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But he didn’t stab her. Instead he prised open her hand and put the spear in it. What?

Rose tried to take advantage of this surprising situation – her captor having handed her a weapon! She tried once again to move, to thrust the pointed spearhead towards Ursus’s ugly, gloating face.

But once again she failed.

Ursus pulled her from the bench. She tried to resist him but she just couldn’t. Now he was moving her helpless limbs, manipulating her as if she was a shop dummy from Henrik’s.

Aside from being terrifying, it was totally humiliating. Rose Tyler, Barbie doll.

Had there ever been a Warrior Barbie? Because now, adding confusion to the terror and humiliation, Ursus had picked up a metal helmet from the pile and was placing it oh‐so‐carefully on her head.

This wasn’t right. Her statue hadn’t worn a helmet, hadn’t held a spear. What was going on?

Ursus finally stopped treating her as if she was made of Plasticine. Rose couldn’t see herself but she could feel that her head was held high, her spear clutched heroically in one hand as she stood tall and proud. So… what happened next?

The sculptor stood back, admiring her. It was an impersonal, clinical look; there was nothing in it that said she was a human being. She was nothing more to him than clay to be moulded into shape.

She tried to speak again. Her fear, her desperation, must have given her strength, because the slightest of slight sounds came out, something that might just have been recognised as ‘Nooooo’.

Ursus frowned. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.

That was good – wasn’t it? At least he had spoken to her. Anything you could do to make them see you as a person, that was the thing.

Suddenly he turned his back on Rose, and she felt a stab of hope. He’d changed his mind, he wasn’t going to do anything to her…

But he just walked over to the covered shape in the corner. Grasping the sheet, he pulled it off, revealing what was below.

It was a statue, as Rose had suspected. A man with wings on his hat and his shoes, like on the Interflora logo. But there was something familiar about him… The curled hair, the handsome features – surely this was Tiro? But he’d said he hadn’t even started modelling yet.

Ursus smiled at the statue. ‘He didn’t make things difficult for me,’ he said. ‘He knew that beauty is more important than life.’

Rose’s stomach seemed to vanish inside her. This couldn’t really be happening to her. It was a dream, one of those ones where your legs won’t obey you, where you can’t run, however hard you try. The talking cats had been real and everything since had been a dream – a nightmare.

But it didn’t seem as if the nightmare was ever going to end.

* * *

The Doctor had spent the morning doing his Sherlock Holmes thing, not that he thought there was much else to be discovered here. Rose, he hoped, would be using her own detective instincts to find things out from Ursus, while he’d drawn a blank in his search around the estate. Gracilis had suggested having the slaves tortured to make sure they were telling the truth, but the Doctor had managed to persuade him out of that.

The more people he spoke to, the more convinced he became that only Ursus had any answers. After sharing a lunch of bread and cheese with Gracilis, the Doctor decided that he needed to find out if Rose had discovered anything. Taking some food with him as an excuse – after all, surely even an artist’s model was allowed lunch – he headed over to Ursus’s workshop.

As the Doctor neared the stable yard, a cart was just pulling away. In the back of it he could see a large wrapped object nestling in a bed of straw. Never one to ignore even the least suspicious of circumstances, he jogged after the cart and jumped on the back before it had gone 100 yards.

‘Hoy!’ cried the carter.

‘Don’t mind me!’ called back the Doctor. ‘Just wanted a quick look at what you’re carrying here.’ He began to unwrap the object – the human‐sized object.

The carter pulled up and jumped down. ‘What do you think you’re doing? I was told to come here, pick up the goods and deliver ’em,’ he said, coming