第 16 页

'So?'

'A duffle-bag, belonging to a Marc Marshall, was found near the same cottage. And Marc Marshall is Alan Marshall's son.'

'So apart from the Doctor passing out the telex number of a supposedly top-secret defence agency, and the son of a prominent MP vanishing, I trust everything is going well?' The Brigadier paused as Corporal Bell re-entered the room. 'And what joy from our Swiss paymasters?'

Bell glanced around the room, but a look from the Brigadier told her to carry on.

'Well, sir, it's bad news. Because C19 won't release any information on our operations over the past twenty-four months to the UN, and both the Dutch and French Governments are being equally tight-lipped, the UN Secretary has cut UNIT's budget by almost half. If we're to get any more money, it must come directly from C19 and the British Government, not the UN.'

The Brigadier wandered over to Hawke's map, deep in thought. He studied the position of the flags for a moment, then turned to face his staff. His face was hardened with the resolve of a man determined to face any slings and arrows that fortune threw at him. 'Our funding is a C19 matter, and until Sir John Sudbury returns from hospital we will just have to carry on as best we can. I will take a small group down to Smallmarshes to look into things and find the Doctor. Benton, call up Yates and ask him to get a squad together. You're staying here to co-ordinate everything. In my absence, you have command.'

'Sir.'

'Hawke, you liaise with Smallmarshes and Hastings police. I want total assistance from them. Put out a complete D notice on everything relating to this. If the media boys give you any trouble, pretend we're bigger and far more powerful than we currently seem to be, and shout a lot. Scare them. Blackmail them. Threaten to shoot their families if necessary, but I want absolutely no press involvement.'

'Sir.'

'Bell, you're with me. Use the Austin, not the Daimler. I want this to be a discreet operation. Benton, ensure Yates does the same. No Rovers, no uniforms. Handguns for the troops. This is going to be a subtle operation, ladies and gentlemen. And there will be no further cock-ups. Is that understood?' He looked around and smiled mirthlessly. 'Dismissed.'

As the troops began to disperse, the Brigadier waved Maisie Hawke over. 'Corporal,' he whispered, 'find Miss Shaw. Contact Private Johnson and ask if he knows where she is.'

'Sir?'

'Hawke, it is my job to know about my staff, and their personal as well as professional lives, much as I don't like it. I believe you have his number. Don't make me turn a suggestion into an order.'

'Sir.' Hawke saluted and left the Ops Room.

The Brigadier followed, heading for his own office. He had to make a phone call himself. A more personal one, a more difficult one than he would ever have imagined. He had to telephone his wife and say he wouldn't be home that night.

He entered his office and looked at the clock. Ten o'clock, an hour and a half since Hawke had rung him in the restaurant.

More importantly, an hour since Fiona had taken herself home, and an hour since Alistair had collected a few odds and ends from the spare room, and then pushed open the door of his own bedroom. She had been in bed and asleep, or pretending to be. Either way, the message was clear.

Then Alistair had popped his head into Kate's room. Lying on the floor, presumably having fallen out of her bed, was Aloysius the bear. He had crossed the room, picked up the soft toy and slid it back under the covers. Kate's arms had instinctively grabbed for it and hugged it closer.

As he had turned to leave the room, a sleepy voice had murmured, 'G'night Daddy. I love you.'

'G'night Tiger,' he had whispered back, and shut the door.

A knock on his office door broke his reverie.

'Brigadier?' It was Bell.

'Yes, Corporal?'

'The cars are ready. Mike Yates will be here with his troops in about ten minutes.' The Brigadier realized he had never seen Corporal Bell out of uniform. She was dressed in a thick grey fisherman's sweater and black jeans.

Perhaps aware that he was staring at her, she coughed. 'I thought it might be cold down there this early in the morning. If it's not appropriate, sir, I can -

'No. No, it's fine, Corporal.' He stared at his own clothes, realizing he was still dressed in the suit and tie he had worn to the restaurant. 'Glad you reminded me. Could hardly go traipsing around Sussex in this get-up, could I?'

