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The low rumble of the three men discussing their financial business permeated the door. Liz found herself hypnotized by the rise and full of the conversation, punctuated every so often by Lethbridge-Stewart's outraged expletives as yet another proposal for an additional truck or sergeant was denied by a government intent on cutting taxes in its next budget. She let her head lie back on the soft armchair and lifted her legs until they rested on the edge of the desk. She closed her eyes and let the drone of the voices carry her away.

God, she was tired. She realized that ever since joining UNIT's never-ending crusade against everything unusual she'd had no time to herself, her friends and even her family had all been ignored. When was the last time she'd phoned her parents? Or seen Jeff Johnson since he'd gone back to the regular army after his stretch in UNIT had ended? She'd not kept in touch with Justin and Laura at Cambridge despite all her promises to them; and no matter how many times she told herself it was all because of the Official Secrets Act, she didn't believe that any more than she knew they would.

Was she happy? Jeff had asked her that on their last night out. Was a role in UNIT, as nothing more than the Doctor's assistant, really what she wanted? Christ, Jeff had been so furious at her. She had more brains than most of the UNIT team put together, he had said. And she couldn't give him an answer. Just why was she languishing in this backwater, tucked just outside London on the A40, when she could be heading research teams at Cambridge, getting recognition for her work, and doing something worthwhile for people? She could be discovering cures, learning the secrets of the world, pushing forward the frontiers of science.

And yet, she'd argued, wasn't that what her work at UNIT was all about? Mankind would have fallen to the Nestenes, or the terrible liquid gases that Stahlman had discovered, if UNIT hadn't intervened. And hell, even if the Doctor did most of the work, it was Liz who had eventually found the cure to the reptile-men's disease. Not many people could have understood the Doctor's notes and made the same intuitive leap that he had. Nevertheless, Liz knew that deep down, she did agree that she was wasting her time at UNIT Jeff was right. It was time for something to change.

The trimphone on Lethbridge-Stewart's desk trilled. She opened one eye, reached out and plucked it off its rest, nestling it under her chin.

'Yes?'

The Brigadier appeared at the door to his office, summoned by the ringing. He harrumphed and held out his hand, but Liz closed her eye and pretended not to have seen him.'I see.'

The Brigadier harrumphed again.

Liz sighed and opened her eyes. 'If it was for you, Brigadier, I would have passed it to you the first time you grunted.' She shifted in her seat, turning to face away from him, unwilling to see the reaction on his face and wishing that she had thought before speaking to him so rudely. She spoke back into the phone: 'Sorry. Go on, Doctor.'

---

The phone tucked under his chin, the Doctor was wandering around the laboratory, staring through the window at the canal one moment, facing the huge green arched doors the next, then squatting on the spiral staircase that led to the little roof garden he kept above the lab.

'Liz, I cannot begin to explain to you how important this is. I've managed to reconnect the stabilizing dio-nodes and the transceiving telo-circuits. All I need to do is feed in the directional memory wafers and weld the dematerialization casing back into the artron filaments. Then a few months of steady-state micro-welding and it'll be completely finished. Where would you like to go?'

'Cambridge,' came the reply.

The Doctor stared at the phone, screwing his face up in puzzlement. 'But Liz, what about Florana? Or the wonderful waters on Majus Seventeen?'

'Cambridge has wonderful waterways, Doctor,' came the reply. 'It'll be May Week soon. You'd like that. Lots of toffs on punts sipping champagne and playing bridge.'

'Liz - it's June.'

'May Week's in June.'

The Doctor frowned. 'I'm confused. But all right, maybe Cambridge soon. But surely you'd like a spin off-planet. Somewhere out there?' He pointed toward the ceiling, knowing that, although she couldn't see him, Liz would imagine the gesture.

'No thank you, Doctor. I prefer to keep my feet on terra firma, you know.'

The Doctor shrugged. 'Oh well, suit yourself. I'm going back to work.'

He stared at the receiver for a moment, then put it down. Instantly the phone rang again. He snatched it towards his ear.

'Changed your mind, have you?' he asked.

'Hello?' came a man's voice; quiet, sibilant and clearly quite aged.

