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‘The phrase “condemned with your own words” springs readily to mind.’

‘The phrase “faked evidence” springs to my mind. You’ve already admitted that the evidence has been faked once. Why can’t it have been faked a second time?’

Forrester shrugged. ‘What’s the point?’

‘The point is,’ Bernice said in exasperation, ‘that you were clever enough to penetrate one lot of false evidence, so the villains of the piece, whoever they are, concocted a second set to throw you off at a tangent. In the process, they decided to frame the Doctor and me for some reason which I have yet to fathom, but which probably has something to do with the theft of the TARDIS.’

‘The what?’ Cwej wanted to know.

‘The . . . Never mind.’

‘Once we start on that route,’ Forrester said sceptically, ‘there’s no end to the levels of faked evidence we could assume. I’ve got a rule of thumb for this sort of thing. If there’s any evidence that the evidence is faked, then I’ll believe it. If not, I won’t.’

‘Fair enough.’ Bernice stared at the image on the screen. ‘There must be a clue here somewhere. Something out of place, some little thing . . . ’ She bit her lip. ‘Did you say that we said something?’

‘Yeah. Press the CONTINUE key.’

Bernice did so, and the images shifted slightly. A voice drifted out of the probe: ‘Bernice, we make a fine pair of murderers.’

‘Your friend’s voice,’ Forrester said.

‘No, it’s not,’ Cwej said, beating Bernice to the punch.

Forrester stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

He blushed. ‘I mean, it’s not the same voice as the man we saw on Purgatory.’

‘Of course it is.’

Cwej shook his head stubbornly. ‘No. We’ve got the wrong man.’

Forrester couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d gone out on a limb for Cwej after he’d sprung that tale about faked mind probe records and mys-128

terious calls to Adjudicator Secular Rashid, and here he was, calmly telling her that he’d been wrong!

‘It’s not the Doctor’s voice,’ Bernice agreed. ‘Listen to it.’

She fumbled with the controls, and managed to replay the sequence.

‘The accent is missing, and the stress on the words is different,’ she continued.

Forrester tried to remember the voice of the little man on Purgatory. Quite harsh, with an odd little roll on the R sounds. This voice, the voice on the mind probe record, was different: smoother, more tentative, with an odd little questioning lift at the end of the sentence.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m prepared to be convinced. How do you think this image got on here then?’

Bernice thought for a moment.

‘I think somebody implanted this sequence in the memory of the mind probe. I think they used images of the Doctor and me they picked up from a camera somewhere, but I don’t think they knew what our voices were like.

For some reason, God knows why, they chose a voice for the Doctor, but it doesn’t match the Doctor’s real voice.’

There was a pause as Forrester thought through the implications of that.

‘Hell,’ she said finally, ‘this is big. We need to send a message to Provost-Major Beltempest to make sure he doesn’t do anything rash to the Doctor. It would also be useful if I could hear the Doctor’s voice again, just to be sure.’

She looked at Cwej. Judging by his expression, he was still a few minutes behind on the conversation.

‘How does your mother feel about long distance calls?’ she asked.

‘Terg Albert McConnel,’ intoned the sombre voice of the judicial cyborg, ‘I find you guilty of the murder of Anil Lymaner.’

The room was empty but for the two of them – McConnel standing at one end and the cyborg suspended in a null-grav harness at the other. A statue-like security bot stood between them, it’s heavy weaponry directed towards McConnel. A desk, piled high with flimsy sheets of plastic, was set behind the hovering cyborg. The walls were a neutral grey.

‘This judgement, in full accordance with Imperial Law, is at a confidence level of point nine nine eight three six, to five decimal places,