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Simpson smiled. 'There's a list as long as your arm. All of it bollocks. He's a stupid prat, my brother-in-law.'

'My point exactly, Sarge,' Bartok said. 'Why don't we just kick this guy loose?'

'Kick this guy loose?' Simpson said with ponderous irony. 'You're going to have to stop watching those films, Constable.' He grimaced at the custody sergeant. 'He's never been the same since he took out that Blockbuster membership.'

'Yeah, well they wouldn't have me in the masons,' Bartok said.

'Off you go, Constable,' Simpson told him, jerking a thumb in the direction of the double doors leading into the office area of the station. 'Check the computer, see if anything's known.'

'He hasn't done anything,' Bartok said, obediently heading towards the doors. 'I'll give odds there's nothing on him.'

'Martin?' Simpson said, 'Before you do that?'

Bartok turned back.

Simpson held out his hand. 'Hand over my fags.'

Bartok hesitated, then he put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out the pack. 'Have you read the warning on these?'

'One statistic,' Simpson threatened. 'One single health statistic passes your lips and you'll be back in uniform within the week.'

Bartok handed him the cigarettes and left.

After he had gone, the custody sergeant said, 'He's a pushy little bugger isn't he?'

Simpson took out a cigarette. 'He's clever though.'

'Bit too clever if you ask me,' the custody sergeant said. 'There's no smoking in the custody suite, Bob, you know that.'

Simpson put the cigarette back in the pack. 'Can you be too clever?'

The custody sergeant sniggered. 'You can if you want to join the masons.'

After several hours the police released the Doctor without charge, which he thought was reasonable since he had done nothing.

They would have let him go sooner, he realised, if he had thought it acceptable to make up a name and an address. As it was,'the Doctor' and

'no fixed abode' inevitably led to exhaustive checks being made while he sat in a cell eating jelly babies and amusing himself with his yo-yo.

He couldn't remember the details of this particular legal system, if he ever knew them, so he wasn't exactly sure whether the local constabulary were exceeding their authority by detaining him. He did, however, remember the advice he had been given about authorities in general and police forces in particular: if in doubt, don't stir them up, and never under any circumstances poke them with a stick. It was Che Guevara who had told him this and it had always seemed to the Doctor to be a sensible rule of thumb.

As he expected, the arresting officers eventually got bored with trying to find some justification for holding him, and settled for requiring that someone vouch for his good character. When that proved to be a problem they simply decided that his claim to be a traveller meant that he was in fact a foreign tourist. They advised him to return to Australia or Holland, or wherever it was he came from, since they would not be as lenient with him next time. The Doctor thanked them and asked politely who it was that would drive him back to the university where they had picked him up.

He had been walking for half an hour and had reached the outskirts of the town when he noticed the Clearspring Water Company lorry pulling off the main road into the local industrial estate. It seemed too much of a fortunate coincidence to pass up, so he set off after it.

The industrial estate was not large and the driver stuck rigidly to the ten miles an hour speed limit, so it was an easy jog for the Doctor to keep the lorry in view until it turned through the gates of a modest warehouse site at the end of a row of similar units.

By the time he got there, however, the gates had been locked and the lorry was nowhere to be seen. Not only that, but there was no sign on the building to indicate that it had anything to do with the Clearspring Water Company. The Doctor began to wonder if he might have been mistaken.

He crossed the deserted