'Who is this?'

'Is Elizabeth Shaw there, please?'

The Doctor paused. 'Who's asking?'

'Hello? Is Doctor Shaw available, please?'

'I asked who is calling for her? Is that her father?'

'Is she there, please?'

'Look, who are you? How did you bypass the switchboard? In fact how did you get this number?'

There was a faint click from the phone, and nothing more.

'Hello? Hello?' The Doctor replaced the receiver. It was unusual enough for him to get phone calls - very few people outside UNIT knew him - but in all the time he'd been exiled on Earth and working in this lab, he couldn't remember anyone ever phoning for Liz before. Come to think of it, she didn't seem to have friends or family; none that she ever talked about, at least. Maybe a trip to Cambridge would do them both good - he'd offer to drive them up there in Bessie and try to meet some of her friends. 'I really don't know anything about you, do I, Miss Shaw?' he murmured to himself. 'Then again, I've never asked.'

He resolved to change that and, in doing so, put the memory of the strange phone call to the back of his mind.

---

From her vantage point overlooking the bay, Jana Kristen stared down at the policemen as they swarmed across the grass and sand dunes like flies around a corpse. Which, she decided, was roughly what they were. As a journalist it was her job to show an interest in anything unusual and, to be frank, in the sleepy backwater of Smallmarshes, a dead tramp was about as much news as you could hope for.

Like all good journalists, she had her notebook, micro-recorder and point-and-shoot Nikon camera with her. Right now they were lying behind her, on the uncomfortably hard bed in Room 9 of the Bayview Guest House. She was one of only three guests in the three storey converted house; and the other two were out shopping. They were a young couple, obviously here without either parents' permission, who had told her they were looking for a week of romance and excitement. Hah! Like hell. They were here because they fancied each other rotten. They'd gone to bed in Room 7, next door, at about ten thirty last night. Jana had heard them rutting away for hours; she shrieking every so often, he groaning like some primeval sub-human.

Pathetic.

Jana herself had once had what she thought were feelings for a man. She'd met him at home in Amsterdam, and they had spent a couple of weeks cycling around the countryside, cavorting like wild animals under bridges, in fields and cheap hostels. She'd soon realized that while anatomically well-developed, he'd been mentally stunted and she'd had to dispose of him. Witless innocent.

Pathetic.

She sat on the bed and stared at the painted wall opposite. Brilliant White (she could picture the Dulux tin now) over dirty wallpaper, with a hint of damp. Every room painted the same by the owners, a charmless couple called Sheila and John Lawson. Sheila was always going on about whatever faded television personality was working the fleapits in Hastings; John would nod and go back to reading his tedious newsletter of the Rollercoaster Passengers Club of Great Britain (inc. Eire). 'I'm trying to get them to set up a theme park in Smallmarshes,' he had enthused to her. Jana hadn't enthused back.

Pathetic.

'Better get some work done,' she muttered as she picked up her camera, slung it over her shoulder and popped her notebook into her bag, then left her room and jogged downstairs, hoping not to meet her hosts along the way. There was no sign of them, so she made her way to the coin-operated phone. Dumping a pile of change beside it, she dialled a London number and waited.

---

March 27th (still)

I'm on my way back to Aunty Eve's now. God, this train is bumpy, which explains why my writing's so crappy.

So that was Dungeness. What a creepy place. You come out of the station near the seaside and walk down this long road that eventually vanishes. It's like one of those roads on an airfield, made in concrete segments. I thought I'd gone wrong until I found a row of small houses. Horrible things that looked like they'd blow over in a harsh wind. All grey and dreary, with a few clothes on lines in front. A few kids were playing with a dog, but that was it as far as life went. Then I found a lighthouse and a small cafŽ/shop.

