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The Doctor was starting to fidget with his cutlery. Ace watched him, wondering why he suddenly looked so out of place. He normally slotted naturally into any situation, however bizarre, from alien ice cave to Victorian dinner party. Was it because twentieth-century suburban London was her territory and elsewhere in the galaxy they were both alien?

She looked across the café at a painting by the fire exit. Against a parched background of craggy rocks and broken trees, three grey swans were swimming on a mirror-surfaced lake. But in the water, the reflections of the swans appeared as elephants. Well weird.

Ace froze. A large marmalade tom cat had just walked in from the back of the café. It stopped and surveyed the occupants of the café as barely tolerated intruders in its territory. Eventually, its amber eyes settled on Ace and stared with an unnerving impassiveness that made the girl want to run. Her aversion to cats, especially black ones, had only recently developed. It wasn't an allergy, they just brought out the worst in her; feelings she didn't talk about. The tom walked casually between the tables with the sort of mooching purposefulness that set Ace's teeth on edge. She braced herself for something terrible.

The Doctor was contemplating the traffic outside. "Nothing to worry about," he said quietly without looking at her.

"What?"

"Just an ordinary cat. No need to get so jumpy."

When Ace looked again, the cat had gone. "Back into the kitchen. Probably his dinnertime too," said the Doctor, but he was still watching the traffic.

How could he know that without looking? Irritated, Ace pretended to study the picture again, but she secretly watched him from the corner of her eye. Her friend, the Doctor. Outwardly a clownish eccentric, a genius in human terms, but that was just the bit you were allowed to see. An alien with a Scottish accent. Travelling through time and space with him, Ace had had the chance to look closer, and through the occasional cracks in his veneer, she glimpsed a darker, huger intellect. It seemed very alien, detached and powerful, as if the Doctor was just something the intellect went about in. Or was it just her imagination?

Never be certain of what you think you see.

Sometimes the darkness seeped from the cracks and those it touched might get hurt. Ace had learned from her own bruises that no one who met the Doctor was left unchanged. Yet he was kind, compassionate, spiky and often angry; vulnerable to all mortal foibles. But that might be deliberate. He embraced them eagerly as if they were toys. Lingering on one world or another, as if to play them out or test their capacity. He was just as dangerous as the evil he attracted and opposed. So what if he did have eyes in the back of his head, had appalling taste in clothes and careered around the universe in a time machine shaped like a police box? If he said it could change shape, she believed him. He was twenty-five out of ten to be with. She prayed her time with him would never, ever end.

She caught a flash of light in the window and realized that the Doctor had been watching the reflection in the glass. Debbie Whatsit was delivering food to the family of three at the next table.

It was half-past five on a Sunday afternoon in July. So why was the dusk gathering outside? The sky, which had been a Hollywood blue, was turning a lurid orange. The passers-by on Ealing Broadway seemed to be going through fits and starts of slow motion. "Professor...?" said Ace to the Doctor, but he shushed her into silence.

Turning round, he pulled a silly face at the little girl, an angelic toddler of no more than two, seated in a high chair at the next table. She played her spoon into a bowl of ice cream while her parents fussed indulgently, their skin flickering the dead colour of mushroom soup. The clock above the kitchen door slowly slid down the wall, over the pelmet and dripped to the floor.

"Professor . . . Doctor, what's happening?"

The Doctor put his hand up to the side of his head