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‘Wait… yes, we saw the Doctor just as we left.’

Raimor and Peltroc looked at each other.

‘In chambers, gone Eight Bells?’ Peltroc asked.

‘Yes. He was in a hurry.’

‘Were you?’

‘We didn’t have to be. I just told you: it is only a couple of minutes from my door to Epsilon.’

‘Constable Peltroc here was kidnapped the night before last, held against his will.’

‘Such a crime is unknown here!’ Larna was genuinely shocked. What was happening here? Murder and kidnap were things that happened in stories, not in the ordered world of the modem Capitol. ‘You think that it was the same man that killed Waym?’

‘The same person, yes,’ Raimor said levelly. ‘Naturally, you’ll do anything you can to apprehend this criminal.’

Larna shrugged. ‘If there is anything I can do.’

‘Would you mind putting this on?’ Raimor asked. He offered her a tiny black dot.

Larna took it from Raimor. ‘What is it?’ she asked, suspecting it to be some lie detector.

‘A voice distorter, like the one that Constable Peltroc’s kidnapper wore.’

‘How do I wear this?’ she asked.

‘Top lip,’ Peltroc prompted.

Raimor scowled at him. Larna suddenly realised what was happening. If she had known how to use a voice distorter, that would be evidence against her. ‘You think that I’m the kidnapper?’

Peltroc grabbed her wrist, Raimor helped to force her hand up to her face.

‘It’s for the best. Don’t struggle and you won’t get hurt.’

‘Get your hands off me!’ Larna pulled her wrist down between Peltroc’s thumb and forefinger, lurching back and away from the guards. The two men almost fell over each other.

‘You’re stronger than you look,’ Peltroc observed, nursing his wrist.

‘I am a Time Lord, Captain Raimor, don’t forget that. Now, watch.’ She placed the black dot on her fingertip and pressed it to her face. It must have looked like a beauty spot. ‘What would you like me to say?’ she asked. A calm, male, voice said the words.

‘She’s him!’ Peltroc blurted. ‘It’s the voice.’

Larna tore the voice distorter off and flung it over at the Constable. ‘It’s a voice distorter, you idiot,’ she shouted. ‘It distorts voices. The whole point is that it makes me sound like him. You wear it. Go on, put the damn thing on yourself.

You will sound exactly the same.’

Raimor sneered. ‘Is that your best defence? That Peltroc kidnapped himself?’

‘I’m sure you could find the evidence to prove it,’ she informed him. ‘After all, he was at the scene of the crime.’

She turned to Peltroc, who was still cringing from her. ‘You saw your kidnapper, I presume. So you saw her face.’

‘My attacker wore a face mask and cloak,’ he stammered.

‘As well you know,’ Raimor added.

Larna ignored him. ‘A mask, a cloak and a voice distorter?

So what makes you think it was me? What makes you even think that it was a woman?’

Raimor held up a metal tube. ‘The Magistrate found this force knife in the Doctor’s room. You were in the room at the time.’ The captain was careful to keep his tone of voice neutral, but just as careful to imply that she and the Doctor had been colluding in some way.

‘I didn’t put it there,’ Larna told them.

‘Your fingerprints are all over it,’ Raimor noted, passing the knife over. ‘And you’ve never seen this before.’

‘I was in the Doctor’s room, I never denied that. I saw the knife there.’

‘You did more than see it.’

‘I touched it.’ She held out her thumb, which still bore the scar. ‘I pricked my finger on the blasted thing.’

‘That’s your thumb,’ Raimor said, his face twitching with the excitement that he’d discovered an inconsistency, however small, in her story.

Larna rolled her eyes. ‘I didn’t take that knife into the Doctor’s room, it was there when I arrived. I left it on the table.’

‘Ah,’ said Peltroc triumphantly. ‘That’s where you’re wrong.

We put that knife there.’

‘What?’

‘We went to the Doctor’s room the night before last, just before I was kidnapped.’

‘The night before last?’ Larna repeated quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘So the knife was placed there just before you were kidnapped and a