And there was the Nuclear Power Station, blocked off with this massive metal fence. No one was friendly there at all, especially the guard. I asked if I could look around and he just said 'No' and that was it. There were more houses to the right of the power station. They looked like they'd been picked up from Salford or somewhere and dumped there. Terraces, made from ugly red bricks and in bad repair. More washing lines and dogs. No kids though. I grabbed a hot dog from the shop, went to look at the lighthouse - couldn't get in there either - and wandered down to the beach. Stones. No sand at all. It looked so desolate that all I felt like doing was throwing stones back into the sea, stone after stone after stone. Mrs Petter once told me that was undoing millions of years of evolution or something. It'd taken millions of years for those stones to get to that beach, and I threw them back in. If Aunty Eve's right, we'll all be radioactive cinders by the time the stones get back to the beach, so it doesn't matter anyway.

Now I'm nearly back in Smallmarshes. It's ten past three. I'll stop off at Casey's and see if Aunty Eve's magazines have arrived like she asked. No doubt she'll tell me what a good boy I am. I want to go home. Home home. Manchester. I want to see Steve and Matt and Alex and Jacqui and Ozmonde and the rest of the gang. I want my own bed, my own room, my own sheets and pillows and everything. I HATE THIS PLACE.

Pulling into Hell now, so I'll write more tonight.

Marc Marshall closed his diary as the train drew into Smallmarshes station, brakes squealing. He put the pencil into the leather tube attached to the book's cover, then dropped the diary into his green duffle-bag with its Sylvester and Tweety Pie stickers. He slung the bag over his shoulder and got off the train.

He stood outside the station and stared down the long road that ran down to the sea-front, with its guest houses and shops. Aunty Eve's road was the third on the right. He could see Casey's newsagents just on the far corner, beside the Highciffe Guest House. Down to the right, the south, the town fell away into streets of depressing houses, all the same, inhabited by old people who couldn't afford a house in Brighton or Bournemouth. The cliff was to the north, a green hill with the town at its feet, as if the buildings were too lazy to attempt the climb. From here he couldn't see the white chalk of the cliff face, but he could make out the single-track cliff road that led from the town up to the highest point, from which it was possible to see France on a good day, and then onwards up the coast. Halfway up it was the abandoned old cottage which Aunty Eve had said ought to be demolished. 'A death-trap,' she'd called it. Probably the only interesting place in the whole of Small-marshes, Marc decided.

As he began wandering towards it, he saw vehicles and figures on the cliff-top and on the road going down. He squinted against the late afternoon sun. Police.

Excitement at last, he thought. Something had happened if the police had been called in. Smallmarshes itself only seemed to warrant a couple of panda cars and a bicycle, yet there were more than a dozen men and women, several cars and a van up there. Best leave them to it, he decided. They wouldn't want some strange Northern kid in the way. Besides, Aunty Eve would know what was going on.

Marc had all but put the abandoned house out of his mind when something caught his eye. Something had moved in there. A curtain had been flicked by someone. He didn't know who, but it wasn't a policeman, he was sure.

He looked at Casey's, then at Aunty Eve's road, and set off up the cliff road. It was steeper and further than it looked, and after ten minutes he was almost out of breath. He put his duffle-bag on the ground and as he did so, decided he'd finally have something interesting to put in his diary tonight. He mopped his brow with his sleeve, and carried on. He'd pick up his bag on the way back. Who was going to steal it with so many police around?

As he wandered away, the bag toppled over and the diary flopped out, nesting in the grass.

Written across the front in flaking correction fluid was the name 'Marc Marshall'.

---

WPC Barbara Redworth, on assignment to Smallmarshes from Hill Vale station in Hastings, found the duffle-bag. She hadn't noticed anyone around, but she guessed that its owner had to be in the ramshackle building - if they were anywhere else, they would have been seen by her or her colleagues.

She left the bag where it was and walked into the building. Considering it was the middle of the afternoon, the place was astonishingly dark. WPC Redworth didn't have a torch with her and she cursed quietly, then called out. No one replied.

She was dimly aware that she was in a two-storey building - a flight of stairs with a moth-eaten carpet was set near the front door. She was standing in what must have been a living room, and to the back she could see a doorway leading to an equally dark kitchenette. It wasn't until she fumbled towards the doorway that she noticed the sofa and seats - mildewed and rotten, but undoubtedly recently disturbed. The coverings had been ripped away, revealing bright yellow foam, without a hint of dirt or mould upon it.