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‘Nonsense, my dear Doctor,’ Parkinson answered. ‘The grave has been ready for a month. Mr Stevens, the gravedigger, was most upset.’

‘I had to leave suddenly,’ explained the Doctor.

‘Forgive me for saying this, but it seems to me that your voice has changed somewhat since we last met.’ And it was true. Parkinson had hardly recognized the voice that morning – a trace of Scottish, perhaps? Parkinson heard the Doctor chuckle softly.

‘Oh, I have changed,’ he said, ‘several times.’

Parkinson felt rather then heard the coffin being laid over the grave.

‘I must say,’ he commented, ‘your pall-bearers are very quiet, silent as ghosts really.’

Ratcliffe started when the telephone rang. With one eye on the figure in the shadows he picked up the receiver. ‘Good, stay with the Doctor and call me back... yours is not to reason why, just to follow orders... Good... Get on with it.’

He slapped down the telephone and turned to the figure.

‘My man has found it,’ he said with some satisfaction.

‘Yes,’ said the figure, ‘but my enemies have found your man.’

In a telephone box by the gates of the cemetery, Mike Smith put down the telephone and stepped out into the weak sunshine. Then, checking that no one was looking, he slipped through the gates and into the graveyard. He had seen the Doctor and the vicar heading behind the church that stood at the centre of the cemetery, so he increased his pace to catch up. He wanted to see if the coffin was still floating in that disturbing way. Miraculous things were happening around this strange Doctor, things that the Association should know about. Besides, he owed Ratcliffe favours.

Suddenly he was choking, an arm tight around his throat, fabric rough on his cheek. A voice whispered in his ear: ‘What is the location of the renegade Dalek base?’

Mike grabbed at the arm, trying to prise it loose, but the pressure only got worse. ‘Get off me,’ he gasped. ‘I’ll break your legs.’

The man repeated the question, the choking grip emphasizing his advantage.

Mike didn’t know what the man was talking about. He tried to tell the man this, but spots of light were blurring his eyes.

‘You are an agent of the renegade Dalcks,’ said the man.

What? thought Mike. He went limp. ‘I work for Mr Ratcliffe, the Association.’ With a sudden burst of energy he twisted in the man’s grip, breaking the hold on his throat, and pulled his adversary’s arm back and up. The man grunted as Mike applied an arm lock, then seized a handful of white hair and savagely pulled back his head.

Mike was shocked to discover that his attacker was old, maybe in his fifties.

‘Who do you work for?’

But the man gazed stupidly past Mike’s face; his old body tensed and jerked like a puppet. A low moan escaped his lips. With a shock Mike recognized him as the headmaster of Coal Hill School. The body went limp and slid out of Mike’s hands, slumping boneless and dead to the ground.

Mike recoiled, breathing hard. He looked wildly about.

No one was in sight; no one had seen. He ran, leaving the headmaster among the maze of gravestones.

But he ran after the Doctor.

‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ intoned Parkinson and snapped his braille bible shut. He heard the Doctor reach over and then the rattle of dirt on the coffin lid. ‘It’s over,’

he said after a respectful pause.

‘No,’ replied the Doctor, ‘it’s just starting.’

It was only as the Doctor led him away that Parkinson realized he didn’t know whom he had just buried.

Mike watched the Doctor walk away, arm and arm with the vicar. He fixed the position of the grave in his mind, the better to report to Ratcliffe later.

Ratcliffe had told him he would see many strange things and he was right, as usual. He had always known things, secrets. When Mike was small, running wild on the bombsites, Ratcliffe had given him a bar of chocolate – a small bar with foreign words on the wrapper. ‘It’s from Germany,’ Ratcliffe had explained.

‘You been there?’ Many returning soldiers had brought back things from overseas.

‘No, Mike me