Bell smiled and shook her head. 'Are you needing anything else, sir?'

The Brigadier shook his head. 'No. I'll get changed now, I've spares here somewhere.'

'Left-hand cupboard, behind the black filing case, sir. Three shirts, four pairs of casual trousers and two pairs of light shoes. Plus assorted sweaters.'

The Brigadier smiled at Bell. 'What would I do without you, Corporal?'

Bell went red, and was smiling as she left.

The Brigadier looked at the cupboard she had indicated. 'No,' he muttered. 'Displeasure before business.' He picked up the phone and dialled his home number. It rang twice before Fiona answered, her voice crisp and clear, without a trace of tiredness. The phone had clearly not woken her.

'What do you want, Alistair?'

'Hello, darling. How did you know it was me?'

'Fifteen years of late-night calls saying I won't see you for the next week, that's how. What do you want?'

Alistair sighed. 'To apologize?'

'Oh, fine, darling. I'm supposed to forgive you for abandoning me for the millionth time, leaving me embarrassed and unable to explain to our daughter exactly what is going on.'

'I really am sorry.'

There was a pause and then Fiona sighed. When she spoke, all trace of sarcasm had gone. The only thing Alistair could detect was a sudden tiredness. She must have been holding back. 'I can't go on, Alistair. It's all too much.'

'What do you mean, darling?'

'Don't bloody "darling" me all the time!' she shouted. 'Stop saying that as if it excuses everything, explains anything or justifies something. Just stop "darling this" and "sweetheart that".' She paused again and then continued, more quietly, 'What I mean, Alistair, is that you come home now. You drop everything and get back here. Your job can survive without you for one evening. You tell Miss Hawke to keep the office running for the next three days or so without you. Is that so impossible?'

Alistair coughed. 'Well, yes, darling, it is impossible. I'm an important person here. I have staff to manage. I can't just -

'Can't or won't?'

'Can't. Absolutely. I'll try and get a weekend off in the next couple of weeks. Mike or John can hold the fort. But not right now.'

Fiona took a deep breath and exhaled noisily down the telephone. 'Alistair, you know as well as I do that you won't leave Mike, John, Miss Hawke, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all in charge. I still don't understand what is going on there, but I do know it's more important to you than your family.'

Alistair interrupted her: 'Now hold on, darling. That's not true at -,

'It is true, Alistair. Absolutely. One hundred per cent true. If I was some faint-hearted little wifey who did not have a life of her own, I'd probably sit back and accept it. But I'm not, and I won't.'

'Shouldn't we discuss this face to face -,' tried Alistair, but Fiona cut him off quickly.

'No! You had your chance for "face to face" this evening. You blew it. This is it, Alistair. Kate and I are off. Don't try to contact us - if there's one thing you do know, it's that my father will ensure you get nowhere near us.'

Alistair felt a sudden pit in his stomach deepen. 'What are you saying, Fi? Your parents are in Chichester. Why are you going that far away? Why are you going at all, damn it?'

Fiona sighed. 'If you don't know that now, Alistair, you never will. Goodbye.' Click. A disconnected hum.

'Fiona?' said a small voice into the phone. 'Fiona, Kate? Please?'

Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart realized that the voice was his, abruptly lost and cut-off.

She was going. Away. Leaving him? But, no, she couldn't. Surely not. It wasn't fair. Not to him. Certainly not to Kate. What chance had he had to explain himself? Fiona couldn't just drop eight years of marriage over something as pointless as this. People didn't just give up on married life, abandon their families because of a few long weekends away and a disrupted dinner.

Except, said the demon in the depths of his stomach as it churned up bile, it wasn't just about long weekends or a ruined dinner, was it? It was about the last eight years of lies and evasions. It was about how his life had altered following that meeting with Air Vice-Marshal Gilmore after the 'London Event'. How secrecy had become his watchword, at home as well as work.

Kate. Had Kate just been the result of some attempt by both of them to solidify a partnership that had never had any concrete base of its own?

