certainly alarm.

Babis was inside the stable in a second.

Nikos was on the ground, holding his head in his hands, silent but clearly dazed.

Standing over him, a shovel in her hands was a pretty young girl, who Babis recognised as Katarina Spiros.

‘You all right, girl?’ Babis asked, reaching for the shovel.

Katarina swung around to face Nikos’s grandfather, and he realised how scared she looked. ‘What happened?’

Babis asked.

He was surprised when Katarina explained. ‘He took a call…’

She was pointing at Nikos Takis, who was now beginning to stand up, abandoning the cell phone on the ground by his foot. He looked at his grandfather, causing Babis to take an involuntary step back.

Babis Takis had fought in the latter days of the war as a youth, kicking the Nazis out of Crete and keeping Greece for the Greeks. He had faced the wrath and pain of his parents, who had so hated and eventually rejected him for falling in love, marrying and having children with one of the hated Italians who had occupied the Greek Islands for

seven hundred years before being sent packing after the war. He had done some time in prison for a barroom brawl in Diagoras, and he had once had to face the embittered son of a German he’d tied a live grenade to back in 1944.

But nothing had ever scared him as much as the look his grandson gave him right now.

Nikos wasn’t there any more. That carefree, funny, clever grandson he had nurtured after his father’s death was just not there.

Babis didn’t know how he knew that. He didn’t know how it had happened. But he’d never been so sure of anything in his life.

He was still sure of this when a flash of purple fire, hotter than the heart of a sun, extinguished his existence in less time than it took Katarina Spiros to draw breath to scream.

A second later, a handful of ashes dropped to the ground where the young girl had stood.

And Nikos Takis threw his arms towards the sky, purple electricity buzzing around his fingertips, as he threw back his head.

‘Welcome back,’ he yelled triumphantly.

Donnie and Portia were on their honeymoon. It was Donnie’s first, Portia’s second, but both were enjoying themselves enormously.

Donnie’s son had been his best man. His grandson had been pageboy. Portia’s granddaughter had been the flower-girl. They’d had two ceremonies, a full-on Jewish one and a simpler Christian one to reflect both their chosen faiths. Portia had always stayed in the Jewish faith,

whereas Donnie’s family had pretty much abandoned it within weeks of arriving at Ellis Island a century and a bit earlier.

They had overcome the odds – a cancer scare for Donnie, some severe frowning by Portia’s more traditional relatives and the death of their 8-year-old cat, Mr Smokey, a week before the ceremonies. After knowing each other for fifteen years, courting for the last six, they were finally together for ever.

And here they were, in Donnie’s jeep, having bombed along the 8, passing through Danbury, before turning off the freeway and into the Connecticut countryside for their honeymoon.

They had taken a nice colonial house outside Olivertown, thirteen miles from Danbury. The house belonged to one of Portia’s clients (she was a dog-walker, traipsing three times a day around Central Park with a variety of canines). The Carpenters were on FM radio, telling the world how they’d like to teach the world to sing, and the happy couple were singing along.

They’d got through Abba, Dr Hook and the Medicine Show, Jo Stafford, and were nodding their heads gently along to Helen Reddy singing about how good it was to be insane: ‘No one asks you to explain’ they sang in unison as they pulled up outside the house they’d rented.

Portia looked at her new husband. ‘Well, Mr DiCotta, we’re here.’

‘We sure are, Mrs DiCotta.’ Donnie winked at her.

‘Gotten used to that yet?’

‘Never will, I reckon,’ she laughed. ‘But I like it just

the same.’ She leaned across the car and kissed Donnie as he switched the ignition off.

And the radio kept playing.

As they separated, they both looked at the fascia of the stereo.

‘That’s not good, Donnie,’ Portia DiCotta said. ‘Must be a short somewhere.’

He nodded. ‘Darn it, I’d better get it fixed up now, hon.

Otherwise we’ll have a flat battery tomorrow which would not be good as I want to take you up to that restaurant in New Preston. The food’s gorgeous, the hospitality’s first class and the view is to die for. You can look right down over Lake Waramaug and it’s real romantic.’

Portia nodded. ‘You sort the car, I’ll put some coffee on.’

Donnie reached out to feel under the dash for a loose wire. There was a tiny spark of electricity and the radio fell silent.

‘Well done you.’ Portia smiled. ‘Now you can help me get the cases out the back.’

Donnie DiCotta said nothing. He just kept his hand under the dashboard of the jeep, staring ahead.

‘Donnie?’

Nothing.

Portia reached out to touch his shoulder, and he swung his head round to face her. Portia saw his eyes – not the beautiful blue eyes that she’d fallen in love with. These had been replaced by two solid orbs of burning purple light, minuscule tongues of electricity sparking from his tear ducts.

 

She couldn’t say a word because he grabbed her head and kissed her on the mouth. Full. Hard. But not at all passionate.

After a second or two, they broke apart.

And now Portia DiCotta’s eyes were blazing with the same eerie purple energy.

Wordlessly, they got out of the jeep and walked to the porch, studying the night sky above them, until Donnie pointed up to the right, to a blazing star that, had he been an expert in such things, he’d have known hadn’t been seen by human eyes for many centuries.

He and his new wife held hands and stared at the star.

‘Welcome back,’ they breathed together.

The Doctor was looking down on London.

‘I can see why you like it up here, Wilf,’ he said to the old man fussing beside him, sorting out a second little canvas seat for him to sit on. ‘It’s terribly… peaceful.’

Wilf Mott nodded. ‘Been coming here for years. Used to stare at the sky at night when I was in the forces. Used to navigate by the stars as well as the charts and stuff. The other lads thought I was mad, but you know what, Doctor, we never got lost. Not once.’

The Doctor smiled at the older man and sat on the proffered seat. ‘Thank you.’

Wilf sat beside him and poured him a mug of tea from the thermos. The Doctor sipped it gratefully. ‘Used to slip a bit of Mr Daniels’ finest in there,’ Wilf said. ‘But her ladyship cottoned on and that was the end of that. Bleedin’

doctors told her I had to keep off it.’

‘Terrible bunch, doctors,’ the Doctor laughed. ‘But they

often know what’s best, however unpopular that makes them.’

‘Subtle,’ nodded Wilf. ‘Sylv’ll come round. Probably.’

‘Really?’

‘Nah,’ and Wilf roared. ‘Not a chance, mate.’

The Doctor smiled again. ‘You don’t have a problem with me, then?’

‘Oh, you make my Donna happy. Keep that up and you’re fine with me. Do anything that upsets her, though, and you’ll hear from me, even on Mars.’

The Doctor looked surprised at this. ‘How much has she told you?’

‘Everything. Right from the off.’ Wilf pointed at his telescope. ‘I was up here, looking up into the sky when she told me about you. I didn’t believe her at first.’

‘Well, no one could blame you for that.’

‘Truth is, I don’t think I understood what she was actually telling me. Then I saw you after that fat business, flying through the sky, Donna waving down at me, and I realised it was all true. She keeps me up to date when she can. Postcards, emails. The odd gift. Still don’t know what to do with the Verron medal. Or what exactly a Verron medal is!’