Was he destined to be on his own for the rest of his life? He remembered what Doris had said in Brighton that day all those years ago: 'Never take a woman for granted, Ali. You never know when familiarity has become boredom; when what one accepts as normality means depression and tedium for the other. That's what destorys marriages. Not one sudden argument, but a slow eroding of love because two people don't realise they have drifted apart, Their mental image of their partner becomes far removed from reality. Beware that, Ali.'

She'd given him a present then; a watch. It lived in a box, tucked away at the back of the cupboard Bell had pointed out. Doris had been a friend from Sandhurst, where she'd been a WRAC-in-trianing and he'd been a young lance-corporal, He'd thought they loved each other but he'd let her go, to drift away from him into the arms of George Wilson.

They'd met up a few years later on the pier in Brighton, the day after his marriage to Fiona. She gave him the watch, ostensibly as a wedding gift, in addition to the Wedgwood dinner set from both of them. But he knew it was more than that. It was a reminder of what might have been. Perhaps what ought to have been.

Wilson had been killed in Northern Ireland a couple of years ago. Alistair had sent a brief letter of commiseration to Doris. Just a few lines - crammed into a few moments between a battle with Cybermen and Autons or some such threat. Thinking back, he realised how impersonal the letter had been. No more meaningful that the frighteningly than the frighteningly regular letters he had written to the parents or wives of young privates who died under his command at UNIT.

No wonder Doris had not written back.

What kind of unfeeling monster had this job turned him into? Was he any better than those Cybermen or Autons? Did they have more feeling or conscience than him?

The phone's hum had become a high-pitched whine, indignant at not being used, and he gently placed the receiver,

He undid his collar and slipped off his tie. Then off came the jacket, trousers and shoes. He crossed to the cupboard and took out a blue cardigan and grey trousers. After that, on went a pair of comfortable black leather Hush Puppies. On the back of one cupboard door was a half-length mirror, and he stared at himself in it. Behind him on the floor lay the suit and tie, the wreckage of an identity, something that had been but wasn't any more. He turned back, scooped them up and shoved them roughly into the cupboard, screwing them up to make them fit. He put his black leather shoes on top. Then, after a moment's though, he reached into the back of the cupboard and pulled out the box and stared at it for a long moment, debating whether to put it on. Then he closed the lid and returned the box to its resting place.

He looked at himself in the mirror again. Alistair Lethbridge-Stewar had been put away.

The Brigadier was ready for action.

---

It was lunchtime.

People milled through the streets, butling their way around the shops, pushing and charging, and generally acting like headless chickens.

Liz Shaw did not feel like one of them, or like a part of the human race. She was just an observer, brought down from an alien planet and forced to watch the silly things mankind did.

She was not sure exactly how long she had been feeling this disjointed, but it had certainly started since joining UNIT. There were so many other life-forms out there, amongst the stars, millions of miles away. Each of them, too, lived day to day, enrapt in their own little worlds, unaware that she or her race, even existed.

When she was small, Liz's parents had walked her around the shops of Nottingham. It had occurred to her even then that each of the hundreds of people she saw in the old market square had homes, families and friends that she would never know. Everyone had lives that she could not know, and her own existence would touch only an infinitesimal proportion of the world's population. Although that knowledge had scared her a little, it had also fascinated her. Since then she had devoted herself to other people. It was that which had driven her towards science at school, college and eventually university. Receiving her doctorate from Cambridge was, she had thought, the pinnacle of her career.

Yet now, as she still stared at the unknown throng around her, she realized not for the first time that there was more to the universe than a few billion people on Earth. There were Nestenes, and Delphons and something called the Great Intelligence. There were Cybermen and Daleks and Zarbi and Drahvins according to the Doctor. There were even Time Lords.

So many different races, so many different cultures, attitudes and moralities. And Earth people could barely maintain a fragile peace with each other. Liz once asked the Doctor why UNIT had to be secret, why it couldn't use its resources to find benign races and bring them to Earth, to show mankind the folly of arguments, disputes and wars.

'And if they came, Liz? If they arrived on Earth just to say hello, what would you do?'

'I'd shake their hands. Or fins. Or tentacles or whatever. I'd say hello.'